Logan Pearsall Smith

Logan Pearsall Smith (18 October 1865 – 2 March 1946) was an American-born essayist and critic, and a notable writer on historical semantics.

Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey^[1] the son of the prominent Quakers Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith. His father's family had become wealthy from its glass factories. He lived for a time as a boy in England, and later attended Haverford College and Harvard College; in his 1938 autobiography he describes how in his youth he came to be a friend of Walt Whitman in the poet's latter years. Smith later studied at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1891. He then settled in England with occasional forays to continental Europe and became a British citizen in 1913. He divided his time between Chelsea, where he was a close friend of Desmond MacCarthy, and a Tudor farmhouse near the Solent, called "Big Chilling". Smith employed a succession of young secretary/companions to help him. This post was Cyril Connolly's first job in 1925 and he was to be strongly influenced by Smith. Robert Gathorne-Hardy succeeded Connolly in this post.^[2]

Smith was an authority on 17th century divines. He was known for his aphorism and epigrams, and his Trivia has been highly rated. He was a literary perfectionist and could take days refining his sentences.^[2] With Words and Idioms he became a recognised authority on the correct use of English. He is now probably most remembered for his autobiography Unforgotten Years (1938). He was much influenced by Walter Pater. As well as his employees listed, his followers included Desmond MacCarthy, John Russell, R. C. Trevelyan, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. He was, in part, the basis for the character of Nick Greene / Sir Nicholas Greene in Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

Gathorne-Hardy described Pearsall Smith as "a largish man with a stoop that disguised his height",^[3] while Kenneth Clark wrote "His tall frame, hunched up, with head thrust forward like a bird, was balanced unsteadily on vestigial legs".^[4]

Smith's sister Alys was the first wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell, and his sister Mary married the art historian Bernard Berenson.

Works

• 1895. The Youth of Parnassus, and other stories
• 1902. Trivia
• 1907. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton. Biography
• 1909. Songs and Sonnets
• 1912. The English Language
• 1919. A Treasury of English Prose
• 1920. Little Essays Drawn From The Writings Of George Santayana
• 1920 (ed.). Donne's Sermons: Selected Passages with an Essay
• 1920. Stories from the Old Testament retold. Hogarth Press
• 1921. More Trivia
• 1923. English Idioms
• 1925. Words and Idioms
• 1927. The Prospects of Literature. Hogarth Press
• 1930 (ed.) The Golden Grove: Selected Passages From The Sermons and Writings of Jeremy Taylor
• 1931. Afterthoughts
• 1933. All Trivia. Collection
• 1933. Last Words
• 1933. On Reading Shakespeare
• 1936. Fine Writing
• 1937. Reperusals & Recollections
• 1938. Unforgotten Years
• 1940. Milton and His Modern Critics
• 1943. A Treasury Of English Aphorisms
• 1949 (ed.). A Religious Rebel: The Letters of "H.W.S." (Mrs. Pearsall Smith). Published in the USA as Philadelphia Quaker, The Letters of Hannah Whitall Smith
• 1949 (ed.). The Golden Shakespeare
• 1972. Four Words. Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius
• 1982. Saved from the Salvage. With a Memoir of the Author by Cyril Connolly
• 1989 (Edward Burman, ed.) Logan Pearsall Smith. Anthology.

References

Sources

• Robert Gathorne-Hardy (1949) Recollections of Logan Pearsall Smith
• John Russell, ed. (1950) A Portrait of Logan Pearsall Smith drawn from His letters and Diaries
• Barbara Strachey (1980) Remarkable Relation: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family
• Edwin Tribble, ed. (1984) A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Logan Pearsall Smith

• Works by Logan Pearsall Smith at Project Gutenberg
• Biographical source
• Quote source
• "'Four romantic words"