Notes
Chapter 1
1 Most of what is known about William Sharp’s early life is contained in William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) A Memoir, compiled by his wife Elizabeth A. Sharp (New York: Duffield & Co., 1910), https://archive.org/details/williamsharpfion00shariala
2 The first two letters, the earliest that survive and both only fragments, were written to Elizabeth A. Sharp (hereafter E. A. S.) after Sharp returned from Australia and before he settled in London in the spring of 1878. The ellipses indicate deletions by E. A. S. in printing the letters in the Memoir.
3 This early poem has not survived.
4 John Elder was the brother of Adelaide Elder, one of E. A. S.’s closest friends. Their father, Alexander Elder, found an opening for Sharp as a clerk in the London office of the City of Melbourne Bank in Spring 1878, thus enabling him to move to London (Memoir 27). Sharp met Adelaide Elder upon his return from Australia in the summer of 1877. Since John Elder was then in New Zealand for his health, he and Sharp first met in the summer of 1878 and soon became close friends. “John was a graduate of Cambridge, a thinker and man of fine tastes, and his new friend (Sharp) found a great stimulus in the keen mind of the older man” (Memoir 29). Adelaide gave William Sharp a book of Rossetti’s poems, and they led to Sharp’s first visit to Rossetti in Cheyne Walk in September 1879. Although this fragment of a letter is dated October 23, 1880 in the Memoir (31), it was written prior to the publication of Sharp’s sonnet entitled “Religion” in the Examiner in September, 1879.
5 Probably “On Reverence,” which, according to Elizabeth Sharp’s bibliography, was published in The Secular Review on May 17, 1879. There was no Sectarian Review.
6 Ernest Belford Bax (1854–1926) was a barrister, author, musician, and philosopher Along with William Morris, he started the Socialist League. As the first to mount a sustained public campaign soliciting compassion for men and boys while denouncing gynocentric chivalry, he is considered the father of the “men’s rights movement.” As young Londoners, he and Sharp took long walks together in the late 1870s, but they drifted apart in the early eighties. For Bax’s view of Sharp, see his Reminiscences and Reflections of a Mid and Late Victorian (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1920). His principal works include; Jean-Paul Marat (1878), Kant’s Prolegomena, etc., with Biography and Introduction (1882), Religion of Socialism (1886), The Roots of Reality (1907).
7 “Religion” appeared in The Examiner: A Sunday Paper on Politics, Literature, and Fine Arts (September, 1879).
8 Sharp’s first meeting with Rossetti probably occurred in September 1879 for, as this letter indicates, he was corresponding with him in familiar terms in January, 1880. In 1899 Sharp thanked Adelaide Elder for introducing him to Rossetti’s poetry “two and twenty years ago” (Memoir 35). Miscalculating, E. A. S. set the date of Sharp’s first acquaintance with Rossetti’s work as fall 1879 and of his first meeting with Rossetti as September 1, 1881 (Memoir 36). The 1899 letter to Adelaide Elder and Sharp’s early letters to Rossetti support fall 1877 as the date of Sharp’s discovery of Rossetti’s poetry and fall 1879 as the date of Sharp’s appearance at Rossetti’s door in Cheyne Walk to present him with the letter of introduction from Sir Noel Paton, an event that changed the course of Sharp’s life by providing entrance to the literary and artistic life of London. For more information about Paton, see note to July 25, 1881 letter to Rossetti.
9 “Dance” was not published and has not survived. Rossetti’s “The Card Dealer” (1849) appeared in Poems (1870).
10 Alice Mona Henryson Caird (1854–1932), a novelist, critic, social reformer, girlhood friend of E. A. S., was married to James Alexander Henryson Caird of Casseneary, Creeton, Kirkeudbrichtsh on December 19, 1877. They had one son, Major A. H. Caird. Her publications include: Whom Nature Leadeth (1883), The Wings of Azrael (1889), Beyond the Pale: An Appeal on Behalf of the Victims of Vivisection (1897, The Morality of Marriage, and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (1897). She was widely known, and by many disdained, for advocating changes in the marriage laws to grant women greater equality. E. A. S. dated this letter February 23, 1880, but it was written soon after Sharp’s memorable private dinner with Rossetti on Friday, January 30. The invitation to that dinner prevented Sharp from continuing a letter to Mona Caird, and this letter describes the evening with Rossetti.
11 The completed “House of Life” was published in Ballads and Sonnets (London: Ellis and White, 1881). Sharp said the sonnet sequence “is, in the main, a record of individual emotions suggested by the presence and absence of embodied love … — a House, not of Life, but of Love… . [They] are the record of what a poet-soul has felt, and we see that love meant with him a dream of happiness while present, a dream of regret and a sense of frustration when passed away, but not that it inspired him to action or made his ideals more impersonal, or gave his aspirations wings to escape from the desolate haunts of sorrow and despondency and vague half-real hopes. Therefore, it is not so much that Love was the soul of his genius, as that his genius lived and had its being in the shadow of Love” (Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study, 408–10).
12 Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887) was a close friend of Rossetti and Sharp. After Marston’s early death, Sharp edited and wrote introductory Memoirs to Marston’s For a Song’s Sake and Other Stories (London: Walter Scott, 1887) and Song Tide (London: Walter Scott, 1888). See note to Sharp’s April 22, 1880 letter to Swinburne.
13 Watts-Dunton (1832–1914), a poet, critic, and novelist, was a close friend of Rossetti. Theodore Watts (1832–1914) became Theodore Watts-Dunton in 1898. In 1879, he and Swinburne took up residence at The Pines, Putney, where they lived until Swinburne’s death in 1909. Watts-Dunton’s publications include: The Coming of Love (1898), Aylwin (1899), Rossetti and Charles Wells (1908), The Poetry of the Renascence of Wonder (1916), Vesprie Towers (1916), and Old Familiar Faces (1916).
14 Moncure D. Conway’s “William Kingdon Clifford” was tenth in the “Leaders of Modern Thought” series in Modern Thought, II (Feb. 1, 1880), 293–99. Clifford (1845–1879) was a mathematician, philosopher, and expert in classical and literary studies. His interest in Christian scholastic dogma was dispelled by his study of Darwin and Herbert Spencer. He was a follower of Berkeley and Hume and radically opposed the Hegelians. His posthumously published works include: Lectures and Essays, ed. F. Pollock and L. Stephen (1879), Common Sense of the Exact Sciences, ed. & partly written by Karl Pearson (1885), and several mathematical studies.
15 Dr. James Martineau (1805–1900) was a Unitarian minister, a respected theologian, and a Professor of Philosophy in Manchester New College, the seminary in which he had been educated. He was the younger brother of the essayist and novelist, Harriet Martineau. His principal works are: Religion as Affected by Modern Materialism (1874), Modern Materialism (1876), Hours of Thought on Sacred Things (last series, 1876; 2nd series, 1879), Ideal Substitutes for God Considered (1879).
16 This letter precedes an undated letter to Rossetti in the Memoir (40–41) which responds to Rossetti’s criticism of Sharp’s sonnets.
17 Philip Bourke Marston.
18 Thomas Henry Hall Caine (1853–1931), who later became a popular novelist, was a close companion of Rossetti in 1881 and 1882. Rossetti had suggested Sharp submit one or two sonnets for publication in Caine’s Sonnets of Three Centuries (1882). Although Rossetti found fault in Sharp’s first effort, two sonnets eventually passed muster and were included in the volume. Caine’s Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Sharp’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study appeared in late 1882 following Rossetti’s death in April. Richard Le Gallienne (Romantic Nineties, 1951, p. 20) recalled Oscar Wilde saying: “Whenever a great man dies, Hall Caine and William Sharp go in with the undertakers.” To be sure, both writers were anxious to capitalize on their close relationship with Rossetti, but both books contain useful information.
19 William Michael Rossetti (1829–1919) was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s brother. His wife, Emma Lucy (1843–1894), was the daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown, and she was also a painter. William Michael was educated at King’s College School, London, and entered the Excise Office in 1845. His publications include Lives of Famous Poets (1878), The Life of Keats (1887), Dante G. Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1895), Memoir of Dante G. Rossetti (1895), and Some Reminiscences (1906). He edited works by the pre-Raphaelites, the romantic poets, and Chaucer’s Troylus and Criseyde.
20 This letter was transcribed and published in The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp by Terry L. Meyers (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). Meyers states that arrangements were made for Phillip Marston to take Sharp to meet Swinburne at his home in Putney, probably in June, 1880. Meyers also reproduces a previously unpublished poem that accompanied this letter: “To Mr. A. C. Swinburne.” The manuscript poem is housed in the Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin where its authorship was previously unknown. This transcription of the letters is from a photocopy of the manuscript.
21 Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887), the son of John Westland Marston, a well-known man of letters, was blinded at the age of three by the administration of belladonna in an effort to cure scarlet fever. He began writing poetry at an early age and published his first volume (Song-Tide and Other Poems, 1871) when he was twenty-one; his second (All in All: Poems and Sonnets, 1875) four years later; and a third (Wind Voices) in 1883. By then he had become a favored member of the circle of young men around Dante Gabriel Rossetti who introduced him to William Sharp in 1880. The two men became fast friends. Following Marston’s death Sharp published a selection of his poems with an introductory Memoir in his Canterbury Poets Series (Song-Tide: Poems and Lyrics of Love’s Joy and Sorrow) and a collection of his short stories containing the same Memoir (For a Song’s Sake and Other Stories). Both were issued by the Walter Scott firm in 1888.
22 Robert Edward Francillon (1851–1919), a novelist and journalist, married Rosamund Barnett, the daughter of the musical composer, John Barnett. Between 1872 and 1894 he was on the staff of the Globe. He belonged to a Pre-Raphaelite group which met at the home of Dr. Westland Marston, a dramatist and father of Philip B. Marston, where Rossetti and Swinburne, as well as Richard Garnett, William Morris, and Arthur O’Shaughnessy were often entertained. His works include: Earl’s Dene (1870), Olympia (1874), A Dog and His Shadow (1876), Queen Cophetua (1880), Gods and Heroes, or The Kingdom of Jupiter (1892), Jack Doyle’s Daughter (1894), and Mid-Victorian Memories (1914).
23 Julian Hawthorne (1846–1934), son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a novelist, journalist, historical writer, and biographer. He lived in London between 1874 and 1881. His publications include: Saxon Studies (1874), Gath (1875), Archibald Malmaison (1878), Sebastian Strome (1879), Dust (1882), Fortune’s Fool (1883), Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1885), History of Oregon (1888), and Shapes That Pass: Memories and Meditations (1928).
24 David Christie Murray (1847–1907), a novelist and journalist, wrote some thirty loosely plotted novels, many drawn from his experience as a reporter. His works include: A Life’s Atonement (1879), Joseph’s Coat (1881), Val Strange (1882), By the Gate of the Sea (1883), Rainbow Gold (1885), Aunt Rachel (1886), Autobiography: A Novelist’s Notebook (1887), and Recollections (1908).
25 Published in The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood (1882), this poem was the subject of an exchange of correspondence between Sharp and Violet Paget (“Vernon Lee”) on the appropriate subject matter of poetry.
26 Rossetti’s written response to these two poems — “Motherhood” and “The Dead Bridegroom” — is contained in a letter from Rossetti to Sharp dated January 1881 (Memoir 44).
27 Eugene Jacob Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907) was a poet-novelist and the half-brother of Violet Paget who published under the pseudonym “Vernon Lee.” In 1873 he was incapacitated by a nervous disease that kept him bed-ridden and completely dependent on his mother and half-sister until 1893–94 when, following his mother’s death, he made an unexpected and complete recovery. He traveled to America in 1898 where he married the novelist, Annie E. Holdsworth, and returned with her to his mother’s villa outside Florence. In later life, Eugene Lee-Hamilton and Violet Paget were almost entirely estranged. His works include Poems and Transcripts (1878); Gods, Saints, and Men (1880); The New Medusa (1882); Apollo and Marsyas (1884); Imaginary Sonnets (1888); The Fountain of Youth (1891); Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894) The Lord of the Dark Red Star (1903); Dramatic Sonnets, Poems, and Ballads, edited by William Sharp for the Canterbury Poets series in 1903; The Romance of the Fountain (1905); and Mimma Bella (1908).
28 Probably Gods, Saints, and Men.
29 Frederic James Shields (1833–1911), a painter and illustrator influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, was a friend of Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, John Ruskin, William Holman Hunt, and Edward Burne-Jones. His most important work, begun in 1889 and finished a few months before his death, was a pictorial decoration of the walls in the Chapel of the Ascension on Bayswater Road in London.
30 Shortly after Sharp settled in London in the late spring of 1878, Alexander Elder, the father of Adelaide and John Elder, found him a position in the City of Melbourne Bank where he was bound as a clerk for three years. His banking career ended in August, 1891, when it became clear to him and his employers that he was unsuited to the work (Memoir 27, 53–54).
31 Auguste Comte (1789–1857) attempted to transform philosophy into religion by substituting the worship of humanity for the worship of God. His principal works include Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), Catéchisme positiviste (1852), Système de politique positive (1851–54), Calendrier positiviste (1849).
32 Published in Sharp’s first volume of poems, The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood (1882).
33 Brackets as written. The ballad was probably “The Son of Allen” which Sharp included in Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy (London: Walter Scott, 1889).
34 Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881) was the author of four volumes of poetry. A brother-in-law of Philip Bourke Marston, he was employed in the British Museum’s Department of History. He died on Sunday, January 30, 1881, which dates this letter Thursday, February 3.
35 Probably “The Son of Allan.”
36 Philip Bourke Marston.
37 Olivia Narney [Singleton] Garnett (d. 1903) was the wife of Richard Garnett (1835–1906), author and Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum where he worked from 1851–1899. Her husband, considered “the ideal librarian,” published extensively in both verse and prose and is best known for Relics of Shelley (1862) and The Twilight of the Gods (1903). She was also the mother of Edward Garnett (1868–1937). A well-known author and dramatist, he published A Censured Play: The Breaking Point (1907); Turgenef (1917); and Papa’s War (1919). He was married to Constance (Black) Garnett (1862–1946), the highly-regarded translator of major Russian novelists.
38 This letter was sent to Elizabeth Sharp while she was in Italy during the early months of 1881.
39 Joaquin Miller (1841–1913) was the pseudonym of Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, “The Byron of Oregon.” A horse thief, Portland lawyer, pony-express messenger, and newspaper editor, Miller fascinated the English who considered him “the frontier poet.” His works include: Specimens (1868), Joaquin, et al. (1860), Pacific Poems (1890), Songs of the Sierra (1877), a Mormon play called The Danites of the Sierras (1877), an autobiographical Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History (1873), and Memorie and Rime (1884).
40 Published in The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood (1882). Eugene Lee-Hamilton and Violet Paget saw the poem in manuscript. Elizabeth probably showed it to them while she was in Italy.
41 This poem was never published (see Memoir 45).
42 Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s first book of poems, Poems and Transcripts (1878).
43 Published in The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood (1882).
44 Violet Paget (1856–1937), daughter of Matilda [Adams] Lee-Hamilton Paget and Henry Ferguson Paget and half-sister of Eugene Lee-Hamilton, was a prolific writer of fiction and works of history, philosophy, and sociology. She chose the pseudonym Vernon Lee, at the start of her career. Vernon reflects her desire to be taken seriously as a “male” writer, and “Lee” the influence of her older half-brother on her intellectual development. It was widely known in literary circles that Vernon Lee was Violet Paget. Her major works include Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), a pioneering work that brought to light the spontaneous national movement that developed in the music and drama of eighteenth-century Italy; Euphorion (1884); its sequel; Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895); Genius Loci (1899); and The Spirit of Rome (1906).
45 Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857–1944) was the daughter of George Robinson, a London banker who was well known in the literary world of the eighties and nineties. He frequently entertained such luminaries as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and Thomas Hardy. Agnes began writing poetry at an early age and published her first book of poetry, A Handfull of Honeysuckle, in 1878 when she was twenty-one. That was followed by The Crowned Hippolytus of Euripides: With New Poems in 1881. In 1882 she married James Darmesteter, a well-known French orientalist, and moved to France. Her third book of poetry, An Italian Garden: A Book of Songs, appeared in 1886. After Darmesteter died in 1894, she married Emile Duclaux, Director of the Pasteur Institute. Her Collected Poems were published in 1901, and she continued writing poetry, much of it influenced by the horrors of both World Wars, until her death in 1944.
46 “Hand and Soul,” a prose tale by D. G. Rossetti published in The Germ in January 1849, tells the story of a painting called “Figura Mistica di Chiaro dell’Erma.” The tale describes a young man obsessed with art who imitates others to win the fame he so passionately desires. The allegory is centered on the figure of a lady who appears in a vision and instructs the young artist to paint her, saying “I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee.”
47 See March 10,1881 letter to Eugene Lee-Hamilton.
48 The reference is to a controversy over an article, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” which Robert Buchanan published under the pseudonym Thomas Maitland in the Contemporary Review (October, 1871). Exploiting a Victorian taboo on open sexuality, Buchanan launched a prudish attack on the “fleshly” treatment of physical passion in Pre-Raphaelite art, denouncing Swinburne and Rossetti for their degenerative influence on public morals. In a pamphlet called “Under the Microscope,” Swinburne defended himself with an outburst of pornographic invective expressed in pseudo-Biblical language. Rossetti, in “The Stealthy School of Criticism” (Athenaeum, Dec., 1871), answered Buchanan’s charge of “fleshliness”: In my poetry “All the passionate and just delights of the body are declared — somewhat figuratively it is true, but unmistakable — to be as naught if not ennobled by the concurrence of the soul at all times.”
49 Published in 1874.
50 Harry Buxton Forman (1842–1917), known for his painstaking editions of Keats and Shelley, worked for forty-seven years in the postal service and was an early advocate of a post office library, later becoming its secretary. He knew and supported Rossetti, Morris, and Meredith. His early works include: Our Living Poets (1871), the book Sharp refers to here, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Scarcer Books (1876). In 1887, in association with a London commodity broker and book collector Thomas James Wise, Forman began publishing what turned out many years later to be forged early editions of British writers. For more information, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Buxton_Forman
51 Emerson’s “The Poet.”
52 There is no record of its publication.
53 Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880).
54 Sharp did not make his first trip to Italy until 1883 (Memoir 78–79). E. A. S. was in Italy in early 1881 (Memoir 44–49).
55 This edition has not been identified.
56 Christina G. Rossetti’s Poems (1872). Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894) was the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her works include Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) and A Pageant (1881). She also wrote nursery rhymes like Sing Song (1872), and children’s tales such as Speaking Likenesses (1874). For the last 20 years of her life she produced mostly works with religious themes. These very popular books include Called to Be Saints (1881) and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892).
57 Light of Asia was not written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton but by Sir Edwin Arnold. The full title is The Light of Asia; or, The Great Renunciation — Mahabhinishkramana, Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama … as told in verse by an Indian Buddhist (1879). In it, Arnold attempted “by the medium of an imaginary Buddhist votary to depict the life and character and indicate the philosophy of that noble hero and reformer, Prince Gautama of India, founder of Buddhism.” It appeared in 1879 and was an immediate success, going through numerous editions in England and America. Arnold’s other volumes of poetry: Indian Song of Songs (1875), Pearls of the Faith (1883), With Sadi in the Garden (1888), Potiphar’s Wife (1892), Adzuma, or The Japanese Wife (1893), and Indian Poetry (1904), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Arnold
58 Sharp seems to be saying that the Tauchnitz edition [Poems, ed. with a Memoir of the author by Franz Huffer (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1873)] is cheaper than the paper edition.
59 Not published.
60 “The Wandering Jew” was not published.
61 Vernon Lee, “A Dialogue on Contemporary Morality,” Contemporary Review, XXXVIV (1881), 682–707. As Sharp proceeds to indicate, Cyril, in this dialogue, was intended to be Sharp, while Baldwin speaks for Violet Paget.
62 “Spring Wind” was published in Sharp’s first collection of poetry, The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood (1882) and in T. Hall Caine’s Sonnets of Three Centuries (1882). “A Poet’s Greeting to a Brother Poet” was probably not published.
63 Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901) was a Scottish artist, illustrator and sculptor. He was also a poet who had a deep interest in, and knowledge of, Scottish folklore and Celtic legends. Most of his life was spent in Scotland, but he studied briefly at the Royal Academy in London in 1843 where he met John Everett Millais who asked him to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The invitation to be an official member of the Brotherhood was turned down by Paton although he painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style. Noel Paton’s parents were damask designers and weavers, William and Elizabeth Sharp descended from three generations of muslin manufacturers, and the two families were close friends. Noel Paton played an important role in Sharp’s establishment as a writer. He provided the introduction to Danial Gabriel Rossetti, who accepted him into his circle of fellow writers and painters. He was responsible for a letter Sharp received when he was desperately short of money in early 1883. The letter was from an unknown friend who had known his grandfather. In his own words, “He had heard from Sir Noel Paton that I was inclined to the study of literature and art. He therefore enclosed a cheque for two hundred pounds, which I was to spend in going to Italy to pursue my artistic studies” (Memoir 78–79). Sharp went to Italy that spring and immersed himself in the study of Italian Renaissance painters in Florence and Rome, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Noel_Paton
64 This refers to either Poems or Ballads and Sonnets, both published in London by Ellis and White in 1881. With the exception of four new poems in Poems, both volumes were comprised of previously printed works.
65 Dinah Maria Mulock (1826–1887), the author of John Halifax, Gentleman (1854), married George Lillie Craik in 1864. Sir Noel Paton was a close friend of the Craiks, and he provided Sharp an introduction in 1880. Mrs. Craik was the godmother of Philip Bourke Marston who became a good friend of Sharp after Rossetti introduced them. According to Elizabeth Sharp, Mrs. Craik “had a house in Kent, at Shortlands, and to it she on several occasions invited the two young poets” [Sharp and Marston]. E. A. S. described one such visit in the summer of 1880 during which Sharp contracted a cold that led to rheumatic fever (Memoir 41–42).
66 Since Rossetti had multiple paintings titled Beatrice it is difficult to determine which Sharp refers to here. It is, however, most likely Beata Beatrix (1864), which, along with Dante’s Dream, Sharp considered Rossetti’s finest painting. Rossetti’s paintings are marvelously reproduced and discussed in the Rossetti Archive: “The Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator who was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain.” http://www.rossettiarchive.org/index.html
67 Dr. Westland Marston (1819–1890), the father of Sharp’s friend Philip Bourke Marston, was a poetic dramatist, a member of the Dickens circle, editor of the National Magazine in 1837, and a poetry critic for The Athenaeum after 1863. His works include The Patrician’s Daughter (1842), Strathmore (1849), Anne Blake (1853), A Life’s Ransom (1857), A Hard Struggle (1858), Donna Diana (1863), The Favorite of Fortune (1866), Life for Life (1869), and Broken Spells (1873).
68 Possibly the wife of Viscount Stratford Canning, Stratford de Redcliffe (1786–1880). An important diplomat, he served for a time as ambassador in Constantinople. Lady Stratford (de Redcliffe) was born c.1807 and survived her husband’s death.
69 A portion of this letter appears in the Memoir (55–57).
70 Sir Noel Paton.
71 Philip Bourke Marston.
72 Rossetti created three paintings titled Dante’s Dream. The first is a watercolor from 1855, and the second, to which Sharp is referring here, is an oil from 1871. It is, according to Sharp’s book on Rossetti, the artist’s largest painting, and its full title is Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice. It can be seen here: https://www.wikiart.org/en/dante-gabriel-rossetti/dante-s-dream The third Dante’s Dream is an oil from 1878.
73 Sir Noel Paton.
74 Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1513), which is at the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden.
75 Frederick James Shields.
76 Noel Paton’s sister, Amelia Robertson Paton (1820–1904), was a portrait painter and sculptor. Her early works consisted mainly of portraits of family and friends, but her professional career flourished after she married, at age forty-two, David Octavius Hill (1802–1870), an Edinburgh landscape painter who was the first to use photography as an aid to painting. A highly respected sculptor, Paton was deeply involved in the artistic and intellectual life of Edinburgh. She sculpted busts of many Scottish dignitaries and created the statue of David Livingston in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, and that of Robert Burns in Dumfries. The Paton and Sharp families were friends, and Elizabeth and Amelia were especially close, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Robertson_Hill
77 Probably The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mary Shelley and published by Edward Moxon (London: 1839).
78 Either Poems or Ballads and Sonnets.
79 Marcus Bourne Huish (1843–1921) was an English barrister, writer and art dealer. He edited The Art Journal from 1881 to 1893, and he was the Director of the Fine Art Society at the time of this letter. Sharp had a temporary position at the Society’s gallery in New Bond Street. He was hired for just six months “to form a section dealing with old German and English Engravings and Etchings,” and he lost that position when the Society decided not to form the section. Had he been successful in urging Rossetti to agree to an exhibition in the gallery, he may well have been hired on a more permanent basis to organize that exhibit.
80 Frederick James Shields (1833–1911) was a British artist, illustrator and designer closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites.
81 Recognized artists whose works were exhibited in the Fine Art Society Gallery: William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Samuel Prout (1783–1852), John Everett Millais (1829–1896), and Samuel Palmer (1805–1881).
82 George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898).
Chapter 2
1 This letter was written from Birchington, Kent, where Rossetti died on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1882.
2 Although he never finished it, Rossetti returned to work on his “Joan of Arc” during a short period of recovery shortly before his death in 1882.
3 Robert Farquharson Sharp (1864–1945) was Elizabeth Sharp’s brother and thus both a first cousin and brother-in-law of William Sharp, whose literary executor he became upon Elizabeth’s death in 1932. He served in the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum from 1888 until 1929. His published works include Dictionary of English Authors (1897), Makers of Music (1898), Reader’s Guide to Everyman’s Library (1932), Short Biographical Dictionary of Foreign Literature (1933), and translations of Hugo, Bjornson, and Ibsen. On February 5, 1937, he read an essay entitled “I Remember William Sharp” on the BBC.
4 In the Memoir (63), this letter is misdated 1883.
5 This sonnet was not published until Mrs. Sharp printed it in the Memoir. Two other sonnets addressed to D. G. Rossetti appear in the section entitled “Sonnets, 1882–1886” in the Selected Writings of William Sharp, Uniform Edition Arranged by Mrs. William Sharp, Volume One, Poems by William Sharp (London: William Heinemann, 1912).
6 William Bell Scott (1811–1890), was a Scottish artist in oils and watercolors. He was also a poet and art teacher, and his posthumously published reminiscences give a chatty and often vivid picture of life in the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites; he was especially close to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His publications include Poems (1854), William Blake: Etchings from his Works (1878), and The Little Masters (1880).
7 Edward Dowden (1843–1913), an Irish poet, essayist, biographer, and literary critic, was a Professor at Trinity College Dublin from 1892 until his death. He gave the Taylor Lectures at Oxford in 1889 and the Clark Lectures at Cambridge between 1892 and 1896. He is best known for his Shakespeare criticism and his two-volume Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886). Among his publications are Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Poems (1876), Introduction to Shakespeare (1893), Essays: Modern and Elizabethan (1910), and Poems (1914).
8 For more information about Dowden, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Dowden.
9 Notice by Theodore Watts (later Watts-Dunton) of Sharp’s first book of poetry — The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood — which was published by Elliot Stock in Spring 1882.
10 Yorkshire Post.
11 A poet and essayist, James Thomson (1834–1882) was the author of “City of Dreadful Night” (1874) and a volume of that title which followed in 1880, in addition to Essays and Phantasies (1881), and Satires and Profanities (1884). In 1840 his father became paralyzed and his mother died in 1842. In 1853 the girl that he loved, Matilda Weller, died suddenly. Additionally, his insomnia, dipsomania, melancholia, poverty, alcoholism, and eventual homelessness are some of the “miseries” to which Sharp refers. He collapsed at Philip Bourke Marston’s on June 1st and died on June 3rd.
12 Date from postcard on envelope.
13 Philip Bourke Marston.
14 James Thomson.
15 Sharp began his book on Rossetti (Daniel Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study) in June 1882 within two months of Rossetti’s death in April. It was published in December by Macmillan. The book was well-received and established Sharp’s reputation as a critic. He later considered it a too-hasty project by a young man whose “judgement” was “immature” (Memoir 63–72).
16 Caine’s Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was published by Elliot Stock in fall 1882.
17 A journalist and novelist, William Tirebuch (1854–1900) was a friend of Hall Caine who lived in Liverpool. After a period of writing for the Liverpool Mail and the Yorkshire Post, he devoted himself to writing novels. He was the first to get a book about Rossetti into print after Rossetti died (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882). Hall Caine and William Sharp were writing books on Rossetti in 1882, and each hoped to be the first to publish. It turned out that Tirebuch’s book “was a slim essay on Rossetti’s art with little about his life. It came out on June, 1882, and William [Rossetti] dismissed it as of no importance as the writer had not known Rossetti personally and was himself unknown.” See Hall Caine. Portrait of a Victorian Romancer by Vivien Allen (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), pp. 151–52.
18 This work became Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study.
19 The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood.
20 For images of the Rossetti paintings identified in this letter, consult the Rossetti Archive: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/index.html
21 I.e. watercolour.
22 “Found” is a famous unfinished painting by Rossetti.
23 Frederick Startridge Ellis (1830–1901 was a bookseller, author, and publisher (Ellis and White) who brought out works by William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and became their close friend.
24 Date from postmark, and addressed to Ellis at Hill House, Epsom. Sharp wrote this card on the 25th, a Thursday, after returning from seeing Ellis’ Rossetti paintings in Epsom.
25 Philip Bourke Marston.
26 Mathilde Blind (1841–1896) was a German-born poet, translator, and friend of the Rossetti family. Her works include The Ascent of Man; The Heather on Fire; Dramas in Miniature; Poems of the Open Air; Tarantella: A Romance (1885); Madame Roland (1886); and George Eliot (1888).
27 This incomplete letter is taken from a summary which was transcribed by a Manx Museum staff member.
28 The “‘unsold drawings” by D. G. Rossetti were sold at Christie’s in 1883. The reference is to the “Supplementary Catalogue” Sharp included in his book on Rossetti.
29 On October 23, Sharp told W. M. Rossetti he would be going to Hampshire for a fortnight or more. This letter indicates he was staying in Northbrook House in Micheldever which was the country home of the Cairds. The Sharps stayed there frequently at the invitation of Mona Caird, a good friend of Elizabeth Sharp since their school days, who became a well-known advocate of women’s rights. (See note to Sharp letter to Caird dated early 1880.) Built in the eighteenth century, Northbrook House is now a grade II listed building. The date of the letter is established by its reference to the proofs, which Sharp expected in a few days, of the wood-engraving of D. G. Rossetti’s design which surrounds the sonnet he wrote about the sonnet. Sharp told Dowden on December 10, 1882 that Christina Rossetti and her mother had made the design containing the sonnet available to him for publication as the frontispiece for his study of Rossetti.
30 The New Medusa and Other Poems (1882). The book Sharp received from Richard Garnett was Selected Letters of Shelley with an introduction by Garnett which was published by Kegan Paul in 1882.
31 Sonnets of Three Centuries: A Selection, ed. T. H. Caine (1882).
32 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study.
33 Frederick Langbridge (1849–1922) was a clergyman who lived for many years in Limerick. He wrote poems, plays, novels, and books for children.
34 The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood.
35 India ink is a simple black or colored ink once widely used for writing and printing.
36 In 1883 there were exhibitions of Rossetti’s art at both the Royal Academy’s Burlington House and the Burlington Fine Arts Club. The latter was offered as a supplementary and concurrent exhibition due to the supposed shortcomings of the Royal Academy’s exhibition. The Royal Academy exhibit opened in December 1882, and the Burlington Club’s opened on January 13, 1883. The London Times responded favorably to both: “the two Rossetti exhibitions now open will be remembered for a long time to come. They have dispelled more than one prejudice, and thrown a new light on the origin of a movement which has played an important part in the development of English art and of the external surroundings of English life” (January 15, 1883, p. 8).
37 For many years an imposing residence in Piccadilly, Burlington House was sold in 1854 to the British government for £140,000. The Royal Society occupied part of the house in 1857. The Royal Academy of Art moved to the main block in 1867 on a 999-year lease with rent of £1 per year. It soon became and remains a prestigious art school and a major art gallery. The Burlington Fine Arts Club was established in 1866 and occupied (until its demise in 1952) imposing quarters at 17 Savile Row. In addition to providing gallery space for exhibitions, it was a men’s club for artists and art patrons. Daniel Gabriel Rossetti was a member as were James McNeill Whistler, John Ruskin, and William Michael Rossetti.
38 Sharp’s four-month visit to Italy, which began in late February 1883, was made possible by the gift of 200 pounds from a friend of his grandfather who heard from Sir Noel Paton that Sharp was “inclined to the study of literature and art” (Memoir 78). Of all the letters Sharp wrote to his fiancé from Italy, only those she printed in the Memoir survive since she destroyed toward the end of her life all the letters she had received from him and most of those he received from others. That was a sad loss because the letters and fragments that survive contain the responses of a perceptive young man, heavily imbued with the work of the British Pre-Raphaelites, to the paintings, murals, and statuary of the Italian Renaissance. Not long after he returned to England, Sharp became the London art critic for the Glasgow Herald, a position he later turned over to his wife. Both William and Elizabeth Sharp attended not only the major art exhibits in London, but also for many years the annual Spring Salons in Paris. They wrote extensively about the art they observed there in the late 1880s and 1890s, a period in which the experimental work of French artists dominated the international art world.
39 The Brancaccio Chapel of the Santa Maria del Carmine is a landmark of Florentine art. Its frescoes were painted by Masolino, beginning in 1424, and by his pupil Masaccio, who worked until his death in 1428 at the age of 27. They were completed by Filippino Lippi in the 1480s. Many of the scenes are among Masaccio’s masterpieces, and many artists of the 1400s and 1500s came to the chapel to sketch and discover how Masaccio achieved his dramatic effects.
40 Mrs. Smillie, Elizabeth Sharp’s aunt, had a villa on the outskirts of Florence.
41 Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée) (1839–1909) was well known on the continent as well as in England and America for her stories and criticism. Her mother, Susan Sutton, was English, and her father, Louis Reme, French. When she was not traveling, she lived and worked at her Villa Farinola outside Florence. She wrote glamorous, unreal, but extremely popular stories. Among her most successful books were: Held in Bondage (1863), Chandos (1866), and Under Two Flags (1867).
42 William Wetmore Story (1819–1895) was an American sculptor, poet, and novelist who moved permanently to Rome in 1850. See note to Sharp’s July 15, 1890 letter to Story. John Rollin Tilton (1828–1888), a close friend of Story, was a landscape painter who worked chiefly in watercolors. Also an American, he settled in Rome in 1852 and remained for the rest of his life.
43 Arthur Lemon (1850–1912) was a British painter who spent his early years in Rome and was, for ten years, a cowboy in California, where he painted Indians and wildlife.
44 John Arthur Lomax (1857–1923) studied in Munich and did his major work in Manchester and London.
45 Mrs. Smillie.
46 Giovanni Antonio Bazzi Sodoma (1477–1549) was a Lombard painter who worked at Monte Oliveto from 1505 to 1508, continuing the frescoes, “Scenes of the Life of St. Benedict that were begun by Luca Signorelli (1450–1523), an Umbrian painter and a pupil and collaborator of Piero della Francesca. Signorelli’s “Legend of St. Benedict,” a work known for its anatomical detail, its foreshortening, and its conveyance of pathos, was probably painted at Monte Oliveto in 1497.
47 Sharp wrote “The Tides of Venice” before he visited Italy. It was published in The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood.
48 John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) settled in Switzerland in 1877 and remained there until his death, with regular trips to Italy, especially Venice. He and Sharp developed a warm friendship, and Symonds encouraged Sharp’s literary pursuits throughout the eighties.
49 William Dean Howells (1837–1920), a novelist, poet, and essayist, was a sub-editor of The Atlantic Monthly under James T. Fields and editor-in-chief from 1872 until 1881. He wrote the “Editor’s Study” column for Harper’s Monthly from 1886 to 1891 when he left to edit Cosmopolitan for a year. He returned to Harper’s in 1900 and wrote the “Editor’s Easy Chair” until his death. Howells was the U.S. Consul in Venice from 1861 until 1865, and he returned frequently for visits. His works include: Poems (1873), A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Modern Italian Poets (1887), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Literature and Life (1902), Years of My Youth (1916), and The Leatherwood God (1916).
50 William Michael Rossetti married Emma Lucy Brown, the daughter of Ford Maddox Brown, in 1874.
51 E. A. S. confirms that Venice, where he enjoyed the “frequent companionship of John Addington Symonds” and long hours in the gondola, was the “crowning pleasure” of Sharp’s Italian sojourn. He stayed there through May, spent June in the Ardennes with Elizabeth and her mother, and returned to London briefly in July before going on to Scotland to stay with his mother and sister at Innellan on the Clyde (Memoir 93).
52 Sharp is probably referring to the second of the two sales described by Oswald Doughty: “On July 5th [1882] and the two following days, the sale of Rossetti’s household effects took place at Cheyne Walk. To William’s [William Michael Rossetti] pleased surprise it produced, together with some of the pictures sold privately, about three thousand pounds… . It chanced to be Gabriel’s birthday, May 12, 1883, when the remaining paintings were sold at Christie’s for about the same sum as the household sale had realized; the total thus raised, almost six thousand pounds, proved sufficient to pay Rossetti’s debts and even leave a small balance in hand.” Oswald Doughty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A Victorian Romantic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 674.
53 Elizabeth Sharp in her Memoir states the portmanteau was lost when Sharp was returning to London from Innellan. This letter makes clear that it was lost on his way from London to Innellan to stay with his Mother & sisters. It was found about a month after its loss with its contents, according to E. A. S., “in a soaked sodden condition, but still legible and serviceable.” Elizabeth reported that his search for the portmanteau in the wet & cold of Scotland caused him to become ill with rheumatic fever which attacked his heart when he returned to London in September (Memoir 94).
54 Although the enclosed poem is dated September 18, 1883, this letter was written in mid-to late-November. Sharp was “feeling better” after becoming seriously ill with rheumatic fever upon his return from Scotland in September. He is glad Caine was feeling better and that Sandown suits him. Caine went to live in a cottage near Sandown on the Isle of Wight at the end of October, 1883 (Vivien Allen, Hall Caine, Portrait of a Victorian Romancer).
55 Wind Voices (London: Stock, 1883).
56 Sharp accepted Dinah Maria Craik’s offer and spent March and April in her Dover house: 9 Hubert Terrace. He told Caine in a letter dated February 11, 1884 that he would be coming up from Dover each “Saty. till Monday — tho’ not to Thorngate Road.” He probably spent at least some weekends in London with Elizabeth at her parent’s house, 72 Inverness Terrace, from which he could attend art exhibits on Saturday and keep up his reviewing for the Glasgow Herald. When he left Dover in early May, he crossed to Paris and stayed there until May 20. In October 1884, Mrs. Craik lent her Dover house to the Sharps for a portion of their honeymoon.
57 Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton (1803–1873) was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and Member of Parliament. His novels include Pelham (1828), The Last Days of Pompeii, 3 vol. (1834), King Arthur (1848), and The Caxtons, 3 vol. (1849). In 1883 his son, (Edward) Robert Bulwer-Lytton (1831–1891), a diplomat and poet, published The Life, Letters and Literary Remains of his father. The two volumes covered the period 1803–1832. There were no subsequent volumes. Lytton’s wife, Lady Rosina (Doyle Wheeler) Bulwer-Lytton, who was Irish, was also a novelist. They separated after about six years of marriage (1827–1836). In 1839 she published a novel called Cheveley, or the Man of Honour, in which her husband was cast as the villain.
58 Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857–1944). See note to Sharp’s March 1881 letter to Violet Paget.
59 One of these books would have been his second volume of poems, Earth’s Voices, etc. (1884).
60 The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. Buxton Forman (1884).
61 Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
62 The New Medusa, and Other Poems.
63 New Arcadia, and Other Poems (London: Ellis and White, 1884).
64 Published in 1884.
65 All in All: Poems and Sonnets (1875).
66 Elizabeth Sharp.
67 Philip H. Caldron was born in France in 1833, went to England in his early boyhood, and began the study of art in London in 1850. He is best known for his painting “The Day of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew” (1863).
68 Earth’s Voices: Transcripts from Nature: Sospitra and Other Poems (London: Elliott Stock) was published in June 1884.
69 Philip Bourke Marston.
70 The identity of this “Romance” is uncertain. Sharp’s first published piece of prose fiction was “Jack Noel’s Legacy: A Story for Boys” which appeared serially in Young Folks’ Papers, 8 (London: James Henderson & Co., Ltd.) in 1886.
71 Walter Pater (1839–1894).
72 I have been unable to identify Mr. Parsons.
73 Probably either Sharp’s first volume of poetry, The Human Inheritance, or his second, Earth’s Voices. If the latter, this letter would date after June 1884 when Earth’s Voices was published.
74 Date from postmark on accompanying envelope. The letter was posted on Wednesday, February 13, 1884.
75 “Sospitra” appeared in Sharp’s second volume of poetry Earth’s Voices.
76 Sharp did add “A Fragment” to the title of “A Record” when it was published in Earth’s Voices.
77 George MacDonald (1824–1905) was a poet, novelist, and fantasy writer. His reputation lies mostly in his fairy tales, examples of which are contained in Dealings with Fairies (1867), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and Lilith (1895).
78 The home of E. A. S.’s parents with whom she lived.
79 “9 Herbert Terrace” was Dinah Maria Craik’s house in Dover. On hearing of Sharp’s serious illness and his need to be away from London in the winter of 1884, Mrs. Craik offered him the use of her Dover house. (See Sharp’s letter to D. G. Rossetti of July 28, 1881.) In October 1884, she lent her Dover house to the Sharps for a portion of their honeymoon.
80 Although this letter is dated 10 April in the Memoir, Sharp’s 26 April letter to Dowden (below) clearly states that he will be in Paris from 5 May until 20 May. This letter was therefore written on 10 May or thereabouts.
81 Paul Charles Joseph Bourget (1852–1935), a conservative French Catholic, wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, criticism and travel books. He was the author of Essais de Psychologie (1883), André Cornélis (1887), Le Disciple (1889), and Un Divorce (1904).
82 Emile Hennequin (1858–1888) was a literary critic and the author of Edgar Allan Poe (1885), La Critique Scientifique (1888), and Etudes de Critique Scientifique (1890).
83 Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891) was Helena P. Hahn until she married General Nicephore Blavatsky (whom she left within the first year of marriage). Born in Ekaterionslav, Russia, she traveled through Europe and the Mideast between 1848 to 1873. She first visited Paris in March 1873 and later that year went to America where she founded the Theosophical Society and became an American citizen. From America she went to India in 1878 and returned to Europe in February 1884. Subsequently, she spent a good deal of time in England, but continued her travels until her death in London in 1891. Her special brand of spiritualism — with elements of eastern religions and of the Kabbalah — was very attractive to young artists and intellectuals, chief among them W. B. Yeats, in the eighties and nineties.
84 Eugène Müntz (1845–1902) was a historian of French art. Sharp’s reference is to his Raphaël, sa vie, son oeuvre, son temps (1881).
85 Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) and Emile Zola (1840–1902) were eminent French novelists.
86 Joseph Antoine Milsand (1817–1886) was a French critic and philosopher whose works include a book on Ruskin, L’Esthetique Anglaise (1864).
87 François Coppée (1842–1908) and Frederic Mistral (1830–1914) were poets, while Jean Richepin (1849–1926), a popular figure in the “Latin Quarter” of Paris, was a poet, novelist, and dramatist.
88 Adolphe William Bouguereau (1825–1905) was born at La Rochelle, studied art in Paris, and became a decorative painter, best known for his “The Body of St. Cecilia Borne to the Catacombs.” FernandAnne-Piestre Cormon (1845–1924), also an artist, was a professor at L’École des Beaux Arts. Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898) painted in a traditional manner though his works have imaginative power and complexity. Jules Breton (1827–1906) was a French poet who became a member of L’Académie des Beaux Arts in 1886.
89 Maurice Guillaume Guizot (1833–1892), a literary scholar, was appointed acting professor of the Department of French Language and Modern Literature at the Collège de France and, in 1874, was named to the Chair of Germanic Language and Literature at the same university. In 1882 he published a partial translation of Macaulay’s essays on history and literature.
90 Earth’s Voices.
91 James Cotton (1869–1916) became editor of The Academy in 1881.
92 This pitiful letter is postmarked June 16, 1884, a Monday. It is written in a nearly illegible scrawl that demonstrates the pain Sharp was experiencing as he wrote. See the introduction to this section.
93 “& bedroom damp” is written in the margin here.
94 Eric Sutherland Robertson who shared rooms with Caine and served as best man at Sharp’s wedding on October 31, 1884. He edited the “Great Writers” series for Walter Scott, for which he wrote the Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1887). He was also the author of The Dreams of Christ, and Other Verses (1891), From Alleys and Valleys (1918), and The Limits of Unbelief; or Faith Without Miracles (1920). In the spring of 1887 Robertson assumed the chair of Literature and Logic at the University of Lahore. Upon leaving London, he had to vacate his position as editor of the “Literary Chair” in The Young Folk’s Paper. He suggested William Sharp succeed him as Editor, and that position provided the Sharps with a modest steady income for three years. Sharp was asking Caine if he could sleep in Robertson’s bed in the quarters they shared in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Caine had another house in Hampstead, perhaps unknown to Sharp, where he sent Sharp to be cared for by Mary Chandler and her maid. See the introduction to this section for more details.
95 When Sharp spent the night at Caine’s Hampstead house in June, he saw that Mary Chandler was pregnant with Caine’s child. As it happened, Mary had given birth to a son on 15 August 1884, and Caine had named him not Abel, but Ralph Hall Caine. Caine registered the birth on 15 September as the son of Thomas Henry Hall Caine, journalist, and Mary Alice Caine, formerly Chandler. Caine considered himself married to Mary, though he was not. They married in 1886 and enjoyed a long life together.
Chapter 3
1 Apollo and Marsyas, and Other Poems (London: Eliot Stock, 1884).
2 Theodore Watts’ review appeared in the issue of December 13, 1884, 764 ff.
3 This undated letter was enclosed with Sharp’s 5 January letter to Eugene Lee–Hamilton.
4 Miss Brown (1884) was Violet Paget’s first attempt at a novel. Peter Gunn, in Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (1964), notes: ‘Ouida, who had experience in these matters, remarked that it showed signs of having been written at a gallop” (p. 99).
5 The essays collected in Euphorion (1884) were written by Paget over several years, and many were published earlier in periodicals.
6 Having run serially in the Liverpool Mercury in the fall of 1884, Shadow of a Crime, Caine’s first novel, was published by Chatto & Windus in late February 1885 and went through several editions. Well reviewed and widely read, this book launched Caine’s forty-year career as a popular romantic novelist.
7 Sharp’s friend and fellow Walter Scott editor Eric Robertson shared lodgings with Hall Caine in London.
8 Sharp was writing a review of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean for The Athenaeum. It appeared as the lead review in the 28 February issue (pp. 271–73). Though Athenaeum reviews were unsigned, Sharp sent a copy to Pater in the hope of ingratiating himself with the well-known Oxford don.
9 See note to Sharp’s 22 May 1882 letter to Dowden.
10 Songs, Poems, and Sonnets of William Shakespeare, ed. by William Sharp (Walter Scott: London, 1885).
11 Dowden’s Sonnets by William Shakespeare (London: C. K. Paul & Co.) was published in 1881.
12 John Cordy Jeaffreson (1831–1901) was the author of The Real Shelley, New Views of the Poet’s Life, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1885). Among his other books are Novels and Novelists, From Elizabeth to Victoria (1858), A Book About Lawyers (1866), and The Real Lord Byron (1883).
13 This MS poem is on a single sheet in the British Library.
14 Born at Ballyshannon in Donegal, William Allingham (1824–1889) was a friend of Tennyson, and associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He edited Fraser’s Magazine from 1874–1879. He was the author of Poems (1850), Day & Night Songs (1854), Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), Irish Songs and Poems (1888), and a posthumous volume entitled Varieties in Prose (1893).
15 Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840–1922), poet, traveler, and explorer, served in the British diplomatic service from 1858–1870. Later he became an opponent of British imperialism and supported Egyptian, Indian, and Irish nationalist movements. In Ireland he was arrested and imprisoned for two months. His publications include Love Sonnets of Proteus (1881), Future of Islam (1882), Ideas About India (1885), Griselda: A Society Novel in Rhymed Verse (1893), and My Diaries (1919–1920).
16 James Ashcroft Noble (1844–1896) was a writer and critic and editor of The Athenaeum. Among his publications are Morality in English Fiction (1886), Impressions and Memories (1895), The Poets and the Poetry of the Century (1903).
17 Date from postmark on envelope.
18 All eventually appeared in the order listed here in Sharp’s Sonnets of this Century.
19 Published by Walter Scott in the Canterbury Poets Series in December 1895.
20 See W. S. letter to W. B. Scott 22 April 1882, fn.
21 Date from postmark.
22 Robert Perceval Graves was a friend and biographer of Sir William Hamilton. He was the recipient of Hamilton’s voluminous papers and letters upon the latter’s death. Graves wrote the 2040-page Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Including Selections from His Poems, Correspondence, and Miscellaneous Writings, 3 vol. (1882–1889; addendum, 1891).
23 Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) was an important mathematician who also wrote poetry. He was friends with both Wordsworth and Coleridge. In 1827, while still an undergraduate, he was named Andrews Professor of astronomy at Trinity College in Dublin. He was the author of General Method in Dynamics (1834), Lectures on Quaternions (1853) and The Elements of Quaternions (1866).
24 Sharp was referring to the papers of Joseph Severn which were given to him by Severn’s son Walter on the condition that he write a biography of the artist and diplomat who nursed Keats in his last illness in Rome. Elizabeth dated the occasion of this understanding as the early Spring of 1889 or 1890, but this letter shows it was much earlier, perhaps in the Spring of 1885. Elizabeth describes the occasion as follows: “‘We spent a week-end in Surrey with some old friends of my mother, Sir Walter and Lady Hughes, and one morning Mr. Walter Severn, the painter, walked over to luncheon. He spoke about my husband’s Life of Rossetti, then of the quantity of unpublished MSS he and his family had written by and relating to his father, Joseph Severn, the friend of Keats.’ Finally, he proposed that his listener should take over the MSS, put them in form and write a Life of Severn, with, as the special point of literary interest, his father’s devoted friendship with and care of the dying poet.” Working on the Severn papers and life, according to Elizabeth, brought Sharp “into pleasant relationship not only with Mr. Walter Severn, and with Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn, but also with Ruskin, who he visited later at Coniston.” (Memoir 168–69)
25 Sharp did not finish the Severn book until August 1891, and it was published (Sampson Low & Co.) in February, 1892.
26 Wilfrid Meynell (1852–1948) was a newspaper publisher and editor and the husband of Alice Meynell (1847–1922) a writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet. After marrying in 1877, the Meynells settled in Kensington and became the proprietors and editors of such magazines as The Pen, the Weekly Register, and Merry England.
27 This novel, here called False Lights, ran serially in The People’s Friend as “The Deathless Hate.” In 1888 it was published in three volumes as The Sport of Chance (London: Hurst and Blackett, Ltd.). See Memoir (121–29) for a discussion of its reception. Sharp began writing the work in the fall of 1885 and submitted it to The People’s Friend for a contest. He did not win the prize of 100£, but the editor accepted it and published it serially beginning in early 1887.
28 It was changed to “A Deathless Hate.” See previous note.
29 Sharp believed his serial novel would start running in The People’s Friend in the Spring of 1886. It did not begin until early 1887.
30 George F. Ferris, Great Musical Composers: German, French and Italian, ed. with an introduction by Mrs. W. Sharp, The Camelot Classics (London: Walter Scott, 1887).
31 Frederick Langbridge, Sent Back by the Angels, and Other Ballad of Home Life (London: Simpkin & Co., 1886).
32 Sonnets of this Century, edited and arranged, with a critical introduction on the sonnet by William Sharp (London: Walter Scott, 1886). It was published on 6 January 1886; thus the date of this letter. The book proved to be very popular, and was reprinted several times before Sharp made some revisions during the summer and fall of 1886 for a new edition. Sharp was hired by the Scott firm to prepare the anthology and later to revise it so he did not share in the book’s long term financial success. He told Dowden (3 February 1886), however, that the publishers had “behaved very decently,” to him, implying his satisfaction with the payment he received for the book from the Scott firm.
33 Of this letter and the two sonnets, Elizabeth Sharp wrote: “The opening of the new year 1886 — from which we hoped much — was unpropitious. A wet winter and long hours of work told heavily on my husband, whose ill-health was increased by the enforced silence of his ‘second self’” (Memoir 124). By “second self” she meant his frame of mind in which he could focus on his creative writing. This letter and the sonnets were written in a state of dejection resulting from these circumstances. Soon after writing this letter, Sharp became seriously ill.
34 Sonnets of this Century.
35 Nothing came of Caine’s plan to collaborate with Robert Buchanan on a dramatization of The Shadow of a Crime. The latter was published serially in the Liverpool Mercury in the fall of 1884 and in book form by Chatto & Windus (London) in February, 1885. See Vivien Allen’s Hall Caine, Portrait of a Victorian (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997).
36 The date “15–2–1886” is written at the top of the first page of the MS letter in another hand. It may have been taken from the postmark of the letter’s envelope, and it is probably correct since only 100 copies were printed of the first edition of Sonnets of This Century. The hundred copies disappeared quickly and more were printed (reissued) very quickly. As subsequent letters demonstrate, Theodore Watts was assisting Sharp in preparing a revised second edition that appeared in fall, 1886.
37 J. E. Pfeiffer (d. 1889) was a German merchant who lived in London. He married Emily Jane (Davis) Pfeiffer (1827–1890) in 1853. She was a poet who prided herself on her ability as a sonneteer. Her many publications include Glan Alarch (1877), The Rhyme of the Lady of the Rock (1884), and Woman and Work (1888), for which she collected periodical articles on the social position of women.
38 Date from postmark on envelope. The absence of letters between February and August 1886 is due to Sharp’s serious illness. See introduction to this section and Memoir, 125ff.
39 Sharp had asked Watts to read the proofs of a revised edition of Sonnets of This Century. Page 314 of the second edition contains the notes to Swinburne’s sonnets, and pages 320ff contain the notes to Watts’ sonnets. A letter from Watts to Sharp in the Memoir (114–15) dated January 8, 1886 indicates Watts wanted to change the order of printing of his five sonnets in the first edition. He sent the revised sequence directly to the printer, but it was too late to make the change since the book was published on January 6. The order was changed in the second and subsequent editions. Watts was especially concerned about his contributions and Swinburne’s to the Sonnets volume and about what Sharp said about them in his notes. Sharp was grateful for Watts’ input.
40 The publication of the revised edition was delayed until December.
41 Kidnapped; being the adventures of David Balfour in the year 1751 (London: Cassell & Co., 1886).
42 Frederick William Robinson (1830–1901) wrote an enormous number of popular novels now forgotten.
43 Watts worked on this novel and discussed it with his friends for many years, and it was finally published — by Hurst and Blackett, London — in October 1898.
44 Sharp was ill during the early months of 1886 and contacted scarlet fever and phlebitis in the spring. That was followed by a life-threatening case of rheumatic fever. After ten straight weeks in bed, he was well enough in August to go with Elizabeth to Micheldever in Kent where the Cairds had lent them their house — Northbrook — for six weeks. There in the peace and warm sunshine Sharp recovered, but his heart was permanently damaged by this long bout of illness. He was only thirty years old at this time, and he was unable to work for most of the year. The Sharps were saved from financial ruin only by a “substantial check” from Alfred Austin who asked that it be repaid not to him but to “someone else who stood in need” (Memoir 125–26).
45 The Great Writers Series that Eric Robertson edited for Walter Scott.
46 No volume on either Borrow or Rossetti appeared in the Great Writers Series. Sharp’s volume on Shelley was number 11 in the series, and was published in fall 1887.
47 For more about Mrs. D. O. Hill (Amelia Robertson Paton) see note to Sharp’s letter to D. G. Rossetti dated September 22,1881.
48 Ford had been hired to paint twelve frescoes for the Great Hall of the recently completed Manchester Town Hall. He invited the Sharps to come to Manchester to see the eight frescoes he had completed in the hope their visit would produce a favorable review in the Glasgow Herald.
49 James Stanley Little (1856–1940) was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction. The son of Thomas Little, of Woodville, Forest Hill, London, and John Cockerell’s daughter Lilla, he married the Viscountess Fanny Maude Therese de la Blache, and they had a daughter and a son. He lived variously in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium as well as in England; at the time of his death he resided in Cichele, Parkstone, Dorset. He and Sharp became close personal friends during the late eighties. In the eighties he published What Is Art? (1884), My Royal Father: A Story for Women (1886), and Doubt (1888).
50 The Shelley Society sponsored a performance of Shelley’s Hellas in London in October, 1886. Few notable people attended, and the event resulted in a grave financial loss to the Shelley Society [Sylva Norman, The Flight of the Skylark, The Development of Shelley’s Reputation (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 269–70)].
51 At the first meeting of the Shelley Society, on March 10, 1886, at University College, London, the Reverend Stopford Brooke substituted for W. M. Rossetti as the principal speaker. His audience consisted of about a hundred members of the Society. Before its dissolution in 1895 from lack of funds, the Shelley Society produced a few of Shelley’s plays (Hellas among them) and printed several of his works. The Society’s notebooks are largely a record of its internal politics (see Sylva Norman, The Flight of the Skylark, p. 268).
52 Oliver Madox Brown (1855–1874), the son of Ford Madox Brown, was a painter and writer. He published his first prose story, “Gabriel Denver,” in 1873 and died the following year, at age 19, of blood poisoning after an attack of gout. He was a close friend of Philip Bourke Marston who published an article about him in Scribner’s Monthly, 12 (1876), 425–28.
53 Sharp’s next volume of poems was Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy (London: Walter Scott, 1888).
54 Envelope postmarked November 27. Friday was November 26.
55 The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co, 1886).
56 Sharp’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Walter Scott) was published in 1887. It includes, following a table of contents, a single page “Note” which reads in part: “A special acknowledgment of indebtedness is due to Professor Edward Dowden, whose two comprehensive volumes on Shelley form the completest and most reliable record extant, and at the same time constitute the worthiest monument wherewith the poet’s memory has yet been honored.”
Chapter 4
1 The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Great Writers Series (London: Walter Scott, 1887).
2 I am indebted to Professor Terry Meyers for dating this letter.
3 What Is Art (1884). Seems to have been privately printed.
4 Richard Le Gallienne (1866–1947) went to London in 1889 to act as Literary Secretary for Wilson Barrett, an actor-manager who wrote a successful play, The Sign of the Cross (1895). There Le Gallienne became a frequent contributor to The Yellow Book and — along with Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, and W. B. Yeats, among others — an original member of the Rhymer’s club. Though ten years younger than Sharp, they became good friends. In the course of his life, Le Gallienne wrote nearly ninety books. Among them are twelve published in the 1890s: George Meredith: Some Characteristics (1890), The Book-Bills of Narcissus (1891), English Poems (1892), The Religion of a Literary Man (1893), Robert Louis Stevenson: An Elegy and Other Poems (1895), Quest of the Golden Girl (a novel, 1896), Prose Fancies (1896), Retrospective Reviews (1896), Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1897), If I Were God (1897), The Romance Of Zion Chapel (1898), In Praise of Bishop Valentine (1898). After several visits to America, Le Gallienne settled there in 1903. In 1927, he began to visit Paris for long periods of time, and he moved permanently to France in 1930. See Richard Whittington-Egan and Geoffrey Smerdon’s The Quest of the Golden Boy: The Life and Letters of Richard Le Gallienne (1962).
5 “Rossetti in Prose and Verse,” National and English Review (formerly The National Review), 9 (March 1887), pp. 111–24. Sharp’s footnote (pp. 122–23) reads as follows: “One of these [sonnets] may now be quoted with exceptional propriety. Since this article was written, Mr. Philip Bourke Marston — a well-known poet and Rossetti’s most ardent disciple — died suddenly, though after prolonged ill-health, at the early age of thirty-six. [Marston died on February 14, 1887.] As many will know, Mr. Marston was afflicted from childhood with blindness. Rossetti had for him a sincere regard: and in the collected works appears the following sonnet, which has hitherto been printed only in a critical biography of the older poet. The names of Mr. Marston’s three books of poetry are Song-Tide, All-in-All, and Wind Voices.” Sharp then reproduced Rossetti’s sonnet: “To Philip Bourke Marston.”
6 Editor of The Academy.
7 Sir Frank Thomas Marzials (1840–1912) succeeded Eric S. Robertson as editor of the Great Writers series for the Walter Scott firm. Marzials wrote the volumes on Dickens and Hugo and co-authored the volume on Thackeray (with Herman Charles Merivale). Eric Robertson, mentioned in the next sentence, was a close friend of Sharp’s. (See note to Sharp’s letter to Hall Caine dated 15 June 1884.) He had recently gone to India to occupy a chair of Literature and Logic at the University of Lahore (Memoir 127).
8 Probably a brother of Elizabeth A. Sharp.
9 May Clarissa Gillington’s Byron’s Poems was published by Elliot Stock in 1892. In addition to poetry, she wrote several books for children, as did her sister Alice E. Gillington.
10 Two more printings of this successful anthology appeared in 1886 and a second edition was published in 1887, which included a sonnet by May Gillington and the following note by Sharp: “A Miss Gillington has written and published some poetry of very considerable promise, for the most part as yet marked by a certain immaturity. A passion for the sea is manifest throughout her verse” (p. 289).
11 Richard Garnett, Life of Thomas Carlyle, Great Writers Series (London: Walter Scott, 1887).
12 An anthology of poems about the sea arranged by Elizabeth A. Sharp for the Canterbury Poets Series (London: Walter Scott, 1887).
13 The reference here is to Garnett’s Io in Egypt and Other Poems, which was published in 1859. It was revised with additions and published as Poems in 1893.
14 Sharp’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley was published as number 11 in the Great Writers Series (London: Walter Scott) in the autumn of 1887.
15 The Royal Jubilee Exhibition of 1887 was held in Manchester, England, to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign. It was opened by Princess Alexandra, wife of Edward, Prince of Wales, on 3 May 1887, and remained open for 166 days, during which there were 4.5 million paying visitors, 74,600 in one day alone. All manner of merchandize and crafts were exhibited in a huge hall, including paintings Sharp would review for the Glasgow Herald.
16 Philip Bourke Marston died after a prolonged illness on February 14, 1887 at the age of thirty-six. See note to Sharp’s letter to Swinburne dated April 22, 1880.
17 Date from postmark.
18 Printed on stationary and crossed out: New Athenaeum Club, | 26, Suffolk Street, | Pall Mall.
19 Edward Dowden, “Victorian Literature,” The Fortnightly Review, vol. 47, June, 1887, pp. 835–67.
20 After taking his B.A. from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1881, John Stuart Verschoyle (1853–1915) was appointed curate of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Marylebone, London in 1882. He entered enthusiastically into the city’s intellectual and social life. He began functioning as associate editor of the The Fortnightly Review under the editorship of his friend Frank Harris in 1886, where he made most of the decisions and did most of the editing of the highly regarded publication. He left London in 1891 to serve as a Rector first in Suffolk and then in Somerset where he died in Taunton in 1915. After moving from London, he returned frequently and remained a well-known and respected figure in the city’s literary and political circles.
21 Edward Silsbee was a sea captain from Massachusetts and an admirer of Shelley’s poetry. “Many acquaintances called him ‘Shelley mad’ … Richard Garnett, however, considered this maritime eccentric the best critic of Shelley he had heard” (Robert Gittings & Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys 1798–1879, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 235). Silsbee visited Claire Clairmont (see following note) in Italy in 1872 determined to gain access to her Shelley papers. Unable to purchase them, he moved into her apartment to read and study them. His efforts to obtain the papers, and the determination of Clairmont’s niece, Paula, to marry Silsbee were described to Henry James by Eugene Lee-Hamilton. James drew upon the incident for his novella The Aspern Papers (1888) (Gittings, 236).
22 Clara Mary Jane Clairmont (1798–1879), who called herself Claire, was a step-daughter of William Godwin and step-sister of Mary Godwin. When Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped, Claire accompanied them to the continent and remained with them throughout their excursion. That brought her in contact with Byron, of course, and their ensuing relationship produced a daughter, Allegra (1817–1822), who died of typhus after Byron assumed responsibility for her and placed her in a convent school. Clairmont traveled widely in Europe and became fluent in five languages. She lived in Russia, Germany, and France, before settling in Florence in 1870. She “contemplated writing a book to illustrate, from the lives of Shelley and Byron, the dangers and evils resulting from erroneous opinions on the subject of the relations between the sexes” (DNB).
23 See note to Sharp’s April 28 letter to Ford Maddox Brown.
24 Ellen Louise Chandler Moulton (1835–1908), a writer of poetry, fiction, and children’s stories, was married to the journalist and publisher William U. Moulton (d. 1898), who was also the editor of a weekly paper in Boston. She was prominent in literary and cultural circles in Boston, where she lived, and in Europe where she spent many summers. Her works include Juno Clifford (1855), Bed-Time Stories (1873), Poems (1877), Swallow Flights (1878), Miss Eyre from Boston, and Others (1889), and At the Wind’s Will (1899).
25 Tentative date from blurred postmark.
26 See note to Sharp’s April 28 letter to Ford Maddox Brown.
27 Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887), the son of John Westland Marston, a well-known man of letters, was blinded at the age of three by the administration of belladonna in an effort to cure scarlet fever. He began writing poetry at an early age and published his first volume (Song-Tide and Other Poems, 1871) when he was twenty-one.; his second (All in All, 1875) four years later; and a third (Wind Voices) in 1883. By then he had became a favored member of the circle of young men around Dante Gabriel Rossetti who introduced him to William Sharp in 1880. The two men became fast friends. Following Marston’s death Sharp published a selection of his poems with an introductory Memoir in his Canterbury Poets Series (Song-Tide: Poems and Lyrics of Love’s Joy and Sorrow) and a collection of his short stories (For a Song’s Sake and Other Stories). Both were issued by the Walter Scott firm in 1888.
28 “Obertoun, | Dumbartonshire” is printed on the stationary and crossed out.
29 Caine’s The Deemster: A Romance in Three Volumes was published by Chatto & Windus in London in November 1887. The book was very successful in English (52 editions by 1921), and it was translated into nine foreign languages. Sharp is proposing the sheets be sold to Appleton’s, for whom Sharp served as an agent in these matters, and published simultaneously in the United States in order to establish U.S. copyright.
30 The October 1887 number of the Century Magazine contained an article by Edmund Clarence Stedman (see the “Life” section preceding Sharp’s letters of 1889) on the younger generation of British poets, which was then published as a supplement to the thirteenth (Jubilee) edition of his Victorian Poets, the first edition of which, published in 1875, introduced the name “Victorian Poets” to define the British poets writing during Victoria’s reign. He mentioned Sharp in the article in a section on Colonial Poets because of the Australian poems in Sharp’s first volume of poetry, The Human Inheritance. According to Elizabeth, Sharp wrote a letter to inform Stedman he was not a Colonial, but a Scot.” She reproduced one sentence of Sharp’s letter to Stedman on page 129 of the Memoir and four more on page 150 (as given above). She must have had the entire letter along with many others her husband wrote to Stedman, but I have not located it. In his generous reply, quoted partially by Elizabeth, Stedman said he would mention Sharp preceding the section on Colonials in the forthcoming edition of Victorian Poets and would also mention Sharp’s Rossetti book. These letters initiated a long friendship between Sharp and Stedman (Memoir 129).
31 Epipsychidion, ed. by S. A. Brooke, A. C. Swinburne and R. A. Potts, was published by the Shelley Society in 1887. The bibliography in Sharp’s biography of Shelley, published in the fall of 1887, gives a date of 1886 for this work.
32 George Leon Little (1862–1941) was a landscape and portrait painter and the brother of J. S. Little. He painted the portrait of Ryder Haggard in 1886.
33 Probably Joseph William Gleeson White (1851–1898) who edited Ballads and Rondeaus; Chants Royal; Sestinas; Villanelles; Etc. for Walter Scott (Canterbury Poets) in 1887 and Book-Song: An Anthology of Poems from Books of Modern Authors for Elliot Stock in 1893. In 1896 and 1897 he served with C. H. Shannon as editor of The Pageant.
34 Next to this paragraph, Sharp wrote in the margin: “Our house, larger & better than the one at West Kensington, is only ,60.”
35 Caine’s popular novel The Deemster (see note to Sharp’s 1 September 1887 letter to Caine) was christened by Punch “The Boomster,” and that name came to be applied also to its author as his fame grew, fed in part by his talent for self-publicity. [Vivien Allen, Hall Caine, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997, p. 188]. The Deemster was successfully adapted to the stage in 1888 by Wilson Barrett, where it was titled Ben-my-Chree, and the play was revived several times over the next twenty years.
36 This novel was published by Hurst and Blackett, Ltd in late 1887 or early 1888 after running serially in The People’s Friend (in Dundee) under the title A Deathless Hate. The dedication to the three volume set: To | Theodore Watts | Poet-Romanticist-critic | These Pages | are | Affectionately Inscribed.
37 Unable to identify.
38 Alfred H. Miles (1848–1929) compiled and edited Poets and Poetry of the Century, nine volumes of which were published by Hutchinson between 1891 and 1894. Several were reprinted in later years.
39 The letter was written in early 1888 after the Sharps moved from West Kensington to South Hampstead. Richard Garnett’s Emerson and Carlyle were both published in 1887 by Walter Scott in the Great Writers series.
40 Le Gallienne’s My Ladies’ Sonnets and Other “Vain and Amatorious” Verses, with Some of Graver Mood (Liverpool: privately printed, 1887). For Le Gallienne see note to Sharp’s late February 1887 letter.
41 Although Mrs. Sharp states they took the house at 17a Goldhurst Terrace in the spring of 1887 (Memoir 141), this letter and Sharp’s use of the Talgarth address in October 1887 indicate the move did not take place until early January 1888.
42 One hundred and four volumes appeared in the Canterbury Poets series between 1884 and 1922. Sharp became general editor of the series in 1885 and served until the early nineties.
43 Vol. XXIII, 943–59.
44 Under the Banner of St. James: A Romance of the Discovery of the Pacific (London: James Henderson and Sons, Ltd, 1887). Published serially in Young Folks Paper (XXI, 891–907) in 1887.
45 Jack Noel’s Legacy: A Story for Boys (London: James Henderson & Sons, Ltd., 1887). Published serially in Young Folks Paper in 1886.
46 Alexander Anderson (1845–1909), a Scottish poet, started his working life at a quarry, and then he became a surfaceman, or navvy, on the Glasgow and South-Western Railway. During the sixteen years he worked as a surfaceman he read and studied and taught himself French, acquired a knowledge of German, Italian and Spanish, and wrote poetry, some of which was published under the pseudonym Surfaceman. He served as Assistant Librarian at Edinburgh University from 1880 to1883 and again from 1886 to1905. From 1883 to 1886 he was Secretary of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution. While still a surfaceman, he translated several poems of Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) from German. His poetry reflects his wide travels in Scotland: A Song of Labour and other Poems (1873), The Two Angels and other Poems (1875), Songs of the Rail (1878), and Ballads and Sonnets (1899). He also wrote many poems for children. His Later Poems was published posthumously in 1912.
47 Sharp’s request must have been turned down as there is no record of his giving the proposed lectures.
48 This letter was probably written after Sharp’s return from reviewing the Paris Salon in April.
49 Philip Bourke Marston’s Wind-Voices, published by Stock in 1884.
50 Le Gallienne’s review of Philip Bourke Marston’s Song-Tides: Poems and Lyrics of Love’s Joy and Sorrow, edited with an introductory Memoir by William Sharp (London: Walter Scott, 1888) appeared in The Academy, 33 (May 19, 1888), 337–38.
51 Sharp’s Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy was published in the spring of 1888.
52 The Sharps lived at Wescam from January 1888 to Summer, 1890. The letter was probably written in early May, after Sharp returned from his annual trip to Paris.
53 Sir Noel Paton.
54 See note to early May, 1888 letter to Le Gallienne.
55 Whitsuntide fell on May 20th in 1888.
56 Philip Bourke Marston.
57 Of this visit, Elizabeth Sharp recalled that Meredith and Sharp would have long conversations in the day, and at night Meredith would read to them from his novels: “The reader’s enjoyment seemed as great as that of his audience, and it interested me to hear how closely his own methods of conversation resembled, in wittiness and brilliance, those of the characters in his novels” (Memoir 145).
58 See letter to Le Gallienne dated 22 May 1887.
59 Charles Grant Blairfinde Allen (1848–1899) was born in Canada and educated in France and in England where he graduated from Merton College, Oxford, in 1870. In his mid-twenties he became a professor at Queen’s College in Jamaica. He left his professorship in 1876 and returned to England, where he turned his talents to writing and gained a reputation for his essays on science and for literary works. He published 30 novels and numerous other writings, including scientific articles praising Charles Darwin and advocating the theory of evolution. He sometimes used pen names such as “Cecil Power,” “A. J. Arbuthnot Wilson,” “Martin Leach Warborough,” and as “Olive Pratt Rayner” he published a short novel entitled The Type-writer Girl. His best-known work, The Woman Who Did, published under his own name in 1895, created a firestorm as it main character was an independent woman who refused marriage and produced a child. His unconventional views on marriage were shared by Mona Caird and Elizabeth and William Sharp.
60 James Cotton, editor of the Academ.
61 The Wednesday after the Sharp’s visit to Meredith at Box Hill was 23 May 1888 (Memoir 145).
62 E. A. S. identifies the novel as One of Our Conquerors, which was not published until 1891 (Memoir 145). Two of Meredith’s novels were published in 1890: The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper and The Tale of Chloe: An Episode in the History of Beau Beamish.
63 The opening night of Ben-my-Chree, the adaptation of Hall Caine’s The Deemster, was on May 17, 1888. See note to Sharp’s fall 1887 letter to Hall Caine.
64 Norman Maccoll (1843–1905) was editor of The Athenaeum. His publications include Greek Sceptics from Pyrrho to Sextus (1869), Select Plays of Calderon (1888), and The Exemplary Novel of Cervantes (1902).
65 I have been unable to identify Mr. Osborne.
66 The main letterhead of this stationery reads (left) Walter Scott, Publisher; (center) The Canterbury Poets, General Editor, William Sharp; and (right) 24 Warwick Lane, London, E.C. Below that at left is William Sharp and the return address.
67 Although this letter is written on 46, Talgarth Road stationery with the old address crossed out and the Wescam address written over it, it appears to postdate the letter of May 22, which mentions Le Gallienne’s anticipated trip to London and promises to send Le Gallienne a copy of Romantic Ballads in a few days.
68 Sharp’s brackets. Graham R. Tomson was the pseudonym for Rosamund Tomson (1860–1911), wife of J. Arthur Tomson. See note to Sharp’s Fall 1888 letter to Richard Garnett.
69 Elizabeth Sharp stated (Memoir 140) that Walter Pater was one of the Sharps’ frequent guests at their “Sunday informal evening gatherings” at Wescam. He came “during his Oxford vacation” in 1888 and at other times in 1888–90.
70 Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy (London: Walter Scott, 1888).
71 Date from postmark.
72 Morayshire lies northwest of Aberdeen in Scotland. Roxburghshire lies south west of Edinburgh.
73 John Nichol (1833–1894) was Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at Glasgow University from 1862–1889. Sharp studied with him during his two years at Glasgow University — 1871–73 — and retained his valued friendship for many years. William Minto (1845–1893) was Professor of Logic and English at the University of Aberdeen.
74 Richard Garnett’s Twilight of the Gods and other Tales was published in 1888 (London: T. Fisher Unwin). An “augmented” edition was issued in 1903 (London and New York: John Lane).
75 Henry Van der Weyde (1838–1924) was a Dutch-born English painter and photographer. His family emigrated to the United States in 1850, and he served in the American Civil War. He emigrated to England in 1870, and set up his photographic studio at 182 Regent Street in London in 1877. That year he became the first photographer to install and take portraits by electric light. He photographed many wealthy and well-known people, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Van_der_Weyde
76 Andrew Chatto (1841–1913) was the principal in Chatto & Windus, a London firm that published works by many well-known writers in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mrs. Caird was Mona Caird, a life-long friend of Elizabeth Sharp.
77 The romance became eventually The Children of Tomorrow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1890).
78 Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy was privately printed for Sharp by Walter Scott in 1888.
79 Graham R. Tomson (1860–1911), ed., Greek Anthology, trans. by Garnett and others (London: Walter Scott, 1889). Born Rosamund Marriott Watson, Graham R. Tomson married at nineteen George Francis Armytage (1853–1921), a wealthy Australian with whom she had two daughters. In 1884 she published anonymously Tares (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner), a volume of melancholy lyrics about love’s transience with epigraphs from François Villon and D. G. Rossetti. In late 1884 she began a relationship with the painter Arthur Tomson (1859–1905), started calling herself Graham R. Tomson, divorced Armytage, and in 1887 married Tomson. In 1889 she successfully published under the pseudonym The Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets (London: Longmans, 1889), a volume aligned with aestheticism and with New Women movement in its exploration of marriage alternatives. Her A Summer Night (London: Methuen, 1891) aligned her with the decadents in its impressionism and representation of female desire. By 1892, she had become poetry critic for The Academy, art critic for The Morning Leader, President of the Literary Ladies, and the editor of Sylvia’s Journal. In June 1894 she left Arthur Tomson and moved in with H. B. Marriott Watson (1863–1921). Tomson divorced her in 1895, but she never remarried. Her Vespertilia, and Other Verses was published in 1895 by John Lane at The Bodley Head. Though Vespertilia appeared under the signature of Graham R. Tomson, its author had renamed herself Rosamund Marriott Watson. Her reputation declined after Vespertilia, and she died at the age of 51 in 1911. She had counted Algernon Swinburne, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, and D. G. Rossetti among her early influences and, among her friends, Oscar Wilde, John Lane, W. E. Henley, Katharine Tynan, Alice Meynell, Violet Hunt, Elizabeth Pennell, and William Sharp. I am indebted to Linda K. Hughes for this information. See her Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), and biographies in The Yellow Nineties Online, http://1890s.ca/Contact_Us.aspx
80 Mathilde Blind. See note to Sharp ltr. to Watts of July 22, 1882.
81 Garnett’s Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales.
82 Sharp’s Life of Heinrich Heine was published (London: Walter Scott) in the Great Writers Series in fall 1888. Garnett wrote to Sharp on November 11, 1888 (Memoir 143–44) to say he had finished reading it and to congratulate him on the work.
83 Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) was a South African novelist, political critic, and feminist. She had published The Story of an African Farm: A Novel in Two Volumes under the pseudonym “Ralph Iron” in 1883. Schreiner also wrote Woman and Labor (1911), From Man to Man (1926), and Undine (1928).
84 The North Wales Express was a weekly English language newspaper published in Caernarfon, Wales and edited by Robert Williams. A full-column and very positive review of Sharp’s Life of Heine appeared anonymously in the issue of November 16, 1888.
Chapter 5
1 This letter is included in a collection of letters to Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909), who edited the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine from 1881 until his death in 1909, and to Robert Underwood Johnson (1853–1937), who worked on the magazine under Gilder and served as editor from 1909–1913. A notation in the upper-left corner of the manuscript “ansd. 2/17/89” is in the same handwriting as similar notations on later letters addressed personally to Gilder. Gilder’s editorship began when the Century Publishing Company bought out the Scribner interest in Scribner’s Monthly (1870–1881) and renamed the magazine The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. By 1885 the Century had a huge circulation (over 200,000), but it began to decline in the nineties as its rising interest in feminism turned away many of its male readers. Also, the new photo-engraving techniques used by the competing ten- and fifteen-cent periodicals took its toll. Gilder’s publications include The New Day (1875), The Poet and His Master (1878), Lyrics and Other Poems (1885), Lincoln’s Genius for Expression (1909), and Grover Cleveland: A Record of Friendship (1910). Following his editorship of the Century, Johnson established the Hall of Fame at New York University and directed it from 1919 until 1937. In 1920 and 1921, he served as Ambassador to Italy. His works include Poems (published in 1902, enlarged in 1908, 1919, and 1931) and his Memoirs, Remembered Yesterdays (1923).
2 The novel was published as Children of Tomorrow: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus) in April 1889. It was issued in the United States in 1890 by F. F. Lovell & Company.
3 A letter Sharp wrote to the Roberts Brothers Publishing Company in Boston has nearly identical wording. The third company that received a similar letter may have been F. F. Lovell and Company, which published the novel in the United States.
4 James Marshall Stoddart (1845–1921), who Sharp met when he visited Philadelphia in 1892, began editing Lippincott’s Magazine in 1889, succeeding William Shepherd Walsh who was the editor when this letter arrived.
5 Sir George Brisbane Douglas (1856–1935), a Baronet, was a Scottish poet and a lecturer. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, he combined the running of a large country estate with his literary and academic endeavors. The family seat was Springwood House, Kelso, in the Scottish Borders. His publications include Poems (1880), The New Border Tales (1892), Diversions of a Country Gentleman (1902), and The Pageant of the Bruce (1911).
6 Mrs. Hill was the sister of Sir Noel Paton. See note to Sharp’s letter to D. G. Rossetti of September 22, 1881.
7 James Mavor (1854–1925) was a social activist who lived in Glasgow and participated in several socialist organizations including the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Socialist League. In 1894, George Bernard Shaw named a lead characters in his play Candida James Mavor Morell. In 1888 and 1889, Mavor edited The Scottish Art Review and in January through June 1890 that periodical’s short-lived successor, The Art Review, which was published by Walter Scott through the good offices of William Sharp. In 1892 Mavor was appointed Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto where he chaired the Political Science Department until he retired in 1923. He was active in establishing the Toronto Art Gallery and the Royal Ontario Museum, and he wrote government reports on immigration, wheat production, workmen’s compensation, as well as an Economic History of Russia.
8 A letter to Elizabeth Sharp from Mrs. Hill dated February 4, 1889 indicates she was sculpting a medallion of William Sharp, thus his sitting to her from 3 till 4.30. She hoped to get the medallion cast the week of February 4. Either she was still working on it in mid-February or she was sculpting a bust of Sharp, as she was wont to do of people she thought famous or special. Writing to her friend Elizabeth, addressed as Lilly, on the 4th, she was still under the spell of Sharp though he had gone: “I see so much of the growth of the Spirit in him, or expansion of Soul, I cannot put words upon it but you know the feeling of being in the presence of a Being from a higher Sphere?” This letter is in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
9 Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) was a man of many talents and interests. He established the Outlook Tower at the head of Edinburgh’s High Street with its camera obscura and oversaw the building of Ramsay Gardens, a group of flats, artists’ studios, and a student residence hall near the Outlook Tower. He was the central figure in the Scottish contingent of the Celtic Revival that began in the 1890s. Although Sharp was unable to meet him during this visit to Edinburgh, they met soon after and in 1895 Geddes named Sharp the Literary Editor of his Celtic-oriented publishing firm, Patrick Geddes & Colleagues. Geddes went on to gain respect and fame as a city planner.
10 T. C. Martin, unknown friend of Mavor, perhaps the editor of The Leader.
11 Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936), an illustrator, painter and embroiderer, was a prominent member of the Arts and Crafts movement. Joseph Thomson (1858–1894) was an explorer of Africa and a rival to Henry Morgan Stanley. Illness plagued his explorations, forced him to return permanently to England, and caused his early death. His best known book was Through Masai Land (1885). John Miller Gray (1850–1894) was an art critic and the first curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Sharp lamented his premature death in a letter to Watts-Dunton of October 11, 1894.
12 Hall Caine’s The Good Old Times was produced by Wilson Barrett at the Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street in February 1889. Barrett (1846–1904) was an actor, dramatist, novelist, and theater manager. His plays include Now-a-Days (1889), Pharaoh (1892), and The Sign of the Cross (1896). Barrett adapted several Caine novels for the stage, among them Ben-my-Chree (from The Deemster) (1888), The Manxman (1894), and The Bondman (1893).
13 Sharp’s third volume of poems, Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy, was published by the Walter Scott firm in 1888. Its sales exceeded expectations, and a revised edition was issued in late February 1889.
14 Norman MacColl (1843–1904) a native of Edinburgh, was a graduate of Downing College, Cambridge, where he excelled in classics and came to know Charles Dilke, proprietor of the Athenæum. In 1871 Dilke appointed him editor of the magazine for which Watts (later Watts-Dunton) served as Literary Editor. See Sharp’s letter to Watts of 23 May 1888.
15 This incomplete letter is reproduced from a transcription/summary made by a staff member at the Manx Museum.
16 Sharp is referring to Caine’s play Good Old Times, which was running in London.
17 The Manx’s transcribed summary indicates this is Douglas Sladen, but Sharp was surely referring to Sir George Douglas with whom he was staying in Scotland when he wrote to Watts about Caine’s play on 16 February 1889.
18 “Barrett’s features were cast in a classic mould and his presence was manly and graceful. Hence his predilection for classical impersonations … [H]is method of acting was usually stilted. In melodrama he presented heroic fortitude with effect. His dramas made no pretense to literature. They aimed at stage effect and boldly picturesque characterization without logical sequence or psychological consistency” (DNB, Supplement 1901–1911, p. 103).
19 Although lacking a salutation, this letter is from the Mavor Collection in the University of Toronto Library and was addressed to Mavor.
20 Henry Muhrman, an important impressionist painter best known as a watercolorist, was born in Cincinnati in 1854. He trained there and in Munich and died in Meissen, Germany, in 1916.
21 This reference dates the fragment as sometime in March 1889.
22 Date from postmark on envelope. Sharp became a candidate for this position in the spring of 1889, but withdrew his candidacy before the election after consulting with his doctor (Memoir 149).
23 Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) was a New England essayist, poet, biographer, historian, Unitarian minister, and abolitionist. He was also, notably, colonel of the first black regiment in the Union army from 1862–64 as well as the “discoverer” of Emily Dickinson. His publications include Harvard Memorial Biographies (1866), his only novel, Malbone (1869), Young Folks History of the United States (1875), and Carlyle’s Laugh and Other Surprises (1904).
24 The Afternoon Landscape: Poems and Translations (1889).
25 American Sonnets, selected and edited and with an “Introductory Note” by William Sharp published by Walter Scott in May 1889. Sharp dedicated it to E. C. Stedman, “the Foremost American Critic,” who helped in the selection process.
26 Afternoon Landscape.
27 John Stuart Verschoyle (1853–1915) was a member of an aristocratic Ireland family who received his B.A. from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1881 and was appointed Curate of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Marylebone in 1882. In London he became a friend and supporter of Frank Harris and secured for him the editorship of the London Evening News in 1883 and of The Fortnightly Review in 1886. Verschoyle assisted Harris in his editing and became formally an assistant editor of The Fortnightly Review in 1889. While living in London between 1882 and 1891, he made many friends in the literary and political worlds. After he left the city to take up Rectorships in Suffolk and Somerset, he maintained a London residence where he continued to entertain many luminaries. Sharp here expresses hope that Verschoyle will arrange a mention or review of his Children of Tomorrow in The Fortnightly.
28 The Sharp’s leaving for Paris on Friday May 5 establishes the approximate date of this letter.
29 Probably Le Gallienne’s second book of poetry, Volumes in Folio (1889).
30 A painting by George Leon Little (1862–1941), J. Stanley’s brother.
31 James Sutherland Cotton, editor of The Academy.
32 This letter from Elizabeth Sharp to Mavor establishes her as the author of “Sculpture at the Salon,” which appeared unsigned [pp. 13–14] immediately following her husband’s unsigned [pp. 12–13] review of the Salon paintings in the June 1888 edition of The Scottish Art Review.
33 The letter must have been written in late May after the Sharps returned from Paris. Sharp’s Children of Tomorrow, referenced in the postscript, was published about May 10, 1889.
34 Several words are obscured and illegible at this point.
35 William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) was a poet and critic who edited The Magazine of Art from 1882 to 1886 and The London, a society paper, from 1887 to 1889, when he became editor of the Scots Observer, an Edinburgh journal of the arts and current events. He continued in that position when the magazine was transferred to London and re-titled the National Observer in 1890. He resigned that editorship in 1894. Whoever began spreading the word that he was about to become editor of The Scottish Art Review must have confused that journal with the Scots Observer. A robust, outspoken conservative sympathetic to the growing imperialism of the time, Henley was not well regarded by William Sharp and his circle of friends. Among his publications are Book of Verse (1880), Views and Reviews (1890), Poems (1901), and In Hospital (1901).
36 A landscape painter, Arthur Tomson (1858–1905) was introduced to the Sharps by Andrew Lang in the mid-1880s and through them he met his second wife, Agnes Hastings, a childhood friend of Elizabeth Sharp’s. The Tomsons remained close friends of the Sharps.
37 Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847–1900), cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, was a painter and art critic for The Pall Mall Gazette. He wrote The Art of Velasquez (1895), Peter Paul Rubens (1898), and Velasquez (1899).
38 Perhaps one of Sharp’s two books published in 1889: Children of Tomorrow by Chatto & Windus in April and the anthology of American Sonnets by Walter Scott in the Canterbury Series.
39 Since there was only one Sunday 23rd in 1889, the letter dates early June, 1889.
40 Frank Dempster Sherman (1860–1916) was a poet, architect, mathematician, and genealogist. His publications include Madrigals and Catches (1887), New Waggings of Old Tales (1888), Little-Folk Lyrics (1892), and A Southern Flight (1905). Date from postmark.
41 Date from postmark.
42 Children of Tomorrow.
43 The Athenaeum notice appeared in the issue of 13 July 1889. I have not located the review in Public Opinion.
44 The first edition was published in 1888 and the second in 1889, both by Walter Scott. A “Postscript to the Second Edition” indicates the edition contained one or two textual variations from the original readings and a new short lyric, “The Isle of Lost Dreams.”
45 Probably Miss Eyre from Boston, and Others (1889).
46 Scollard (1860–1932) graduated from Hamilton College in 1881, studied at Harvard and Cambridge Universities, and served as Professor of English Literature at Hamilton College from 1888–96. He published many volumes of poetry, among them Pictures in Song, 1884; With Reed and Lyre, 1886; Old and New World Lyrics, 1888; and Ballads, Patriotic and Romantic, 1916.
47 Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908), banker, poet, and critic, was born in Hartford, Connecticut. After opening his own brokerage office in New York in 1864, he became known as the “banker-poet” and exercised considerable influence over the American literary establishment in the eighties and nineties. He became William Sharp’s best friend in the United States, and Sharp’s letters to him became increasingly intimate. Their relationship became that of a father and son sharing their most intimate experiences in coded language. Excepting the few letters or portions of letters Elizabeth used in the Memoir, we have only Sharp’s side of the correspondence, but Stedman’s is often reflected in Sharp’s responses. Stedman produced many books, among them Poems Lyrical and Idyllic (1860), Poetical Works (1875), Victorian Poets (1875), Hawthorne and Other Poems (1877), Lyrics and Idylls: With Other Poems (1879), Poems Now First Collected (1894), and A Victorian Anthology (1895).
48 Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1945), a writer of poetry and fiction, was a professor of English Literature at King’s College, Windsor, Nova Scotia, between 1885 and 1895. His works include Orion and Other Poems (1880), In Divers Tones (1886), New York Nocturnes, and Other Poems (1898), Barbara Ladd (1902), The Heart That Knows (1906), The Vagrant of Time (1927), and Selected Poems (1936).
49 Bracketed sections are Elizabeth’s paraphrases.
50 James Wilberforce Longley (1849–1945), a judge and historian born in Paradise, Nova Scotia, edited The Halifax Chronicle and served as Attorney General of Canada between 1884 and 1896. He was the author of two biographies: Joseph Howe (1904) and Sir Charles Tupper (1916).
51 William Bliss Carman (1861–1929), a cousin of Charles G. D. Roberts, was a Canadian literary journalist, editorialist, and poet. He worked for various magazines, including the New York Independent (1890–92) and the Atlantic Monthly. After 1889, he spent the rest of his life in the U.S.A., although he was a frequent visitor to Canada. His reputation rests on his first collection of poems, Low Tide on Grand Pré (1893). His other works include Behind the Arras: A Book of the Unseen (1895), Ballads of Lost Haven: A Book of the Sea (1897), By the Aurelian Wall, and Other Elegies (1898), April Airs (1916), Later Poems (1921), Ballads and Lyrics (1923), Far Horizon (1925), Wild Garden (1929), and Sanctuary (1929).
52 Having traveled from St. John to the St. Lawrence River via the St. John River and overland to Rivière du Loup, Sharp made a side excursion up the Saguenay River for 100 miles to Ha! Ha! Bay before proceeding up the St. Lawrence to Montreal.
53 George Stewart (1848–1906) was an accomplished and celebrated editor and writer. In Saint John, New Brunswick, he founded and edited Stewart’s Literary Quarterly Magazine from 1867 to 1872. In 1879 he went to Quebec where he edited the Daily Chronicle until 1896. A voluminous writer, his chief works are Canada Under the Administration of the Earl of Dufferin (1878) and The Story of the Great Fire in St. John, New Brunswick (1877). The New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia, w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/index.aspx
54 Sir James MacPherson Le Moine (1825–1912), a charter member of the Royal Society of Canada, was an antiquarian and the author of Maple Leaves, 6 vol. (1863–1906), a collection of short sketches on the general and local history and legends of Canada. The site of a Huron village established in 1697, Lorette is now Loretteville, a suburb of Quebec.
55 Rev. Joseph Antisell Allen (1814–1900) was the father of Sharp’s good friend Grant Allen. A clergyman of the Irish Church, J. A. Allen emigrated to Canada in 1840 where he married Catharine Ann Grant, the daughter of Charles William Grant, 5th Baron de Longueuil, a title created by Louis XIV in 1700, and the only title in Canada that is officially recognized. The Reverend Allen became the first Anglican minister of Holy Trinity Church on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ontario where Grant Allen was born in 1848. Allen was living in Alwington, an area of Kingston and the name of the great house in that area where Allen probably lived.
56 The accompanying note reads: THE NOOK. | HORSHAM ROAD.| DORKING. | July 27. | My Dear Father, | Just a line to introduce our very good friend William Sharp, whom you probably know as the author of a life of Rossetti, and of many graceful poems. He is his own best credential. If you like him half as much as we do, you will welcome him well. In haste (for we’re just off) | Yours affectionately. | Grant.
57 Sherburne Hardy (1847–1930), a civil engineer, editor, novelist, poet, and later a diplomat, was a Professor of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. He edited Cosmopolitan for two years, 1893–95. His works include Francesca of Rimini (1878), But Yet a Woman (1878), The Wind of Destiny (1886), Passe Rose (1889), Aurélie (1912), and Things Remembered (1923).
58 John Henry Wright (1852–1908), a distinguished classical scholar and student of educational problems, left Johns Hopkins to become Professor of Greek at Harvard in 1887. Justin Winsor (1831–1897), a librarian and historian, was superintendent of the Boston Public Library from 1868 until 1877 when he became librarian at Harvard. His works include Bibliography of the Original Quartos and Folios of Shakespeare (1876) and (as editor), the Narrative and Critical History of America (1884–89), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Winsor.
59 Arthur Sherburne Hardy.
60 Sharp first met William Dean Howells in Venice in 1883 (see letter dated 10 May 1883 to Elizabeth Sharp). See Chapter 2, note 49.
61 The Stedmans lived at 44 East 26th Street; Sharp probably arrived there on Tuesday September 17 as indicated in the previous letter to Stedman.
62 Henry Mills Alden (1836–1919) was managing editor of Harper’s Weekly from 1863 to 1869 and then editor of Harper’s Magazine until his death in 1919. His works include God in His World (1890) and Magazine Writing and the New Literature (1908). For more about Alden, see note to Sharp's letter to E. A. S. dated late September 1889.
63 Henry C. Bowen (1813–1896) a principal in the firm of Bowen and McNamee, wholesale dealers in silk, was one of the publishers of the New York Independent, a weekly religious journal, from 1848 to 1896 and edited the magazine from 1870 until 1896. Sharp published in the Independent between 1889 and 1893.
64 Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903), a poet, editor, and critic, was opposed to literary pretense and “Bohemianism.” During the last thirty years of his life, his house was a favorite meeting place for literary men in New York. His works include Poems (1851), Songs of Summer (1857), Abraham Lincoln: A Horatian Ode (1865), The Book of the East (1867), and The Lion’s Cub (1890).
65 Thomas Allibone Janvier (1849–1913), a native of New Orleans, worked in Philadelphia as a journalist with the Times, the Evening Bulletin, and the Press between 1871 and 1880. There he met and married in 1879 Catharine Ann Drinker (1841–1922), a member of the distinguished Drinker family. (She was an aunt and the namesake of the twentieth-century novelist Catherine Drinker Bowen.) For three years, starting in 1880, the Janviers traveled in Colorado, New Mexico, and Mexico. In 1883, they settled in New York’s Greenwich Village, where they lived for a decade. In 1893, they began spending winters in Provence, stopping in London briefly while in transit. After this first meeting in 1889, the Janviers became close friends of both Sharps. “Mrs. Janvier was the first person on either side of the Atlantic to penetrate Sharp’s disguise as Fiona Macleod, and she received a letter [from Sharp on Jan. 5, 1895] admitting the identity” (Dictionary of American Biography, vol. V., pp. 613–14). Thomas Janvier’s publications include Color Studies (1885); The Mexican Guide (1886); The Aztec Treasure House (1890); Stories of Old New Spain (1891); Embassy to Provence (1893); In Old New York (1894); In Great Waters (1901); Henry Hudson (1909); and From the South of France (1912).
66 Charles DeKay (1848–1935), an essayist and poet, was an editorial writer for the New York Times. His works include The Bohemian: A Tragedy of Modern Life (1878), Hesperus, and Other Poems (1880), The Vision of Nimrod (1881), The Vision of Esther (1882), and Bird Gods (1898).
67 This letter was written before Sharp sailed on the “Sierra” from New York to Liverpool, post-dated, and given to a florist to deliver with flowers to Stedman on October 8th, Stedman’s birthday (see next letter).
68 Arthur Stedman was Edmund Clarence Stedman’s son.
69 Sir Alfred East (1849–1913) was named to the Royal Academy in 1899. His paintings were widely displayed in Europe and the United States. He also wrote The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Color (1906).
70 Thomas Robert Macquoid (1820–1912) was a prolific watercolorist and illustrator for, among other publications, the Graphic and Illustrated London News. His wife Katherine Sarah Macquoid (1824–1917) was an equally well-known travel writer and novelist. “1889” is written in pencil on the letter. Mid-October 1889 is a reasonable date since Sharp had just returned from the United States and Canada where he had been entertained by Roberts.
71 See note to November 6 card to Kineton Parkes (following).
72 Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge (1831–1905), an editor and children’s writer, published adult fiction in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and The Century. In 1870 she became an associate editor of Hearth and Home, and from 1873 until her death, she edited the juvenile magazine, St. Nicholas. Her works include Hans Brinker: or, The Silver Skates (1865), A Few Friends and How They Amused Themselves (1869), Rhymes and Jingles (1874), Along the Way (1879, republished in 1904 as Poems and Verses), Donald and Dorothy (1883), When Life is Young (1894), and The Land of Pluck (1894).
73 The date stamped on the postcard looks like 8/89, but Sharp was on his way to America on that date. Shortly after returning from the United States in mid- October, he went to Cologne to meet his wife, who had been staying with Mona Caird at Veldes in the Carpathian Alps during her husband’s absence. The card’s probable date is 6 November 1889, the day he also sent a card to Robert Underwood Johnson, which he dated and in which he says he had just returned from Germany. W. Kineton Parkes (1865–1938), a novelist and critic, edited Comus from November 1888 to October 1889. He also edited The Library Review in 1893–1894. His works include Shelley’s Faith: Its Development and Relativity (1888), The Pre-Raphaelite Movement (1889), The Painter Poets, ed. for the Canterbury Poets Series (1890), Love a la Mode: A Study in Episodes (1907), Potiphar’s Wife (1908), The Altar of Moloch (1911), The Money Hunt: A Comedy of Country Houses (1914), Hardware (1914), and The Art of Carved Sculpture (1931).
74 Mavor’s response appears at the bottom of the telegram: “Glad to have poem Browning.” Mavor was the editor of The Scottish Art Review and its short-lived successor, The Art Review, which appeared monthly from January to July 1890. Sharp’s long elegiac poem (twelve stanzas) on Browning appeared in the February number of The Art Review. For more on Mavor, see note to Sharp’s February 10, 1889 letter to him.
75 Shortly after Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889, Sharp agreed to write a biography of Browning for Walter Scott’s Great Writers Series. Sharp's poem “In Memoriam: Robert Browning,” appeared in the January 1890 issue of Belford’s Magazine, a periodical published by Belford, Clarke, & Co. in Chicago.
76 For Henry Bowen, see note to late September 1889 letter to Elizabeth Sharp.
77 This letter is interesting because it was dictated to Sharp’s sister Mary and is in her hand. Several years later Sharp decided to reinforce the independent identity of Fiona Macleod by having Mary copy all her letters and send them from Edinburgh where she lived. Her handwriting became that of Fiona Macleod. This is the only instance discovered so far of Sharp’s using Mary as an amanuensis prior to the advent of the Fiona Macleod letters in 1894.
78 Sharp’s hand concludes the letter from this point.
79 A poem by Sharp entitled “Remembrance” appeared in the Century, which Gilder edited, in December 1891. See note to Sharp’s letter dated 11 January 1889.
Chapter 6
1 “Six months of life are enough for me; the seventh month I solemnly promise to the underworld [or the god of the underworld, or death].” This is a line of poetry quoted by Cicero in De Finibus, 2.7.22.
2 A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson, 11 vols. (1889–1890).
3 E. C. Stedman’s son.
4 The Sharps vacated their house on Tuesday, June 24. This letter was written several days earlier.
5 George Meredith.
6 Sharp’s edition of C. A. Sainte Beuve’s Essays on Men and Women (London: David Stott, 1890). On February 22, 1890, Sharp had told Lane the Sainte Beuve volume would be dedicated to Meredith.
7 Date from postmark on card.
8 Sharp’s “Fragments from the Lost Journals of Piero di Cosimo” appeared in the January and June numbers of The Art Review in 1890.
9 Robert Allan Mowbray Stevenson (1847–1900), a first cousin and close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson and a painter, was well known in the art world of Paris and London in the 1870s. After his marriage in 1881, he found his inheritance nearly exhausted and turned to teaching and writing about art. He last exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885. He spent his later years as the art critic for The Pall Mall Gazette. He wrote The Art of Velasquez (1895), Peter Paul Rubens (1898), and Velasquez (1898). See note to Sharp’s April 1889 letter to Mavor.
10 Sharp’s The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn was published in London by Sampson Lowe, Marston & Co. in March 1892.
11 The date, written in pencil on the first page of the manuscript, may have been taken from the postmark of the envelope which is missing. The content confirms the date approximately.
12 The Painter Poets Parkes was editing for Walter Scott’s Canterbury Poetry Series. Sharp was general editor of the series. See letter dated May 29, 1890.
13 Mary Sharp was Sharp’s unmarried sister who lived with their mother in Edinburgh. She occasionally did secretarial work for Sharp, and later she provided the handwriting for Fiona Macleod, a service essential for maintaining the fiction of her separate identity.
14 Date from postmark. A note in a different hand at the top right of this postcard reads “Ansd Au 26.90.”
15 William Wetmore Story (1819–1895) was an American sculptor, poet, and novelist who moved permanently to Rome in 1850. The Story’s apartment became a gathering place for American and British artists and writers, among them the Brownings, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Lytton, and Henry James who wrote his biography. Roba di Roma (1862), according to Peter Gunn, is the novel in which Story’s “humanity, humor and erudition are most clearly seen.” Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 45.
16 The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892).
17 “The Coves of Crail” and “Paris Nocturne” were published in the July 3rd issue of The New York Independent, for which Bliss Carman was an editorial writer. See note to letter to Carman dated mid-May, 1890.
18 Mavor, who is leaving for a holiday in Ireland, must have been staying in Broadhurst Gardens, a street in north London not far from where the Sharps were staying with the Cairds in Hampstead.
19 On March 18, 1890, Sharp asked Mavor if Wedmore could review his Browning book in The Art Review. The review appeared in early July.
20 Sharp’s “Piero di Cosimo” appeared in the January and June numbers of The Art Review.
21 See Sharp’s letter to Eric Robertson on his birthday (February 18) in 1886 and the Introduction to the 1886 letters for more on the relationship between Sharp and Robertson. Sharp and Robertson were close friends in the mid-eighties, before Robertson left in the Spring of 1887 to fill a chair in literature and logic at the University of Lahore.
22 See mid-May letter to Bliss Carman.
23 Date from postmark on envelope. The Sharps were in the west of Scotland from mid-August until mid-September. See itinerary in Sharp’s 15 August letter to Robertson.
24 Philip Bourke Marston, whose desk Sharp inherited after Marston’s death in January 1887.
25 October 8th.
26 A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time (1889–1890).
27 E. C. Stedman’s son.
28 This letter was written on the day the Sharps returned from Scotland to London where they were staying briefly with Elizabeth’s mother before leaving for Germany. It was written two or three days before the proposed afternoon tea with Eric Robertson and George Meredith on Saturday which was October 4 in 1890. On Saturday, the 11th, the Sharps were in Heidelberg.
29 E. A. S. (Memoir 168) said they went to Clynder on the Gareloch, Argyll, in July, 1890, “to be near my husband’s old friend, Dr. Donald Macleod, who, as he records in his diary, ‘sang to me with joyous abandonment a Neapolitan song, and asked me to send him a MS. from Italy for Good Words,’” a Scottish magazine directed at evangelicals and nonconformists, particularly of the lower middle class. Donald Macleod (1857–1916), the Rector of Park Church in Glasgow and a repository of Gaelic lore, became Editor in 1872 and began to include more illustrations and fiction and fewer sermons. Sharp had spoken with Macleod about the possibility of his publishing, perhaps serially, Watts’s novel Aylwin, and he now forwards Macleod’s positive response to Watts.
30 Percy Macquoid (1852–1925) was a theatrical designer and a collector and connoisseur of English furniture. He wrote articles, largely for Country Life, and four books on the history of English furniture. He was the son of Thomas Robert Macquoid (1820–1912) a painter and editor who worked for several periodicals, among them Graphic and The Illustrated London News, and of Katharine Sarah Macquiod (1824–1917), who was also a painter, and an author of fiction and poetry. Sharp was a friend of Percy’s parents, and Percy must have contacted Sharp about writing a book for Walter Scott. Elizabeth’s mother was having a dinner party on Saturday, October 11 as send-off for Elizabeth and William who left for Germany on Sunday, October 12.
31 “American Literature,” National Review, 17 (March 1891), 56–7l. This is a review of Stedman’s Library of American Literature.
32 Blanche Willis Howard (1847–1898), an American novelist who married Dr. Julius von Teuffel, the court physician of Württemberg, in 1890. She continued to write under her maiden name and collaborated with William Sharp on A Fellowe and His Wife (London: Osgood & McIlvain, 1892). Her other works inc1ude One Summer (1875), Aunt Serena (1881), Guenn: A Wave on the Breton Coast (1883), The Open Door (1889), No Heroes (1893), Dionysius the Weaver’s Heart’s Dearest (1899), and The Garden of Eden (1900).
33 This fragment of a letter to a friend appears in the Memoir (169–70) where it is introduced by Mrs. Sharp as follows: “Early in October my husband and I crossed to Antwerp and stopped at Bonn. The Rhine disappointed William’s expectations.”
34 Margaret Wilson Oliphant (1828–1897) was a well-known and prolific writer of fiction and essays about literature. She was born in Scotland, but lived most of her life in England, near Wimbledon. Much of her work was published by Blackwood & Sons, in Edinburgh. She is best known for her seven-novel series under the general title Chronicles of Carlingford. For a time, she was editor of Foreign Classics for English Readers, a series of books about foreign writers published by Blackwood & Sons. This letter proposing a book on Sainte-Beuve for this series was probably addressed to Blackwood’s, where his proposal would be reviewed by someone else if Mrs. Oliphant were no longer editor of the series. Sharp’s proposal was not accepted by Blackwood’s. See Elisabeth Jay, Mrs. Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
35 Sainte-Beuve’s Essays on Men and Women was published by David Stott in London in 1890. The essays were translated by William Matthews and Harriet W. Preston, and Sharp wrote a brief introduction.
36 Blanche Willis Howard.
37 Elizabeth Sharp’s aunt.
38 “The Coves of Crail,” which appeared in July, 1890.
39 The Reverend Frederick Langbridge (1849–1922) was a Church of Ireland clergyman in Limerick, and also a poet, novelist, and playwright. The author of many novels, among them The Dreams of Dania (1897), he was also a successful dramatizer of novels. His adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities (The Only Way) had a long run in London in 1899. Sharp is attempting to gain notice among reviewers and readers for one of Langbridge’s publications.
40 Horace Elisha Scudder (1838–1902), editor, biographer, and juvenile writer, was a general editorial assistant for the publishers Hurd & Houghton (later Houghton, Mifflin) and edited The Atlantic Monthly from 1890 to 1898. His works include Seven Little People and Their Friends (1862), Dream Children (1864), Stories and Romances (1880), Noah Webster (1882), Men and Letters (1887), George Washington: An Historical Biography (1890), Childhood in Literature and Art (1894), and James Russell Lowell: A Biography (1901).
41 “Dionysos in India” was published under the pseudonym William Windover in August 1892, in the first and only number of The Pagan Review, a periodical Sharp edited under the pseudonym W. H. Brooks. He wrote everything in the volume under various other pseudonyms.
42 In a letter dated July 25, 1890, Sharp encouraged Carman to publish a volume of his poems first in England, but that did not happen. Carman’s first volume of poems, Low Tide on Grand Pré, was published in New York in 1893. The reference here must be to the appearance of one of Carman’s poems in a periodical.
Chapter 7
1 Richard Garnett (1835–1906), English librarian and author, entered the British Museum in 1851 as an assistant and rose to be superintendent of the reading-room in 1875. From 1890 to 1899, when he retired, he was the Keeper of Printed Books (or Chief Librarian), a post his father held for many years. He also wrote and published extensively. Among his publications were biographies of Carlyle (1887), Emerson (1887), Milton (1890), Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1898); a volume of original, fanciful tales, The Twilight of the Gods (1888); a tragedy, Iphigenia in Delphi (1890); A Short History of Italian Literature (1898); and Essays of an Ex-librarian (1901).
2 Elihu Vedder (1836–1923), a painter and illustrator of considerable merit, was born in New York of Dutch ancestry. Having decided to become an artist, he went to Europe to study and fell in love with Italy. He lived most of his life in Rome where he became a central figure in the expatriate life of the city. He is best known for his illustrations for the Rubaiyet of Omar Khayyam, the first edition of which was published with the poem in 1884 and sold out in six days.
3 Probably “Lilith,” a prose outline of which he read to Elizabeth on January 9 (Memoir 176).
4 “Paris Nocturne” was printed in the December 25, 1890, issue.
5 On January 8, 1891, Sharp wrote in his diary: “After dinner copied out ‘Rebirth’ (Spring’s Advent) to send to Belford’s, and ‘The Sheik’ for The Independent” (Memoir 175). Neither poem was accepted for publication, but Elizabeth included “Spring’s Advent” in her 1910 edition of the poems Sharp published under his own name. “The Sheik” remains a mystery. Sharp wrote a poem titled “The Sheik (A Portrait from Life)” in El Ah’bra, Morocco when he and Elizabeth visited North Africa in January/February, 1893. That poem, perhaps because of its homoerotic shadings, appears to exist only in a fair copy manuscript in private hands.
6 Elizabeth Sharp stayed in Rome until mid-March and then went to Florence (Memoir 181). Sharp stayed in Rome through the end of March to oversee the final proofing of Sospiri di Roma.
7 Sharp is commenting on the critical reception of Sospiri di Roma (1891).
8 Coulson Kernahan (1858–1953) was a writer of fiction, criticism, recollections, and imaginative and religious studies who co-edited, with Frederick Locker-Lampson, Lyra Elegantiarum (1891), a standard anthology of light verse. His works include A Dead Man’s Diary (1890), Wise Men and a Fool (1901), In Good Company (1917), Swinburne as I Knew Him (1919), and Six Famous Living Poets (1926).
9 Charles G. D. Roberts. See note to Sharp's letter to E. C. Stedman dated July 27, 1889.
10 Walter Severn (1830–1904), a painter, was the son of Joseph Severn, also a painter and a friend of John Keats. Severn in 1885 asked Sharp to write a biography of his father and, when Sharp agreed, loaned him a large trove of papers by and about Joseph Severn, including unpublished manuscripts and letters. For additional information about Sharp’s Severn biography, see Memoir 168 and note to Sharp’s December 1885 letter to Edward Dowden. Sharp wrote most of his Life and Letters of Joseph Severn in the summer of 1891, finishing it at the end of August, and it was published in March 1892 by Sampson Low & Co. in London and Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. On August 24, 1891, he had lunch with Joseph Severn’s youngest brother, Charles Severn, who was 86 years old. Charles confirmed what he had told Sharp the previous September that Keats composed his Nightingale ode after spending a night under a tree in Hampstead listening to the bird’s song (Memoir 186).
11 “The Second Shadow: Being the Narrative of Jose Maria Santos y Bazan, Spanish Physician in Rome” was accepted by Bliss Carman and published in The Independent on August 25, 1892.
12 The Sharps went to Stuttgart so he could collaborate with Blanche Willis Howard on A Fellowe and His Wife.
13 The salutation and content of this letter indicate clearly it was addressed to Bliss Carman.
14 Charles G. D. Roberts. See note to Sharp's letter to E. C. Stedman of July 27, 1889.
15 I have been unable to identify this person.
16 Edmund and Laura Stedman; Catharine and Thomas A. Janvier.
17 The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn appeared in March 1892.
18 “The White Gull” (1892) is an elegy subtitled “For the Centenary of the Birth of Shelley.”
19 The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892).
20 William Sharp, “Joseph Severn and His Correspondents,” Atlantic Monthly, LXVIII (Dec. 1891), pp. 736–48.
21 Richard Westmacott (1799–1872), the son of Sir Richard Westmacott, also a sculptor, was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy from 1857 to 1867 and was a well-known writer and lecturer on art.
22 George Richmond (1809–1896), an English painter and a member of Blake’s circle, was a fashionable portrait painter.
23 Ruskin’s letter included his first impressions of Venice and his criticism of English artists (particularly those of the Royal Academy) and English art: “It isn’t of any use to try and do anything for such an age as this. We are a different race altogether from the men of old time: we live in drawing-rooms instead of deserts, and work by the light of chandeliers instead of volcanoes” (p. 740, see note 2).
24 Seymour S. Kirkup (1788–1880) was a painter and one of a group of young men who were friends and disciples of William Blake. Later he settled in Italy and became a leader of Anglo-American literary society in Florence where he spent most of his life.
25 Thomas Fisher Unwin (1848–1935) founded the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin in 1882 and was a joint founder of the First Council of the Publishing Association.
26 The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn was published in March 1892.
27 “Joseph Severn and His Correspondents” was published in the December 1891 issue of Atlantic Monthly.
28 A second Sharp article on Severn, “Severn’s Roman Journals,” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1892, 631–44.
29 A Fellowe and His Wife (1892).
30 The Atlantic Monthly did not publish any poems by Sharp in 1891–1892.
31 “Wm. Sharp, Oct 8-’91” is written in another hand at the top left of the letter’s first page. This is the date of Stedman’s birthday and indicates approximately when the letter was received. Sharp regularly wrote birthday letters to Stedman after they met in New York in the summer of 1889, and many have survived. Also written in pencil on the top left of the first page: “J. B. Pond – show him” and “For Dr. Lambert from L. S. Y. [?].”
32 Again, Sharp puts his letter address in London at the top of the page.
33 “The Second Shadow, Being the Narrative of Jose Maria Santos y Bazan, Spanish Physician in Rome” was published in The Independent, 44 (August 25, 1892), 1205ff.
34 The Sharps were in Stuttgart from early September to mid-October.
35 Derby: Frank Murray, 1891.
36 Le Gallienne married Eliza Mildred Lee on October 22, 1891.
37 Edward John Trelawny (1792–1881) was a friend of Shelley and Byron and author of Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858).
38 Rayner Storr (1835–1917) was the author of a concordance to the Latin original of the four books known as De Imitation Christi: Given to the World A. D. 1441, by Thomas a Kempis: With full contextual quotations by Rayner Storr (1910).”
39 William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), a graduate of Eton and Oxford, dominated British politics throughout the century. As head of the Liberal Party, he first served as Prime Minister in 1868–74.
40 Walter Severn, Joseph Severn’s son.
41 Staff members in the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books. See note to Sharp’s early January 1891 letter to Garnett.
42 In the Memoir, E. A. S. prefaced this letter as follows: “The brilliant summer was followed by a damp and foggy autumn. My husband’s depression increased with the varying of the year. While I was on a visit to my mother he wrote to me, after seeing me in the morning.” Following the letter, she wrote: “His health was so seriously affected by the fogs that it became imperative that he should get into purer air so he decided to fulfill his intention of going to New York even though he had been forced to relinquish all ideas of lecturing.” He began planning this trip to the United States when he was in Germany in September. See Sharp’s late September 1891 letter to E. C. Stedman.
43 Edmund Schérer, Essays on English Literature, trans. George Saintsbury (1891).
44 Jules Breton, Life of an Artist: Art and Nature, trans. Mary J. Serrano (1891).
45 William Edmonstone Aytoun’s Firmillian: or, the Student of Badajoz: A Spasmodic Tragedy (1854) was published under the pseudonym, T. Percy Jones.
46 Charles G. D. Roberts. See note to Sharp's July 27 letter to E. C. Stedman.
47 Like Bliss Carman, Clarence Winthrop Bowen (1852–1935) wrote for The Independent, and he served as publisher of that paper from 1896–1912. He was also an historian, his most famous work being The History of the Centennial Celebration of the Inauguration of George Washington as First President of the United States (D. Appleton, and the Committee on the Centennial Celebration of the Inauguration of Washington as President, New York: 1892), a beautiful book designed in part by the architect Stanford White and a monument of New York’s gilded age. Bowen was one of the principal founders of the American Historical Association in 1884.
48 Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy (1881) and Sospiri di Roma (1891). This “new imaginative work” was the brief dramatic sketches Sharp published in 1894 as Vistas (Derbyshire, Moray Press). In his diary for October 1891 (Memoir 190–91), Sharp mentions that he has completed two “Dramatic Interludes” (“Northern Night” and “The Birth of a Soul”) and has begun “The Passion of Manuel van Hoëk.” All three works appeared in Vistas, the latter under the title “The Passion of Pere Hilarion.”
49 The December 1891 number of The Atlantic Monthly contained Sharp’s “Joseph Severn and His Correspondents.”
50 This article became “Severn’s Roman Journals” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1892.
51 John Ruskin, Praeterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life, 3 vols. (1885–1900).
52 The proposed double article became one article: “Severn’s Roman Journals,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1892.
53 Meaning “potpourri”.
54 Giacomo Antonelli (1806–1876) was premier of the first constitutional ministry of Pius XI.
55 John Gibson (1790–1866) was an English neo-classicist sculptor who spent most of his life in Rome.
56 Friedrich Oberbeck (1789–1869) was a German painter who made extensive use of religious symbolism and initiated a Pre-Raphaelite movement in Germany.
57 Charlotte Saunders Cushman (1816–1876) was a well-known and popular American actress who lived and traveled in London and Rome in the 1850s and 1860s.
58 Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908), an American sculptor and poet, studied under John Gibson in Rome.
Chapter 8
1 For information about Le Gallienne, see Sharp’s letter to him in late February 1887.
2 Hall Caine, a disciple and biographer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was a close friend of Sharp’s in the early 1880s. Shortly after Rossetti died in 1882, Caine, a native of the Isle of Man, moved to Liverpool to work as a reporter for the Liverpool Mercury. For more about Caine, see note to Sharp’s letter to Rossetti of March 1880.
3 The Book-Bills of Narcissus (Derby: Frank Murray, 1892).
4 Le Gallienne’s English Poems (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1892).
5 Sharp’s Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London: Sampson Lowe, Marston & Co: March, 1892).
6 Sharp visited Louise Chandler Moulton on January 26 or 27 while staying with the Scudders in Boston.
7 A Fellowe and His Wife (London: James R. Osgood, MacIlvain & Co., 1892, and Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1892).
8 Phillip Marston’s A Last Harvest: Lyrics and Sonnets from the Book of Love, ed. Louise Chandler Moulton (London: Mathews & Lane, 1892).
9 Sharp is describing his meeting with Walt Whitman on January 16. E. A. S. said this meeting took place on January 23 (Memoir 193–94), but the sequence of events described in these letters supports the earlier date.
10 Horace Elisha Scudder (1838–1902) gained prominence and power on the American literary landscape when he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1890, a post he held until 1898. See note to Sharp's letter to Scudder dated November 15, 1890.
11 Henry Mills Alden (1836–1919), a descendent of John and Priscilla Alden who arrived with the Mayflower, was born in Vermont and graduated from Williams College, where his fellow students included James A. Garfield, John J. Ingalls, and his life-long friend Horace E. Scudder. After Williams, Alden spent three years at Andover Theological Seminary. Though he never entered the ministry, he often served as preacher at neighborhood parishes. Alden’s literary career began while he was in the seminary with the acceptance of two articles by the Atlantic Monthly.
They were sent to the magazine, unbeknownst to him, by his friend Harriet Beecher Stowe. When Alden moved to New York in 1861 to teach at a young ladies’ school, he wrote some articles for The Times (New York) and the New York Evening Post.
His connection with Harper and Brothers began in 1862 when the publishing house commissioned him to write a guidebook for the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Alden soon became an assistant editor of Harper’s Weekly, and in 1869, he was made editor of Harper’s Magazine, a position he held for fifty years until his death in 1919.
In addition to the monthly essays he wrote for Harper’s Magazine, Alden published three books: God in His World (1890), A Study of Death (1895), and Magazine Writing and New Literature (1908). He also edited several volumes of American literature and short stories with William Dean Howells. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Alden received the honorary degrees of Doctor of Literature and Doctor of Laws in 1890 and 1907, respectively, from his alma mater, Williams College.
12 Letter dated by postmark.
13 Arthur Stedman, E. C. Stedman’s son, served as Sharp’s agent in dealing with C. L. Webster & Co., which published Sharp’s Flower o’ the Vine later in 1892.
The following itinerary of Sharp’s second visit to America can be constructed from the internal evidence of his letter:
Wed. 1/13: Arrived in New York, stayed with the Stedmans at 137 West 78th.
Fri. 1/15: Went to Philadelphia and met with Horace Traubel and J. M. Stoddart, editor of Lippincott’s Magazine
Sat. 1/16: Visited Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey.
Sun. 1/17: Returned to New York.
Mon. 1/18 Wrote to E. A. S. regarding his visit to Whitman.
Thurs. 1/21: Wrote to Horace Scudder accepting invitation to stay at his home in Boston.
Fri. 1/22: Wrote to Arthur Stedman regarding Flower o’ the Vine.
Fri. 1/22: Wrote p/c to Louis Chandler Moulton: he would see her the following Tuesday or Wednesday in Boston.
Fri. 1/22: Accompanied H. M. Alden to Metuchen, N.J., and spent the weekend with him.
Mon. 1/25: Traveled to Boston and stayed with the Scudders in Cambridge.
Tues. 1/26: Wrote to A. Stedman discussing plans to return to New York.
Wed. 1/27: Wrote to Laura Stedman discussing plans in N.Y.
Thurs. 1/28: Left Boston for New York and spent the night at A. Stedman’s.
Fri. 1/29: Returned to the E. C. Stedmans’ and stayed until Tuesday.
Fri. 1/29: Letter to Horace Scudder re: proposed articles.
Sat. 1/30: Dined with Irene Jones Harland, Henry Harland’s mother.
Sun 1/31: Spent the day with E. C. Stedman who had been in Philadelphia
Tues. 2/2/92: Farewell to the Stedmans and spent the night in a midtown hotel.
Wed. 2/3/92: Departed New York on the Majestic; thank you letter to Laura Stedman mailed from the pilot boat.
14 F. J. Hall was an editor at C. L. Webster & Co. and responsible for the negotiations with Arthur Stedman and Sharp regarding the firm’s publication of Sharp’s Flower o’ the Vine: Romantic Ballads and Sospiri di Roma, introduction by Thomas A. Janvier (New York: 1892).
15 Thomas A. Janvier.
16 Stedman had asked Sharp to be his guest at a dinner meeting of the Author’s Club on Thursday, January 28.
17 Leaves of Grass: Including Sands at Seventy, 1st Annex, Goodbye My Fancy, 2nd Annex: A Backward Glance o’er Traveled Roads (Philadelphia: The David McKay Company, 1891–92).
18 David McKay (1860–1918), a Scotsman, established a publishing firm in Philadelphia in 1882: The David McKay Company. The first book published by the firm was the ninth edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1882).
19 Irene Jones Harland was the widow of a very successful New York lawyer and the mother of Henry Harland (1861–1905) who was well known in New York as the author of a series of sensational novels published under the pseudonym Sidney Luska. In 1887 Henry and his wife, Aline Merriam Harland, left New York for Paris and soon settled in London where he began to refine his prose style in a series of stories. His first widely read and widely acclaimed novel, The Cardinal’s Snuff-box, was published in 1890. Harland is best known today for his advocacy of fin de siècle aestheticism. With Aubrey Beardsley, he founded in 1894 The Yellow Book which became the principal vehicle of the movement. He served as that periodical’s literary editor and contributed many stories. He was plagued by physical and nervous disorders, and he died very young, following a protracted illness, in 1905 in Saint Remo.
20 Sharp returned to New York from his three-day stay in Cambridge with the Scudders on January 28, 1892 (a Thursday). This is the surviving section of a personal letter Sharp wrote to thank Scudder for his hospitality and to report he had seen Henry Mills Alden’s wife who was very ill and in either a hospital or a nursing home in New York City. She would soon die, leaving Alden a widower. Scudder and Alden were college classmates and firm friends.
21 Sharp had planned to stay a week in Boston and prolong his stay in America, but while staying with the Scudders he received news that his brother Edward had died. He returned to New York on Thursday, January 28 and sailed for England on Wednesday, February 3 on the Majestic.
22 This is a business letter Sharp wrote to Scudder to ask if he would like to consider two articles on contemporary Belgium and French writers. He decided not to approach Houghton Mifflin directly about publishing a book consisting of these articles expanded and translations of some of the writers. He suggests that Scudder might broach that subject with the editors of the firm using this letter as a basis. A principal purpose of Sharp’s trip to the United States was to gain more access for his writings among U.S. publishers and editors and thus to increase his visibility and income.
23 An article by Sharp entitled “La Jeune Belgique” was published in Nineteenth Century, 34 (Sept. 1893), 416–36.
24 There follows a list of sixty-five Belgian and French writers.
25 Sharp was at the publisher’s office and wrote to Stedman on the firm’s letterhead.
26 Possibly Daniel McIntyre Henderson, a Scottish poet and bookseller who emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1873 and became a bookkeeper with R. Renwick & Sons, furniture makers. He had written poetry before his emigration, and he published two volumes of poetry in the United States: Poems: Scottish and American (1888) and A Bit Bookie of Verse (1906). He was best known for his ode to celebrate the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Baltimore in 1880 and for a poem that honored his fellow Scottish emigrant: “Epistle to Andrew Carnegie.” He would have known both Stoddart of Lippincott’s Magazine and the Stedmans. If he had an office in Philadelphia, Arthur Stedman may have sent him, for transmission to Sharp, his letter introducing Sharp to Whitman.
27 Horace Traubel (1858–1919), editor, biographer, and poet, is best known for his friendship with Walt Whitman, who lived with Traubel’s brother in Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia. A native of Camden, Traubel visited the poet almost daily from the mid-1880s until Whitman died in March 1892. At the time of Sharp’s visit in January 1892, Traubel worked as a clerk in a Philadelphia bank while also serving as Whitman’s primary gatekeeper. He probably accompanied Sharp to Camden and was “the fair companion” who returned with Sharp to Philadelphia. After Whitman’s death, Traubel began producing from his notes what would become a nine-volume biography of Whitman’s final four years, With Walt Whitman in Camden (1964). Three volumes of this massive work were published before Traubel died, and the others appeared posthumously. One of Whitman’s three literary executors, Traubel also edited The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (10 vols., 1902).
28 Joseph Marshall Stoddart (1845–1921) was the editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and a friend of Whitman’s. Sharp discussed with him various stories and articles he might write for that important periodical.
29 Possibly Francis James Child (1825–1896), who became the first Professor of English Literature at Harvard in 1876. He edited Four Old Plays (1848), The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (1855), English and Scottish Ballads (1857–1858), and Poems of Sorrow and Comfort (1865). His five-volume collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883–1898) was a monumental achievement and remains the standard collection of English and Scottish folk music.
30 F. J. Hall. See note to January 22, 1892 letter to Arthur Stedman.
31 J. W. Young, a student or faculty member at Harvard, wrote a letter to Stedman asking if he would invite Sharp to lecture at Harvard on a subject of contemporary literature: “Quite a number of Harvard men are anxious to see and hear Mr. Sharp if he will consent to come to Cambridge.” Laura Stedman must have sent Young’s letter to Sharp since E. A. S. quoted from it in the Memoir (194–95).
32 Flower o' the Vine (1892).
33 Although Sharp considered publishing the short dramatic works under a pseudonym, the volume finally appeared under his own name in 1894 as Vistas. Sharp’s interest at this time in pseudonyms was manifest, however, when, later in 1892, he edited The Pagan Review under a pseudonym and wrote all its contents under various pseudonyms.
34 (Henry) Austin Dobson (1840–1921), poet, essayist, and biographer, entered government service with the Board of Trade, where he remained until his retirement in 1901. His non-poetical works include biographies of Hogarth (1879), Fielding (1883), Richard Steele (1886), Oliver Goldsmith (1888), Horace Walpole (1890), Samuel Richardson (1902), and Fanny Burney (1903). His poetry was collected in the Complete Poetical Works (1923).
35 A portion of the manuscript is unreadable here. When the book appeared it was dedicated “To Edmund Clarence Stedman with Homage and Love.”
36 Regarding the death of Sharp’s brother.
37 Edgar Fawcett (1847–1904) was a successful novelist Sharp met in New York. His best known novels — Purple and Fine Linen (1873) and New York (1898) — were satirical studies of New York high society. He also wrote Solarion (about a dog given human intelligence) and Douglas Duane (on scientific body-switching), as well as The Ghost of Guy Thryle (which features astral projection as a means of interplanetary travel).
38 James Clarence Harvey (1859–1917) was a poet.
39 A Fellowe and His Wife (1892).
40 There is no evidence of such a commission.
41 “Primavera di Capri,” Good Words, 33 (1892), 396–411.
42 Janvier’s The Uncle of an Angel, and Other Stories (1891).
43 “Editor’s Study,” Harper’s, 84 (Feb. 1892), 478–79.
44 Henry and Aline Merriam Harland; Irene Jones Harland. See note to Sharp’s letter to Laura Stedman of January 27, 1892.
45 Austin Dobson, Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 3 vols. (1892–1896).
46 John Charles Van Dyke (1856–1932) was a prolific writer on art and art history.
47 Principles of Art: Part I: Art in History; Part II: Art in Theory (1887).
48 James Stanley Little, who was educated at King’s College Cambridge, lived for a time with his brother George, an artist, in Buck’s Green, Rudgwick, Sussex. He became a good friend of William and Elizabeth Sharp after he found them a house to let in Buck’s Green. He was the First Executive Secretary of the Society of Authors (1888–90) and Honorable Secretary of the Shelley Society (1886–87). He was the principal organizer of a Shelley Centenary Celebration at Horsham in 1892. He was actively involved in the movement to reform the Royal Academy. Among his many publications: What is Art (1884), The United States of Britain (1887), A Vision of Empire (1889), The Wealdon Painters (1892), A Wealdon Tragedy (1894) and The Life and Work of W. Q. Orchardson, RA (1897).
49 Possibly The Library Review, published from 1892–1893.
50 George Léon Little (1862–1941).
51 I have been unable to identify her.
52 Walt Whitman died on March 26, 1892.
53 “Walt Whitman,” The Athenaeum, 96 (April 2, 1892), 436–37. Watt’s lengthy article on Whitman damned him for lack of intelligence and criticized his poetry, especially Leaves of Grass, for its lack of meter, its unintelligibility, and its amazing indecency “that has done no harm. It is merely the attempt of a journalist to play ‘the noble savage’ by fouling with excrement the doorstep of Civilization.” One can see why Sharp, an admirer of Whitman, would strongly object to Watts’ diatribe and share his views with Stedman who, along with many American critics, venerated Whitman and mourned his passing.
54 Henry Harland.
55 Alfred Austin (1835–1913), a political journalist who succeeded Tennyson as poet laureate in 1895, founded and edited, with William J. Courthope, The National Review. His works include Randolph (1854), The Human Tragedy (1862), The Tower of Babel (1874), Prince Lucifer (1887), Lyrical Poems (1891), Narrative Poems (1891), and The Garden That I Love (1894).
56 The rest of the manuscript is missing.
57 Probably The Literary World of April 9, 1892 in which Sharp’s and Blanche Willis Howard’s A Fellowe and His Wife was reviewed.
58 Sharp mentions later (see letter 151) a “Summer Shows” article written by Little for the West Sussex Gazette and reprinted as The Wealden Painters at the Summer Exhibitions, 1892 (Arundel: West Sussex Gazette Office, 1892).
59 Introduction to Flower o’ the Vine (1892).
60 Jean Moréas (1856–1910) was the name taken by Iannis Pappadiamantopoulos, a Greek poet who adopted French culture and tastes. He began as a Symbolist and gradually moved toward poetry that was classical in theme, form, and style. Maurice Barrès (1862–1923) was a novelist, essayist and politician who studied law at Nancy and became active politically after 1889. Henri Cazalis (1840–1909) was a minor poet, doctor, and friend of Mallarmé who took the name Jean Lahor. He was interested in the occult. Jules Renard (1864–1910), a novelist, joined the original staff of Mercure de France, chief among the symbolist reviews. I have been unable to identify Eugène Holland or Leon Vaniers.
61 Catherine Janvier.
62 Stedman wrote a poem about Walt Whitman following his death that was published in the United States and England. He has sent Sharp a manuscript copy of the poem which Sharp says he will place in the edition of Whitman’s poems Stedman gave him during his recent trip to America.
63 The reference is to Little’s defense of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles against an article in the Quarterly Review that criticized the novel as unrealistic and contrary to the obligations of marriage. Little had given Sharp proof slips for an opinion piece by Little that would appear in the August issue of The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, a publication which promoted the arts. The complete sentence Sharp found praiseworthy: “Broadly considered physical beauty denotes intellectual beauty and right-living, though it is often only the legacy – the unearned increment – of these things; and the desire to possess this beauty, perverted as that desire often is, is per se a healthy instinct making for beauty and righteousness in the race.” Whether or not many men and women shared Little’s opinion, Sharp believed the desire to possess physical beauty, though often perverted, more often generates intellectual beauty and righteousness.
64 Henry Hyde Champion (1859–1928), a socialist and one of the founders of the Independent Labor Party, was acting editor of the journal Nineteenth Century in 1892. Sharp was sending proof-slips of Little’s “Hardy Counterblast” in the hope that Champion would recognize Little as ally in the liberal cause and ask him to contribute to the journal. A month later, on June 21, Sharp had to tell Little he had not been able to see Champion.
65 Date from postmark.
66 Date from postmark.
67 George Léon Little.
68 This single folded letter card is addressed to J. M. Stoddart Esq. | Editor | Lippincott’s Magazine | Messrs. Lippincott & Co. | Philadelphia. A received post mark in Philadelphia is dated June 2.
69 Elizabeth’s illness forced Sharp to cancel a meeting with Henry Hyde Champion, editor of Nineteenth Century, where he would have praised Little as a potential contributor.
70 See note to March 9, 1892 letter to Little. E. A. S. said: “During a visit to the art critic, J. Stanley Little, at Rudgwick, Sussex, my husband saw a little cottage which attracted him and we decided to take it as a pied-a-terre.” The Sharps were staying with Mona Caird at Northbrook, Micheldever during the first week of June while negotiations were taking place for the house in Sussex. On June 7 Sharp wrote in his diary: “Went down to Rudgwick, Sussex by appointment, and agreed to take the cottage on a 3-years’ lease” (Memoir 199–200).
71 E. C. Stedman’s “The Nature and Elements of Poetry” appeared first in eight installments in The Century Magazine, 43–44 (March-Oct., 1892), 752–761, 821–829, 143–152, 180–189, 365–374, 613–622, 661–669, and 859–869. The essays were then published as a book in the fall of 1892.
72 Later named Phenice Croft.
73 This idea morphed into Sharp’s Pagan Review which had no contributors but Sharp himself.
74 Heinrich Heine, Italian Travel Sketches. etc. Part I, trans. E. A. Sharp (1892).
75 Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897), the eldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave, the antiquarian, was the art critic for the Saturday Review, a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1885–1895. His works include: Idylls and Songs (1854), Hymns (1867), Lyrical Poems (1871), The Visions of England (1881), and the anthologies, Golden Treasury of English Verse (1861), The Children’s Treasury of English Song (1875), and The Treasury of Sacred Song (1889).
76 Sharp sent Henry Hyde Champion a sample of Stanley Little’s writing on May 19.
77 Sharp’s sister Mary, who did copying work for him from time to time and, crucially, would provide the handwriting for the letters Sharp would write as from Fiona Macleod.
78 J. Stanley Little, The Wealden Painters at the Summer Exhibitions, 1892, reprinted from the West Sussex Gazette (1892).
79 A story or article Little had written, which Sharp suggests he try to publish as a pamphlet or book.
80 The Wealdon Painters at the Summer Exhibitions (1892).
81 Jay _______?, of Phenice Farm near Great Bookham, several miles north of Horsham, must have owned the house in Buck’s Green the Sharps were letting and wished to name Phenice Croft.
82 Theodor Watts (later Watts-Dunton) was a well-known critic and a friend of Sharp’s, and Water Crane (1845–1915) was an illustrator of children’s books and a close friend of Little’s.
83 Do you understand, my friend?
84 You may break, but shall not bend [me].
85 The following letter from Elizabeth A. Sharp to Stanley Little – one of several in the Princeton library – is included to demonstrate the close relationship they were developing.
86 Heinrich Heine, Italian Travel Sketches, etc. Part I, trans. E. A. Sharp (1892).
87 At this point two pages of the manuscript letter are missing.
Chapter 9
1 Maud Howe Elliot (1854–1948), a daughter of Julia Ward Howe and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, wrote fiction, art criticism, travel narratives, and biography. Her best known book is Julia Ward Howe 1819–1910, published in 1915, for which she and her sisters, Laura E. Richards and Florence M. H. Hall with whom she collaborated, won the Pulitzer prize.
2 Sharp’s reference to his trip to America in January 1892 and to settling into Phenice Croft establish the date of the letter as early July, 1892.
3 Louise Chandler Moulton.
4 Unable to identify.
5 The San Rosario Ranch (1884) and Atlanta in the South: A Romance (1886).
6 W. H. Brooks is the pseudonym Sharp adopted as editor of The Pagan Review, a periodical he planned to issue from his new home in Rudgwick. For the first and only number of this venture, he wrote all the pieces under different pseudonyms, as well as editing it pseudonymously.
7 Stopford Augustus Brooke (1832–1916), an Anglo-Irish clergyman, essayist, critic, and biographer, was influenced by Ruskin. His works include: Primer of English Literature (1876), Poems (1888), History of Early English Literature (1894), and Studies in Poetry (1907).
8 Edward Dowden. See note to Sharp’s letter to Dowden on May 22, 1882.
9 Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel (1834–1894), son of Charles Noel, Lord Barham and Earl of Gainsborough, was a poet whose work reflected his leaning towards socialism, his concern with the oppressed, his love of nature, and his philosophical mysticism. His works include Behind the Veil (1863), A Little Child’s Monument (1881), Essays Upon Poetry and Poets (1886), The People’s Christmas (1890), and Collected Poems (1902).
10 Richard Garnett. See note to letter from Sharp to Garnett of early January 1891.
11 Henry Buxton Forman (1842–1917) was a bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller whose literary reputation is based on his bibliographies of Shelley and Keats. In 1934 he was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) to purvey large quantities of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.
12 John Nichol (1833–1894), a Scottish poet and biographer, was Professor of English Language and Literature at Glasgow University from 1862 to 1889. During his brief period of study at Glasgow University, Sharp was deeply influenced by Nichol, and they became good friends. Nichol’s works include Fragments of Criticism (1860), Byron (1880), The Death of Themistocles and Other Poems (1881), Robert Burns (1881), and Carlyle (1892).
13 Selsea Bill is a headland on the Selsea Peninsula, West Sussex.
14 The letter of the 10th may not have survived.
15 Sharp wrote a similar letter in 1887 objecting to being classified as a colonial poet in Stedman’s Victorian Poets. In a new edition, he was placed with the Australian poets.
16 Sir Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) was a poet, novelist, and literary commentator who wrote with special insight on Restoration comedy and Ibsenite drama. His works include On Viol and Flute (1873), New Poems (1879), Firdausi in Exile (1885), and In Russet and Silver (1894).
17 The Pagan Review.
18 The eight papers Stedman published in The Century Magazine (see note to June 9, 1892 letter to Laura Stedman) were collected in a single volume titled The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892).
19 The implication here is that Edith Rinder will be with him for at least part of his stay in the Highlands.
20 Sharp must have suggested Stedman donate an autograph copy of “Ariel,” his poem about Shelley, to the Shelley Museum in Horsham if Stanley Little and others succeed in their campaign to establish it.
21 The Pagan Review was published on August 15, 1892.
22 Joseph Edmund Collins (1855–92) was born in Newfoundland, migrated to New Brunswick in 1875, and began to exercise a strong influence on Charles G. D. Roberts in 1880, when the two men were working in Chatham, Collins as the editor of a local newspaper (The Star) and Roberts as a teacher at the local Grammar School. Collins moved to Toronto in 1880 to take up an editorial position on The Globe and to New York in 1886 to become editor of a new periodical, The Epoch, where he continued to promote Roberts’s poetry. He became a close friend of Bliss Carman after he too moved to the city in 1890. By that time, Collins had left The Epoch and his health had begun to deteriorate. In writing this letter to Carman, Sharp did not know that Collins had died in a New York hospital on February 23, 1892. After his death, Collins was recognized as the literary father of Roberts, Carman, and their generation of young poets.
23 Unable to identify.
24 Charles G. D. Roberts.
25 Here Sharp implies more explicitly that Edith Rinder would be with him in the Highlands after August 30.
26 Edward Dowden (1843–1913). See note to Sharp’s May 22, 1882 letter to Dowden.
27 E. A. S. added “And at the little cottage a solemn ceremony took place. The Review was buried in a corner of the garden, with ourselves, my sister-in-law Mary and Mr. Stanley Little as mourners; a framed inscription was put to mark the spot, and remained there until we left Rudgwick” (Memoir 207).
28 The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892).
29 Baldwin was an Editor of The New York Independent and later of The Outlook.
30 “The Passing of Thomas,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 85 (Aug. 1892), 439–454; and “The Efferati Family,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 85 (Oct. 1892), 763–780.
31 Catherine Janvier.
32 Robert Murray Gilchrist (1868–1917) was a prolific writer of fiction and travel books. He was born in Sheffield and educated at Sheffield Grammar School. At twenty-one, he gave up his apprenticeship in the manufacture of cutlery, decided to become a full-time writer, and moved to a house called Highcliffe in Eyam, a village near Sheffield in Derbyshire. He became a popular writer of stories and novels many of which featured ghosts and supernatural phenomena. His works include Frangipanni (1893), Willowbrake (1898), The Labyrinth (1902), Natives of Milton (1902), Beggar’s Manor (1902), The Dukeries (1910), The Peak District (1910), Scarborough and Neighborhood (1910), and The Chase (1921). See the Introduction to this chapter for more information.
33 Only one issue was published.
34 Le Gallienne’s English Poems (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, [1892]). An edition of twenty-five copies was privately printed in Edinburgh.
35 A reference to Philip Bourke Marston’s For a Song’s Sake.
36 Thomas Woolner (1825–1892) was a sculptor and poet, a friend of Rossetti, and one of the original Pre-Raphaelite brethren. Sharp’s comment refers to Woolner having made two busts of Tennyson.
37 Sharp saw Austin at Tennyson’s funeral. Tennyson died on October 6, 1892, and the funeral was on October 12.
38 The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (1892).
39 Austin became poet laureate in 1895.
40 Alfred Henry Miles (1848–1929) was a prolific author, editor, anthologist, journalist, composer and lecturer who published hundreds of works on a wide range of topics, among them The Poets and Poetry of the Century, 10 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1891–97) and The Universal Natural History, with Anecdotes Illustrating the Nature, Habits, Manners and Customs of Animals, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, Insects, etc., etc. (New York : Dodd, Mead & Co., 1895, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Henry_Miles
41 Hutchinson & Co. was an English book publisher, founded in 1887 by Sir George Hutchinson.
42 Sharp had written to the publisher of Miles’ Poets and Poetry of the Century Series (Hutchinson & Co.) proposing that he prepare a volume on Phillip Bourke Marston for the series. Before sending it he decided he had better check with the editor of the series and sent him (Miles) a copy of the letter he intended to send to Hutchinson (see October 31 letter above). Miles asked Sharp not to send the letter since he was doing all the selecting, editing, and writing for the series.
43 Theodore Watts, later Watts-Dunton, was poetry editor of The Atheneum.
44 A village in West Sussex.
45 The first and last portions of this letter are missing.
46 William Bell Scott (1811–1890) was a Scottish poet and painter. The publication of his posthumous Memoirs, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, in 1892 created a sensation with his comments on the leading literary men and artists of his time.
47 William Minto (1845–1893), a Scottish critic and novelist, edited the Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott. Edmund Gosse and Theodore Watts [-Dunton] were among his protégés. His works include A Manual of English Prose Literature (1872), Daniel Defoe (1879), The Crack of Doom (1886), and Was She Good or Bad? (1889).
48 Sharp’s review of Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scot was printed in The Academy, 42 (Dec. 3, 1892), 499–500.
49 Little was planning an article on Rossetti.
50 Bognor is a locality in West Sussex where D. G. Rossetti leased Aldwick Lodge in 1875. He lived there from October 1875, to July 1876.
51 Swinburne had attacked Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott for its inaccurate and unfair treatment of his and Watts-Dunton’s relations with Rossetti in his later years. Sharp is giving Watts-Dunton, and perhaps through him Swinburne, a chance to review the manuscript of his review of the book and note inaccuracies or suggest additions before he submits it to The Academy.
52 James Cotton, editor of The Academy.
53 Thomas Gordon Hake (1809–1895) was a physician, a poet, and a friend of Rossetti. Sharp refers to Hake’s Memoir of Eighty Years, which was published by Bentley in 1892.
54 W. Kineton Parkes (1865–1938), novelist and art critic, was on the staff of the Nicholson Institute at Leek. An expert on the silk industry of Leek, he and his wife were heavily involved in the social and artistic life of the town. From November 1888 to October 1889, he edited Comus, and in 1893–94 the Library Review. Parkes’s works include Shelley’s Faith: Its Development and Relativity (1888), The Pre-Raphaelite Movement (1889), The Painter Poets, ed. for the Canterbury Poets Series (1890) (Sharp was the editor of this series), Love a la Mode: A Study in Episodes (1907), Potiphar’s Wife (1908), The Altar of Moloch (1911), The Money Hunt: A Comedy of Country Houses (1914), Hardware (1914), and, most significantly, The Art of Carved Sculpture (1931).
55 George Meredith.
56 Sharp’s article of Maeterlinck appeared in the March 1892 issue of The Academy.
57 Date from postmark.
58 Stedman’s The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892).
59 John Charles Van Dyke (1856–1932) was an American art historian and critic. The two books mentioned are How to Judge a Picture (New York: Chautauqua Press, 1889) and Principles of Art: Pt. 1. Art in History; Pt. 2. Art in Theory (New York, Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1887).
60 Edmund Clarence Stedman, The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892).
61 A. C. Swinburne, “The New Terror,” The Fortnightly Review, 52 (Dec. 1, 1892), 830–833.
62 William Bell Scott.
63 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
64 Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
65 William Bell Scott.
66 The manuscript ends, and the remainder of the letter is lost.
67 This is an autograph letter card postmarked December 7, 1892 from Horsham and addressed to Kineton Parkes Esq, The Library, Nicholson Institute, Leek, Staffordshire.
68 Sharp’s review of William Bell Scott’s autobiography.
69 George Meredith.
70 Address on lettercard: 14 Henrietta Street | Covent Garden W.C. | London. Date from postmark on card.
71 The novel Sharp wrote jointly with Blanche Willis Howard was published in London by James R. Osgood, McIlvain & Co. in 1892 and in Germany in the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors, vol 2813.
72 Elkin Mathews (b. 1851), a publisher and bookseller, founded The Bodley Head Publishing Co. in 1887 with John Lane. The partnership was dissolved in 1894.
73 Date from postmark.
74 Date from postmark.
75 J. J. Robinson was an editor of the West Sussex Gazette and a friend of Stanley Little who wrote frequently for the Gazette. Robinson and Little were the two Honorary Secretaries of the Committee to organize a Centenary Celebration to mark the 100th anniversary on August 4, 1892 of the birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Horsham, Sussex and to solicit funds to establish in Horsham a Shelley Library and Museum, which survives as the Shelley Gallery in the Horsham Museum.
76 Perhaps a notice of The Pagan Review in the West Sussex Gazette written by Little, who wrote frequently for the paper.
77 Date from postmark.
78 Sharp had arranged with Joseph Cotton, editor of The Academy, to write an article about Stedman’s Nature and Elements of Poetry, but he did not follow through.
79 The Phenice Croft address on the stationery is crossed through and “Permanent address after March” is written next to it. The Sharps would be away from England until March, and they would use the address of E. A. S.’s mother to receive mail while away.
80 The Sharps originally planned to travel to Sicily overland via the Gotherd Pass, Milan, and Florence, leaving on January 2. Their decision to travel by ship delayed their departure.
Chapter 10
1 Dr. Ward to be identified. Anne Jean Marie René Savary, 1st Duke of Rovigo (1774–1833), was a French general and diplomat. In 1812, Napoleon awarded him the duché grand-fief (a rare, nominal but hereditary honor extinguished in 1872) of Rovigo in Italy. He was among the last to desert the emperor at the time of his abdication in April 1814 and among the first to welcome his abortive return from Elba in 1815, when he became inspector-general of gendarmerie and a peer of France. Sharp’s friend, Prof. E. Savare d’Odiardi, must have been his grandson and a physician who had settled in London. He continued to identify himself as the Duc de Rovigo, though the title seems to have been abolished in 1872. In the September 29, 1886 issue of The Lancet he published an article entitled “New Pneumo-dynamometer and Spirometer.” There he is identified as President of the General Society for the Welfare of the Blind.
2 Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892).
3 Prince Lucifer (1887).
4 The Leon MS may have been an article by George Leon Little, a painter, or an article written about him by Stanley Little, his brother. In a letter to Stanley Little on April 16, 1890, Sharp said he admired Leon’s work and added: “You may be sure that whenever it is practicable for me to put in a spoke anywhere ‘will’ shall not lag behind ‘can.’” He then suggested Little encourage his brother to try placing his work in a Glasgow gallery where Sharp could do more for him in his capacity as art critic for the Glasgow Herald. D. C. T. may have been an editor at the Walter Scott publishing firm to whom Sharp had sent the manuscript. See Sharp’s letter to Little dated 22 January 1893.
5 Date from postmark.
6 Edmund Clarence Stedman and Thomas and Catherine Janvier.
7 Date from postmark.
8 L. L. was George Leon Little, Stanley Little’s brother. See note to Sharp’s letter to Little dated January 7, 1893.
9 Robert Farquharson Sharp, Elizabeth Sharp’s brother.
10 The Walter Scott publishing company. Sharp’s January 7 letter implies that D. C. T. of that firm agreed to publish the manuscript, but not immediately.
11 E. A. S. included three letters Sharp wrote “to a friend” from Africa (Memoir 208–14). This is the first of the three. Had that friend been anyone other than Edith Rinder, E. A. S. would have given the name. And only for Edith would Sharp have taken time to write in such detail about the scenery and atmosphere of North Africa.
12 The editor at Walter Scott Publishing Co has turned down the George Leon Little manuscript. See Sharp to Little, January 7 and 22, 1893.
13 Date from postmark.
14 Robert Farquharson Sharp is E. A. S.’s brother. Madge was one of William Sharp’s sisters.
15 Sharp had agreed to contact Robert Farquharson Sharp — his first cousin, Elizabeth’s brother, and on the staff of the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books — regarding a job for Charles William Dalmon. Dalmon (1862–1938) was a minor Sussex poet and a friend of Stanley Little. He became a film designer in the 1920s and joined the British Union of Fascists in 1934.
16 This letter-card is postmarked April 4, 1893, which was a Tuesday.
17 Possibly Alice Mangold Diehl (1846–1912), a prolific writer of popular novels.
18 Frank Frankfort Moore, I Forbid the Banns, The Story of a Comedy which was played seriously, 4th ed., 3 vols. (1893).
19 Sharp’s business letter to Alden proposed a poem for publication that Alden accepted (“kind and considerate editorial” response). A poem by Sharp entitled “The Weaver of Snow” appeared in Harper’s in March 1894.
20 God in His World (1890), Alden’s most recent book. For more about Alden, see note to Sharp’s January 21, 1892 letter to Horace Scudder.
21 François de Malherbe (1555–1628), French poet and critic. “But she bloomed on earth, where the most beautiful things have the saddest destiny; and Rose, she lived as live the roses, for the space of a morning”.
22 Nina Francis Layard was an American poet whose lyrics appeared in Harper’s Magazine and other American periodicals. Longman’s had published her volume entitled Poems in 1890. She has sent Sharp a manuscript of a second volume of poems. The letter suggests Sharp was unaware of her published volume of poems.
23 The letter was sent to officials at Swan Sonnenschein & Co. who had agreed to publish a new biography of D. G. Rossetti, a work Sharp began but never finished.
24 Kinneton Parkes edited the Library Review from 1892 to 1898.
25 Date from postmark on letter card. Sharp had tried to see Little in the middle of the night to discuss several matters, but his house was dark. This card was written the next morning in Horsham station, where Sharp was about to board a train to spend a week on the Isle of Wight while E. A. S. was in Paris for the Salons.
26 See note to Sharp’s May 4, 1893 letter to this firm.
27 Library Review.
28 Postmark on letter card.
29 The book for which Sharp thanks Garnett is probably Poems, which was published in 1893. In the spring of 1894 Sharp wrote as follows to Garnett: “I understand that at last my short review of your Poems is to appear in this week’s “Academy”. If perforce shorter than I would so much more willingly have made it, I have tried to say in it something adequate to your book’s high & rare merit, & that may, moreover, send some new readers to it. … The book gains upon me more and more. It is full of fine work.”
30 The word “no” written in the upper left-hand corner of the letter indicates that Gilder accepted none of Sharp’s suggested articles for the Century Magazine. Articles by Sharp on North Africa were published elsewhere: “French African Health Resorts” appeared in the December 1893 issue of Nineteenth Century; “The New Winterland of French Africa” in the January 1894 Nineteenth Century; “Tclemcen and Its Vicinage” in the February 1894 Art Journal; “Cardinal Lavigerie’s Work in North Africa” in the August 1894 Atlantic Monthly; and “Rome in Africa” in the June 1895 Harper’s Monthly.
31 The Fallen City and Other Poems, Will Foster (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1892).
32 The following note appears on the reverse of the letter in a hand that is not Sharp’s: “Houghton Mifflin say no. Write Sharp to that effect: 20:Oct:93:” The individual to whom Sharp’s letter is addressed must have proposed an edition of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poetry in Walter Scott’s Canterbury Poets series, of which Sharp was General Editor. As Sharp suggested in the postscript, that individual pursued the matter with Houghton Mifflin, publisher of Oliver Wendell Homes, and received a negative response.
33 These must be proofs of Sharp’s notice of Philip Bourke Marston’s Poets and Poetry of the Century. See Sharp’s letter to Alfred H. Miles dated 31 October 1892.
34 The word “Decline” is written in the upper lefthand corner of the letter’s first page. In the upper right-hand corner is a note in Johnson’s hand: “I do not see anything for us in these suggestions. R.U.J. We have articles on Lang, Coleridge, & others for which we have been long in finding room.” See Sharp’s letter of June 3, 1893 to Richard Watson Gilder proposing articles on North Africa, which Gilder declined. Gilder was editor and Johnson assistant editor of the Century Magazine in New York.
35 Richard Watson Gilder.
36 Andrew Lang.
37 Robert William Buchanan (1841–1901), a Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright, is known for his attack on Rossetti and the PreRaphaelites, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” in the 1871 Contemporary Review. After a controversy, he withdrew his charges and dedicated his novel, God and Man, to Rossetti. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937), the Scottish journalist, novelist, and playwright, noted for his use of whimsy and best known as the author of Peter Pan (1904). His works include Quality Street (1901), The Admirable Crichton (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), and The TwelvePound Look (1910). Henry Duff Traill (1842 1900), a poet and journalist, was on the staffs of The Pall Mall Gazette, St. James’s Gazette, and the Daily Telegraph; and edited The Observer and Literature. His best work was done as a critic and literary biographer. Among his works are Central Government (1881), Recaptured Rhymes (1882), Coleridge (1884), Sterne (1889), Saturday Songs (1890), and The New Fiction and Other Essays on Literary Subjects (1897). With J. S. Mann he edited The Building of Britain and the Empire (London: The Waverley Book Company, Ltd., 1909). Walter Chalmers Smith (1824–1908), a Scottish poet and clergyman of the Free Church, wrote narrative, colloquial works under the pseudonyms, “Orwell” and “Hermann Knott.” His works include The Bishop’s Walk (1861), Borland Hall (1871), Hilda Among the Broken Gods (1878), and A Heretic (1890). John Davidson (1857–1909), a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, wrote melancholy “tragedies and testaments,” and poems and plays espousing his “gospel of philosophic science.” His works include The North Wall (1885), The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (1891), Fleet Street Eclogues (1893), The Last Ballad (1899), and Testaments, 5 vols. (1901–1908).
38 Thomas Miles Richardson, Jr. (1813–1890), a painter who worked primarily in watercolors, became an Associate of the Old Water Colour Society in 1843 and a Member in 1851. He was also a member of the Royal Academy in Scotland. From 1843 until his death, he exhibited his work over 800 times.
39 Henry Arthur Jones (1851–1929) was a playwright who wrote and produced more than sixty plays during his lifetime. His best-known works include The Silver King (1882), Judah (1890), Saints and Sinners (1894), Michael and His Lost Angel (1896), The Liars (1897), Mrs. Dane’s Defence (1900), and Whitewashing Julia (1903).
40 Perhaps the wife of Sir James Knowles (1831–1908) the English architect and editor who designed among other buildings Lord Tennyson’s house at Aldworth. In 1860 he published The Story of King Arthur. In 1870 he became editor of the Contemporary Review, and in 1877 he founded and edited the Nineteenth Century.
41 Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855–1936) was an American writer who lived in London most of her adult life. She was “an adventurous, accomplished, self-assured, well-known columnist, biographer, cookbook collector, and art critic.” Her Life of Mary Wollstonecraft was published in 1884 and the biography she wrote with her husband, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, was published in 1911. Many well-known writers and painters frequented her London salon. Her husband was Joseph Pennell (1857–1926), an American artist who, like his friend James McNeill Whistler, went to Europe and made his home in London. He produced numerous books, but was best known as a lithographer and as an illustrator of others’ books.
42 Charles W. Dalman.
43 Vistas was published by Frank Murray in Derby in 1894 and in the United States by Stone and Kimball in the same year.
44 Pierre Loti’s (pseudonym for Louis Marie Julien Viaud) Pêcheur d’Islande was published in Paris in 1886. The first British edition, edited by R. J. March, was published in London in 1891.
45 Sharp’s new biography of Rossetti was not completed. Sharp’s new “one-vol. Novel” would become Pharais, and his “vol. of short stories” was probably Comedy of Woman, also never published. His “French studies” was possibly Chansons d’Amour. See Sharp’s diary for December 1893 (Memoir 215–17).The article in the September 1892 Nineteenth Century was “La Jeune Belgique.”
46 Pharais: A Romance of the Isles (The Regent’s Library, Derby: F. Murray, 1894) was the first of Sharp’s works published under the name Fiona Macleod. Catherine Janvier included portions of this letter in “Fiona Macleod and her Creator William Sharp” which appeared in the North American Review in 1907 (Vol. 184, No. 612, pp. 718–732). She loaned many of her letters from Sharp to Elizabeth for her to use in the Memoir, and portions of this letter are printed there (224–25). I have not located the manuscript letter, but I have included in this transcription passages omitted by both writers. Mrs. Janvier used the letter to demonstrate that Sharp claimed authorship of Pharais many months before he decided to publish it as the work of Fiona Macleod. When Sharp had a copy of Pharais sent to Catherine Janvier in December 1894, claiming it was the work of a woman friend, she recalled the moon-flower exchange in this letter and elicited the truth from Sharp (see Sharp letter to Catherine Janvier dated January 5, 1895).
47 This story became Wives in Exile: A Comedy in Romance (London: Grant Richards, 1898).
48 See the Introduction to Chapter Nine for more information about Gilchrist.
49 Murray had told Sharp he could afford to offer only ten pounds for the projected romance. Sharp rejected that offer, but told Murray he would accept that amount for Vistas, which Murray published in the spring of 1894 (Memoir 216–17).
50 Date from postmark.
51 Sharp meant to say he wanted to stop in Derby on his return to London to talk with Frank Murray with whom he was arranging the publication of his Vistas.
52 The date is written in another hand.
53 Perhaps a work by Little never published.
54 This must have been the etching Charles Holroyd made of Sharp in Rome in February 1891.
55 Shortly after Gilchrist moved to Highcliffe in Eyam in 1888, Garfitt joined him there, and the two men continued to live together until Gilchrist’s death from a sudden bout of pneumonia in the spring of 1917. The two men were close friends of Edward Carpenter, the socialist poet and advocate of Uranianism, who lived with his companion, George Merrill, nearby at Millthorpe. Gilchrist and Garfitt were ardent cyclists and began driving a motor car in 1909. (See a pamphlet by Clarence Daniel entitled “Eyam — The Milton of Robert Murray Gilchrist: Portrait of a Victorian Village.” Of unknown date, a copy of the pamphlet was kindly provided by the staff of the Sheffield City Archives. Eyam was the model for the village Gilchrist called Milton in his works of fiction.) There is more about Garfitt and Gilchrist in the Introduction to Chapter Nine.
56 Henry Austin Dobson (1840–1921) was a well-known English poet and essayist.
57 Gilchrist’s novel Frangipanni (1893) was the first volume published by Frank Murray, the Derby bookstore owner, in his Regent’s Library series. Sharp stopped to see Murray on his way to London after visiting Gilchrist. Fiona Macleod’s Pharais (1894) was the second, and William Sharp’s Vistas (1894) was the third. These volumes were finely printed on excellent paper.
58 Internal evidence and the return address establish the date.
59 Scudder commissioned none of the articles proposed here, but he did publish in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1894 an article by Sharp entitled “Cardinal Lavigerie’s Work in North Africa.” Sharp’s friend Henry Mills Alden published in Harper’s Magazine his “Rome in Africa” in June 1895 (91:95–116).
60 The painter Frederic Shields (1833–1911).
61 Born in 1821, Ford Madox Brown was a distinguished painter, teacher, and close friend of D. G. Rossetti. Through his own work and his influence on Millais and Holman Hunt as well as Rossetti, he was a central figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement in British art.
62 Date from postmark.
63 See Sharp’s May 1, 1893 letter to Layard in which he comments on the manuscript she sent him. In that letter he told Layard he doubted anyone would publish the book. He was clearly wrong, as she has sent him the published volume. He may have forgotten his earlier response, but he expresses in both letters his admiration for the poem entitled “Sweet Peas.”
64 Perhaps William Clavell Ingram (1834–1901) Dean of Peterborough Cathedral. Ingram has proposed a volume for one of Walter Scott’s series.
65 This note accompanied a Christmas gift to the Stedmans.
66 This etching by Scott appeared as the frontispiece of the first edition of Sharp’s Vistas. It is an etching of one of Blake’s designs for Milton’s Paradise Lost and portrays Adam and Eve in an embrace and Satan, entwined as a serpent, hovering above them.
Chapter 11
1 Grant Richards, (1872–1948) was a British publisher and writer. Recognizing his interest in publishing, Sharp’s good friend Grant Allen, his uncle, found a job for him with the wholesale booksellers Hamilton, Adams & Co when he was only sixteen in 1888. Two years later, he secured a position with W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews as an editor and reviewer. In 1897, he opened his own publishing house under the imprint Grant Richards and published, among other works, Grant Allen’s The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry into the Origins of Religion. In 1898, he issued works by two major authors: George Bernard Shaw (Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant) and A. E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad). Years later, he wrote and published eight novels under his own imprint and two Memoirs: Memories of a Misspent Youth, 1872–1896 (London: Heinemann, 1932), Author Hunting by an Old Literary Sportsman: Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing, 1897–1925 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934). [Dunbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection: https://www.doaks.org/resources/bliss-tyler-correspondence/annotations/grant-richards]
2 Henry Blake Fuller’s The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890).
3 (London: Longman’s and Company, 1888).
4 William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) was a Pre-Raphaelite painter who contributed designs to The Germ in 1850. He published his Memoirs, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, in 1903. A drawing of Rossetti at twenty-five, executed by Hunt in 1853, is reproduced in Volume I of Hunt’s Memoirs.
5 Kensington Court Gardens.
6 The date of this letter is uncertain, but Wednesday, February 14, 1894 seems most likely. In a December 2 1893 letter to Gilchrist, Sharp said he would not be able to go north to visit Gilchrist in December or January and asked if there was a chance of Gilchrist coming south. Later in December [around the 20th] he wrote to Gilchrist: “You are to come here in the early Spring, remember!” Mid-February is not early Spring, but the sequence of events as evidenced in subsequent correspondence argues for this February date and Friday/Saturday, February 16/17 for the Gilchrist/Garfitt visit to Phenice Croft.
7 In a letter of September 26, 1895, Sharp wrote to Gilchrist, “The most tragic & momentous epoch of my life followed that visit of yours to Phenice Croft, & is, so far, indissolubly linked with that day I met you, and that time.” He also said he had described a walk he and Gilchrist and Garfitt took during their visit to Phenice Croft in one of the “Tragic Landscapes” he published in The Sin-Eaters as the work of Fiona Macleod. That brief sketch and its implications are described in some detail in the “Life” section of this chapter. Here it can be noted that Sharp became very ill in the latter half of February 1894 and this illness, which lasted for several months, appears to have resulted from his psychic experiments and the conflict between what Elizabeth Sharp described as “the two forces in him, or the two sides of his nature.” That conflict, which was brought strikingly to the surface as he began to write as Fiona Macleod, “produced a tremendous strain on his physical and mental resources; and at one time between 1897–98 threatened him with a complete nervous collapse.” (Memoir 223). The first such collapse seems to have occurred following the visit of Gilchrist and Garfitt, and that must have been what he had in mind when in 1895 he told Gilchrist that his visit was followed by “the most tragic & momentous epoch of my life”.
8 These friends were the Rinders who must have come on the weekend of March 10/11 to stay with Sharp at Phenice Croft for two weeks. See letter dated March 5, 1894.
9 This review appeared in Literary World on Saturday, May 5, 1894.
10 Public Opinion, see letter dated February 26, 1894 to Little.
11 This review appeared on Saturday, March 3, 1894.
12 Sharp’s Vistas (1894).
13 Little’s notice of Vistas appeared in Public Opinion on February 16, 1894.
14 Sir Frederick Wedmore (1844–1921) wrote essays on literature and art and contributed to The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement edited by his wife, Millicent Wedmore. Among his works are Studies in English Art (1876); Etching in England (1895); Fine Prints (1897); and Life of Honore de Balzac (1890).
15 The first edition of Vistas, printed on large paper [L/P], was limited to 400 copies.
16 This laudatory review by George Cotterell dates the letter. It appeared in the number dated Saturday, March 3, 1894, 182–83. After brief summaries of each vista, the concluding sentence: “It is a book of rare excellence and real charm: a book to read and re-read until the vistas beyond vistas which it contains have revealed their full beauty and significance.”
17 Sharp’s review of Garnett’s Poems appeared in The Academy no.1141.
18 Frank Murray, the Derby bookseller who printed Sharp’s Vistas, edited and published Derbyshire Notes and Queries between October 1892 and December 1898 and compiled and published A Bibliography of Austin Dobson in 1900. In his October 7, 1893 letter to Gilchrist, Sharp said he learned from Frank Murray that Austin Dobson was his cousin.
19 The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances (1894).
20 The Labyrinth: A Romance (1902).
21 An evil demon.
22 Date from postmark.
23 A mistake or private reference.
24 Herbert Stuart Stone (1871–1915) was the son of Melville Elijah Stone, a distinguished journalist, book collector, and patron of authors, who founded the Chicago Daily News and was its editor until 1888. In 1893, while still at Harvard, Stone and his fellow undergraduate Hannibal Ingalls Kimball (1874–1933) founded a publishing firm, Stone and Kimball. A bibliography of American first editions was their first jointly-issued book. Their policy was to accept only manuscripts of literary merit and to publish them in an artistic form. After earning their bachelor’s degrees, they moved the firm to Chicago in August 1894 where Stone’s father could help them financially. In May 1894 they began publishing The Chap-Book to publicize their books. Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm contributed to the periodical, and Toulouse-Lautrec designed posters for their publications. Among authors on the Stone and Kimball list were Hamlin Garland, George Santayana, Gilbert Parker, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Ingalls Kimball bought out Stone in 1896 after Melville Stone withdrew his financial support. Stone entered publishing again in Chicago as Herbert Stone and Company with the assistance of his younger brother Melville E. Stone, Jr. George Bernard Shaw’s authorized editions were published by the Herbert Stone firm, which continued publishing until 1905.
25 George Herman Ellwanger (1848–1906) was an American writer whose works included The Garden Story (1890); In Gold and Silver (1892); Love’s Demesne, A Garland of Contemporary Love Poems (1896); Idyllists of the Country Side; (1896) and Pleasures of the Table, An Account of Gastronomy (1902).
26 Stone and Kimball published an American edition of Vistas late in 1894 in their Greentree Library Series.
27 “The Rape of the Sabines” was included in the Pagan Review in 1892. Sharp wrote under various pseudonyms all the material in the single issue of that periodical.
28 Les Rois En Exile (1879)
29 Probably some other material to be included in Pharais.
30 W. T. Price’s Technique of the Drama (1892).
31 Sharp must have left for Normandy shortly after writing his April 8 card to Arthur Stedman, (in accord with the plans he sent Gilchrist on March 27). He had reached Paris by April 22. Several references suggest that Edith Rinder accompanied Sharp on this holiday in France.
32 This letter was written on May 4, the Friday of the week before Whitsunday. Easter was on March 25 in 1894, and Whitsunday was seven weeks later on May 13. Since Little could not come to Rudgwick on Whitsunday, Sharp wonders if he can come the weekend before Whitsunday. In a letter to Stanley Little on May 3 Elizabeth Sharp said she and her husband had just returned from Paris where she spent only three days. Sharp was in France for at least the last two weeks of April. On March 17 he told Gilchrist he hoped to be in Normandy before the week was out “and after a day or two by the sea at Dieppe, and then at beautiful and romantic Rouen, to get to the green lanes and open places, and tramp ‘towards the sun.’” The trip was delayed for almost a month.
33 Sharp’s Pharais: A Romance of the Isles was published under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod by Frank Murray in Derby in May 1894.
34 Literary World.
35 This letter is not in the Fiona Macleod handwriting, which was that of Mary Sharp, the writer’s sister, but in Sharp’s own. It is, therefore, the original, which Sharp forwarded to Mary for her to copy into the Fiona Macleod hand. The return address — “C/o Mrs. B. etc” — is incomplete, and there is a note in the Fiona Macleod hand above the address to the effect that the letter was copied and sent to Allen. Preserved by Mary, E. A. S. used it in the Memoir and returned it to the Allen family along with other letters from her husband to Grant Allen. For information about Grant Allen, see the note to Sharp’s letter to Richard Le Gallienne of May 22, 1888. It is interesting to note Grant Allen wrote a novel, The Type-writer Girl (1897), and published it under the feminine pseudonym, Olive Pratt Rayner.
36 Price’s Technique of the Drama. See note to Stedman dated April 8, 1894.
37 Stone & Kimball Publishing Company.
38 The reference here is to Flower o’ the Vine, a volume of Sharp’s poetry published by C. L. Webster and Company in 1892. Since that firm was in liquidation, Stedman had raised with Sharp the possibility that Stone and Kimball might purchase the plates at a good price and issue a second edition.
39 Pharais: A Romance of the Isles was published in May 1894.
40 The Mountain Lovers was published by John Lane (London) in the summer of 1895.
41 Transformation was the title of the original 1860 British edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.
42 Little has written a favorable review of Pharais, perhaps for the journal Public Opinion. W. R. may have been the June issue of the Westminster Review, which contained a review of Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danae.
43 Sharp left Phenice Croft permanently on June 21 and moved to South Hampstead. Two days later, on Saturday 23, he went to Derbyshire to visit Gilchrist and Garfitt in Eyam. He may have gone on to Scotland for a few days, but that is uncertain.
44 Horace Elisha Scudder (1838–1902) edited The Atlantic Monthly from 1890 until 1898.
45 Sharp’s “Cardinal Lavigerie’s Work in North Africa,” Atlantic Monthly, 74 (August, 1894), 214.
46 Sharp’s Fair Women in Painting and Poetry (London: Seeley and Company, 1894). The book was published in July.
47 Lady Colin Campbell [Gertrude Elizabeth Blood] (1857–1911) was the youngest daughter of Edmund Maghlin Blood of Brickhill, County Clare, Ireland. She married Lord Colin Campbell, who was the youngest son of the eighth Duke of Argyll. Her publications include Darell Blake (1889); Etiquette of Good Society (1893); Ninety-second Thousand (1911); A Woman Walks in the World (1903). Sharp’s plan to write a novel with her came to nothing.
48 Sharp’s idea of collaborating on an article on copartnery came to nothing.
49 Paul Lacroix (1806–1884) was a French novelist, historian, and miscellaneous writer. Among his numerous works are Contes du Bibliophile Jacob (1831); La Dance macabre (1832); Convalescence du vieux conteur (1832–38); Romans relatifs a l’histoire de France aux XV et XV siecles (1838); and Curiosites de l’histoire des arts (1858); Berny was the pseudonym used by Louis Bergeron (1811–1890) who was the author Entre femmes, causerie intime (1892).
50 Edmund Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt (1822–1896) and Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt (1830–1870) were novelists, historians, and art critics. Among their joint works are La Lorette (1853); Histoire de La Societe Francaise pendant la Revolution (1854); Portraits Intimes du XVIII Siecle (1857–58); Les Hommes de Lettres (1860); Germinie Lacerteux (1869).
51 Erckmann-Chatrian is the joint pseudonym of Emile Erckmann (1822–1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–1890), French novelists whose works include L’Ami Fritz (1873); Le Brigadier Frederic (1874); Les Vieux de la Vieille (1881).
52 Walter Besant (1836–1901) and James Rice (1843–1882) were British novelists whose joint publications include The Golden Butterfly (1871); Ready-Money Moritboy (1872); ‘Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay (1897); The Chaplain of the Fleet (1881).
53 This letter establishes the date Sharp moved from Phenice Croft to Rutland House.
54 According to E. A. S. (Memoir 235–36), her husband wrote this poem the night before he left Phenice Croft. The poem was later included in Sharp’s volume of poetry entitled From the Hills of Dream which was published as the work of Fiona Macleod. in 1896.
55 “Darthool and the Sons of Usna” appeared in Fiona Macleod’s The Laughter of Peterkin (London: Archibald, Constable and Company, 1897). No separate book on the Darthula story was published.
56 Sharp left London on June 23 for Derbyshire where he spent three days with Gilchrist and Garfitt in Eyam. At this early point he was conflating Fiona’s movements with his own. The trip establishes the probable date of the letter, which is in the Fiona handwriting.
57 As the previous card to Mavor indicates, Sharp was back in London by July 2. He may have gone on to Scotland for a few days (June 17 to July 2).
58 Roden Noel, an accomplished and well-known poet, died on May 16, 1894 at the age of 60 in a train station in Mainz, Germany.
59 The letter can be fully dated because it was certainly written in 1894 and July was the only month in which the seventh fell on Saturday.
60 For ultimo: of the preceding month.
61 “Cardinal Lavigerie’s Work in North Africa” appeared in the August Atlantic Monthly.
62 Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834–1894) was an editor, writer on art, landscape painter, and etcher. His books include Thoughts About Art (1862); Etching and Etchers (1866); Contemporary French Painters (1867); The Intellectual Life (1873). He also wrote several romances, and reprinted (1888) articles he had written for The Portfolio: Artistic Monographs, a periodical he began editing in 1869. Sharp’s Fair Women in Painting and Poetry constituted the July 1894 number of The Portfolio. Later in the year it was published in book form by Seeley & Co. in London and Macmillan & Co. in New York.
63 Probably the British edition of Vistas.
64 Probably Adelaide Louisa Allison (c.1855–1936) who married Christian Wilton Allhusen (1840–1924) in 1874.
65 This letter is marked with a large initial (“G”) extending over its major contents.
66 The first portion of this letter is missing.
67 Sharp’s portrait appears in The Chap-Book, 1 (September 15, 1895), 218. The photograph was taken by Frederick Hollyer.
68 “Lines to E. C. Stedman,” The Chap-Book, 1 (September 15, 1894), 212.
69 Probably Sharp’s “Dedica,” The Chap-Book, 2 (January 15, 1895), 216.
70 Henry Mills Alden.
71 “A Northern Night,” The Chap-Book, 1 (June 15, 1894), 60
72 The Gipsy Christ and Other Tales (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895).
73 “Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics,” The Academy, 45 (January 6, 1894), 7–8.
74 Anagram of Elizabeth Sharp.
75 The Graphic was a British weekly illustrated newspaper first published on December 4, 1869 by William Luson Thomas’s company Illustrated Newspapers Limited. The influence of The Graphic within the art world was immense. It continued as a weekly under this title until July 1932 when it ceased publication after 3,266 issues, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graphic
76 The identity of this projected book by William Sharp is uncertain. The only book of Sharp’s published by John Lane was Fiona Macleod’s The Mountain Lovers.
77 Sharp’s poem entitled “Dedica.” See letter to Herbert Stone dated August 15, 1894.
78 Katharine Tynan-Hinkson (1861–1931) was an Irish poet and novelist. Among her numerous works are New Poems (1911); The Cure of Castle Eagle (1915); The Middle Years (1916); The Golden Rose (1924); A Fine Gentleman (1929); Twenty-five Years: Reminiscences (1913). The manuscript of the letter used here, in William Sharp’s hand, is in the National Library of Scotland. Katharine Tynan-Hinkson printed in her Memoir, volume II, The Middle Years (127), the version she received, which is Mary’s copy in the Fiona Macleod hand. A comparison of the two versions indicates that Mary made some minor changes when she copied Sharp’s letter. E. A. S. printed this letter in the Memoir (238).
79 The Atlantic Monthly, 74 (December 1894), 801–14.
80 A novel by Hall Caine. “Heinemann published the Manxman on 3 August, 1894. It was an immediate and huge success, already reprinting on the 17th. By mid-September it had sold 34,000 copies. Caine wrote in awe to Heinemann, stunned by the way the money was rolling in, far more than his previous books had earned. By 1913 the book had sold half a million copies and been translated into 12 languages. It was published simultaneously in New York by Appleton’s and had an enormous success in the States, making Caine a household name there.” (Vivien Allen, Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.)
81 A collection of Gilchrist’s stories entitled The Stone Dragon and Other Tragic Romances (London: Methuen, 1894). “Hercules” is one of the stories in the volume. In their introduction to Gilchrist’s The Basilisk and Other Tales of Dread (Ash-Tree Press: Ashcroft, British Columbia, 2003), John Pelan and Christopher Roden praise The Stone Dragon: “Among the great works of this period is a collection of the fantastic by one contributor to The Yellow Book, Robert Murray Gilchrist (1868–1917). Gilchrist is an author little-known today, but his collection is revered by aficionados of the genre as one of the most desirable, both for its literary merits and its near-legendary rarity…. Such is the rarity of the volume [The Stone Dragon] that even facsimile reprints vanished in short order following their publication, and a first edition of the book heads the wants-list of many world class collectors.”
82 The stories intended for that volume, which was not published, may have appeared in Ecce Puella: And Other Prose Imaginings (Elkin Mathews: London, 1896).
83 The Gipsy Christ and Other Tales (Stone and Kimball: Chicago, 1895). It appeared in Britain as Madge o’ the Pool: The Gipsy Christ and Other Tales (Archibald Constable: Westminster, 1897). Whereas the American publication contained seven tales, the British publication contained only four.
84 “Dec 4 94” is written at the top of the letter in a hand that is not Sharp’s. That was probably written by Little as the day he received the letter. Sharp told Gilchrist (letter of 12 Nov 94) that he was going to Scotland “for 2 or 3 weeks from the 1st of December.”
85 Catherine Janvier quoted this passage from a William Sharp letter in her article entitled “Fiona Macleod and her Creator William Sharp” that appeared in the North American Review (184.612 (April 5), 1907). The passage followed Christmas greetings to the Janviers. She went on to quote from a letter she received from Sharp dated August 12, 1893 in which he said he was working on “a strange Celtic tale” called Pharais. She did not recall this letter when she read the copy of Pharais, but she did recall describing in a letter to Sharp a field of “mist-veiled daisies,” and there they were in Pharais. When she reminded Sharp of this image and declared he was certainly Fiona Macleod, he had no choice but to tell the truth and pledge the Janviers to secrecy, which he did in a letter dated January 5, 1895.
86 “The Second Shadow,” The New York Independent, 44 (August 25, 1892), 1205 ff.
87 The stories in The Gypsy Christ (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895) appeared in the following order: “The Gypsy Christ,” “Madge o’ the Pool,” “The Coward,” A Venetian Idyl,” “The Graven Image,” “The Lady in Hosea,” “Fröken Bergliot.”
88 “Some Personal Reminiscences of Walter Pater,” The Atlantic Monthly, 74 (December 1894), 801–14.
89 “Rome in Africa,” Harper’s, 91 (June, 1895), 95–116.