Texts of lectures and talks given by Professor Bonamy Dobre, and notes on English literature by him

The contents of the folders are as follows: (1) Notes on prose and criticism. 80 ff.; (2) Notes on the Victorians. Lecture on Thackeray. Inaugural lecture, Leeds, 19 October, 1936. W.S. Knickerbocker's paper on Victorian education and the idea of culture. 107 ff.; (3) Notes on Shakespeare. Broadcast talk on "The phoenix and the turtle". Lecture on Shakespeare's Romances. 164 ff.; (4) Lectures on approaches to poetry, approaches to criticism, biography, satire, literature, and politics. 182 ff.; (5) Notes on poetry, lyric, Donne's prosody, and for a speech on ends and means to the English-Speaking Union. 102 ff.; (6) Lecture and notes on Milton, and lecture on Milton and Dryden. 80 ff.; (7) Lectures and notes on Dryden, and another copy of the lecture on Milton and Dryden. 171 ff.; (8) Notes on the 19th century (to 1837). 8 ff.; (9) Notes on drama. Draft of broadcast on tragedy. 82 ff.; (10) Notes on 18th century prose. Lecture on Defoe. Lecture on Chesterfield and France. Lecture on the classical age in English literature. Lecture on great writers of the early 18th century. Article by George Santayana on Bishop Berkeley. 123 ff.; (11) Notes on the novel. Lecture on Yorkshire regional novelists. 127 ff.; (12) Notes on Ben Jonson and other seventeenth century poets. Lecture on the reading of eighteenth century poetry. 80 ff.

The son of Bonamy Dobre and Violet Chase, Bonamy (the younger) was born in 1891 and educated at Haileybury and the R.M.A., Woolwich. Commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1910, he served in France and Palestine, and in the Second World War attained to the rank of Lt.-Col. He graduated in 1921 from Christ's College, Cambridge, then lived mainly in France until 1925, when he was appointed a lecturer in English at Queen Mary College, London. There he was active in journalism and as theatre critic for the Nation & Athenaeum. Between 1926 and 1936 he was Professor of English at Cairo before coming to his professorship at Leeds. After retirement in 1955 he became Gresham Professor of Rhetoric in London. He died in 1974. Dobre is particularly remembered for his work on Restoration dramatists, eighteenth-century English literature, and Kipling. He was also a member of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) and of the editorial board of Universities Quarterly

Access is unrestricted

Deposited 1971; on permanent loan during the lifetime of Professor Dobre and of his daughter Georgina Dobre

In English

A selective bibliography of Bonamy Dobre up to 1962, prepared by Margaret Britton, was published in the Festschrift, Of Books and Humankind (1964), edited by John Butt