Return of the "English Men of Letters" Series

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bookslover

Puritan Board Doctor
I'm not sure anyone on the PB will care about this, but here goes:

The English Men of Letters series was a set of 39 biographies of British literary figures published from 1878 to 1892 by Macmillan. Well, Cambridge University Press has put the entire set back in print. The volumes are available individually or as a set (for 525 British pounds!).

The persons written about are: Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, David Hume, Oliver Goldsmith, Daniel DeFoe, Robert Burns, Edmund Spencer, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edmund Burke, John Milton, Nathaniel Hawthorne (the only American represented), Robert Southey, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Bunyan, William Cowper, George Gordon - Lord Byron, John Locke, Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, Thomas de Quincy, Walter Savage Landor, John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Richard Bentley, Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Thomas Gray, Lawrence Sterne, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Henry Fielding, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Joseph Addison, Francis Bacon, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Philip Sidney, John Keats, and Thomas Carlyle.

The biographies were written by men (and one woman) who were English Men of Letters in their own right: Anthony Trollope wrote the biography of Thackeray and Sir Leslie Stephen wrote on Johnson, for examples.

These were highly regarded works in their day and, for the most part, still are. But they've been out of print for so many years that no library known to me in my area has a complete set.

The books are available through CUP or on Amazon. (No word yet on whether the volumes of the Second Series [published: 1902-1919] will also be republished.)

Yippee!
 
Apparently Amazon currently has available one or two sets from the original 1901 printing, for $299 per set.

Nice looking set.
 
Sounds wonderful! I had never heard of that series before, do you have a link to the Amazon page for the whole set?
 
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