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In: Harvard Classics·Essays, Letters & Speeches·British Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #21962.
Harvard Classics Volume 28 gathers a varied selection of English and American essays, beginning with a detailed introductory note on William Makepeace Thackeray. The note traces Thackeray’s life from his birth in Calcutta through his education, early artistic pursuits, and eventual rise as a novelist and lecturer, emphasizing his later work as an essayist. From there the volume moves into the first essay, a lecture on Jonathan Swift, where Thackeray’s speaker‑like tone sets the stage for a series of biographical sketches and literary reflections that blend historical detail with personal commentary.
The prose reflects the late‑Victorian habit of erudite, conversational diction, marked by long, flowing sentences and a penchant for digressive, anecdotal illustration. Its tone is scholarly yet accessible, aiming to inform as much as to entertain. Readers who enjoy thoughtful cultural history, enjoy the blend of biography with literary criticism, or have an appetite for the rhetorical style of 19th‑century essayists will find this collection rewarding.
[Transcriber's note: This book contains a number of Greek fragments. Most of these fragments (the smaller ones) were transliterated into their English equivalents using the guidelines in Project Gutenberg's "Greek How-To". The three largest fragments were scanned and inserted into the HTML version of this e-book as images. Those three fragments are all in Matthew Arnold's "The Study of Poetry" section of this book, with translations (not transliterations) of them in footnotes 3, 4, and 5.] …
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