Listings for Reader:
Charles Maturin
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Samuel Richardson : Clarissa
"By what unction of purity our great grand mothers were preserved when they studied Pamela without danger or disgust we know not. There are many points of Richardson?s writings more injurious, because less shocking, to virtue than the sonnets of Rochester. Clarissa is less objectionable, though many of the scenes at Mrs Sinclair?s are such as are wholly unfit for modern readers.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Samuel Richardson : Pamela
"By what unction of purity our great grand mothers were preserved when they studied Pamela without danger or disgust we know not. There are many points of Richardson?s writings more injurious, because less shocking, to virtue than the sonnets of Rochester. Clarissa is less objectionable, though many of the scenes at Mrs Sinclair?s are such as are wholly unfit for modern readers.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Samuel Richardson : Sir Charles Grandison
?In his Sir Charles Grandison, the inherent vulgarity, egotism and prolixity of Richardson?s character breakout with a latitude unexampled and uncontrolled. His personages, forever listening to or repeating their own eulogy, forever covering their own selfishness with arrogant humility, preaching forever in a monotonous key of maudlin morality, bowing on hands, and asking the benison of aunts and grandmothers, are now as flat and faded as the figures in an ancient tapestry but, like them, compensate in some measure for the dullness of the design by the fidelity of the costume.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Maria Edgeworth : Patronage
?Her next obvious defect (we hesitate to call it a defect) is a total moral inability to paint the strongest passion that can distract the human heart or agitate human life. Miss Caroline Percy, to the best of our recollection, makes one strong speech about love in Patronage, and that is the first and last we hear of it in her words.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Maria Edgeworth : Belinda
?In Belinda, Lady Delacour offers the heroine ?a silver penny for her thoughts?, and so fond is Miss Edgeworth of this bright image that she repeats it again in her Comic Dramas. Where could she have heard this silly vulgarism??
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Maria Edgeworth : Comic Dramas
?In Belinda, Lady Delacour offers the heroine ?a silver penny for her thoughts?, and so fond is Miss Edgeworth of this bright image that she repeats it again in her Comic Dramas. Where could she have heard this silly vulgarism??
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Maria Edgeworth : Tales of Fashionable Life
?Miss Edgeworth?s incomparable description of Mrs Beaumont?s marriage in Manoeuvering, where the interesting, almost fainting, lady is lifted out of the arms of her anxious bridesmaids and supported up the aisle, with the marked gallantry of true tenderness by her happy bridegroom Sir John Hunter.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Charlotte Lennox : The Female Quixote
?It would be necessary to notice here, when we profess to give a sketch of the progress of novel or romance writing, as indication of and connected with the state of manners, the few exceptions that occur to be our observations in the novels of Mrs Lennox, Mrs Sheridan and Cumberland. The Female Quixote of the former .. retains still a portion of its original interest.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Richard Cumberland : Arundel
?Cumberland attempted and failed to revive the classical English novel. We sit down in fact by Cumberlands? fireside and listen to his long dull stories as we would to the tales of a garrulous, good tempered, prosing old man, pleased with him sometimes for occasional amusement, and pleased with ourselves for our patience and charity.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Clara Reeve : The Old English Baron
?Walpole?s Catle of Otranto, though dramatized by Jephson, has few imitations. Clara Reeve?s English Baron was the best, but even she in vain beckoned authors to cross the magic threshold of Gothic romance. They paused on the verge, gazed with wistful romance, and forbore to enter its mysterious precincts.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Hannah More : Coelebs in search of a wife
??the work of Mrs Hannah More called Coelebs in search of a wife, as not knowing well where to class it. It is too pure and too profound to be ranked with novels, and too sprightly and entertaining to be wholly given up to philosophy, theology or dialectics. Mrs More?s works form a class of themselves; it is enough, perhaps, to say Coelebs is one of them.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Richard Lalor Sheil : The Apostate: a tragedy in five acts
?Upon the whole, this play with the powerful assistance of eminent actors and scenical illusion and burning palaces, and processions with towers of the Inquisition in perspective and Moors who preach the Gospel to Christians just as they are going to be burnt for not believing it and half mad, half poisoned heroines who visit their lovers in dungeons with wreaths of flowers on their heads, may produce an effect on the stage ? but what effect will it produce in the closet??
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Fanny Burney : Evelina
?Amid these dark middle ages of novel literature, Miss Burney?s Evelina strikes us with the first gleam of ?rescued nature and reviving sense.? Her novels, all her novels, impress us with an indescribable sense of their nationality. They could not have been written by any but an Englishwoman. Her sense is English, her humour is English, her character is English, so inveterately, untranslatably English, as to be absolutely unintelligible to any but those who have deeply studied the English character.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Henry Fielding : The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
?In the works of Fielding our credulity is not taxed for superfluous admiration by any of those faultless monsters? Fielding?s chief excellence appears to lie in the delineation of his characters that combine simplicity, ignorance and benevolence. His Parson Adams and his Partridge will still induce us to tolerate even Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. His mind appeared incapable of concocting a character of real virtue. His Allworthy is a prosing, self sufficient moral pedant; in Joseph Andrews virtue is ridiculous; in Tom Jones vice is honourable. Nobody now reads either but the school boy, and one of the earliest signs of an improved taste, and an advancement in Christian morality, is the rejection of both.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Charlotte Smith : The Old Manor House
?The transition from the vapid sentimentality of the novel of fifty years ago to the goblin horrors of the last twenty is so strong that it almost puzzles us to find a connecting link? Perhaps Charlotte Smith?s novels might have been the connecting link between these different species. ?The Old Manor House has really a great deal to answer for? Her heroines have all the requisites of persecuted innocence? The rage for lumbering ruins, for mildewed manuscripts.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Ann Radcliffe : The Mysteries of Udolpho
??in Mrs Radcliff?s romances. She was ? an extraordinary female, and her style of writing ? must be allowed to form an era in English romances. Her ignorance was nearly equal to her imagination and that is to say a great deal. Of the modest life on the continent (where scenes of all her romances ? are laid) she knew nothing. With all this, and more, her romances are irresistibly and dangerously delightful? The most extraordinary production of this period was the powerful and wicked romance of The Monk. The spirits raised by the Enchantress of Udolpho, compared to those evoked by Lewis, are like the attendants on Prospero in his enchanted island.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Matthew Gregory Lewis : The Monk
?The most extraordinary production of this period was the powerful and wicked romance of The Monk.?
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
George Gordon, Lord Byron : Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
?But Lord Byron ? he must write with great ease and rapidity.? ?That I don?t know. I could never finish the perusal of any of his long poems. There is something in them excessively at variance with my notions of poetry. He is too fond of the obsolete? It is a sort of a mixed mode, neither old nor new, but incessantly hovering between both.? ?What do you think of Childe Harold?? ?I do not know what to think of it; nor can I give you definitely my reasons for disliking his poems generally.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Thomas Otway : Complete Plays
"'Putting Shakespeare and his immediate followers out of the way, whom do you think the best dramatist?' 'Otway, Lee and Southern, unquestionably.'"
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Thomas Southern : Complete Plays
"'Putting Shakespeare and his immediate followers out of the way, whom do you think the best dramatist?' 'Otway, Lee and Southern, unquestionably. I speak, perhaps, from an old feeling of attachment, but, nevertheless, from deep conviction? Southern was a sweet and natural poet; he was the Goldsmith of tragedy.'"
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Samuel Taylor Coleridge : Christabel and Other Poems
??Coleridge, who, en parenthesis, he disliked for a merciless attack on his tragedy. Which the ill success of the ?Remorse? had incited; and he had prepared a retaliation in the pages of ?Colburn?s Magazine? which I read in manuscript ? a review of ?Christabel?, but which I do not remember to have seen published.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Maturin Print: Book
Nathaniel Lee : The Rival Queens, or The Death of Alexander
?He ingenuously seized opportunities, when his parents were away from home, to construct his private theatricals, which he did by converting folding doors into a green curtain, the back apartment into a stage and the front into a pit, boxes and gallery for the accommodation of his imaginary or, at best, scanty audience. ? his favourite play was Alexander, in which he enacted the principal part himself. The mad poetry of that piece was his favourite recitation and it would have been difficult to discover an actor who could give greater force to the tempestuous passage of his Bucephalus than young Maturin.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
James Sheridan Knowles : Virginius
?In May 1820 Sheridan Knowles produced ?Virginius?. The extraordinary success of that play naturally excited Maturin?s curiosity, and he was impatient to read it. ? When ?Virginius? was first published, a friend of Maturin?s purchased a copy, with which he was so pleased that it always lay on his table and he constantly devoted hours of relaxation to its perusal.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Nathaniel Lee :
"I can see no difference between his case [Nathaniel Lee] and Shelley or Byron, except that they have method and he had none."
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Sir Walter Scott : complete works to 1820
?Of Sir Walter Scott I have heard Maturin speak in terms of rapture. He considered his extraordinary productions the greatest efforts of human genius, and often said that in the poetry of universal nature he considered him equal to Shakespeare. So sensibly imbued was he with the characteristics of those magic fictions, that he apprehended the publication of an intentional imitation of Ivanhoe. I believe the public however never perceived any imitation beyond that into which every novelist falls who happens to write after Sir Walter.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
George Crabbe : poetic works
??And which of the living poets fulfils your ideal standard of excellence?? ?Crabbe. He is all nature without pomp or parade and exhibits at times deep pathos and feelings. His characters are certainly homely and his scenes rather unpoethical; but then he invests his object with so much tenderness and sweetness that you care not who are the actors, or in what situations they are placed.??
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
Thomas Moore : Complete Poems and Songs
??Moore, who is a poet of inspiration, could write in any circumstances. There is no man of the age labours harder than Moore. He is often a month working out the end of an epigram. Moore is a writer for whom I feel a strong affection, because he has done that which I would have done if I could; but after him it would be vain to try anything.??
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
James Hogg :
??And whom do you estimate after Crabbe?? ?I am disposed to say Hogg. His ?Queen?s wake? is splendid and impassioned work. I like it for its varieties and its utter simplicity? Take my word in what I say of Crabbe and Hogg. They have struck the cord of my taste, but they are not, perhaps, the first men of the day.?
Century: 1700-1799 / 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Robert Maturin Print: Book
James Hogg : Bonny Kilmeny
"Another favourite of his was Hogg, whose ballad of "Bonny Kilmery" he had by heart."
