English Men of Letters

In the 1870s, the publishing house of Macmillan began to issue a series of books called English Men of Letters - biographies of English writers by other English writers. The general editor of the series was the journalist, critic, politician, and supporter (and later biographer) of Gladstone, John Morley (1838-1923), and its aim was that the books should be a short introduction to the subject and his works, but also that the life should illuminate the works, and vice versa. The subjects range chronologically from Chaucer to Thackeray and Dickens, and one of the great interests of the series is that many of the authors were discussing writers of the previous generation, and some had even known their subjects personally. The series demonstrates an approach to literary biography and criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, and also reveals which authors were at that time regarded as canonical.