Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 14716

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
'Scott was the first great writer to draw me under his spell - the first to open for me the golden gates of poetry and romance. I can well remember the time when, a mere child, I would spend my half-holidays over "Ivanhoe" and "the Lay of the Last Minstrel", seated in rapt silence on a hassock in my father's library, in our old house at Bristol. I can well remember, too, how I would carry fragments of these enthralling stories to my fellows at school, resolved, with all the enthusiasm of boyhood, to make them willing or unwilling partakers of my pleasure. The men and women of whom I read and told were real figures to us then; and in the organization of our little school we lived out a kind of chivalrous life, even emulating, to the no small alarm of our elders, the scenes on sherwood forest, and the achievements at ashby-de-la-Zouche.'
Century: 1850-1899
Date: Between 1870 and 1875
Country: England
Time: n/a
Place: city: Bristol
location in dwelling: Library
   
Type of Experience (Reader):
silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
Type of Experience (Listener):
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Reader/Listener/Reading Group:

Reader:William Henry Hudson
Age Child (0-17)
Gender n/a
Date of Birth 2 May 1862
Socio-economic group: Professional / academic / merchant / farmer
Occupation: Schoolboy
Religion: Anglican
Country of origin: England
Country of experience: England
Listeners present if any:
(e.g. family, servants, friends, workmates)
Schoolfriends present at subsequent re-tellings.
Additional comments: n/a

 

Text Being Read:

Author: Sir Walter Scott
Title: The Lay of the Last Minstrel
Genre: Fiction, Poetry
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: n/a
Provenance: read in situ
Read in father's library

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 14716  
Source - Print  
  Author: William Henry Hudson
  Editor: n/a
  Title: Sir Walter Scott
  Place of Publication: London
  Date of Publication: 1901
  Vol: n/a
  Page: ix
  Additional comments: Author's Preface to his biography of Scott.

Citation: William Henry Hudson, Sir Walter Scott (London, 1901), p. ix, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=14716, accessed: 19 March 2024

Additional comments:

Not clear if actual reading or recitation involved in the re-tellings, rather than paraphrase.

 

 

Reading Experience Database version 2.0.  Page updated: 27th Apr 2016  3:15pm (GMT)