[Marginalia]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
'Allen Clark, the son of Bolton textile workers, found physiology books in the public library incomprehensible. A newspaper reference to Rabelais motivated him to borrow Gargantua and Pantagruel, which was no more helpful: "the love passages in the tales were meaningless and boring and I skipped them".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Allen Clarke Print: Book
'Weaver-novelist William Holt extolled the standard greats ("Noble Carlyle; virtuous Tolstoi; wise Bacon; jolly Rabelais; towering Plato...") and, having taught himself German, memorized Schiller while working at the looms. But he did not limit himself to classics: "I read omnivorously, greedily, promiscuously", from dime novels and G.A. Henty to Hardy and Conrad. Holt disparaged popular authors such as Ethel M. Dell and Elinor Glyn for "peddling vulgar narcotics", yet he was closely attuned to the mass reading public. His own autobiography sold a quarter of a million copes and he once owned a fleet of bookmobiles. He reconciled taste with populism through this logic: though most readers consume a certain amount of junk, it does them no harm because they recognize it as junk'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: William Holt Print: Book
'He lapped up those French writers who kicked against those conventions - Rabelais, Villon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
'Although he read Rabelais and several other French authors in the original, it is unlikely that [Gabriel] Harvey's mastery of this language approached that of Italian'.
Century: 1500-1599 / 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Gabriel Harvey Print: Book
'And have I read no books, then, save bad ones? That I have. Amongst those sent to me from home is an old Dublin copy of Rabelais, in four volumes, imprinted by Philip Crampton, of Dame Street - and has kept me in good wholesome laughter for a fortnight - laughter of the sort that agitates the shoulders, and shakes the diaphragm, and makes the blood tingle; than which no medicine can be more cordial to me - I have read the cause of his effects in Galen.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: John Mitchel Print: Book
'The [Tennyson] boys had one great advantage [as home-educated pupils], the run of their father's excellent library. Amongst the authors most read by them were Shakespeare, Milton, Burke, Goldsmith, Rabelais, Sir William Jones, Addison, Swift, Defoe, Cervantes, Bunyan and Buffon.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Tennyson children (boys) Print: Book
'Although Mrs Craigie carried out her "duties" as a Roman Catholic, she took her religion lightly, and from her writings it was easy to read that she did not mind jests about the saints ... She told me that her conversion was entirely due to her reading Rabelais, which at the time I believed literally'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie Print: Book
