Geoffrey Tillotson

Geoffrey Tillotson, FBA was an English literary scholar and academic. He was Professor of English Literature at Birkbeck College, London, from 1944 to 1969.

Biography

The son of a millworker, he attended Keighley Grammar School before reading English at Balliol College, Oxford, on a county scholarship, after which he worked briefly as a teacher, before lecturing at University College London from 1931 to 1944.
He was principally interested in the works of Alexander Pope and in 18th- and 19th-century literature and poetry; especially Victorian literature.
Some of the work was carried out with his wife, the literary scholar Kathleen Tillotson.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1967.

Selected works

A View of Victorian Literature On the Poetry of Pope Essays in Criticism and Research English Poetry in the Nineteenth Century The Moral Poetry of Pope The Manner of Proceeding in Certain Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Poems Poets, Scientists and Men: An Inter-Faculty Lecture Delivered on 7th December 1948 Criticism and the Nineteenth Century Thackeray the Novelist Pope and Human Nature Augustan Studies Augustan Poetic Diction Mid-Victorian Studies with Kathleen TillotsonThackeray. The Critical Heritage editor with Donald Hawes