Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a British poet, novelist, and anthologist who published using the pseudonym Q. He is noted for his compilation of The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900 (1900; revised 1939) and The Oxford Book of Ballads (1910).
Career
To readers of his work outside of England, Arthur Quiller-Couch, who published most of his books as “Q,” was an Englishman, a fact solidified by the knighthood conferred on him in 1910. But to Britons he was Cornish, and his most enduring fiction works are the novels and stories, such as Dead Man's Rock: A Romance (1887) and The Astonishing History of Troy Town (1888), that offer lighthearted depictions of his native Cornwall. Michael Douglas Smith, assessing Quiller-Couch’s fiction in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, wrote that “his chronicles of life in Cornwall at the turn of the century are unsurpassed, but his adventure tales and more serious works are largely forgotten.” Had he died before 1900, he would remain an almost completely obscure Figure; perhaps ironically, given the fact that he enjoyed a successful career as a novelist and short-story writer, his most permanent legacy is in the form of the many literary anthologies he edited, the most well-known of which was The Oxford Book of English Verse. First published it 1901 and revised in 1939, it enjoyed well over seventy-five years of popularity and marked the beginning of an extensive series.
As for the lack of interest in most of Quiller-Couch’s fiction writings after the 1930s, Smith wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, this arose in part from “changing tastes, but more fundamentally it reflects Quiller-Couch’s inability to deal adequately with the darker human emotions or portray more than superficial evil.” His worldview was that of an English Liberal with a capital “L”: he was a longtime member of that political party, which held considerable sway for the better part of a century starting in the 1840s. It had been the party of powerful prime ministers such as William Gladstone and H. H. Asquith and would continue to remain a vital force under Lloyd George during World War I. But in Quiller-Couch’s waning days, during the 1930s, the more leftist Labor Party took its place as the chief opposition to the Conservatives, and thereafter it held third place in British political life.
Like his party, Quiller-Couch represented an earlier era, a fact for which the circumstances surrounding his death offer an apt metaphor: though he died of mouth cancer, a result of a lifetime smoking habit, his final collapse came about after Quiller-Couch, then well into his ninth decade, fell while stepping out of the way of a speeding military vehicle. It was 1944, a few weeks before the D-Day Invasion of Normandy, and the world by then had become something quite different from the one he had known in his youth. Yet aspects of his work were surprisingly forward-looking: Smith observed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that “as a novelist he was ahead of his time in describing shell shock” long before this phenomenon received a name in World War I, “and notable for his defense of women,” along with his practice of “choosing many of his chivalrous heroes from the poorer classes.”
Quiller-Couch’s career is divided into two phases: the period from 1887 to 1912, when he worked as a journalist and freelance writer, and produced most of his novels and short stories, in London and later Cornwall; and the period from 1912 until his death, when he served as Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge University and fellow of Jesus College at Cambridge. In addition to being an extremely popular lecturer, Quiller-Couch reformed the system of teaching English at Cambridge, his most notable achievement being his role in the creation of the English tripos, a system of examinations for students of English literature at the university. In addition to his work as a writer and educator, Quiller-Couch had a third vocation as a public official in his beloved town of Fowey (pronounced “Foy”) in Cornwall. Though this was the least significant of his achievements from a historical standpoint, in Quiller-Couch’s mind it may have been his proudest, because his heart always remained in Cornwall even when his body could not be with it.
Richard Tobias, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, noted that “in London he contributed to magazines and newspapers, but he lived in Cornwall, and his fiction is set almost exclusively there; in Cambridge he was in residence during term as fellow of Jesus College, but as soon as term ended, he was off to Cornwall.”
In school Q. edited the Oxford Magazine with his friend Charles Cannan, and there began signing his poems and parodies - some of the best he ever wrote, according to Smith - with the initial letter “Q.” Financial difficulties continued to dog him, and he was put in the position of having to support his mother and siblings. Back home in Fowey, he asked Louisa Amelia Hicks to marry him, but they had to wait some time to do so because he could not yet support her.
As a tutor during the summer of 1886, Quiller-Couch began writing his first novel, Dead Man’s Rock, an adventure story about the search for a giant ruby. Like most of his adventure novels, this one was influenced by the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose novel St. Ives, uncompleted at the time of Stevenson’s death in 1894, he would later finish. However, unlike Treasure Island and other Stevenson classics, Smith wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Quiller-Couch’s stories - ‘the most perishable of [his] novels’ - have had little to offer succeeding generations.” He soon followed his debut novel with another adventure set during the English Civil War, The Splendid Spur: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of Mr. John Marvel, a Servant of His Late Majesty King Charles I, in the Years 1642-3 (1888). In 1888 he also published The Astonishing History of Troy Town, the first of many books in which he presented Fowey (the fictional “Troy”) in a gently comical style. His financial success from these books enabled Quiller-Couch to marry in 1889, and in the following year, he moved to London. There he worked for the Liberal weekly Speaker and began a long friendship with the writer J. M. Barrie.
In London Quiller-Couch also published what Smith called “the first and finest” of his short-story collections, Noughts and Crosses: Stories, Studies, and Sketches (1891). An example of his style, including his humorous portrayal of simple Cornish folk and his rendering of the Cornish dialect, is “The Gifts of Feodor Himkoff” from this collection. In the tale, the narrator stops at a cottage and asks an old woman for a glass of milk, and she invites him in for a cup of tea instead. She tells her senile husband, “Isaac, you poor deaf haddock, here’s a strange body for ’ee to look at; tho’ you’m past all pomp but buryin’, I reckon.” Then, as Tobias related in his summation of the story, “Not only is the narrator given a cup of tea - the kind that he estimates would cost a working man two weeks’ labor in London - but also caviar and other delicacies thoroughly out of place in a rough cottage on the Cornish shores.” The back-story slowly emerges as the narrator and the woman chat. The couple have nourished a hatred of Russians ever since their son died fighting in the Crimean War, and one night when a Russian sailor whose ship had wrecked on the nearby rocks knocked on their door for help, they beat him to death. Years later the sailor’s brother, thinking they had cared for his brother but been unable to save his life, began sending them tokens of his thanks - the finest tea and caviar. To the old couple, who have no frame of reference for appreciating them, the regular arrival of these delicacies through the posts is a peculiar burden: “He’s been breaking our heads dro’ the postoffice wi’ such-like balms as these here,” the woman tells the narrator. “’Tis all we can do to get rid of ’em on poor trampin’ fellows same as yourself.” As Tobias concluded in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The urban reporter and the urban reader recognize the irony. The wife misses the point. Readers note her lack of perception and laugh. The silent husband may see his sin and in his silence recognize what his wife cannot understand.”
Among these was a second story collection, The Delectable Duchy: Stories, Studies, and Sketches (1893), whose title became a nickname for Cornwall He edited his first anthology of poems, The Golden Pomp, a Procession of English Lyrics from Surrey to Shirley (1895), and wrote the first of several books in which he offered sensitive portrayals of female characters, la: A Love Story (1895). Four years after Stevenson’s death came St. Ives; Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England, of which Quiller-Couch wrote the last six chapters. According to Smith, “Q’s material was so well integrated and so imitative of Stevenson’s style that few can tell where Q begins and Stevenson ends.” Furthermore, he published the first of many notable works on literature, Adventures in Criticism (1896), and the novel The Ship of Stars (1899), which Smith called one of his best. In the spring of 1899, he began a friendship with another literary figure, Kenneth Grahame. A version of Quiller-Couch appears as a character in The Wind and the Willows, and Grahame even makes a reference to Fowey as “the little grey sea town that clings along one steep side of the harbour.”
In 1901 Quiller-Couch edited The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, which Smith called “the finest anthology of verse published to that time.” Eventually it would go through twenty editions, and a journalist would joke that “no civilized person” in Great Britain, its Dominions, or America could get married without receiving a copy of The Oxford Book as a wedding gift. The volume began a long tradition of Oxford anthologies, of which Quiller-Couch himself edited several.
Quiller-Couch’s prodigious output continued throughout the first twelve years of the twentieth century, during which time he wrote or edited some twenty books of fiction, of which thirteen were novels. With his appointment to the professorship at Cambridge in 1912, however, he turned from fiction toward literary criticism. After the latter year, he produced only two novels and two story collections; after his death, just as Quiller-Couch had completed Stevenson’s book, Daphne du Maurier would finish a third novel, Castle Dor, in 1961.
The next-to-last novel of Quiller-Couch’s lifetime, Nicky-Nan, Reservist (1915), is a tale set during the war then raging in France and illustrates its effects on an English village and a hometown boy who goes away to fight. Nicky-Nan received enthusiastic reviews: “The book has many touches of pathos,” wrote a critic in the New York Times, “and more than one glimpse of inner spiritual conflict, but it also has an abundance of humor.” E. P. Wyckoff in Publishers Weekly promised that “you will read it with undiluted pleasure,” and a commentator in the Saturday Review praised it for “its capital characterization” and the way in which it conveyed “the real smell of the sea and the breeze from the Cornish headlands that it brings with it.”
Around the time the fighting ended, Quiller-Couch produced the final novel of his lifetime, Foe-Farrell: A Romance (1918). Another war tale, this one contained a warning against the moral relativism bred in the trenches of the bitter conflict. Quiller-Couch’s message was that the British should not, in Smith’s words, “let their zeal in prosecuting the war turn them into the enemy.” This was a forward-looking attitude in an age of nationalism, and perhaps for this reason it received less than enthusiastic reviews in some quarters. “The psychological problem” of the protagonist who takes revenge on an adversary “has a grim fascination,” wrote a critic in the Independent, “but, on the whole, it is a morbid, unpleasing book. ” A commentator in the Boston Transcript criticized the writing style: “Nothing is gained by the clumsy manner in which Sir Arthur chooses to tell his tale.” A New Republic critic called it “an absurd story,” and a reviewer in Outlook held that Quiller- Couch “takes an impish delight in violating every law of the unities of construction.”
In fact Quiller-Couch, both as a writer and as an enormously popular lecturer at Cambridge, had begun setting down laws of his own. He had definite ideas of how literature should be approached, concepts which were almost diametrically opposite from later fashions in literary criticism. He believed, for instance, that readers studying a literary work should concentrate on the writer’s intentions rather than substituting their own ideas for what the author meant. Of his many principles regarding the study of literature, Smith wrote, the primary one was his dictum that “Literature is an Art” rather than an exact science; approaches to it should be flexible. From his lectures emerged The Art of Writing (1916), which received considerably more positive reviews than his last novel: “There is much poetic feeling,” observed a critic in the Nation, “in spite of a scheme which is as precise as it is ingenious.” Quiller-Couch’s observations on jargon, in which the author “touches satirically on the pompous, abstract, and meaningless verbiage now so common in newspapers” and other areas of public life were, according to Library Association Record, a high point of the book. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer pronounced On the Art of Writing “the beginning of a liberal education in style.”
In 1918 Quiller-Couch produced the first in the three-part series Studies in Literature. “His studies ofHardy, of Coleridge, of Matthew Arnold, of Swinburne,” wrote a critic in the Boston Transcript, “are both discriminating and appreciative, and he adds on every page something to our appreciation and understanding of English literature.” Quiller-Couch was, in the opinion of a writer in the New Republic, “a scholar who keeps in his scholarship the bearing of a well-read gentleman, whose manner of making a subject his own persuades us, as we read, that it is also ours. We are wrong, of course, but the mistake continues to be pleasant even after we have discovered it.” A Times Literary Supplement contributor called it a “stimulating, sensible, and delightful book,” and a commentator in the Saturday Review held that “all the poetic studies are full of interest and suggestions.”
The author of On the Art of Writing in 1920 produced On the Art of Reading, in the preface of which he announced “the real battle for English lies in our elementary schools, and in the training of our elementary teachers.” It was in these institutions, he asserted, that “the foundations of a sound national teaching in English will have to be laid, as it is there that a wrong trend will lead to incurable issues.” Furthermore, “a liberal education is not an appendage to be purchased by the few humanism is, rather, a quality that can, and should, condition all our teaching.” Likewise this humanism “can, and should, be impressed as a character from a child’s first lesson in reading up to a tutor’s last word to his pupil on the eve of a tripos.” Quiller-Couch, who became involved in Cornish elementary school reform, had also set about reforming the tripos, proposing the creation of an English examination separate from the medieval and modern language ones by substituting literary criticism and comparative literature for philology and the study of the Anglo-Saxon language.
Despite his successes as a critic and an educator, Quiller-Couch suffered a devastating personal loss in 1919 when his son Bevil died while serving with the Allied occupation forces in Germany. According to Smith, “Q never completely recovered from this tragedy. For a time he considered resigning his professorship but decided to stay and throw himself into his work.” In the early part of the 1920s, he began editing work on The King's Treasuries of Literature, published by J. M. Dent, which like the Oxford Books would grow into an extensive series. He also worked with Dover Wilson on editing Shakespeare’s comedies, and edited several biblical anthologies as well. In 1922 he produced a second series of Studies in Literature, which like its predecessor met with acclaim from critics: “The author writes with considerable analytical faculty,” a reviewer in the Dial observed, “and with a warm appreciation of that which was best in the Victorians and their predecessors.” Robert Lynd in the New Statesman assessed the author thus: “There are several literary critics who equal - perhaps surpass - ‘Q’ in intellectual and imaginative curiosity,” but “there is no literary critic except ‘Q’ who could preach the gospel of good literature to youth with just this attractiveness and passion. It is as though ‘Q’ himself had renewed his youth in the company of youth.”
In 1925 Quiller-Couch produced Lecture on Lectures, in which, according to a reviewer in the Springfield Republican, “he holds our attention to every phrase, entertainingly stating the case both for and against the college lecture.” A third volume of Studies in Literature appeared in 1930, of which a writer in the New Statesman observed, “The common quality of the essays is a store of reflection and learning conveyed in a lucid prose beyond the scope of most professors.” With Quiller-Couch approaching his seventies, reviews took on a tone of celebration, both for the man and for his talent as an engaging writer of critical studies. “Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch,” wrote John Cournos in Bookman, “has the supreme gift of a great teacher, that of being able to charm while he instructs.” Quiller-Couch published his last collection of essays, The Poet as Citizen, and Other Papers, in 1935. By then his views had begun to stand out from the changing times, and several reviews were critical. But a commentator for the Boston Transcript found in Quiller-Couch a refreshing change of pace from the increasingly more uncertain times: “Naturally, one would not expect Sir Arthur to furnish much grist for the mill of the modernists, but his conservatism is both convincing and refreshing.”
Just before his death in 1944 Quiller-Couch was working on his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, published in the unfinished form later that year. Despite the fact that it was his life story, the book was not particularly revealing work. Tobias wrote that “one of the few moments of passion in Quiller-Couch’s autobiography is his return home from his first Latin class: he ‘went home as one baptised into a cult. I felt able (aged seven or so) to look my father in the face almost as initiated man to man!”’ Assessing Quiller-Couch’s career as a whole, but particularly the fiction writings that took up the early pah of it, Tobias observed, “At times he seems the quintessence of the Victorian spirit, but he imitates and parodies eighteenth-century styles. He was rarely out of England, but with perfect aplomb, he sets tales in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Corsica - places he never visited.” In sum, “Q registers one set of mind in England at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. His fictional world, in a sense, went to France and never came back from its bloody battles.”