Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) By Leslie Stephen Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.-Bacon, Advancement of Learning. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.
In the forty years after he left Cambridge in 1864, Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) published thirty volumes of his own writings and contributed to another twenty books. He wrote literally hundreds of articles for British and American magazines and worked as editor of The Cornhill Magazine and of Alpine Journal as well as the Dictionary of National Biography. By any standards his literary career was successful, epitomising the life of the Victorian man of letters. But he was never completely satisfied with his endeavours. He remained self-effacing, adopting the pose of an amateur in a field in which, in fact, he was a superb professional; asking, 'Will not the twentieth century laugh at the nineteenth?' Contrary to his expectations, Leslie Stephen has not been relegated to the learned footnotes, as contemporary Victorian scholarship and Bloomsbury studies prove.This bibliography is an account of Leslie Stephen's entire writing and publishing career, based on the author's detailed research into his books and articles as well as unpublished, and in many cases, uncatalogued, autograph material in British and American libraries, museums and publishers' archives. Emphasis is on the composition, publication history and evolution of the works, including new editions and reissues of his books during Leslie Stephen's lifetime.