Francis Palgrave, the founder of the Public Record Office, didn’t like having his version of the past parcelled in neat gobbets. In his History of Normandy and England, he described anthologies as ‘sickly things’, adding that ‘cut flowers have no vitality’. His son, Francis Turner Palgrave, differed fundamentally, and, with Alfred Tennyson’s help, gathered what is still the greatest collection of English lyric poetry, The Golden Treasury, which sold 10,000 copies in six months after its publication by Macmillan in 1861 and, according to Clare Bucknell in this delightfully engaging survey of verse anthologies, had shifted 650,000 copies by 1939 and must surely now be hitting the million mark.
Having worked in adult education, Palgrave junior pitched The Golden Treasury as an improving text for inquisitive, aspirational Victorians. He also genuinely wanted to introduce them to the wide range of English poetry, providing imaginary landscapes from Shakespeare’s Arden to Scottish border ballads.
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