John Churton Collins (1848-1908)
English literary critic, was born on the 26th of March 1848 at Bourton on the
Water, Gloucestershire. From King Edwards school, Birmingham, he went to Balliol
College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1872, and at once devoted himself to a
literary career, as journalist, essayist and lecturer. His first book was a
study of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1874), and later he edited various classical
English writers, and published volumes on Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England
(1886), a Study of English Literature (1891), a study of Dean Swift (1893),
Essays and Studies (1895), Ephemera Critica (1901), Essays in Poetry and
Criticism (1905), and Rousseau and Voltaire (1908), his original essays being
sharply controversial in tone, but full of knowledge. In 1904 he became
professor of English literature at Birmingham University. For many years he was
a prominent University Extension lecturer, and a constant contributor to the
principal reviews. In September 1908 he was found dead in a ditch near Lowestoft,
at which place he had been staying with a doctor for the benefit of his health.
The circumstances necessitated the holding of an inquest, the verdict being that
of accidental death.
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