English Men of Letters

English Men of Letters was a series of literary biographies written by leading literary figures of the day and published by Macmillan, under the general editorship of John Morley. The original series was launched in 1878, with Leslie Stephen's biography of Samuel Johnson, and ran until 1892. A second series, again under the general editorship of Morley, was published between 1902 and 1919.

First Series

1. Leslie Stephen, Samuel Johnson, 1878 2. James Cotter Morison, Gibbon, 1878 3. Richard H. Hutton, Sir Walter Scott, 1878 4. John Addington Symonds, Shelley, 1878 5. Thomas Henry Huxley, Hume, 1879 6. William Black, Goldsmith, 1878 7. William Minto, Daniel Defoe, 1879 8. John Campbell Shairp, Robert Burns, 1879 9. R. W. Church, Spenser, 1879 10. Anthony Trollope, Thackeray, 1879 11. John Morley, Burke, 1879 12. Mark Pattison, Milton, 1879 13. Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1879 14. Edward Dowden, Southey, 1879 15. Adolphus William Ward, Chaucer, 1879 16. Goldwin Smith, Cowper, 1880 17. James Anthony Froude, Bunyan, 1879 18. John Nichol, Byron, 1880 19. Thomas Fowler, Locke, 1880 20. Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope, 1880

21. Alfred Ainger, Charles Lamb, 1882 22. David Masson, Quincey, 1881 23. Sidney Colvin, Landor, 1881 24. George Saintsbury, Dryden, 1881 25. F. W. H. Myers, Wordsworth, 1881 26. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Bentley, 1882 27. Leslie Stephen, Swift, 1882 28. Adolphus William Ward, Dickens, 1882 29. Edmund Gosse, Gray, 1882 30. H. D. Traill, Sterne, 1882 31. James Cotter Morison, Macaulay, 1882 32. Austin Dobson, Fielding, 1883 33. Mrs. Oliphant, Sheridan, 1883 34. W. J. Courthope, Addison, 1884 35. R. W. Church, Bacon, 1884 36. H. D. Traill, Coleridge, 1884 37. John Addington Symonds, Sir Philip Sidney, 1886 38. Sidney Colvin, Keats, 1887 39. John Nichol, Thomas Carlyle, 1892

Further reading

• Fenwick, Gillian (1995), "Nourishing the curiosity: Leslie Stephen and the English Men of Letters series", Nineteenth-Century Prose
• Kijinski, John L. (Winter 1991), "John Morley's "English Men of Letters" series and the politics of reading", Victorian Studies, 34: 205–225
• Kijinski, John L. (1994), "Macmillan's English Men of Letters, First Series", in Serafin, Steven (ed.), Nineteenth Century British Literary Biographers, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 144, Detroit: Gale Research Inc.
• Amigoni, David. Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse. London: Routledge, 2014.