John Churton Collins | |
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Born | Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire, England | 26 March 1848
Died | 15 September 1908 | (aged 60)
Alma mater | Balliol College |
John Churton Collins (26 March 1848 – 15 September 1908) was a British literary critic.
Churton Collins was born at Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire, England. From King Edward's School, Birmingham, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1872, and at once devoted himself to a literary career, as journalist, essayist and lecturer. His first book was a study of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1874), and later he edited various classical English writers, and published volumes on Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England (1886),[1] The Study of English Literature (1891),[2] a study of Dean Swift (1893), Essays and Studies (1895),[3] Ephemera Critica (1901), Essays in Poetry and Criticism (1905), and Rousseau and Voltaire (1908), his original essays being sharply controversial in tone, but full of knowledge.[4]
In 1904 he became professor of English literature at Birmingham University.[5] For many years he was a prominent University Extension lecturer, and a constant contributor to the principal reviews. On 15 September 1908 he was found dead in a ditch near Lowestoft, Suffolk, at which place he had been staying with a doctor for the benefit of his health. The circumstances necessitated the holding of an inquest, the verdict being that of accidental death.[4]
Lord Tennyson, a target of Collins' pen,[6] referred to him as "a louse in the locks of literature".[7]
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