Book Review: A Manual of English Prose Literature Biographical and Critical by William Minto

• Title: A Manual of English Prose Literature Biographical and Critical Designed Mainly to Show Characteristics of Style
• Author: William Minto
• Published: Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1881. Pages-548.

Preamble

This book was easy to read and well organized.  It has provided me with a better understanding of English Literature and its composition.  I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in either topic.

About the Author

The International Association for Scottish Philosophy states that William Minto was born October 10, 1845 at Nether Auchintoul, near Alford, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and died March 1, 1893 in Aberdeen, Scotland.  His father, James Minto, was a farmer and his mother was Barbara Copland.  At the University of Aberdeen he took honors in the departments of classics, mathematics, and philosophy, graduating with a MA in 1865.  He served as an assistant, from 1867 to 1873, to Alexander Bain the professor of Logic at the University of Aberdeen.  In 1872 he published the first edition of this book.   From 1873 to 1880 he lived in London and contributed numerous literary and political articles to The Examiner, Daily News, and the Encyclopedia Britannica.  When Bain retired in 1880, Minto took his place as Regius Chair of Logic and English in Aberdeen University and he held this post until his death.[1]

My Perspective

This book can be broken down into three major parts:  The Introduction is a description of terminology and how the writers will be critiqued; Part I is an in depth look of three contemporary authors: De Quincey, Macauley, and Carlyle; Part II is an historical overview of English writers from the 14^th Century to the middle of the 19^th Century.  Minto does not cover poetry or works of fiction, but rather those works he considered strictly literature.  His goal is to help the student better understand writing styles by examining a large number of English writers.

Before learning to put a complicated mechanism together, we must take it to pieces, and study the parts one by one.  If the student goes to work at random, picking up a hint here and a hint there, he is completely at the mercy of every pedantry that comes to him under the sanction of a popular name.  The only true preservative against literary crochets and affections is a comprehensive view of the principal arts and qualities, the principal means and ends, of style.[2]

By breaking down the writing into its basic building blocks, Minto attempts to analyze hundreds of writer’s styles.  Minto explores the elements of style, the qualities of style, and the kind composition each writer uses.  By “element of style” he refers to the structure of sentences and paragraphs, the figures of speech and the vocabulary used.  Does the writer use neologisms?  What about an abundance of foreign words, Latin, or Greek?  By “quality of style” he refers to intellectual qualities, such as simplicity and clearness, and emotional qualities such as strength, pathos, ludicrousness.  By “elegancy of style” he inquires as to whether the writer exhibits melody, harmony, and taste.  Finally, he classifies the writers work by composition styles such as description, narration, exposition, and persuasion.

After explaining in detail his specific terms that he will be using and how he differs or concurs with current thought on the use of these terms, he presents three writers that are from the 19^th Century and our considered great writers.  These are Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Thomas Carlyle.  He presents each with a biography, character sketch, opinions, elements of style, qualities of style, kinds of composition.  Numerous extracts are presented to the reader to facilitate their understanding of each particular writer.  It is important to note these three, as Minto will be constantly referring back to them and what they have written about all the other writers that he will mention.  They are his measuring stick you might say.  I found this section very informative.  Below is an example of Minto’s description of the term clearness.

Clearness, as we have said, may conveniently be subdivided into general clearness and minute clearness – minute clearness being expressed by such words as distinctness, exactness, precision.  There is a marked line of separation between these subdivisions.  Accuracy in the general outlines is a different thing from accuracy in the details.  In truth, the two are somewhat antagonistic.  To dwell on minute precision on the details tends rather to confuse our impressions as to the general outlines.  After our attention has turned to minute distinctions, we find it difficult to grasp the mutual relations of the parts so distinguished when we endeavor to conceive them as a whole.  Again, minute distinctness is opposed to simplicity.  The general outline of things can be conveyed in familiar language; but when we desire to be exact, we must have recourse to terms that are technical and unfamiliar.  To say that the earth is “round” is a sufficiently clear description of the form of the earth in a general way – and the word is familiar to everybody; but when we are more exact and describe the earth as “a sphere flattened at the poles,” we remove ourselves from the easy comprehension of many of our countrymen.[3]

In the last section of the book, Minto presents his litany of English writers.  He starts with the 14^th century and ends with mid-19^th Century.  He covers eighteen writers in detail in this section.  They are not as in depth as the primary three, but there is a significant amount and it follows the same format as before.  Over two-hundred additional writers are discussed with either single lines of reference or several paragraphs dedicated to each.  He organizes his presentation chronologically, starting with the period from the 14^th Century to before 1580 and then increasing in thirty year increments.  I will list the time frames and the major writers covered.

• 14^th century to 1580 [Various writers, none in great detail]
• 1580-1610 [Sir Philip Sydney, Richard Hooker, John Lyly]
• 1610-1640 [Francis Bacon]
• 1640-1670 [Thomas Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, Abraham Cowley]
• 1670-1700 [Sir William Temple, John Dryden]
• 1700-1730 [Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele]
• 1730-1760 [Samuel Johnson]
• 1760-1790 [Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith]
• 1790-1820 [William Paley, Robert Hall]
• 1820-1850 [Various writers, none in great detail]

As I mentioned, these cover thirty-year increments.  They typically focus on from one to four writers.  Each section then finishes with information on additional writers with subject headings such as Theology, History, Philosophy, Miscellaneous and with some periods requiring additional headings.

Overall, I feel the work is an excellent teaching aid if you are interested in English Literature.  The work is organized with a pertinent table of contents and an index that lists where to locate each writer.

[1] “William Minto 1845-1893,” International Association for Scottish Philosophy, Accessed May 5, 2018. http://www.scottishphilosophy.org/william-minto.html

[2] Minto, William.  A Manual of English Prose Literature Biographical and Critical. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1881. Preface vi.

[3] Ibid., 17.