London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green
Abstract
Lucy Aikin (1781-1864) was a leading historian of the early nineteenth century. Her studies of Elizabeth, Charles I and James I were commercial and critical successes. She also wrote a memoir of her father, John Aikin, and edited the poetry and prose of her aunt, Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Following in the Bluestocking traditions of her aunt, Lucy advocated for women’s education and civil rights, emphasising that the lives and roles of women were essential aspects of world history.
Poet, essayist, and educationist, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), was a member of the eighteenth-century Bluestockings, a community of women writers and intellectuals. Barbauld shared an interest in science with her physician-brother, John, as demonstrated in her poem dedicated to Joseph Priestley, ‘The Mouse’s Petition’. This poem, written from the perspective of the mouse found in one of Dr Priestley’s traps, presents a veiled plea for social justice in an oppressive society.
Writer Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919) assisted her father, novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), by transcribing his manuscripts for publishers, including copying out the majority of The Newcomes. Anne lived most of her adult life with her sister Harriet and Leslie Stephen, Harriet’s husband and literary journalist. Anne and Stephen continued to live together after Harriet’s early death in 1875.
John Hunter was not as celebrated an instructor as his older brother, William, but students nevertheless recorded his lectures with great care, as this journal of extensive notes attests.
Both brothers were great collectors: William’s donations to Glasgow University formed the basis of their Hunterian Museum, while John’s collections survive in London at the Royal College of Surgeons.
Poet and botanist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) united his professional pursuits in the two works that comprise The Botanic Garden: ‘The Loves of the Plants’, a versification of Linnaean classifications, and ‘Economy of Vegetation’, a reflection on contemporary scientific theories. Darwin incorporated extensive scientific learning into his poetry and in the accompanying notes. His insights into natural history and evolutionary thought anticipated the theory of natural selection of his grandson, Charles Darwin.
Frances Burney (1752-1840) is perhaps best remembered for developing the novel of manners, a genre which Jane Austen later made famous. Frances’s wildly successful first novel, Evelina (1778), was written in secret. She told only her brother and sister about her plans to publish her own work. She disguised her handwriting to prevent printers from associating the work with the Burney family.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) inherited a keen interest in science and education from both his paternal and maternal grandfathers, Thomas Huxley and Tom Arnold. Although Huxley is now best remembered for his fictional works, such as his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), he began his authorial career as a poet. Leda (1920) was the third major collection Huxley published by age 26. Critics often read this work as representing the height of Huxley’s poetic talent and signaling his turn to fiction writing.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) descended from a family of illustrators, including grandfather John Doyle (b.1797), uncles Henry (b.1827) and Richard (b.1824), and father Charles (b.1832). Arthur’s uncles helped fund his early education, paving the way for his future medical studies at Edinburgh. This education shaped the characterisation of Sherlock Holmes; A Study in Scarlet marks the first appearance of this legendary detective. Doyle made several unsuccessful attempts to publish this work before it finally appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. The following year it was published in book form, featuring six illustrations by his father.
Oscar Wilde was accused of sodomy in 1895 and charged with gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. After a drawn-out trial process, Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Once released, he was exiled to France where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Wilde published the poem anonymously, signing the work C.3.3. (cell block C, landing 3, cell 3). The poem sold well and quickly, going through seven editions in just over one year. This copy is a fifth edition.
London: Printed for the Author and sold by J. Robson and G. Robinson
Abstract
Musicologist Charles Burney (1726-1814) worked closely with his daughter, Frances, to complete his many essays on music theory and history. Charles was motivated by literary and social success. He valued his reputation very highly, which seems to have influenced his relationship with Frances: he claimed to have read his daughter’s first novel, Evelina (1778), only after it became successful, and even then he approached it ‘with fear & trembling,’ wondering whether 'she c[oul]d write a book worth reading'.
Family connections were paramount for the Darwin-Wedgwood family. It is therefore no surprise that Charles Darwin, writing to English physician and horticulturalist Dr John Denny, uses terminology of family structures to discuss geranium breeding: ‘With respect to transmittance of character, when both parents are of equally good constitution, I shd expect from what little I know that different rules wd hold in difft families’.
Charles Darwin continued to develop his theory of natural selection first articulated in On the Origin of Species (1859). With his botanist son Francis (1848-1925), he co-authored The Power of Movement in Plants. In addition to his research on botanical genetics, Francis Darwin published Rustic Sounds and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History (1917), a series of essays that reflected the influences of his family.
Charles Maturin (1780-1824) was the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde. He wrote several Irish national tales and Gothic romances. His fifth novel, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), was one of Wilde’s favourite books, and critics have noted the thematic resonances between it and Wilde’s own novels. One obvious influence of Maturin is in Wilde’s choice of the pseudonym ‘Sebastian Melmoth’, which he adopted upon his release from Reading Gaol. Wilde explained his reason to a friend: ‘to prevent postmen having fits I sometimes have my letters inscribed by the name of a curious novel by my great-uncle Maturin’.
The youngest of the Rossetti family, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) grew up surrounded by art and literature. She wrote prolifically throughout her life, publishing her first works at age 20 in the Germ, a magazine edited by her brother, the literary critic William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919).
Christina Rossetti dedicated Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress to her mother ‘in all reverence and love.’ Her brother Dante created the memorable illustrations for both books.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists who sought to recapture the aesthetics of Raphael and Michelangelo – as opposed to the ‘sloshy’ style of contemporary Royal Academy painters. In addition to his work as artist and illustrator, Dante was a successful and sometimes scandalous poet: the poem, ‘Jenny', concerns a young man’s visit to a prostitute. He dedicated his Poems to his brother and fellow Pre-Raphaelite, William Michael Rossetti.
The only child of Edward and Constance Garnett, David Garnett (1892-1981) was born into a life of letters. He studied botany at college but soon returned to the literary circles he was accustomed to – particularly the Bloomsbury Group – and pursued a career in writing. Garnett wrote prolifically and successfully throughout the 1920s. His first wife, artist Rachel (‘Ray’) Marshall (1891-1940), provided woodcut illustrations for several of his works, including Lady into Fox. Garnett maintained intimate relationships with members of the Bloomsbury Group, including with painter Duncan Grant (1885-1978), the father of his second wife, artist Angelica Bell (1918-2012).
In 1808, brothers John (1775-1848) and Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) created one of the most important weekly journals of the nineteenth century, TheExaminer. Known for its sharp wit and radical commentary, the journal published early work from John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Hazlitt. A critique of the Prince Regent in 1813 landed the Hunt brothers in prison for two years, but it also brought in new readers. This issue dates from 1831 – a few years after the Hunt brothers had sold their interests in the weekly to the journalist Albany Fonblanque – but it remained an important political paper well into the Victorian era: Thackeray and Dickens were later contributors.
Leigh Hunt was involved in a number of journals besides the Examiner. These included the Indicator (1819-1821), which first published one of the most famous poems of British Romanticism, John Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Hunt perhaps proposed the pseudonym ‘Caviare’, a reference to Hamlet, Act II, scene II: ‘’twas / caviare to the general’. The pseudonym links Keats with Shakespeare and challenges reviewers who had dismissed Keats’s previous work.
Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) was an accomplished mountaineer, writer, and magazine editor. His two marriages connected him to some of Victorian Britain’s foremost literary and artistic forces: the novel-writing Thackerays and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. In 1882, Stephen undertook the monumental role of editing the Dictionary of National Biography. He contributed 283 entries, among them the lives of his father, Sir James Stephen (1789-1859), and his father-in-law, William Makepeace Thackeray.
Leigh Hunt remained a significant figure in the Victorian era. Despite financial challenges, he continued to publish poetry and essays, and he was immortalised as Skimpole in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House (1853). Thornton Hunt (1810-1873), the eldest of Leigh and Marianne Hunt’s seven children, prepared this posthumous collection of his father’s letters. Best known today as editor of his father’s collected works, Thornton was also a noted journalist, eventually serving as editor of the Daily Telegraph.
In 1889, Constance Black (1861-1946) married Richard Garnett's son, the writer and literary editor Edward Garnett (1868-1937). A remarkable scholar, Constance began learning Russian out of her interest in Bolshevism. In 1892, after the birth of her son, David, she devoted her time to Russian translation. In 1894, she travelled to Moscow to meet with Leo Tolstoy. She was among the first to introduce the writings of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov to an Anglophone audience. Her translations of 71 volumes of Russian literary works are still read and used as models for translations.
The Anglo-Italian Rossetti family was close-knit and highly educated. The patriarch, poet and scholar Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854) was born in Italy. He settled in London in 1824 after being exiled for his political views. In 1826, he married Italian émigré Frances Polidori (1800-1886), sister of Gothic novelist John Polidori (1795-1821). Rossetti taught Italian at King’s College in London, and there he continued writing political poetry, including Dio e l’Uomo [God and Man], first published in 1833. His four children – Maria, Dante, William, and Christina – all carried on their familial legacy, becoming celebrated writers, poets, and painters.