Bertram Dobell

Bertram Dobell
Portrait from In Memoriam. Bertram Dobell. 1842-1914
Born(1842-01-09)9 January 1842
Battle, East Sussex, England
Died14 December 1914(1914-12-14) (aged 72)
Haverstock Hill, London, England
Occupations
  • Bookseller
  • scholar
  • editor
  • poet
  • essayist
  • publisher
Spouse
Eleanor Wymer
​
​
(m. 1869; died 1910)​
Children5
Signature

Bertram Dobell (9 January 1842 – 14 December 1914) was an English bookseller, literary scholar, editor, poet, essayist and publisher.

Biography

Bertram Dobell was born on 9 January 1842 in Battle, East Sussex, to Edward Dobell, a tailor, and his wife Elizabeth.[1] He received little education and started work at a young age.[2] Dobell married Eleanor Wymer (1847–1910) on 24 July 1869; they had five children.[3]

Dobell opened a newsvendor's shop in 1872;[2] he went on to become the proprietor of two bookshops in Charing Cross Road, which were well respected by contemporary book collectors.[3] In addition to continuing "the good tradition which knits writers, printers, vendors, and purchasers of books together," Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote, Dobell was "at pains to make his second-hand catalogues better reading than half the new books printed, and they cost us nothing."[4]

Dobell formed close friendships with a number of contemporary writers, most notably the poet James Thomson, whose poems he helped publish in book form.[3]

Dobell died from liver cancer at his home in Haverstock Hill, London, on 14 December 1914, at the age of 72.[3]

Works

As an author, Dobell was best known for his editions of the works of Thomas Traherne (whose unpublished manuscripts he had discovered), Shelley, Goldsmith, Strode and James Thomson.[3]

At first, Dobell issued his books through other publishers, but after some collaborative ventures, he began publishing under his own imprint, beginning with a "cheaper and more popular" edition of Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night in 1899.[5]

This was followed by a privately published collection of his own verse, Rosemary and Pansies (1901), which, after favorable reception, he reissued in expanded form in 1904. This received some praise for its satires and epigrams,[6] and contained, as well, a dozen haikai, one of the first English experiments with the recently-imported Japanese poetic form afterward known as haiku.[7]

Dobell's other books included A Century of Sonnets (1910), and the biographies Sidelights on Charles Lamb (1903) and The Laureate of Pessimism: a Sketch of the Life of James Thomson (1910).[3]

References

  1. ^ "Bertram Dobell Biography (1842-1914)". Victorian Era. Archived from the original on 2 July 2020. Retrieved 20 February 2021.
  2. ^ a b McCabe, Joseph (1920). A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists. London: Watts & Co. p. 218.
  3. ^ a b c d e f "Dobell, Bertram". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/32843. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ^ Quillen-Couch, Arthur (1924). "Of Oliver Goldsmith and a Printer's Devil". Adventures in Criticism. London: Cambridge University Press. p. 29.
  5. ^ Bradbury, S. (1909). "A List of the Works Written or Edited by Bertram Dobell". Bertram Dobell; Bookseller and Man of Letters. London: Bertram Dobell. pp. 28–32.
  6. ^ "Satire and Seriousness," The Outlook, 9 July 1904, 591.
  7. ^ Edward Marx, Yone Noguchi: The Stream of Fate, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara: Botchan Books, 2019), 275. ISBN 978-1-939913-05-0.

Further reading