The Letters of J. R. Green

THE postscript of a woman’s letter has long been understood to be its most significant feature, but it is not often that a sentence in the appendix to a book makes more impression upon the reader than anything in the book itself. Here is an exception. I have just finished Mr. Leslie Stephen’s admirably edited Letters of John Richard Green.¹ The author of the famous Short History of the English People was an eager, manysided, fascinating figure, a friend and correspondent of some of the most brilliant men and women of his time. The Letters give pictures of his lonely boyhood and youth in Oxford, his ten years of clerical toil in the East End of London, and of the deliberate girding of his loins for his great task, which was at first planned as a history of the Church of England, and only gradually assumed a wider scope. There is the ardor of an intense intellectual and spiritual life in these pages ; there are capital anecdotes, vivid portraits of notable persons, eloquent descriptions of nature. And yet, when one remembers Green’s heroic struggle against illness and poverty, the pitiable fight he was making for bread and a chance to work, at the very moment when his name was upon everybody’s lips, the most suggestive sentence in the book occurs in the brief bibliography at its close. The Short History, one must bear in mind, appeared in 1874, before the passage of the International Copyright Act. It was reprinted by at least nine American publishers. It was the greatest popular success of any history since Macaulay’s. Green died, overworked and poor, in 1883. And here is the sentence : “ It should be noted that Messrs. Appleton, in their edition of 1899 [twenty-five years after the book was first published], followed the well-known tradition of their house in assuming the obligation which copyright would have imposed, and forwarded the first cheque received from America for the original text of the Short History.”