"Literary Links" - T.S.Eliot in Oxford

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

T.S.Eliot

·         Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was American born but arrived in Oxford in 1914 with a scholarship to study philosophy.  He was based at Merton College.

Merton College Library

  Oxford did not win him over and he was gone within a year claiming “I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls… Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.”  However, England did win him over for in 1927 he became a British citizen.  His most famous works are The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.  The latter was adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber into the musical Cats.  

This is an excerpt from the tour Oxford’s Noble and Great Ones - Part 1  which explores around the southern part of Oxford.  The full tour is found on www.obelisktours.co.uk

"Literary Links" - Jacob Tonson

"Literary Links" is a series of posts celebrating Britain's wonderful links with great authors, dramatists and poets.

Jacob Tonson (1656-1736) is buried in this Ledbury graveyard.   

His name is probably unfamiliar to you, but he published the works of the literary greats of his time such as John Milton (1608-1674),  Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Alexander Pope (1688-1744),  Richard Steele (1672-1729), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), and John Dryden (1631-1700).    He revived the works of Shakespeare and published The Spectator. 

Jacob Tonson

John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost, never brought Milton much of a return during his life.  His political leanings made him a hot potato and publishers were reluctant to invest in him.   After his death the monarchy and the political scene had shifted and Tonson, who now owned all publishing rights to Milton's epic poem, was able to cash in making him a small fortune.

He served as Secretary of the Kit-Kat Club which was both a political and literary club in London.  Why Kit-Kat?  The answer is unclear, but one contemporary gave this reason: 

"Whence deathless Kit-Kat took his name

Few critics can unriddle

 Some say from pastrycook it came

 And some from Cat and Fiddle.

 From no trim beaus its name it boasts

 Grey statesmen or green wits

But from the pell-mell pack of toasts

 Of old Cats and young Kits."

Tonson spent his working life in London, but he chose Ledbury as his retirement place.   Here he spent the last sixteen years of his life and here he is buried. 

This is an excerpt from the tour Ledbury which explores this medieval market town.  The full tour is found on www.obelisktours.co.uk