George Edward Bateman Saintsbury (23 October 1845 - 28 January 1933), was an English writer and critic.
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Born in Southampton, he was educated at King's College School, London, and at Merton College, Oxford (B.A., 1868), and spent six years in Guernsey as senior classical master of Elizabeth College. From 1874 to 1876 he was headmaster of the Elgin Educational Institute. He began his literary career in 1875 as a critic for the Academy, and for ten years was actively engaged in journalism, becoming an important member of the staff of the Saturday Review. Some of the critical essays contributed to the literary journals were afterwards collected in his Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 (2 vols., 1890-1895), Essays on French Novelists (1891), Miscellaneous Essays (1892), Corrected Impressions (1895). In 1895 he became professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, a position he held until 1915. He retired to 1A Royal Crescent, Bath, Somerset and died there in 1933.[1]
His first book, A Primer of French Literature (1880), and his Short History of French Literature (1882), were followed by a series of editions of French classics and of books and articles on the history of French literature, which made him the most prominent English authority on the subject. His studies in English literature were no less comprehensive, and included the valuable revision of Sir Walter Scott's edition of John Dryden's Works (Edinburgh, 18 vols., 1882-1893), Dryden (1881) in the "English Men of Letters" series, History of Elizabethan Literature (1887), History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896), A Short History of English Literature (1898, 3rd ed. 1903), an edition of the Minor Caroline Poets of the Caroline Period (2 vols., 1905-1906), a collection of rare poems of great value, and editions of English classics. He coined the term "Janeite" for a fan of Jane Austen in his introduction to a 1894 edition of Pride and Prejudice.
At the turn of the century, Saintsbury edited and introduced an English edition of Honoré de Balzac's novel series La Comédie humaine. He went on to edit the series of "Periods of European Literature," contributing the volumes on The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (1897), and The Earlier Renaissance (1901). He subsequently produced some of his most important works, A History of Criticism (3 vols., 1900-1904), with the companion volume Loci Critici, Passages Illustrative of Critical Theory and Practice (Boston, U.S.A., and London, 1903), and A History of English Prosody from the 12th Century to the Present Day (i., 1906; ii., 1908; iii., 1910); also The Later Nineteenth Century (1909).
Although Saintsbury was best known as a scholar during his lifetime, he is perhaps best remembered today for his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920), one of the great testimonials to drink and drinking in wine literature. When he was close to death, André Simon arranged a dinner in his honour. Although Saintsbury did not attend, this was the start of the Saintsbury Club, men of letters and members of the wine trade who continue to have dinners to this day.
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury (1845-10-23 – 1933-01-28) was a prolific and popular English historian and literary scholar.
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Quotations are cited from the first US edition (New York: Dodd, Meads, 1900-04).
Quotations are cited from John W. Oliver et al. (eds.) A Last Vintage (London: Methuen, 1950).
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