Oxford Companions

Sir Paul Harvey's The Oxford Companion to English Literature was first published in 1932, and it has been in print continuously ever since. The latest edition of the book has recently been published. A look at its history provides insight into the changing picture of the British literary and cultural landscape.

The original appearance of this book occurred by chance. Harvey had been a British civil servant; wanting to do something purposeful after his retirement, he approached the Oxford University Press and asked whether he could write something for them. Kenneth Sisam of the press suggested that he might compile a broad reference book about English literature, and offered to pay him five hundred pounds for the job. Harvey took up the challenge and started work on it in 1927 with enthusiasm and vigor. He covered, in his own words, "fifty generations of English authors" all by himself. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his fellow Englishman Dr. Johnson, who single-handedly compiled his great Dictionary (1755). The latter took up the vast store of English words and went on to explain their meanings with "examples from the best Writers"—over one hundred thousand such examples in fact. Johnson took only nine years (amidst ill-health, poverty, and neglect) to complete his Dictionary, whereas forty French academies took fifty-five years to produce Dictionannaire de l'Academie française. Harvey's own performance was equally remarkable. He single-handedly covered over a thousand years of English literature and published his book within five years.

That Harvey completed this vast undertaking without the resources available to a modern editor is astonishing. He lists the few reference books, such as the Dictionary of National Biography, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and works on classical literature, mythology, religion, and history then available. Only in the case of American literature did he seek actual contributions from the Brooklyn-born author and editor Ben Ray Redman, who filled "gaps in the treatment of American writers and subjects." Oxford University Press was so pleased with the reception of Harvey's book that it commissioned him to edit the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, as well as much of the Oxford Companion to French Literature. In fact, unbeknown to Harvey and his publishers, both had created the publication phenomenon called the Oxford Companion, under which title about seventy volumes have so far been published, the latest being the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010). This was to be different from the "Oxford Book." Arthur Quiller-Couch had first published the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900 in 1900, which, unlike subsequent Oxford books on a wide variety of subjects and topics, was strictly limited in scope by its title. Harvey, however, inaugurated the concept of an Oxford Companion that was to be much more comprehensive and encyclopaedic, covering the whole range of related material relevant to the title of the book. He had said that "there is no subject on which [English literature] does not touch," and therefore he provided details not only about English writers and their works but also about their historical, religious and philosophical backgrounds, literary journals, clubs, theaters, actors and actresses. It is a measure of the literary culture of the time that Harvey's book soon became very popular among the general public, both at home and abroad, and that this 866-page book was reprinted three times within four months, December 1933-March 1934.

Sir (Henry) Paul Harvey was not a literary man. Born in 1869, he was the illegitimate child of the highly regarded French sculptor Baron Henri de Triquetti and his pupil, the strikingly good-looking Englishwoman Susan Durant, who soon gained her own renown as a sculptress. She died when Paul was still very young, and he was brought up, first by his stepsister, and later by W. B. Yeats's friend Augusta, Lady Gregory. Henry James often met Harvey as a little boy in Lady Gregory's house. James found in him "a source of much delectation" and took...