The Idler was an illustrated monthly magazine published in Great Britain from 1892 to 1911. It was founded by the author Robert Barr, who brought in the humorist Jerome K. Jerome as co-editor, and its contributors included many of the leading writers and illustrators of the time.
The Idler generally catered to the popular taste, printing light pieces and sensational fiction. The magazine published short stories, serialised novels, humour pieces, poetry, memoirs, travel writing, book and theatre reviews, interviews and cartoons. It also included a monthly feature called 'The Idlers' Club', in which a number of writers would offer their views on a particular topic.
Most of The Idler's contributors were popular and prolific writers of the time. Some of them, such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain and Ernest Bramah, are still read today.
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics is a popular anthology of English poetry, originally selected for publication by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861. It was considerably revised, with input from Tennyson, about three decades later. Palgrave excluded all poems by poets then still alive.
McClure's or McClure's Magazine (1893–1929) was an American illustrated monthly periodical popular at the turn of the 20th century. The magazine is credited with having started the tradition of muckraking journalism, and helped direct the moral compass of the day.
The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 is an anthology of English poetry, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, that had a very substantial influence on popular taste and perception of poetry for at least a generation. It was published by Oxford University Press in 1900; in its india-paper form it was carried widely around the British Empire and in war as a 'knapsack book'. It sold close to 500,000 copies in its first edition. In 1939, the editor revised it, deleting several poems that he regretted including and adding instead many poems published before 1901 as well as poems published up to 1918. The second edition is now available online.
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse is a poetry anthology edited by Philip Larkin. It was published in 1973 by Oxford University Press with ISBN 0-19-812137-7. Larkin writes in the short preface that the selection is wide rather than deep; and also notes that for the post-1914 period it is more a collection of poems, than of poets. The remit was limited by him to poets with a period of residence in the British Isles. Larkin's generous selection of Thomas Hardy's poems has been noted for its influence on Hardy's later reputation. On the other hand, he was criticized, notably by Donald Davie, for his inclusion of "pop" poets such as Brian Patten. The volume contains works by 207 poets.
The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950 is a poetry anthology edited by Helen Gardner, and published in New York and London in 1972 by Clarendon Press. It was intended as a replacement for the older Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse. Selections were largely restricted to British and Irish poets.
William Arthur Dunkerley was an English journalist, novelist and poet. He was born in Manchester, spent a short time after his marriage in the US before moving to Ealing, West London, where he served as deacon and teacher at the Ealing Congregational Church from the 1880s. In 1922 he moved to Worthing in Sussex, where he became the town's mayor.
The Penguin poetry anthologies, published by Penguin Books, have at times played the role of a "third force" in British poetry, less literary than those from Faber and Faber, and less academic than those from Oxford University Press..
The Oxford University Press published a long series of poetry anthologies, dealing in particular with British poetry but not restricted to it, after the success of the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). The Oxford poetry anthologies are traditionally seen as 'establishment' in attitude, and routinely therefore are subjects of discussion and contention. They have been edited both by well-known poets and by distinguished academics. In the limited perspective of canon-formation, they have mostly been retrospective and well-researched, rather than breaking fresh ground.
Poems of Today was a series of anthologies of poetry, almost all Anglo-Irish, produced by the English Association.
These are Oxford poetry anthologies of English poetry, which select from a given period. See also The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse and Eighteenth century women poets: an Oxford anthology.
Dying Inside is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg. It was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1972, and both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1973.
Robert Barr was a Scottish-Canadian short story writer and novelist who also worked as a newspaper and magazine editor.
— closing lines of Rudyard Kipling's If—, first published this year
Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century.
Cassell's Magazine is a British magazine that was published monthly from 1897 to 1912. It was the successor to Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper, (1853–1867) becoming Cassell's Family Magazine in 1874, Cassell's Magazine in 1897, and, after 1912, Cassell's Magazine of Fiction.
International Short Stories is a three-volume anthology of outstanding English, American, and French short stories and novellae of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. It was published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1910. The first volume features celebrated short fiction from the United States, the second volume of England, and the third of France. The three-volume series was compiled by Frances J. Reynolds, and edited by William Patten.
"In the Neolithic Age" is a poem by the English writer Rudyard Kipling. It was published in the December 1892 issue of The Idler and in 1896 in his poetry collection The Seven Seas. The poem is the source of the quotation: "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / And every single one of them is right."
George Wylie Hutchinson (1852–1942) was a painter and leading illustrator in Britain and was from Great Village, Nova Scotia, Canada. He illustrated the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Hall Caine, Robert Louis Stevenson and Israel Zangwill. His paintings inspired the poem "Large Bad Picture" and "Poem", both by Elizabeth Bishop, his great grand niece. Hutchinson was a contributor to and subject of the novel The Master (1895) by Israel Zangwill, with whom he was a close friend.