Ernest Rhys

Edit links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ernest Rhys
Born
Ernest Percival Rhys

(1859-07-17)17 July 1859
Islington, London, England
Died25 May 1946(1946-05-25) (aged 86)
London, England
Occupation(s)Writer, editor
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1891; died 1929)​
Children5

Ernest Percival Rhys (/riːs/ REESS; 17 July 1859 – 25 May 1946) was a Welsh-English writer, best known for his role as founding editor of the Everyman's Library series of affordable classics. He wrote essays, stories, poetry, novels and plays.[1]

Early life

Rhys was born in

Hockerill. Shortly afterwards his father set up in the wine and spirits trade, working for Walter Gilbey in premises in Nott Square, Carmarthen, where before marriage he had been in training for the ministry. The family was in Carmarthen for a number of years, and had a Welsh-speaking maid. In 1865 John Rees was transferred to another Gilbey shop, in Newcastle upon Tyne.[2][3]

After home education with a governess, Rhys spent two years at Bishop's Stortford Grammar School as a boarder, leaving in poor health. He then attended a Newcastle school run by a German master, acquiring some German and French. He then spent a desultory period working in his father's office. In 1876 he took up an apprenticeship as a mining engineer, or "coal viewer". Against the wishes of his father, Rhys did not apply to the University of Oxford.[4]

Rhys worked through his apprenticeship in the

Lower Weardale, and wrote extensively, poetry and prose, without being published. He set up a library, a book group and a programme of lectures. He described the miners' life in his story collection Black Horse Pit (1925).[6][8][4]

On his own account, Rhys owed his first literary commission, and his interest in poetry, to

John Rhys.[7]

Early associations

Rhys had connections to the

American Ethical Union. In his early life, Chubb was a disciple of Thomas Davidson, founder of the Fellowship of the New Life, and indirectly of the Fabian Society. Chubb with Rhys at the start of the 1880s mixed in these circles, and also with the Social Democratic Federation. Rhys kept up during the decade with socialists such as Edward Carpenter.[5][12][13]

Rhys was one of a number of British socialists who visited Walt Whitman;[14] it followed a postal introduction in 1885 by William Michael Rossetti.[15]

In London

Turning to writing in London as a profession from 1886, Rhys built up a steady reputation as a reviewer for periodicals.[2] The American journey on which the meeting with Walt Whitman occurred is described in Everyman Remembers, Rhys's autobiography. It was also the occasion of his encounter with Edmund Clarence Stedman in New York, and dates to 1887/8. He and Stedman became correspondents.[16][17][18] In 1890, he was sharing rooms in Hampstead with Arthur Symons.[19]

Rhys married his wife

Leigh Hunt, who moved to the unsalubrious Vale in 1816.[21][22] They moved on from "Hunt Cottage", but within Hampstead so-called, to a house in Hermitage Lane, now Childs Hill, which they named "Derwen".[23] The Rhyses there held a form of literary salon.[24]

In 1906, Rhys persuaded J. M. Dent the publisher to start out on the ambitious Everyman's Library project. When Rhys died in London on 25 May 1946, 983 Everyman titles had been produced.[2][25]

London associations

In 1887 Rhys met W. B. Yeats at a Sunday political gathering called by Morris; he later introduced Yeats to the duo Michael Field.[26] It was at a garden party held by Yeats that Rhys first met Grace Little, his future wife.[18]

In February 1890 Rhys was a founder member of the Rhymers' Club in London.[2] In June of that year he met the poet John Davidson at a Sunday gathering in Hampstead held by William Sharp. Davidson became a recruit to the Rhymers' Club.[27] In its early form, the club was for "Celtic" poets.[28] That restriction changed in January 1891, with a meeting at the base of the Century Guild of Artists in Fitzroy Street.[27] Rhys also attended Yeats's evenings in the Woburn Buildings, St. Pancras, meeting there Maud Gonne and the young Rupert Brooke.[29]

Chapter XIX of Everyman Remembers describes an occasion at Rhys's home attended by Yeats, Davidson,

Ford Madox Hueffer and D. H. Lawrence. It has been argued that this gathering, dated to 1909, must be a conflation of events, since chronology makes it implausible that Davidson and Lawrence were both there.[30] That year, Rhys and Ernest Radford were 1890s figures invited to the founding meeting of the poets' club set up by F. S. Flint and T. E. Hulme.[31]

The Rhyses also knew

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.[2] Evelyn Waugh, on the other hand, came to dislike the Rhys style of family and literary entertainment, by 1920.[33]

Works

As editor

  • with John Gwenogvryn Evans, The Text of the Bruts from the Red Book of Hergest (1890) editors
  • Literary Pamphlets Chiefly Relating to Poetry from Sidney to Byron (1897) editor
  • Lays of the Round Table and Other Lyric Romances (1905) editor
  • Fairy Gold: A book of Old English Fairy Tales (1906) editor
  • A Century of English Essays (1913) editor
  • The New Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (1914) editor
  • Browning & His Poetry (1918) editor
  • The Golden Treasury of Longer Poems (1921) editor
  • The Growth of Political Liberty: A Source Book of English History (1921) editor
  • The Haunters and the Haunted: Ghost Stories and Tales of the Supernatural (1921) editor
  • 31 Stories by Thirty and One Authors (1923) editor
  • Volume 8 of Library of World’s Best Literature Ancient and Modern, Thirty Volumes, edited by Charles Dudley Warner, R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, publishers, 1897, contains a rather long section (47 pages, pp. 3403–3450), devoted comprehensively to Celtic literature, written by William Sharp and Rhys.

References

  1. ^ "RHYS, Ernest". The International Who's Who in the World. 1912. p. 893.
  2. ^
    doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/35733. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  3. ^ Roberts, John Kimberley (1983). Ernest Rhys. University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council. pp. 1–2.
  4. ^ a b Roberts, John Kimberley (1983). Ernest Rhys. University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council. p. 3.
  5. ^
    ISBN 9781317634812
    .
  6. ^
    ISBN 9781587295997
    .
  7. ^
    ISBN 9780748626274
    .
  8. ^
    ISBN 9780300098082
    .
  9. ISBN 9780191637919
    .
  10. ISBN 9781783745036
    .
  11. ISBN 9781317087250
    .
  12. ^ MacKenzie, Norman Ian; MacKenzie, Jeanne (1979). The First Fabians. Quartet Books. p. 21.
  13. ^ "Chubb, Percival Ashley, 1860-1960, Fabian - Archives Hub". archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk.
  14. ISBN 9781317634805
    .
  15. ISBN 9781317087250
    .
  16. ISBN 9780674222250
    .
  17. ISBN 9780299088705
    .
  18. ^ a b c Roberts, John Kimberley (1983). Ernest Rhys. University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council. p. 4.
  19. ISBN 9780198182481
    .
  20. ^
    ISBN 9780198605348
    .
  21. ^ Rhys, Ernest (1931). Everyman Remembers. Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. p. 213.
  22. ISBN 9781408708699
    .
  23. ^ Roberts, John Kimberley (1983). Ernest Rhys. University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council. p. 5.
  24. ^
    ISBN 9780804718424
    .
  25. ^ "Mr. Ernest Rhys dies". Evening Standard. London. 25 May 1946. p. 5. Retrieved 17 September 2023 – via Newspapers.com.
  26. ISBN 9780192880857
    .
  27. ^
    ISBN 9780198182481
    .
  28. ISBN 9780820407692
    .
  29. ISBN 9781349029921
    .
  30. JSTOR 3831316
  31. ISBN 9780521086813
    .
  32. ISBN 9780393306057
    .
  33. ISBN 9780393306057
    .
  34. ^ Roberts, John Kimberley (1983). Ernest Rhys. University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council. pp. 45–6.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ernest_Rhys&oldid=1176621147"