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the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

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Listings for Author:  

Herbert Spencer

 

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Herbert Spencer : [unknown]

'The [1890s] dockers' leader Ben Tillett went hungry in order to buy books ... [and] thereby struggled through the literary classics, as well as works on evolution by Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley ... after his day's work in the warehouse.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Ben Tillett      Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : Autobiography

'Arnold Bennett, when reading [Herbert] Spencer's posthumously published Autobiography (1904), found the account "disappointingly deficient in emotion".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett      Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : The Study of Sociology

In the public library [Manny Shinwell] doggedly tackled volumes "whose contents I usually failed to understand": Paley's Evidences of Christianity, Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, Herbert Spencer's Sociology, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Shinwell's whole intellectual career was an exciting but laborious exercise in decoding. All his life he used a dictionary to correct his pronunciation'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Emmanuel Shinwell (later Baron Shinwell)      Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : 

'Taxi driver Herbert Hodge...knew that years on the dole only produced apathy, and that out-of-work men wanted practical help in dealing with the Board of Guardians far more than ideology. That experience plus his eclectic reading (Bergson, Nietzsche, William McDougall, Bertrand Russell, the new Testament, and Herbert Spencer as well as Marx) led him out of the [Communist] Party towards a socialism that would be brought about by individual volition...'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Herbert Hodge      Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : [unknown]

'After a miserable Catholic school education...periodic unemployment allowed [Joseph Toole] to study in the Manchester Reference Library. There he discovered, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Mill, Emerson, Dickens, Morris, Blatchford, Shaw and Wells, and of course John Ruskin..."Study always left me with a deep feeling that there was so much amiss with the world. It seemed that it had been started at the wrong end, and that it was everybody's business to put the matter right".'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Toole      Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : The Genesis of Science

'Read Schrader. Spinoza. Leader and Athenaeum. "Genesis of Science". Gibbon.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud.]      Print: BookManuscript: Unknown

  

Herbert Spencer : [probably] Principles of Psychology, The

'I have read rapidly through Max Muller's History of Sanskrit Literature and am now reading Lecky's "History of Morals". I have also finished H. Spencer's last number of his Psychology'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud]      Print: Serial / periodical

  

Herbert Spencer : Principles of Psychology

'Read Spencer's Psychology'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot [pseud]      Print: BookManuscript: Unknown

  

Herbert Spencer : Principles of Sociology

'Having finished Spencer's Sociology we began Max MUller's Lectures on the Science of Language'.

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: George Eliot and John Cross     Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : unknown

'I am reading Herbert Spencer just now very hard.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : A System of Synthetic Philosophy

'Part III is 'the reconciliation', in Spencer's phrase, - a mean term between I and II, a minimistic retrospect on both.'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson      Print: Book

  

Herbert Spencer : 

'[Letter from Mrs Ward to the Society of Authors when that body recommended Herbert Spencer not George Meredith for the Nobel Prize] If Mr Meredith had written nothing but the love scenes in "Richard Feverel"; "The Egoist"; and certain passages of description in "Vittoria" and "Beauchamp's Career", he would still stand at the head of English "dichtung" [the quality Mrs Ward thought the prize should reward] There is no critic now who can be ranged with him in position, and no poet. As a man of letters he is easily first; to compare Mr Spencer's power of clear statement with the play of imaginative genius in Meredith would be absurd - in the literary field'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Augusta Ward      Print: Book

 

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