Out of Bounds

Ian Gilmour

  • The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St Clair
    Cambridge, 765 pp, £90.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 521 81006 X

‘Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted Chaucer and Shakespeare, Spenser and all the Elizabethans, Donne and nearly all the Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault was not Dr Johnson’s. The guilty men, as a contemporary noted, were not ‘the illustrious scholar but his employers, who thought themselves . . . the best judges of vendible poetry’.

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