John Churton Collins

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]

• Bolingbroke: A Historical Study (1886).
• Illustrations of Tennyson (1891).
• The Study of English Literature (1891).
• Essays and Studies (1895).
• A Treasury of Minor British Poetry (1896).
• The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1900).
• Ephemera Critica (1901).
• Jonathan Swift, a Biographical and Critical Study (1902).
• Critical Essays and Literary Fragments (1903).
• Studies in Shakespeare (1904).
• Studies in Poetry and Criticism (1905).
• 13 essays, most on 18th century poets, in Poets' Country, ed. Andrew Lang (1907).
• Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau in England (1908).^[8]
• Greek Influence on English Poetry (1910).
• Life and Memoirs of John Churton Collins (1911).
• The Posthumous Essays of John Churton Collins (1912).