Robert Bernard – författare

Charles Kingsley was born, appropriately enough, in the same year as Queen Victoria: appropriately, for he embodies so many of the positive aspects of that epoch. Into a comparatively short life he packed an almost incredible amount of work and activity: as parish priest, Canon of Chester and Westminster, Chaplain to the Queen, tutor to the Prince of Wales, Professor of History at Cambridge, poet, novelist, critic, translator, political pamphleteer, sanitary reformer, popularizer of geology and zoology. Round his head raged some of the great controversies of the time, in particular those evoked by the Christian Socialist movement and by his disastrous crossing of swords with Cardinal Newman. But for us today his chief interest lies, perhaps, in his own contradictory personality; and in the understanding of his age which we gain by studying the impetuous workings of his heart and mind, at once so individual and so representative of the times in which he lived. This is a scholarly, readable, civilized and sympathetic biography by a writer, as this book and those on Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins testify, who was pre-eminent in this field.

The common perception of Britain's Victorian era as one of strict and strait-laced conformity has long been subject to rebuttal, and Robert Bernard Martin's Enter Rumour (1962) was an early and distinguished endeavour in this line. Herein Martin weighs the evidence of four scandalous incidents that aroused great public interest during the first dozen years of Victoria's reign, each of them emanating from 'what the Victorians might have called the higher orders of society.' Martin recounts the sorry tale of Lady Flora Hastings, victim of Court gossip; Lord Eglinton, who tried and failed to revive the medieval tournament; the strange case of the St Cross Hospital Charity; and George Hudson, 'Railway King', whose rise and fall remains a story for our times.Martin examines sources expertly and further explores how three of these scandals were transformed into fiction - by none less than Dickens, Disraeli and Trollope.

First published in 1966, Robert Bernard Martin's The Accents of Persuasion is a consummate critical study of Charlotte Brontë's four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette.'The bare facts are so literally improbable as to tease one into considering the lives of the Brontes themselves as some wild metaphorical statement of the Romantic conception of the world...Even the best of biography, however, may tend to serve history rather than literature, and one may be forgiven for wishing to return from their lives to the works of the sisters Bronte... The following study, then, is an attempt to search out the themes that occupied [Charlotte] Bronte in her novels and to demonstrate how they are given artistic life; in short, to show how Charlotte Brontë attempted to speak 'the language of conviction' in the 'accents of persuasion'.'(Robert Bernard Martin, from his Introduction.)