Peter Buchan was described almost contemptuously by Thomas Carlyle as 'a lean-visaged, crane-necked, scraggy-bearded human figure, with an air of enthusiasm, simplicity, distraction and ill-luck'. Yet today, with Carlyle hardly read outside Academia, it is the ballads collected of Buchan that have survived in the rich oral tradition of north-east Scotland to be 'discovered' again by the endeavours of Gavin Greig at the turn of the century and, more recently, by the collectors of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. The importance and prominence of Buchan's ballad texts (they constitute a large percentage of the 'A' texts in Child) is due, I believe, to three important factors: his situation - the first collector to truly tap the oral tradition of the north east, his social standing - less distanced from the roots of the folk tradition than the upper-class <i>literati</i>, and his work as a printer - familiar with the increasingly wider dissemination of song texts as broadsheets and chapbooks. In this study I have tried to trace Buchan's quixotic career and I have been fortunate in having the help of a wide range of letters and manuscripts in the possession of various institutions available only in part to the early biographers of Buchan - Walker and Fairley. Secondly, I have tried to reassess Buchan's work in the context of our wider knowledge of the Scottish and English folk traditions. To this purpose, I have touched only briefly on the controversy concerning the source of Buchan's ballad manuscripts - as this matter has been well dealt with already by, among others, William Walker, Alexander Keith, Hamish Henderson and David Buchan - but instead concentrated on songs other than the classic ballads preserved in Buchan's manuscripts that have been little considered in the past - notably the songs in his long neglected manuscript collection <i>Secret Songs of Silence</i> - comparable in scope and purpose to Burns's <i>Merry Muses</i>. I have also tried to reassess Buchan's important contribution to the delineation of sources for songs collected or collated by Burns which has been either ignored or condemned by Burns editors to this day. Finally, I have collated and updated the bibliographies of Buchan's publications compiled by Cameron and Fairley.

It is a curious fact of the recant scholarship inspired by the "return to Tennyson," that his Arthurian poetry, into which he put a lifetime's thought and skill, has bean almost ignored. While a few articles have dealt with minor points, critics hare been content to ignore these poems, particularly the Idylls of the King, as if they were literary fossils, efforts to put a superficial Victorian patina on the medieval Arthurian chronicles and romances. This critical neglect has meant that there is no clear idea of the extent and kind of tho Arthurian sources upon which Tennyson drew. I believe it is useless to assess Tennyson's Arthurian poetry until we take these sources into consideration, and accordingly the greater part of this thesis is taken up with their systematic examination. Aratny thesis as such is to show that Tennyson's reha: dling of the sources is so extensive and comprehensive that it constitutes an original creation. Within the scope of a work of this kind I cannot claim to have treated, every aspect of Tennyson's Arthurian poetry exhaustively; but I hope the work I have done will make it easier for others to form a picture of the skill and insight with which Tennyson wrote, in order to present the legends in a suitable form, and not simply as idle tales.

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This dissertation attempts to provide a readable annotated edition of nearly one-hundred and twenty letters written by Harriet Martineau (1802-76), between 1837 and 1871. Written to sympathetic and trusted friends, the letters illuminate some of the more attractive aspects of Harriet Martineau's forceful personality, while they also provide a chronicle of her opinions, her reading and writing, and her unusual medical history, during most of her career as a respected radical journalist. The letters of Harriet Martineau also allow some insight into the lives of the rather retiring Wedgwood-Darwin clan, among whose distinguished family members and friends were Charles Darwin and Jane and Thomas Carlyle. The mutual friendship of the Carlyles, Wedgwoods, Erasmus Darwin and Harriet Martineau is the first interest in these letters, for Harriet Martineau recalls and repeats anecdotes about the Carlyles with entire freedom, as she continues to do about other contemporary figures. Among those whom she knew or with whom she corresponded, were Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, and politicians such as Richard Cobdon, Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, Lord Brougham, SLR. Forster, and many others. She also kept up a correspondence with leaders of the radical abolitionists led by William Lloyd Garrison in the United States. Harriet Martineau and the Wedgwoods shared an allegiance to religious dissent and radical, middle-class dominated reform. Her faith in the middle classes and her strict adherence to the "laws" of political economy, however, did not prevent her support for various schemes to aid the working classes, which she recounts with infectious enthusiasm. In addition to their narrative appeal, the letters are in fact a compendium of a particular range of Victorian interests, and they offer a fertile ground of investigation for the social history of the Victorian period.

This thesis explores the relationship between imperial rhetoric and metaphors of literary production. It focuses on British literature from the late nineteenth century, a period that was crucial to the development of 'New Imperialism'. Beginning in the 1870s, when the South African diamond rush radically altered Britain's colonial policy, this thesis offers a reevaluation of the relationship between literature and empire as it is expressed by colonial discourse about South Africa. It examines what is at stake when the same language and imagery used to express the value of literary labour is also drawn upon to popularise colonial expansion. Chapter One investigates the textual practice of 'jewel- setting', the reuse of extracts to create new texts. It juxtaposes the creative ideology that one novelist, Charles Reade, attached to this method with the political symbolism that imbues the recutting and resetting of the famous Koh-i-noor diamond. Chapter Two places Anthony Trollope's relentless literary labour in the context of South African diamond fever and the political rhetoric of rush. It analyses how his 1878 travelogue, South Africa, conveyed the experience of 'rush' to its British readers. Chapter Three offers a counterpoint to the implicitly masculinist energy of rush with an assessment of Lady Barker's maternal perspective on South Africa. Barker, who travelled to Natal as the spouse of a colonial official, represents a revealing confluence of domestic duty and professional authorship in her maternal literary persona. This chapter places that persona in the context of cultural attitudes to home and the mother country. Chapter Four brings together a collection of adventure writers whose boy heroes travelled to South Africa in the 1880s. This chapter explores the relationship between journalism and the evolution of this brand of boys' own fiction and the longing it conveys for an empire innocent of the business of diamonds.

William Bodham Donne (1807-1882) was born in Norfolk, attended school in Suffolk and entered Cambridge University in 1824. Elected an 'Apostle', he went down without graduating, objecting to making the necessary religious subscriptions. Returning to Norfolk, and moving later to Suffolk, he began the career which would result in the writing over the years of eight books and 170+ articles in learned journals. Although a classical specialist, his range of interests was wide, reflected in his publications.;In 1852 he became librarian of the London Library and in 1857 the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, a post he held until retirement in 1874. His evidence to the 1866 Select Committee of the House of Commons on theatrical licensing and censorship is central to an understanding of nineteenth century practice. While holder of the Examinership, he directed for a time the command performances at Windsor Castle, for which he was rewarded by Queen Victoria. In 1867 he composed his magnum opus, editing the correspondence of George III with Lord North.;He was the friend of many prominent literary figures of his day, including Bernard Barton, J W Blakesley, Edward Fitzgerald, J A Froude, J M Kemble, Charles Merivale, James Spedding, W M Thackeray, Richard Chenevix Trench, as well as the actress, Fanny Kemble, with all of whom he engaged in voluminous correspondence.;The thesis offers a portrait (not formal biography) in a landscape which is both geographical and intellectual. It reveals Donne as a kindly, discriminating literary critic, omnivorous in his reading, retiring in his habits, loyal to his friends. One of them wrote - 'Many men are liked, Donne is loved'.

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