Works
For some years he edited the Foreign Quarterly Review; in 1846, on the retirement of Charles Dickens, he took over the Daily News; and, from 1847 to 1856 he edited the Examiner. From 1836 onwards, he contributed to the Edinburgh Quarterly and Foreign Quarterly Reviews a variety of articles, some of which were republished in two volumes of Biographical and Historical Essays (1858).
In 1848 appeared his admirable Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (revised 1854). Continuing his researches into English history under the early Stuarts, he published in 1860 the Arrest of the Five Members by Charles I: a Chapter of English History rewritten, and The Debates on the Grand Remonstrance, with an Introductory Essay on English Freedom. These were followed by his Sir John Eliot: a Biography (1864), elaborated from one of his earlier studies for the Lives of Eminent British Statesmen.
In 1868 appeared his Life of Landor. On the death of his friend Alexander Dyce, Forster undertook the publication of his third edition of Shakespeare. For several years he had been collecting materials for a life of Jonathan Swift, but he interrupted his studies in this direction to write his standard Life of Charles Dickens. He had long been intimate with the novelist, and it is by this work that John Forster is now chiefly remembered. The first volume appeared in 1872, and the biography was completed in 1874.
Towards the close of 1875 the first volume of his Life of Swift was published; and he had made some progress in the preparation of the second at the time of his death.
Read more about this topic: John Forster (biographer)
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Night and Day ‘ve been tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)