Geoffrey Tillotson, FBA (30 June 1905 – 15 October 1969) was an English literary scholar and academic. He was Professor of English Literature at Birkbeck College, London, from 1944 to 1969.

Biography

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The son of a millworker, he attended Keighley Grammar School before reading English at Balliol College, Oxford, on a county scholarship (graduating with a BA in 1927 and the BLitt in 1930), after which he worked briefly as a teacher, before lecturing at University College London from 1931 to 1944.

He was principally interested in the works of Alexander Pope and in 18th- and 19th-century literature and poetry; especially Victorian literature.

Some of the work was carried out with his wife, the literary scholar Kathleen Tillotson.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1967.[1]

Selected works

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  • A View of Victorian Literature (1922; reprinted 1978)
  • On the Poetry of Pope (1938; 2nd ed. 1950)
  • Essays in Criticism and Research (1942)
  • English Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (1945)
  • The Moral Poetry of Pope (1946)
  • The Manner of Proceeding in Certain Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Poems (1948)
  • Poets, Scientists and Men: An Inter-Faculty Lecture Delivered on 7th December 1948 (1948)
  • Criticism and the Nineteenth Century (1951)
  • Thackeray the Novelist (1954)
  • Pope and Human Nature (1958)
  • Augustan Studies (1961)
  • Augustan Poetic Diction (1964)
  • Mid-Victorian Studies (1965) with Kathleen Tillotson
  • Thackeray. The Critical Heritage (1968) editor with Donald Hawes

References

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  1. ^ Hawes, Donald (4 October 2012). "Tillotson, Geoffrey (1905–1969)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/101274. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

Further reading

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