Logan Pearsall Smith

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Logan Pearsall Smith
Lady Henry Somerset with Hannah Whitall Smith, Mary Brenson, Logan Pearsall Smith, Karin Stephen and Ray Strachey.jpg
Logan Pearsall Smith (2nd from the right) with Hannah Whitall Smith (his mother, seated), and, from left: Ray Strachey, Mary Berenson (his sister), Karin Stephen and Lady Henry Somerset.
Born(1865-10-18)18 October 1865
Millville, New Jersey
Died2 March 1946(1946-03-02) (aged 80)
London, England
OccupationEssayist, critic, autobiographer
CitizenshipBritish
Alma mater Haverford College, Harvard College, University of Berlin, Balliol College, Oxford
Subject17th century divines
Relatives Robert Pearsall Smith (father), Hannah Whitall Smith (mother) and sisters Alys Pearsall Smith and Mary Berenson

Logan Pearsall Smith (18 October 1865 – 2 March 1946) was an American-born British essayist and critic. Harvard and Oxford educated, he was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and was an expert on 17th century divines. His Words and Idioms made him an authority on correct English language usage. He wrote his autobiography, Unforgotten Years, in 1938.

Contents

Early life

Age and Death

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.

Logan Pearsall Smith [1]

Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey. [2] He was the son of the prominent Quakers Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, and a descendant of James Logan, who was William Penn's secretary and the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania in the 18th century. [3] [4] His mother's family had become wealthy from its glass factories. [3] [4] [5] He lived for a time as a boy in England. [3] In his 1938 autobiography, Smith describes how in his youth he came to be a friend of Walt Whitman in the poet's latter years. [6]

Smith's sister Alys was the first wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell. His sister Mary was married twice, first to the Irish barrister Benjamin Conn "Frank" Costelloe. Their two daughters were Ray Strachey and Karin Stephen, in-laws to Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, respectively. Mary later married the art historian Bernard Berenson. [7]

Education

Smith attended the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, Haverford College, Harvard College, and the University of Berlin. [8] Smith later studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1891. [6]

Career

Smith employed a succession of young secretary/companions to help him. This post was Cyril Connolly's first job in 1925 and he was to be strongly influenced by Smith. Robert Gathorne-Hardy succeeded Connolly in this post. [9]

Authorial Vanity

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Logan Pearsall Smith [1]

Smith was an authority on 17th century divines. He was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and his Trivia has been highly rated. He was a literary perfectionist and could take days refining his sentences. [9] With Words and Idioms he became a recognised authority on the correct use of English. He is now probably most remembered for his autobiography Unforgotten Years (1938). He was much influenced by Walter Pater. He was a devotee of Jane Austen's fiction and referred to himself as a "Mansfield Parker." [10] As well as his employees listed, his followers included Desmond MacCarthy, John Russell, R. C. Trevelyan, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He was, in part, the basis for the character of Nick Greene (Sir Nicholas Greene) in Virginia Woolf's Orlando . [11]

Personal life

He settled in England after Oxford with occasional forays to continental Europe and became a British subject in 1913. He divided his time between Chelsea, where he was a close friend of Desmond MacCarthy and Rose Macaulay, [6] and a Tudor farmhouse at Warsash near the Solent, called Big Chilling. [9]

Gathorne-Hardy described Smith as "a largish man with a stoop that disguised his height". [12] Kenneth Clark further wrote "His tall frame, hunched up, with head thrust forward like a bird, was balanced unsteadily on vestigial legs". [13]

Politically he was a socialist, having been converted by Graham Wallas, a founder of the Fabian Society.[ citation needed ]

His portrait, made in 1932 by Ethel Sands, is at the National Portrait Gallery, London. [14]

Works

Notes

  1. 1 2 Logan Pearsall Smith. Afterthoughts: Life and Human Nature. Statesman and Nation Publishing Company; 1931.
  2. Logan Pearsall Smith Manuscripts, 1881–1943, Kent State University. Accessed 11 February 2008,
  3. 1 2 3 Logan Pearsall Smith. Unforgotten years. Little, Brown and Company; 1939.
  4. 1 2 Robert Allerton Parker. A Family of Friends: The Story of the Transatlantic Smiths . Museum Press; 1960.
  5. Barbara Strachey. Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Women. Universe Books; 1980. ISBN   978-0-87663-396-0.
  6. 1 2 3 Logan Pearsall Smith; Edwin Tribble. A chime of words: the letters of Logan Pearsall Smith. Ticknor & Fields; March 1984.
  7. Palmer, Alan (1987). Who's Who in Bloomsbury. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 17–18.
  8. Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years; Edwin Tribble (ed.), A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith
  9. 1 2 3 Jeremy Lewis. Cyril Connolly: A Life . Random House; 29 February 2012. ISBN   978-1-4464-9970-2.
  10. Looser, Devoney (2017). The Making of Jane Austen. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 40. ISBN   978-1421422824.
  11. M.H. Whitworth, "Logan Pearsall Smith and Orlando," Review of English Studies 55 (2004)
  12. Robert Gathorne Hardy; Logan Pearsall Smith. Recollections of Logan Pearsall Smith. The Story of a Friendship. [With a Portrait]. London; 1949.
  13. Kenneth Clark. Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait. Hamish Hamilton; 1974. ISBN   978-0-241-11409-4.
  14. (Lloyd) Logan Pearsall Smith. Your Paintings: Ethel Sands. BBC. Retrieved 18 January 2014.

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