English Men of Letters

"British Men of Letters" redirects here. For the fictional occult group, see list of Supernatural and The Winchesters characters § Other humans.

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

Second series

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

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, vol. 144, Detroit: Gale Research Inc.
• Amigoni, David. Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse. London: Routledge, 2014.