Lonsdale, Roger, 1934-2022

Roger Lonsdale was pre-eminent as an editor of 18th-century English literature, the scholar who for many of us changed the 18th century. In his two anthologies, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (1989), for which he read and evaluated all 18th-century verse, he rescued forgotten voices and introduced us to a culture more diverse, practical, and wayward. Earlier distinguished editions of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith (1969), Beckford’s Vathek (1970), and John Bampfylde (1988) were followed by a final, prize-winning, four-volume edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (2006).

Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 20