The Abinger edition of E. M. Forster

Front matter

Forster 2061400 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and related writings sXQgAGEi

PUBLIC LIBRARY Fort Wayne and Allen County,

Ind iana

Contents

Foreword by W. H. Auden Editor’s Introduction

Author’s Preface *£0611400

1 Family

Epilogue

Appendices

A G. L. Dickinson: A Tribute, by E. M. Forster

B A Great Humanist : E. M. Forster on Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

PAGE

vii

xi

xxi v

C Forster’s Preface to The Greek View of Life 213

D Forster’s Introduction to Letters from John Chinaman and

Other Essays 2 1 6

E Pilgrim’s Progress: Forster’s Review of The Magic Flute 218

F A Broadcast Debate: Forster’s Review of Points of View 221

G Beatrice Webb on Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 223

A Note on the Text 225

Bibliography by R. E. Balfour, revised by the Editor 230

Illustrations

G.L.D. From the portrait by Roger Fry frontispiece

Age 6. Photo by Dickinson Bros, his grandfather' s firm facing page 8

Age 14. Photo by Thorpe, Hastings 9

Age 23. Photo by F. Holly er 40

Manuscript of “Dedication” for a sonnet-sequence 41

Gibbs’s Building. Photo by permission of “Country Life ” 136

Age 58. Photo by courtesy of Peter Savary 137

Letter to Julian Bell 168

Age 6g. Photo by courtesy of N. Teulon-Porter 169

(There is no satisfactory portrait of him in middle life.)

vi

Foreword

I first read this book when it came out in 1934. Rereading it now, it seems to me even better than I remembered. I have only one criticism. If I had been Forster, I would not have quoted so extensively from Goldie’s verses. In my opinion, poetry was an art for which he had little talent. This may, I realize, be a matter of personal taste rather than critical judgement. Goldie was devoted to the poetry of Shelley, which I have always found un¬ readable. On the other hand, he shared my admiration for Goethe, though, according to Forster, “he was soon confronted with the immense boringness of Goethe, and few Englishmen have faced it so frankly, and so successfully outstared it”. I myself only find Goethe boring when, as in Dichtung und Wahrheit , he talks about his romantic attachments to a series of young ladies ; on any other topic I find him endlessly fascinating.

That this biography should be the great book it is, seems to me a miracle. To begin with, it is not easy to write justly and objec¬ tively about a personal friend, a situation which, Goldie wrote, when asked to review a book by Forster, “leads us Cambridge people to under-estimate virtues and gifts for fear of being too partial”. Then nothing is more difficult than writing an interest¬ ing book about a really nice person. The biographer of a monster, like Wagner, has a far easier task. Bad behaviour always has a dramatic appeal. Forster imagines Mephistopheles asking him why a memoir of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson needs to be written, and when he answers, “My friend was beloved, affec¬ tionate, unselfish, intelligent, witty, charming, inspiring,” the devil says, “Yes, but that is neither here nor there, or rather it was there but it is no longer here.” Forster can only reply:

These qualities in Goldie were fused into such an unusual creature that no one whom one has met with in the flesh or in history the least resembles it, and no words exist in which to define it. He was an indescribably rare being, he was rare without being enigmatic, he was rare in the only direction which seems to be infinite : the direction

• •

Vll of the Chorus Mysticus. He did not merely increase our experience: he left us more alert for what has not yet been experienced and more hopeful about other men because he had lived. And a biography of him, if it succeeded, would resemble him; it would achieve the unattainable, express the inexpressible, turn the passing into the everlasting. Have I done that? Das Unbeschreibliche hier isfs getan? No. And perhaps it only could be done through music. But that is what has lured me on.

There were other difficulties too. Though Goldie travelled to America, India, China, a civilization with which he fell in love, he had no dramatic adventures there.

It is difficult to think of a life where so little happened outwardly. He wTas never shipwrecked or in peril, he was seldom in great bodily pain, never starved or penniless, he never confronted an angry mob nor went to prison for his opinions, nor sat on the bench as a magis¬ trate, nor held any important administrative post, he was never married, never faced with the problems of parenthood, had no trouble with housekeeping or servants.

Normally, the chief source of material for a biographer is his subject’s letters. Forster quotes from a number of Goldie’s, and I find them most interesting, but he warns us that they are of small value compared with his conversation.

When he spoke to his friends or spoke of them ... he vibrated to wave after wave, and as he turned his head from guest to guest at one of his lunch parties one felt that a new universe was seated on every chair. That was his strength, that was his glory, and if that could be communicated in a biography he would appear for what he was : one of the rarest creatures of our generation. His letters are a misleading substitute; they tend to exhibit him as merely sympathetic and kind.

In 1905, Forster tells us, Goldie’s literary reputation was so high that it was believed that he “would easily beat Pater and Gobineau, and even creep up towards Voltaire and Mr Bernard Shaw”. If he is little read today, this is not due simply to changes in fashion. He never claimed to be writing for posterity: nearly all of his books are concerned with the immediate issues of his time, political, religious, educational or what-have-you. Then his style when lecturing or talking to small groups seems to have been superior to his written prose. One of his younger friends wrote :

You know I always find a “but” about Goldie’s writing. He would be so inclined to clarity in conversation (with me anyway) but so vm

FOREWORD beautifully unclear with his pen. I get mesmerized when I read any¬ thing he writes (except John Chinaman ) and then have to read it all over again.

On which Forster comments: •

There frequently is this hypnotic effect, although the argument is taut and the language apposite. Something is wrong — or perhaps too right — with the style.

It is only when he is describing Goldie’s eccentricities that one feels Forster has an easy job.

He was not practical, and I can still hear him damning his sleeve-links in the morning because they wouldn’t go in, or his hot-water bottle at night because it puffed in his face when he filled it. He swore constantly, and no wonder. For he was unhandy with “so called inanimate objects”. They were always splashing or scalding him, or beating a merry retreat at the moment he needed them most, “Flere you are, yes of course,” he would say, lifting a sheet of paper, and there beneath it, after the locksmith had been sent for, would be the bunch of keys. . . .

He is said to be the only man who could make a Corona type upside down. He struck the keys rapidly and violently, thinking of what he thought and not of what he did, with the result that he doubled lines, halved them, threw capitals in the air, buried numerals in the earth, broke out into orgies of ?????? or %%%%%%, and hammered his ribbon to shreds. George becomes “Geroge”, Gerald “Gerlad”, perhaps “perhpas”, and there are even happier trans¬ formations such as husband into “humsband”, and soul into “soup”. A semicolon in the middle of a word means “1”.

Forster first met Goldie at a lunch in 1898. Lunch was not a success, and Forster left it “unprepossessing and unprepossessed”. A few weeks later, however, on Forster’s returning a play he had borrowed and confessing that he hadn’t liked it, the smile on Goldie’s face came as a revelation of what charm could mean.

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration. It genuinely belongs to them, as a good complexion may, but it lies on the surface and can vanish. Charm in Dickinson was structural. It penetrated and upheld everything he did.

He seems, also, to have had the even rarer gift of creating charm

in others. In a letter he wrote “Lennie - (?) gets nicer and

nicer”, and Forster comments:

Lennie’s surname is indecipherable, but that he got nicer and nicer

IX there is little doubt: most of the people who constantly saw Goldie did that, though he did not realize why.

And I have never heard of a finer tribute to anyone than Forster’s reattion when he learned of Goldie’s death:

He never staged himself as an invalid. He was chiefly occupied in saving us trouble and in sparing our feelings. Oddly enough he succeeded. A character of his strength manages to sustain those who cling to it, and I have “minded” more the deaths of people I have loved much less.

It must always be harder to draw a convincing portrait of a real person than of a fictional character, since, in the first case, the author is free to make the facts and situations what he pleases. I can only say that I find Forster’s Goldie as living and convincing as any of the characters in his novels. Then, of course, one is frequently delighted by passages the authorship of which one would immediately guess, if one didn’t know it already. For example, this passage about Goldie’s unhappiness at his prepara¬ tory school :

But these amenities lay at the edge of his life. Its centre was covered with rubbish and worry. And at its opposite edge lay an imbecile boy whom he sometimes kicked in order to ingratiate himself with his schoolfellows. He made no special confession to his parents about this ; it was not a crime like the potatoes, nevertheless it haunted him.

One matter puzzles me a little. In view of Goldie’s passionate interest in the League of Nations, I should have expected to find references to Count Kessler, the German who proposed that the League be made up, not of representatives of sovereign states, but of various interest groups, the professions, the churches, the trades unions, etc., on the ground that the League as consti¬ tuted would be powerless to act in any case of serious conflict between the major powers. This idea, I should have thought, would have appealed to Goldie, but there is no mention of Kessler in Forster’s book, nor of Goldie in Kessler’s diaries, and it seems to be the case that they never met.

w. H. AUDEN

X

E. M. Forster wrote two biographies: of his friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934) and his great-aunt Marianne Thornton (x95^)- About the writing of the earlier book more might have been known but for a rather curious reason. Shortly after 16 January 1931 Forster lost the key of his private diary. The keeping of the diary had always been spasmodic, and now for nearly four years it ceased entirely. Then the key turned up again, and on 7 October 1934 Forster summarized the intervening period, mentioning Dickinson’s death and commenting:

I am a worse speaker than I was and no creator. But a good journalist

and my book on Goldie was good, always thought it would be. I will

not do a book on Roger Fry.

The reference to Roger Fry is interesting. Fry had died on 9 September 1934, Forster had written an obituary note on him for the London Mercury (later reprinted in Abinger Harvest ), and a full-scale biography had apparently been mooted by Fry’s sisters; in the event it was written, not without fearful anguish, by Virginia Woolf. Two or three years later another biographical project of Forster’s, this time for an edition of T. E. Lawrence’s letters, made rather more progress but was also, eventually, abandoned. It would appear that, except for short biographical essays, biography was not a genre which came easily to Forster, that he was drawn to it only by motives of affection or gratitude, and that even these were not always sufficient to sustain him. This makes it notable that Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson was com¬ pleted with relative despatch — and that Forster “always thought it would be” good.

He had, of course, one considerable advantage. On his death on 3 August 1932 Dickinson had bequeathed to Forster what the latter describes in his Preface as “a quantity of autobiographical matter”. This “was not to be published in its entirety, but might be used at my discretion”; and Forster “worked with the transcript of the Recollections at his elbow, following it closely in xi matter, in arrangement, and often in actual wording”.1 Although, as we shall see, the Recollections gave Forster some problems, they provided him with a framework, a large number of essential facts, and a source of copious — though always judicious — quotation.

Forster’s statement that the “autobiographical matter . . . might be used at my discretion” suggests that he may have dis¬ cussed with Dickinson the question of a biography; and this possibility appears at first sight to be strengthened by a letter to J. R. Ackerley of 12 January 1933:2 “I continue ... to hear him saying: ‘Really my dear Morgan that you should have to do this.’” But, although one can easily imagine Dickinson making just such a deprecatory little joke, other evidence makes it much more likely that the imagination, and the joke, were Forster’s, and that what had been in question between him and Dickinson was the publication of the Recollections rather than of a biography based on them. However this may be, Forster certainly dis¬ cussed the project with Dickinson’s two surviving sisters — “it would not have been begun without their approval” (page xxiii). Evidently this permission had been given by 10 November, when the Times Literary Supplement (followed two days later by the New Statesman) published a letter from Forster announcing his inten¬ tion of writing Dickinson’s biography, and asking for the loan of letters. The request met with a generous response.

Thus armed, Forster went briskly to work. He may already have been committed to the series of seven broadcast talks on books which he gave during the last quarter of 1932 ; but he took the opportunity of devoting the second entirely to Dickinson. For the next year he cut down severely on his occasional writing: in 1933 he published only three articles and two reviews (no broadcasts), as against twenty-four such items in 1932. As with almost every book he wrote, there were bad moments: “I have been feeling unusually restless and dissatisfied lately ... I wish I could finish the Goldie Dickinson memoir. I have got so untidy and unconcentratish [«V],” he writes to William Plomer on 29 August 1933. But most of his references in extant letters are cheerful and positive in tone:

1 Dennis Proctor, Introduction to The Autobiography of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , and Other Unpublished Writings (London, Duckworth, 1973), p. vii. I am grateful to Sir Dennis, and to his publisher, Mr Colin Haycraft, for making available to me proofs of this volume (in which, despite its general title, the main item is captioned Recollections ).

2 Now, with other letters of Forster to Ackerley, in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

• •

Xll

I have an idea that I’m going to do the book rather gaily — anyhow I keep jotting down sentences that make me smile. (To J. R. Ackerley, io January 1933.)

But I must stop and get on with Goldie’s book, which I find more interesting and occupying than I expected. (To Florence Barger, 9 February 1933.)

I must finish the Lowes Dickinson memoir. What its merit will be I don’t know, I expect people will laugh at it for being sentimental academic stuff, and then ignore it. But I enjoy doing it and keep get¬ ting down things which seem to come from G. L. D. rather than myself, and please me. (To Forrest Reid, 4 July 1933.)

I am rather busy finishing the life of Goldie Dickinson. (To Siegfried Sassoon, 6 November 1933.)

There is also a letter to his publisher, Brian Fagan of Edward Arnold, dated as early as 11 December 1932 — four days before the actual contract was signed :

I do want the book to be advertised and “pushed”, in ways suitable to its character. I have got the idea that Dickinson, owing to his broadcasting, was on the edge of a much wider public, and I do want him to reach them.

In addition to enjoyment, affection, gratitude and a ready¬ made framework, Forster may have been speeded on his way by two further factors : an enthusiastic collaborator in the person of R. E. Balfour, who contributed the Bibliography, and — a spur to which as a novelist he would have been unaccustomed — a contractually agreed completion date. Originally 30 June 1933 (for autumn publication), this was modified at some stage to allow Forster a further six months. If the modification represented a reluctant concession on the publisher’s part, it is not surprising that by 29 December he was, as Forster wrote to William Plomer, “taking up a strong line which I do not altogether resent”. Less than four months later, on 19 April 1934, the book was published.

As I mentioned above, Dickinson’s Recollections , while providing Forster with invaluable help, also posed him some problems. Their nature is explained in a letter to Forster which Dickinson wrote on 10 July 1932, less than a month before his death:

What I want to say to you is that I am sending the autobiography to Dennis Proctor, 5 Peel St, Church St, W.8. But I should like you, not

Xlll him, to make any decision about it. My present feeling is that if anything were published (as to which I have no judgement) the sex part should be omitted. One can’t trust people yet (nor perhaps ever) to be decent about those things, and anyhow my relations are still alive. Remember that my sisters have not seen this autobiography and I don’t wish them to, except in a safely bowdlerized form. I must I am afraid leave all that to your judgement, but perhaps you would also consult with Dennis, though I want the final decision to be yours. There are other MSS which I have told May to send you but I doubt if there is anything that should be published and you have full leave to destroy or do what you like.

More than twenty years later Forster in turn gave Dickinson’s unpublished writings to Dennis Proctor, with no restrictions over their ultimate publication; and today the Recollections in their entirety are available to all. In the less liberal climate of 1934 Forster decided to respect Dickinson’s feeling and omit “the sex part” in toto. To quote Sir Dennis Proctor:

One can well imagine how he must have chafed under the necessity of describing his friend’s life without mentioning the rarest thing about it, the almost continuous experience over a lifetime of pas¬ sionate love for another human being, merely because the other human being was always someone of the same sex.3

And indeed there is perhaps an element of casuistry in Forster’s statement (page xxii) that “I have not tried to exclude facts about him with which I am not in sympathy or which might be held to decrease his reputation”. If pressed, he might have claimed that at various points (pages 47, 56, 63, 64, 103, 15 1 in this edition) he does make it plain that Dickinson was homo¬ sexual. But at least one reader, in 1947, contrived not to realize this fact; and of Dickinson’s shoe fetishism — to which both of Forster’s relative clauses presumably apply — there is naturally not a word. To say this is not to dispute Forster’s judgement; it is merely to point out “a serious omission in the portrait as well as a gaping hole in the narrative”4 — an omission and a hole which may (such is human nature) partly explain the biography’s comparative neglect. Certain passages — those where Forster voices his own feelings about Cambridge or public schools — are of course familiar and indeed famous; but largely through the frequency with which they have been quoted by commentators. But if Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson is not one of Forster’s best- 3 Proctor, toe. cit. 4 Ibid.

xiv known works its admirers have been fervid as well as dis¬ tinguished. W. H. Auden, for example, who reviewed it for Scrutiny and who has contributed a Foreword to this edition, has been quoted5 as considering it Forster’s best book. Christopher Isherwood was equally enthusiastic:

I ... am lost in admiration of your marksmanship in the G. L. D. book, which I have now read four or five times, and like better and better. (Letter to Forster, 26 August 1934.)

And Siegfried Sassoon has to pull himself up short :

No one else could have done it, and the world will be a better place when, say, 5,000 thoughtful persons have read it. It just made me quietly grateful that “Goldie” existed and was “perpetuated” by E. M. F., whose existence also makes one gra . . . but I am waxing fulsome. (Letter to Forster, 17 July 1934.)

Reviewers, too, were almost unanimous in their praise; they included, apart from Auden, David Garnett in the New Statesman , J. A. Hobson in Philosophy , F. L. Lucas in the Cambridge Review and the Observer (identical reviews; such pluralism is, one hopes, a thing of the past), Desmond MacCarthy in the Sunday Times , Kingsley Martin in the Political Quarterly , Lord Ponsonby in the Listener , J. T. Sheppard in the Spectator , and H. M. Tomlinson (another who considered this Forster’s best book) in the News Chronicle. Only three dissentient voices were raised : Montgomery Belgion, who made the book a peg for his famous onslaught in the Criterion , c The Diabolism of E. M. Forster”;6 7 Hugh Kingsmill in the English Review (“If Lowes Dickinson was indeed the best man who has ever lived, Mr Forster must be the worst of all bio¬ graphers, for of the sublime qualities implied in Mrs Newman’s praise Mr Forster has given us no hint at all”); and, in the Vegetarian News , Henry S. Salt, whose review hinges on a remark of Dickinson’s (page 1 76) about abattoirs, and includes this acid footnote :

Mr Forster devotes to me a dozen lines, which show with what amazing carelessness such memoirs may be compiled. I am described, quite untruly, as having been “a rebellious master at Eton”;7

5 By Paul Cadmus in a letter to Forster, 7 May 1944.

6 Dickinson figures as “a man in some mental confusion . . . when he meant ‘God’ he had to say ‘It’

7 Salt was a master at Eton from 1875 to 1884; and his own published accounts of those years lend some colour to Dickinson’s adjective.

XV then, with Mr Cox (who was much my junior) as a magnet for “cranks”; and the general impression conveyed is that the Cox house¬ hold, with its Kentish agricultural folk, was roughing it together with mine. This quite misleading story is taken, I understand, from Dickinson’s “unpublished recollections”, which, I venture to think, had better remain unpublished.

Broadly speaking, those (the great majority) who loved Dickinson have loved Forster’s biography, while those who were irritated by him were irritated also by the book that portrayed him so sympathetically. The reader who never knew Dickinson, and has perhaps read few of his works, may be curious to see him — the man and the writer — through other eyes than Forster’s. Forster himself (or possibly Balfour) catered for such curiosity by listing (pages 252— 3) sixteen obituary notices; but the list is confined to notices written by “friends who knew Dickinson personally”. The following paragraphs — which make no claim to comprehen¬ siveness — mention both friendly and hostile witnesses.

As early as 1905 Dickinson had a chapter to himself in G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics .8 Triggered off by Dickinson’s article “How Long Halt Ye?” in the Independent Review that February, the essay is far from being Chesterton at his most swashbuckling. A much more sustained attack on Dickinson’s outlook (and style) is made by Wilfred Stone in The Cave and the Mountain : A Study of E. M. Forster A These criticisms are based, of course, entirely on Dickinson’s writings. Of the accounts based on personal know¬ ledge the unkindest perhaps, for all its protestations of gratitude, is that given by Esme Wingfield-Stratford in Before the Lamps Went Out,10 where he sums Dickinson up as “the best type of old maid”. Something of the same feeling is voiced by Virginia Woolf (“Always Shelley and Goethe, and then he loses his hot water bottle”) and endorsed by Leonard, who refers to “a weak¬ ness, a looseness of fibre, in Goldie and in his thought and writing, which was subtly related to the gentleness and high¬ mindedness”. Among other remarks made or quoted in this passage from Leonard Woolf’s Beginning Again11 may be men¬ tioned Virginia’s “Always alone on a mountain top asking himself

8 London, John Lane, 1905.

9 Stanford and London, Stanford University Press and Oxford University Press, 1966.

10 London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1945. The author has some biting things to say about Forster’s biography also.

11 London, Hogarth Press, 1964.

XVI how to live, theorizing about life; never living.” In the same vein are Michael Holroyd’s view of Dickinson as an “almost perfect example of the academic millenarian”12 and George Santayana’s epigram: “He prayed, watched and laboured to redeem human life, and began by refusing to understand what human life is.”13 This, however, and the patronizing reference to “poor Dickinson” belong to Santayana’s sophisticated old age; as an undergraduate he had described Dickinson as “the type of everything I like and respect in the way of intelligence and feeling”.14

Much more sympathetic, again, are Bertrand Russell’s com¬ ments in his Autobiography , the first volume of which15 also includes six of his letters to Dickinson. Wholly sympathetic is the picture given in The Life of John Maynard Keynes 16 by Sir Roy Harrod, who twice mentions Dickinson’s “absolute integrity”. Christopher Hassall’s Rupert Brooke 17 is notable for an amusing anecdote about a misfortune that befell Dickinson while bathing nude near Grantchester, and a charming one about the occasion when Rupert Brooke and Hugh Dalton disturbed Dickinson in the small hours by arguing loudly at the entrance to their staircase.

“I wish you’d go to bed!” he called out, testily, “I can’t sleep.” Next morning the two . . . went up to apologize and were asked what they were talking about. “Immortality,” one of them replied. “Oh,” exclaimed Dickinson, seeing the incident in a new light, “now if only I’d known that, I would have come down and joined you.” Dickinson was a being as rare for the breadth of his tolerance as for his learning, and when he was offered the Kahn Travelling Fellow¬ ship, the main purpose of which was to widen the Fellow’s mind, Brooke exclaimed, “If they widen Goldie’s mind any more, it’ll break!”

Finally, an account of Dickinson that equals Forster’s in affection may be found in Sir Dennis Proctor’s long and moving Introduc¬ tion to the Autobiography.

12 Lytton Strachey : A Critical Biography, vol. i (London, Heinemann, 1967), P- I73*

13 My Host the World (London, Cresset Press, 1953), p. 31.

14 Letters, ed. Daniel Cory (London, Constable, 1956), p. 52; letter to Susana Sturgis de Sastre, 14 January 1897.

15 London, Allen & Unwin, 1967.

16 London, Macmillan, 1951.

17 London, Faber, 1964. The bathing anecdote is told on p. 267; the passage quoted occurs on p. 170.

XVil

An explanation is perhaps needed for the appearance, in this volume, of seven appendices which formed no part of Forster’s book as originally published. In a collected edition of his work, here surely is the place for anything else he wrote on Dickinson and his books; and Appendices A to F fall under this heading. Inevitably, Forster repeated himself; and I have excluded, as adding nothing of any significance, several pertinent items (C248, C255, C258, part of B21) from Miss Kirkpatrick’s biblio¬ graphy18 — as well as, a fortiori, his contributions to a programme on Dickinson broadcast by the B.B.G. in i960,19 and an “Intro¬ duction” to a new edition20 of A Modern Symposium which consists merely of linked extracts from Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Appendix G is a letter from Beatrice Webb to Forster thanking him for a gift copy of his book. (It was doubtless to ask Sidney Webb about his visit to Cambridge — see page 80 — that Forster paid the visit to Passfield Corner described in Two Cheers for Democracy.) The letter, besides offering yet another view of Dickinson, is amusing in a number of ways, and the Maharajah of Chhatarpur’s request to Sidney Webb “to help him to save his soul” deserves to have been immortalized by a Max Beerbohm cartoon.

Notes on the text and on the Bibliography will be found on pages 225 and 230 respectively; and it only remains for me to express my thanks to those who in one way or another have given me generous and valuable help. First and foremost, on this occasion, comes Mr W. H. Auden, whose graceful Foreword will surely win new readers for this comparatively neglected book. To Sir Dennis Proctor I am deeply indebted, in ways which I have detailed above and on page 227. He is also one of three people who have made helpful suggestions concerning this Introduction, the others being Mr P. N. Furbank — whose knowledge and kind¬ ness I continue shamelessly to exploit — and Mr Roger Greaves. For help of various kinds at King’s College, Cambridge, I am again grateful to the Vice-Provost, Dr Donald Parry; the