'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
' ... the refrain in Gladstone's diaries, in his notes on the many controversial books he read, from Hardy to Zola, was his moral anxiety that a society without a Christian framework would lose its ethical bearings.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: William Ewart Gladstone Print: Book
Henry James to Theodore E. Child, 13 May 1885: " ... the only thing I have read from la-bas [ie France] is the wondrous, and I must say in some ways admirable, Germinal."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 25 July 1896: '"Rome" is of a [italics] lourdeur [end italics] -- as I read it here at the rate of ten pages a day -- under which even my little rock-built terrace groans.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry James Print: Book
'In these last years in the Five Towns, before he left for London, Bennet claims to have done little reading, apart from work for his law examinations; though he admits to Ouida and Vizetelly's translation of Zola.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Arnold Bennett Print: Book
'Read "Pot-Bouille"; "Pot-Bouille" made me laugh, there is one good character'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Book
'15th September 1928.
Reading Zola today (Une Page D?Amour). A book surprisingly different from, and somehow weaker than ?La Terre?, but also one of the Rougon Macquard series. It seems to be only a sort of sketched-in incident, a bit of relief to the greater volumes. A great book, none the less, and a little less strained in the stressing of the hastily obvious. Zola is too inclined to describe to his readers certain habits of mankind, which they know quite as well as he. He does not seem to understand that it is just this fact that causes the less ?realist? author to leave them out.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Gerald Moore Print: Book
Gone on with Comparetti Vergilio nel Medio Evo. Bourget’s Physiologie de l’Amour. [next unclear] Dumas Nouveaux Entr’actes. Ribot Maladies de la Volonté. In Flaubert’s Correspondance. Mercier Sanity and Insanity. Zola La fortune des Rougon. Son Excellence ER. Loti Roman d’un Enfant. Zola La Curée. Mme Bovary. Manresa (Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius). Ribot. Hérédité Psychologique. Zola Nana. Bjornson. In God’s Way. Tolstoy Marchez pendant que vous avez la lumiere. In Mary Wilkins. Tolstoy Les fruits de la Science. Vacherot Science et conscience. Tolstoy. Ivan imbecile etc. Zola Au bonheur des Dames. Julius Caesar. In Numa Roumestan 2nd time. In Chartreuse de Parma 3rd time. Zola La Terre. Tolstoy & Bondareff. Le Travail. Ibsen Canard Sauvage & Rosmersholm. Goncourt Clairon. Meinhold Amber Witch. The Newcomes. Ibsen H. Gabler. Kingsley Alton Locke. Spencer etc Plea for Liberty. Arnold White Tries at Truth. Merimée Venus d’Ille & Ames du Purgatoire. [next unclear] Havelock Ellis The Criminal. Zola La Reine. Stevenson Cervennes. Maeterlinck Les Aveugles, L’Intruse. Maupassant Bel Ami. Fabre L’abbe Tigrane. Much Kipling – Meredith Beauchamp. Morris News from nowhere. Mill on the Floss.- Zola l’argent. Diderot Religieuse. Laveleye Luxe. Mary Marguerites. Spencer Ethics. Sand La Morceau Diable. La Petite Fadette. Guyau Morale sans obligation. In Hazlitt. Zola Pot Bouille. Balzac Paysans.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Vernon Lee Print: Book
Gone on with Comparetti Vergilio nel Medio Evo. Bourget’s Physiologie de l’Amour. [next unclear] Dumas Nouveaux Entr’actes. Ribot Maladies de la Volonté. In Flaubert’s Correspondance. Mercier Sanity and Insanity. Zola La fortune des Rougon. Son Excellence ER. Loti Roman d’un Enfant. Zola La Curée. Mme Bovary. Manresa (Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius). Ribot. Hérédité Psychologique. Zola Nana. Bjornson. In God’s Way. Tolstoy Marchez pendant que vous avez la lumiere. In Mary Wilkins. Tolstoy Les fruits de la Science. Vacherot Science et conscience. Tolstoy. Ivan imbecile etc. Zola Au bonheur des Dames. Julius Caesar. In Numa Roumestan 2nd time. In Chartreuse de Parma 3rd time. Zola La Terre. Tolstoy & Bondareff. Le Travail. Ibsen Canard Sauvage & Rosmersholm. Goncourt Clairon. Meinhold Amber Witch. The Newcomes. Ibsen H. Gabler. Kingsley Alton Locke. Spencer etc Plea for Liberty. Arnold White Tries at Truth. Merimée Venus d’Ille & Ames du Purgatoire. [next unclear] Havelock Ellis The Criminal. Zola La Reine. Stevenson Cervennes. Maeterlinck Les Aveugles, L’Intruse. Maupassant Bel Ami. Fabre L’abbe Tigrane. Much Kipling – Meredith Beauchamp. Morris News from nowhere. Mill on the Floss.- Zola l’argent. Diderot Religieuse. Laveleye Luxe. Mary Marguerites. Spencer Ethics. Sand La Morceau Diable. La Petite Fadette. Guyau Morale sans obligation. In Hazlitt. Zola Pot Bouille. Balzac Paysans.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Vernon Lee Print: Book
'In the late 1880s Gissing immersed himself in contemporary European fiction, as he had during previous periods of his life. Gissing's wide reading has been often noted but rarely assessed. Salient in any study of it would be his reading of Goethe and Heine in 1876 (and throughout his life), Eugene Sue and Henri Murger (in 1878 "Scenes de la Vie Boheme" was deepy influential), Comte (notably "Cours de Philosophie Positive" in 1878), Turgenev (in 1884 - but also constantly, for by the end of the decade he had read "Fathers and Sons" five times), Moliere, George Sand, Balzac, de Musset (whom he called indispensable" in 1885), Ibsen (in German, in the late 1880s), Zola, Dostoevski, the Goncourts (at least by the early 1890s). Gissing read with equal ease in French, German, Greek and latin, and these from an early age. Later he added Italian and late in life some Spanish'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing Print: Book
'Gissing, probably more than any of his contemporaries, knew well the main trends of European literature at that time, for he continued to read widely in both French and German, as well as English. During the eighteen-eighties, he re-read George Sand and much of Balzac; read Zola for the first time; purchased cheap German editions of Turgenev and read them all; was famiiar with Daudet, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and later de Maupassant; and read Ibsen as his work became available and in the late eighties saw his plays when they were performed for the first time in London'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: George Gissing Print: Book
'Read Pot-Bouille. Pot-Bouille made me laugh, there is one good character.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert Louis Stevenson Print: Serial / periodical
1. Apologies for absence were received from Margaret and A. Bruce Dilks, Alice
and Arnold Joselin, Sylvanus A. Reynolds, Kenneth F. Nicholson, Francis H. Knight.
[...]
3. The subject chosen was letters, and during the evening we heard a most
interesting variety of letters, the matter varying from good & energetic advice to a
brother-in-law by Abraham Lincoln, to the butcher of our dreams; from Zola’s
account of the Dreyfus case to the amazing all-round ability to destroy of Leonardo
da Vinci. Charming letters to children were read, and various letters to the public;
and yet through all this variety, links were found connecting one set of letters with
the next.
In the first section of the meeting the following were read:- Letters by
Leonardo da Vinci read by K. Waschauer, by Abraham Lincoln read by F. E.
Pollard, and a humorous selection read by Edith B. and Howard R. Smith.
4. We adjourned for refreshments.
5. The minutes of the last meeting were then read and signed.
[...]
7. The business being completed, we had a further selection of letters
Zola’s letters on the Dreyus case [read by] Howard R. Smith[.]
Letters written to children [read by] Muriel Stevens[.]
Captain Scott’s last letters [read by] Elsie D. Harrod[.]
J. M. Barrie’s letter to Mrs. Scott [read by] Rosamund Wallis[.]
Letters of Gertrude Bell [read by] Mary Stansfield[.]
8. The meeting ended with general thankfulness that we had not to spend the
coming night as Gertrude Bell had done on the mountains.'
Century: Reader/Listener/Group: Howard Smith Print: Book
