British writer (1888–1957)
Michael Sadleir (25 December 1888 – 13 December 1957
[2] ), born Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler , was a British publisher, novelist, book collector, and
bibliographer .
Biography
Bookplate of Michael Sadleir
Michael Sadleir's grave and memorial at Bisley Burial Ground,
Bisley , Gloucestershire, England
Michael Sadleir was born in
Oxford, England , the son of
Sir Michael Ernest Sadler and Mary Sadler.
[3] He adopted the older variant of his surname to differentiate himself from his father, a historian, educationist, and
Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Leeds .
[4]
[5] Sadleir was initially taught by
Eva Gilpin in Ilkley
[6] before he was educated at
Rugby School and was a contemporary of
Rupert Brooke , with whom he was romantically involved, and
Geoffrey Keynes .
[7] He then attended
Balliol College, Oxford , where he read history and won the 1912
Stanhope essay prize on the political career of
Richard Brinsley Sheridan .
[8] Before the
First World War , Sadleir and his father were keen collectors of art,
[9] and purchased works by young English artists such as
Stanley Spencer and
Mark Gertler .
[10]
[11] They were amongst the first collectors (and certainly the first English collectors) of the paintings of the Russian-born
German Expressionist artist
Wassily Kandinsky .
[12]
[13] In 1913, both Sadleir and his father travelled to Germany to meet Kandinsky in
Munich .
[14] This visit led to Sadleir translating into English Kandinsky's seminal written work on
expressionism ,
Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1914. This was one of the first coherent arguments for
abstract art in the English language and the translation by Sadleir was seen as both crucial to understanding Kandinsky's theories about abstract art and as a key text in the history of
modernism .
[15] Extracts from it were published in the
Vorticist
literary magazine
BLAST in 1914,
[16] and it remained one of the most influential art texts of the first decades of the twentieth century.
[17]
Sadleir began to work for the publishing firm of
Constable & Co. in 1912, becoming a director in 1920,
[18] and chairman in 1954.[
citation needed ] In 1920 as editor of
Bliss and Other Stories by
Katherine Mansfield for Constable he insisted on censoring sections of her short story
Je ne parle pas français which show the cynical attitudes to love and sex of the narrator. Her husband
John Middleton Murry persuaded Sadleir to reduce the cuts slightly (Murry and Sadleir had founded the
avant-garde quarterly
Rhythm in 1912).
[19]
After the end of World War I, he served as a British delegate to the
Paris Peace Conference, 1919 , and worked at the secretariat of the newly formed
League of Nations .
[18] As a literary historian, he specialised in 19th-century English fiction, notably the work of
Anthony Trollope . Together with
Ian Fleming and others, Sadleir was a director and contributor to The Book Handbook , later renamed
The Book Collector , published by
Queen Anne Press . He also conducted research on
Gothic fiction and discovered rare original editions of the
Northanger Horrid Novels mentioned in the novel
Northanger Abbey by
Jane Austen . Beforehand, some of these books, with their lurid titles, were thought to be figments of Austen's imagination.
[20] Sadleir and
Montague Summers demonstrated that they did really exist. In 1937, he was the
Sandars Reader in Bibliography at
Cambridge University , on the subject of the "Bibliographical Aspects of the Victorian Novel".
[21] He was President of the
Bibliographical Society from 1944 to 1946.
[22]
Sadleir's best known novel was
Fanny by Gaslight (1940), a fictional exploration of prostitution in
Victorian London. It was
adapted under that name as a
1944 film . The 1947 novel
Forlorn Sunset further explored the characters of the
Victorian London underworld. His writings also include a biography of his father, published in 1949, and a privately published memoir of one of his sons, who was killed in World War II.
The remarkable collection of
Victorian fiction compiled by Sadleir, now at the
UCLA Department of Special Collections, is the subject of a catalogue published in 1951. His collection of
Gothic fiction is at the University of Virginia
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library .
Sadleir lived at Througham Court,
Bisley , in
Gloucestershire , a fine
Jacobean farmhouse altered for him by the architect
Norman Jewson , c. 1929.
[23] He sold Througham Court in 1949
[24]
[25] and moved to Willow Farm,
Oakley Green , in
Berkshire .
[2]
Bibliography
Michael Sadleir book sticker
Privilege: A Novel of the Transition (
New York and
London :
G. P. Putnam's Sons , 1921) (The Knickerbocker Library)
Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (London: Chaundy & Cox, 1922)
Daumier: The Man and the Artist (London, Halton & Truscott Smith, Ltd., 1924)
Desolate Splendour (1923)
The Noblest Frailty (1925)
Trollope: A Commentary (1927)
Trollope: A Bibliography (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1928)
The Northanger Novels (London: The English Association, 1927) (Pamphlet No. 68)
Evolution of Publishers' Binding Styles (1930)
Bulwer and His Wife: A Panorama, 1803-1836 (London:
Constable & Co. Ltd. , 1931)
Authors and Publishers: A Study in Mutual Esteem (1932)
Blessington D'Orsay: A Masquerade (1933)
Archdeacon Francis Wrangham (1937)
These Foolish Things (London: Constable, 1937)
Collecting
"Yellowbacks" , (London: Constable & Co., 1938) (Aspects of Book-Collecting series).
Fanny by Gaslight (London: Constable & Co., 1940; New York:
Penguin Books , 1981)
Things Past (London: Constable, 1944)
Forlorn Sunset (London: Constable, 1947)
XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record (Constable & Co. and
University of California Press , 1951)
The Sadleir Library (1955)
See also
References
^ Sadler, Michael (3 June 1958).
"Probate Record" . probatesearch.service.gov.uk . p. 4. Retrieved 25 February 2020 .
^
a
b
"Derek Hudson, 'Sadleir, Michael Thomas Harvey (1888–1957)', rev. Sayoni Basu, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press, 2004 (subscriber access only)" .
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004.
doi :
10.1093/ref:odnb/35904 . Retrieved 9 May 2008 . (Subscription or
UK public library membership required.)
^
Michael Sadleir Papers, 1797–1958 , unc.edu. Retrieved 15 July 2017.
^ "Monopolising the Kicks",
Yorkshire Evening Post , 6 April 1923, p. 8. British Newspaper Archive. Retrieved 24 February 2020. (subscription required)
^ Stokes, Roy (1980).
Michael Sadleir, 1888-1957 (loan required) . Internet Archive. Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press. p.
4 .
ISBN
9780810812925 .
^ Matthew, H. C. G.; Harrison, B., eds. (23 September 2004).
"The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" .
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. ref:odnb/71922.
doi :
10.1093/ref:odnb/71922 . Retrieved 18 February 2023 . (Subscription or
UK public library membership required.)
^ Brooke, Rupert; Strachey, James (1998).
Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 . Yale University Press. p. 8.
ISBN
978-0-300-07004-0 .
^ Sadleir, Michael; Sheridan, Elizabeth Ann (1912).
The political career of Richard Brinsley Sheridan: the Stanhope essay for 1912 : followed by some hitherto unpublished letters of Mrs. Sheridan . Oxford; London: B.H. Blackwell ; Simpkin, Marshall & Co.
OCLC
1358737 .
^ Piper, John; Ernest Brown & Phillips (1944). Catalogue of an exhibition of selected paintings, drawings and sculpture from the collection of the late Sir Michael Sadler ...: [exhibition] Ernest Brown & Phillips Ltd., the Leicester Galleries ... London, Jan.-Feb., 1944 . London: The Gallery.
ISBN
9781406731255 .
OCLC
80686873 .
^ Tate.
" 'The Roundabout', Sir Stanley Spencer, 1923" . Tate . Retrieved 24 February 2020 .
^ Tate.
" 'The Artist's Mother', Mark Gertler, 1911" . Tate . Retrieved 24 February 2020 .
^ Glew, Adrian (1997). " 'Blue Spiritual Sounds': Kandinsky and the Sadlers, 1911-16". The Burlington Magazine . 139 (1134): 600–615.
ISSN
0007-6287 .
JSTOR
887464 . (subscription required)
^
"Bonhams : FRANZ MARC (1880-1916) Pferd (Executed in 1912)" . www.bonhams.com . Retrieved 24 February 2020 .
^ Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club (1893–1923) (Aldershot, Ashgate 1990) p. 179.
^ Tate.
"Important Kandinsky letters and poems fully published in English for the first time – Press Release" . Tate . Retrieved 24 February 2020 .
^
"BLAST no. 1, the Vorticist magazine" . The British Library . pp. 143–144. Retrieved 24 February 2020 .
^ Tate.
"Every work of art is the child of its time, often it is the mother of our emotions": Kandinsky – Tate Etc" . Tate . Retrieved 24 February 2020 .
^
a
b
"The Times Digital Archive - Mr. Michael Sadleir" . go.gale.com . 16 December 1957. p. 10. Retrieved 24 February 2020 . (subscription required)
^ Alpers, Antony, ed. (1984). The Stories of Katherine Mansfield . Auckland: Oxford University Press. pp. 551, 560.
ISBN
0-19-558113-X .
^ Sadleir, Michael (1927). A Footnote to Jane Austen . Oxford: OUP.
^ Waldoch, Laura (18 December 2014).
"List of Sandars Readers and lecture subjects" . www.lib.cam.ac.uk . Retrieved 24 February 2020 .
^
The Bibliographical Society – Past Presidents
Archived 4 August 2009 at the
Wayback Machine , bibsoc.org.uk (archived webpage). Retrieved 15 July 2017.
^ "
Lower Througham Farm, Througham (Bisley) " (1930) [Extracts from a conveyance]. Bruton Knowles and Co of Gloucester, estate agents, surveyors and auctioneers, Series: Estate agency files, c.1870-1980s. Clarence Row, Alvin Street, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England: Gloucestershire Archives, Gloucestershire County Council.
^
"Bisley: Manors and other estates" . British History Online . Retrieved 25 February 2020 .
^ Sadleir, M (1949). Berkshire Telephone Directory, Maidenhead Exchange . High Holborn: BT PLC. p. 117.
External links
Library collections
"Nineteenth Century Literature" . UCLA Library Research Guides . University of California, Los Angeles. Retrieved 7 April 2017 . More than 4600 titles mainly from the 19th century including important novelists, series, and cheaply published yellowbacks.
The Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Fiction , Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. collection of Gothic fiction titles assembled by Sadleir, Arthur Hutchinson and Robert Kerr Black.
Michael Sadleir Papers, 1797–1958 description of archival material held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Michael Sadleir papers, MSS 2053 at
L. Tom Perry Special Collections ,
Harold B. Lee Library ,
Brigham Young University
Sadleir MSS ,
Sadleir MSS II and
Sadleir MSS III brief descriptions of manuscripts at the Lilly Library, Indiana University
Online editions
International National Academics People Other