George Saintsbury

George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, FBA (23 October 1845 – 28 January 1933) was an English critic, literary historian, editor, teacher, and wine connoisseur. He gained a reputation as a highly influential literary critic of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Biography

Born in Lottery Hall, Southampton, he was educated at King's College School, London, and at Merton College, Oxford, where he achieved a first class BA degree in Classical Mods, (1865), and a second class in literae humaniores (1867).

He left Oxford in 1868 having failed to obtain a fellowship, and briefly became a master at the Manchester Grammar School, before spending six years in Guernsey as senior classical master of Elizabeth College, where he began his literary career by submitting his first reviews to The Academy. From 1874 until he returned to London in 1876, he was headmaster of the Elgin Educational Institute, with a brief period in 1877 on The Manchester Guardian.

From the early 1880s, until 1894 he worked as a writer and subeditor for the Saturday Review. Some of the critical essays contributed to the literary journals were afterwards collected in his Essays in English Literature, Essays on French Novelists (1891), Miscellaneous Essays (1892), and Corrected Impressions (1895).

In 1895, Saintsbury became professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh, a position he held until 1915. During his time in Edinburgh, he was a member of the Scottish Arts Club.

In his retirement, he continued to write, while living at 1A Royal Crescent, Bath, Somerset. He died there in 1933, at the age of 87.