Howard Erskine-Hill

Howard Henry Erskine-Hill, FBA (19 June 1936 – 26 February 2014) was an English literary scholar most notable for his work on the eighteenth century poet Alexander Pope.[1]

He was born in Wakefield and studied at a Methodist boarding school in Harrogate, Ashville College.[1] He studied English with philosophy at the University of Nottingham and upon graduating in 1957, wrote his PhD thesis (also at Nottingham) on Alexander Pope.[2] His first book, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope, was published in 1975. In this work he sought to place Pope's work in its historical context by analysing six figures who featured prominently in Pope's life and poetry.[1] His next book, The Augustan Idea in English Literature, was published in 1983 and explored how writers from the time of Shakespeare to Pope used the Roman Emperor Augustus as a model to praise or criticise politics.[1]

From 1960 to 1969 Erskine-Hill taught at Swansea University, from 1969 until 1980 he was University Lecturer in English at Jesus College, Cambridge and from 1980 he was Reader in Literary History at Pembroke College, Cambridge.[2] From 1994 until his retirement in 2003 he was Professor of Literary History. In 1981 he was elected a fellowship of the British Academy.[1]

Erskine-Hill's political views were originally left-wing but he moved to the right whilst at Cambridge and towards the end of his life his Euroscepticism caused him to support the UK Independence Party. Throughout his life he was a supporter of Amnesty International.[1]

Abandoning the atheism of his student days, he became a member of the Church of England. In 1994, after the Church of England decided to ordain women, he converted to the Roman Catholic Church.[1]

Works

  • The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example, and the Poetic Response (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
  • The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Hodder Arnold, 1983).
  • Swift: Gulliver's Travels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
  • Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
  • Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 The Daily Telegraph, 'Professor Howard Erskine-Hill - obituary' (13 May 2014), retrieved 10 December 2017.
  2. 1 2 The Times, 'Howard Erskine-Hill, 1936-2014' (17 April 2014), retrieved 10 December 2017.

Further reading

  • David Womersley and Richard McCabe (eds.), Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context Presented to Howard Erskine-Hill (University of Delaware Press, 2008).
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