Arthur Quiller-Couch

Artist Info

Arthur Quiller-CouchBodmin, Cornwall, 1863 - 1944, Fowey, Cornwall

LC name authority rec. nn80076613

LC Heading:Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 1863-1944

Biography:

Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller- [pseud. Q] (1863–1944), writer and anthologist, was born on 21 November 1863 at Poul Street, Bodmin, Cornwall, the eldest of the five children of Thomas Quiller Couch (1826–1884), physician, and his wife, Mary (d. 1901), daughter of Elias Ford, yeoman, and his wife, Theophilas, of Abbots Kerswell, near Newton Abbot, Devon. The Quillers and Couchs had lived for generations in Polperro, Cornwall, earning their living largely from the sea. Q's grandfather Jonathan Couch (1789–1870) was a doctor and noted naturalist.

Educated at Newton Abbot College, Devon, and Clifton College, Bristol, Quiller-Couch won a classics scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1882. While there he wrote for the Oxford Magazine and began using the pseudonym Q. After he obtained a second class in literae humaniores (1886), Trinity awarded him a one-year lectureship in classics. In 1887 Q published his first novel, Dead Man's Rock—an adventure story in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson—and moved to London. At this time he was supporting his family, his father having died in 1884; audaciously, Q asked Louisa Amelia (d. 1948), second daughter of John Hicks of Fowey, Cornwall, to be his wife. They were married on 22 August 1889 and had a son, Bevil, and a daughter, Foy Felicia.

In London Q combined work for Cassell, which published many of his novels, with freelance writing. When Cassell started a Liberal weekly, The Speaker, Q was appointed assistant editor, and provided a short story each week. Overwork led to ill health and in 1892 Q was happy to take his doctor's advice and move to the seaside. At Fowey, from a house called The Haven, he indulged his love of rowing and yachting for fifty years.

During the twenty years between leaving London and returning to university life in 1912 Q published nearly forty novels, short-story collections, and anthologies. His second book on Cornish themes, The Delectable Duchy: Stories, Studies, and Sketches (1893), was so popular that the title became a synonym for Cornwall. His facility with the style of R. L. Stevenson caused Stevenson's estate to ask Q to finish the draft of St. Ives, which he did with great skill (1898). He initiated the Oxford Books series with The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900 (1900, revised and extended to 1918 in 1939). This volume soon became the standard anthology of English verse and sold nearly a million volumes during Q's lifetime. In 1903 he antagonized mainstream Methodists with Hetty Wesley, a sympathetic portrayal of Hetty's unhappy relationship with her famous family.

Q combined public service with his prodigious writing, working tirelessly for improvement in Cornish education, and holding numerous local offices. He spent over thirty years on Cornwall's education committee, which was established to create a countywide system of grammar schools provided for in the Education Act of 1902. His reward for his public service was a knighthood in 1910 and his appointment as the second King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge University in 1912. In that year he was also elected a fellow of Jesus College, where he spent each term. There was scepticism about his selection inside and outside the university, but Q confounded the critics with his inaugural lecture, finely crafted, rich in learning, and grounded in the classics. For over a decade his lectures were filled to capacity and his published collections of lectures were immensely popular. In On the Art of Writing (1916), his ‘On jargon’ was a timeless and telling warning of the stultifying influence that jargon has on clear and concise writing. The preface to On the Art of Reading (1920) is equally apposite, with its ‘The real battle for English lies in our Elementary Schools, and in the training of our Elementary Teachers’. Throughout his lectures Q championed his belief that literature was an art that must be practised. During the First World War he and his allies H. M. Chadwick, professor of Anglo-Saxon, and Hugh Fraser Stewart, fellow of St John's and later Trinity, campaigned for an independent English faculty. In 1917 they were successful, when an English tripos, separate from the medieval and modern languages tripos, was authorized by the university senate. The study of Anglo-Saxon, philology, and medieval literature became optional and literary criticism and comparative literature could be offered instead. In 1928, at Q's urging, the English tripos was divided into two parts and a paper on the English moralists was added.

After his son's death in occupied Germany in 1919 Q submerged his grief in work, and the next decade was filled with academic studies and collections of lectures, including most notably the introductions to Shakespeare's fourteen comedies for the New Shakespeare series (Cambridge, 1921–31). In 1931 Q withdrew from the project and left the series to his co-editor, John Dover Wilson.

Q's output declined precipitously in the 1930s, but recognition for his life's work included honorary degrees from the universities of Bristol (1912), Aberdeen (1927), and Edinburgh (1930), and an honorary fellowship at Trinity College, Oxford (1926). He was made freeman of Bodmin, Fowey, and Truro, and became mayor of Fowey in 1937–8. His friend and first biographer, Frederick Brittain, wrote of Q that he was celebrated for ‘his hospitality, his conversation, his humour, his kindness of heart, and the care he took in choosing and wearing picturesque clothing’ (DNB).

Q's successor in the professorship and an early English school graduate, Basil Willey, described his predecessor as:

intensely and even sentimentally patriotic; unobtrusively but sincerely Christian; a passionate believer in liberal education, liberal politics, and the idea of the gentleman. All that he thought and said presupposed the unbroken continuity of the old Christian-Humanist tradition, the old class structure of society, the old sense of decorum, propriety and ceremony in human relations in literature. (Willey, Cambridge and other Memories, 20)

These traits, and an inability to treat adequately the darker human emotions, have dated Q's serious works for a world grown cynical and less secure in its verities. In other areas, however, Q's legacy remains: the creation of the grammar school system in Cornwall; the English faculty at Cambridge; the unsurpassed window on Cornwall and the Cornish in his fiction; and the enduring power of the lectures. Books by Helene Hanff have twice renewed interest in Q's works: 84 Charing Cross Road (1970; later made into a play and a film) and Q's Legacy (1986).

In late March 1944 Q fell while avoiding a vehicle in Fowey, and on 12 May, at his house in Fowey, he succumbed to cancer of the mouth, brought on by a lifetime of smoking. He was buried in Fowey on 15 May.

Michael Douglas Smith

Sources F. Brittain, Arthur Quiller-Couch: a biographical study of Q (1948) · A. L. Rowse, Quiller-Couch: a portrait of ‘Q’ (1988) · Memories and opinions by Q, ed. S. C. Roberts (1945) · A. T. Quiller-Couch, On the art of writing (1916) · A. T. Quiller-Couch, On the art of reading (1920) · B. Willey, Cambridge and other memories, 1920–1953 (1970), 12–20 · B. Willey, The ‘Q’ tradition (1946) · H. Carey, Mansfield Forbes and his Cambridge (1984) · E. M. W. Tillyard, The muse unchained (1958) · F. R. Leavis, English literature in our time and the university (1969) · D. J. Palmer, The rise of English studies (1965) · T. MacKillip, F. R. Leavis: a life in criticism (1995) · DNB · b. cert.

Archives Cornwall RO, corresp. and papers · Jesus College, Cambridge, letters and MSS; corresp. and papers, some relating to The pilgrim's way · Oxford University Press, archives · Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, family papers, books, memorabilia · Trinity College, Oxford, corresp. and papers, incl. literary MSS :: BL, letters to William Archer, Add. MS 45295 · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Bertram Dobell · Duke U., Perkins L., letters to J. A. Manson · Jesus College, Cambridge, letters to F. Stanley Service · NL Scot., letters to Sydney Cockerell · NL Scot., letters to John Dover Wilson · U. Leeds, Brotherton L., letters to Clement Shorter

Likenesses L. Paul, watercolour drawing, 1920, NPG · W. Nicholson, oils, 1934, Jesus College, Cambridge [see illus.] · H. Lamb, oils, 1938, Truro City Art Gallery, Cornwall · H. Coster, photographs, NPG · H. Lamb, chalk sketch, NPG · Stereoscopic Co., photographs, NPG

Wealth at death £5431 0s. 9d.: probate, 12 Aug 1944, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Michael Douglas Smith, ‘Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller- (1863–1944)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/35640, accessed 6 Nov 2015]