Thomas Campbell | Biography

Thomas Campbell's neglected biographical works spring not from a curiosity about individuals but from opinions about literature and from a desire to make a wider range of earlier poetry accessible to a popular readership. His most important biographical project, Specimens of the British Poets; with Biographical and Critical Notices, and an Essay on English Poetry (1819) is an ambitious extension of the plan of Samuel Johnson's Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (1779-1781), dealing with 238 named (and many anonymous) authors from Geoffrey Chaucer to Christopher Anstey. The biographical sketches in this work are, Campbell says, "necessarily and designedly only miniatures of biography," but they reveal important assumptions about the relationship between life and writing, and they bring to biography the fastidiousness and refinement of taste for which Campbell was renowned. His other biographical works are his Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834), his introduction to...
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