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Bonamy Dobree
‐
Academic and literary scholar
Place of birth
Place of death
London
About
Bonamy Dobree was a literary scholar and university teacher, best known for his works on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. In 1925–6 he taught at London University, and he became Professor of English at the University of Leeds in 1936. He was educated and trained as a professional soldier and fought with distinction during the First World War. He is also famous as a Kipling critic.
During his lectureship in London, Dobree became part of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a close friend of T. S. Eliot, whom he met in 1924 at Leonard Woolf’s house in Richmond and with whom he regularly met up for lunches in London. The two men shared a love for Kipling as an artist, and in 1926 Eliot commissioned him to write an essay on Kipling for The Criterion. Among Dobree’s other friends was Herbert Read, with whom he collaborated to edit The London Book of English Prose (1931) and English Verse (1949).
Dobree was, in Richard Hoggart’s words, a ‘teacher and patron of young men’ (in Butt, p. 195). Mulk Raj Anand, in his Conversations in Bloomsbury, presents a similar picture. Anand met Dobree through his fellow student Nikhil Sen shortly after his arrival in London in 1925. Anand records a lively conversation he had with Dobree, Sen and Gwenda Zeidmann in Museum Tavern, and a relaxing evening together with Dobree, his wife Valentine, Sen and Irene Rhys at Francis Meynell’s flat in the summer of 1926. In 1925 Dobree introduced Anand to T. S. Eliot, and helped him to set up a meeting with the poet. He proved to be a good friend and mentor, despite the fact that his views on British India and admiration of Kipling occasionally offended Anand.
Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Clive Bell, Francis Birrell, Jean Cocteau, Valentine Dobrée, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Francis Meynell, Harold Monro, Alfred Richard Orage, Ezra Pound, Ananda Vittal Rao, Herbert Read, Irene Rhys, Nikhil Sen, George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Gwenda Zeidmann.
Kipling Society (Vice-President)
Restoration Comedy, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924)
Essays in Biography, 1680–1726 (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1925)
(ed.) Comedies of Congreve, The World’s Classics (London: H. Milford, 1925)
Histriophone: A Dialogue on Dramatic Diction (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1925)
Timotheus: The Future of the Theatre (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1925)
Rochester: A Conversation between Sir George Etherege and Mr. Fitzjames (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1926)
Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (London: Gerald Howe, 1927)
(ed. with Geoffrey Webb) The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (Bloomsbury: Nonesuch Press, 1927–8)
Restoration Tragedy, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929)
The Lamp and the Lute: Studies in Six Modern Authors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929)
Essays of the Year (1929–1930) (London: Argonaut, 1930)
(ed. with Herbert Read) The London Book of English Prose (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1931)
Variety of Ways: Discussions on Six Authors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932)
(ed.) The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1932)
Giacomo Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt (London: Peter Davies, 1933)
As Their Friends Saw Them: Biographical Conversations (London: Cape, 1933)
John Wesley (London: Duckworth, 1933)
Modern Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934)
(with G. E. Manwaring) The Floating Republic: An Account of the Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 (London: Geoffry Bles, 1935; Penguin, 1937)
(ed.) The Letters of King George III (London: Cassell & Co., 1935)
English Revolts (London: Herbert Joseph, 1937)
(ed.) From Anne to Victoria: Essays by Various Hands (London: Cassell & Co., 1937)
The Unacknowledged Legislator: Conversation on Literature and Politics in a Warden’s Post, 1941 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942)
Arts’ Faculties in Modern Universities (Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son, 1944)
(with Herbert Read) London Book of English Verse (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949)
Alexander Pope (London: Sylvan Press, 1951)
The Broken Cistern (London: Cohen & West, 1954)
John Dryden (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956)
(ed. with Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin) New Poems, 1958 (London: Michael Joseph, 1958)
English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959)
(ed.) Algernon Charles Swinburne: Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961)
Three Eighteenth Century Figures: Sarah Churchill, John Wesley, Giacomo Casanova (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)
(ed.) Shakespeare: The Writer and His Work (London: Longmans, 1964)
Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist (London: Oxford University Press, 1967)
Milton to Ouida: A Collection of Essays (London: Cass, 1970)
Butt, John (ed.) Of Books and Humankind: Essays and Poems Presented to Bonamy Dobrée (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964)
Morrish, P. S., ‘Bonamy Dobrée, Theatre Critic of The Nation & Athenaeum’, Notes and Queries 29 (1982), pp. 344–5
Sherbo, Arthur, ‘Restoring Bonamy Dobrée: Additions to the Canon of His Writings’, Notes and Queries 49(247).1 (March 2002), pp. 96–7
Correspondence, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge University
Papers of Professor Bonamy Dobrée, Leeds University Library Special Collections
Correspondence, Hogarth Press Archives, University of Reading
‘I don’t agree with defiance of law,’ Eliot said. ‘The British have done much good in India.’
I looked at him, then bent my head down. After a while, Dobrée said: ‘That is what I have told this rebel. Look at the unity we have given you. And the railways.’
I was perspiring under the collar, through the humiliation of having been flogged by the police. I had been cultivating the will to decide on the struggle against, what Gandhi called, the satanic British.
And now I wanted, even through my bluff and bluster, to cultivate the vision of freedom for India – freedom against all the enemies, the family, the brotherhood, the stupid lazy people and the conformists.
‘I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim,’ I said at last, ‘from the opposite point of view.’
‘Some hopes!’ Dobrée said.
He sensed my discomfiture and offered us more coffee.
Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 50
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
