Arthur Quiller-Couch


Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900 and for his literary criticism. He influenced many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84, Charing Cross Road and its sequel, Q's Legacy. His Oxford Book of English Verse was a favourite of John Mortimer fictional character Horace Rumpole.

Life

Arthur Quiller-Couch was born in the town of Bodmin, Cornwall. He was the son of Dr.Thomas Quiller Couch, who was a noted physician, folklorist and historian who married Mary Ford and lived at 63, Fore Street, Bodmin, until his death in 1884. Thomas was the product of the union of two ancient local families, the Quiller family and the Couch family. Arthur was the third in a line of intellectuals from the Couch family. His grandfather, Jonathan Couch, was an eminent naturalist, also a physician, historian, classicist, apothecary, and illustrator. His younger sisters Florence Mabel and Lilian M. were also writers and folklorists.
Arthur Quiller-Couch had two children. His son, Bevil Brian Quiller-Couch, was a war hero and poet, whose romantic letters to his fiancée, the poet May Wedderburn Cannan, were published in Tears of War. Kenneth Grahame inscribed a first edition of his The Wind in the Willows to Arthur's daughter, Foy Felicia, attributing Quiller-Couch as the inspiration for the character Ratty.
He was educated at Newton Abbot Proprietary College, at Clifton College, and Trinity College, Oxford, where he took a First in Classical Moderations and a Second in Greats. From 1886 he was for a brief time a classical lecturer at Trinity. After some journalistic experience in London, mainly as a contributor to the Speaker, he settled in 1891 at Fowey in Cornwall.
In Cornwall he was an active political worker for the Liberal Party. He was knighted in 1910, and in 1928 was made a Bard of the Cornish cultural society Gorseth Kernow, adopting the Bardic name Marghak Cough. He was Commodore of the Royal Fowey Yacht Club from 1911 until his death.
Quiller-Couch died at home in May 1944, after being slightly injured by a jeep near his home in Cornwall in the preceding March. He is buried in Fowey's parish church of St. Fimbarrus.

World War I

Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry 10th Btn..

The 10th was an unusual battalion, having been raised in March 1915, not by the War Office, but by the Mayor and citizens of Truro. It initially had only two officers – Colonel Dudley Acland Mills who had retired from the Royal Engineers six years earlier, and Couch, who was devoid of any military experience. Neither of them was paid. Their work in raising and training a battalion for war was remarkable by any standard, but their herculean efforts appears never to have been recognised by the military hierarchy. It must have been an enormous relief to these two gentlemen when the War Office took over the 10th Battalion on 24 August 1915.

Literary and academic career

In 1887, while he was attending Oxford, he published Dead Man's Rock, a romance in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and later Troy Town, a comic novel set in a fictionalised version of his home town Fowey, and The Splendid Spur. Quiller-Couch was well known for his story "The Rollcall of the Reef", based on the wreck of HMS Primrose during 1809 on the Cornish coast. He published during 1896 a series of critical articles, Adventures in Criticism, and in 1898 he published a completion of Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel, St. Ives.
From his Oxford time he was known as a writer of excellent verse. With the exception of the parodies entitled Green Bays, his poetical work is contained in Poems and Ballads. In 1895 he published an anthology from the 16th- and 17th-century English lyricists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900. Later editions of this extended the period of concern to 1918 and it remained the leading general anthology of English verse until Helen Gardner's New Oxford Book of English Verse appeared in 1972.
In 1910 he published The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales from the Old French. He was the author of a number of popular novels with Cornish settings.
He was appointed King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1912, and retained the chair for the rest of his life. Simultaneously he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College, which he also held until his death. His inaugural lectures as the professor of English literature were published as the book On the Art of Writing. His rooms were on staircase C, First Court, and known as the 'Q-bicle'. He supervised the beginnings of the English Faculty there — an academic diplomat in a fractious community. He is sometimes regarded as the epitome of the school of English literary criticism later modified by his pupil F. R. Leavis.
Alistair Cooke was a notable student of Quiller-Couch and Nick Clarke's semi-official biography of Cooke features Quiller-Couch prominently, noting that he was regarded by the Cambridge establishment as "rather eccentric" even by the university's standards.
Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing editions of some of Shakespeare's plays and several critical works, including Studies in Literature and On the Art of Reading. He edited a companion to his verse anthology: The Oxford Book of English Prose, which was published in 1923. He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945.

Legacy

His Book of English Verse is often quoted by John Mortimer's fictional character Horace Rumpole.
Castle Dor, a re-telling of the Tristan and Iseult myth in modern circumstances, was left unfinished at Quiller-Couch's death and was completed many years later by Daphne du Maurier. As she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph on April 1962, she began the job with considerable trepidation, at the request of Quiller-Couch's daughter and "in memory of happy evenings long ago when 'Q' was host at Sunday supper".
He features as a main character, played by Leo McKern, in the 1992 BBC television feature The Last Romantics. The story focuses on his relationship with his protégé, F. R. Leavis, and the students.
His Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, is the source of the popular writers' adage "murder your darlings":

Works

Fiction

A collected edition of Q's fiction appeared as Tales and Romances''.

Verse