Edward Thomas
(photo: Edward Thomas Fellowship)
Edward Thomas was the subject of my MPhil and DPhil theses at Oxford University. I have been working on Thomas’s prose and poetry ever since. He was the subject of my Chatterton Lecture for the British Academy. I am currently editing The Icknield Way and In Pursuit of Spring for Oxford University Press.
‘Oxford University Press are currently issuing Thomas’s selected prose in six vast and superbly edited volumes. His writing continues to preoccupy literary critics and English students, but is also of increasing interest to cultural and human geographers, anthropologists, historians, conservationists and environmentalists.’ (Robert Macfarlane, Literary Review, 2012)
See The Simple Life
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The Wasp Trap
This moonlight makes
The lovely lovelier
Than ever before lakes
And meadows were.
And yet they are not,
Though this their hour is, more
Lovely than things that were not
Lovely before.
Nothing on earth,
And in the heavens no star,
For pure brightness is worth
More than that jar,
For wasps meant, now
A star – long may it swing
From the dead apple-bough,
So glistening.
– Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
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‘There was nobody in the fields. The hay-waggon stood by the rick where it had arrived too late to be unloaded last night. To one bred in a town this kind of silence and solitariness perhaps always remains impressive. We see no man, no smoke, and hear no voice of man or beast or machinery, and straightway the mind recalls very early mornings when London has lain silent but for the cooing of pigeons. That silence of so many things that can and will make sounds gives some of its prestige to the country silence of very quiet things. Therefore when I have looked out of a strange window for the first time and seen nothing move but leaves on the earth and clouds in the sky, I have often for a moment felt as if it were dawn and have slipped into a mood of dawn; it might be possible on a cloudy day and in a new country to be deceived thus even at noon. Thus the innocence of silent London is transferred to the downs, the woods, the vacant fields, and the road without a wheel or a foot upon it for miles and miles.’ (The Icknield Way)
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My edition of Thomas’s Autobiographies was one of the ‘Books of the Year’ for 2011 in The Times Literary Supplement (‘Guy Cuthbertson’s splendidly edited Autobiographies promises well for the series’), and, in English Literature in Transition, Michel Pharand commented that ‘Guy Cuthbertson’s editorial apparatus cannot be faulted […] If Autobiographies is any indication, the other volumes are likely to become indispensable resources for the rediscovery of a large and neglected part of Edward Thomas’s oeuvre’. Both this volume and England and Wales were praised in a long review in The Times Literary Supplement, and in The Observer Robert Macfarlane chose England and Wales as his summer reading. In The Literary Review, Macfarlane described the volumes as ‘superbly edited’.
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- ‘Edward Thomas and the Mundays of East Meon’, Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter, 89 (January 2023), pp. 16-21.
- ‘Edward Thomas (1878-1917)’, A History of World War One Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 350-64.
- ‘“Pike, Popler, Oram, and Fatt”: Exploring Churchyards, Graves and Epitaphs with Edward Thomas’, Edward Thomas Fellowship Newsletter, 87 (January 2022), pp. 26-8.
- ‘“That remoter, changeless England”: Walter de la Mare and Edward Thomas’, Walter de la Mare: Critical Appraisals, ed. Yui Kajita, Angela Leighton and A.J. Nickerson, Liverpool English Texts and Studies, 95 (Liverpool University Press, 2022), pp. 77-94.
- ‘”I should want nothing more”: Edward Thomas and simplicity’, Journal of the British Academy (November 2019).
- ‘Dymock Poets’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- ‘Edward Thomas, George Crabbe and the Crab-Like Hand’, Dymock Poets and Friends (2007).
- ‘Edward Thomas’s “Words” and the Worthies of Dymock Country’, Dymock Poets and Friends (2005).
- ‘Leonard Bast and Edward Thomas’, Notes & Queries (March 2005).
- ‘“Bredon Hill” and “Adlestrop”’, The Housman Society Journal (2004).
- ‘The Shakespeare and Tennyson behind Edward Thomas’s “Parting”’, Notes & Queries (2004).
- ‘Back to the Oxford Country’, Oxford Magazine (2003).
From the Oxford University Spring School, a podcast recording of a talk on Thomas is available online, which is also available at Oxford University’s Great Writers Inspire site. My inaugural professorial lecture was delivered at Liverpool Hope University on 3 March 2022: ‘A Return to Nature: The pursuit of “the simple life” from Edward Thomas to the present day’. The video recording is available on YouTube. The lecture begins by exploring the remarkable ‘simple life’ story of Arthur Bishopstone in The Icknield Way.
It was an honour and a pleasure to give the Chatterton Lecture @BritishAcademy_ yesterday evening. Thank you to the British Academy, and to Robert Crawford for chairing it, and to everyone who came along to hear about Edward Thomas. (Photo by Thomas, from SCOLAR @cardiffuni) pic.twitter.com/U1w0zPkKLA
— Guy Cuthbertson (@guywjc) November 2, 2018
It’s Open House @LiverpoolHopeUK today and, among other things, I’ll be talking about Edward Thomas and houses pic.twitter.com/XdueCO8nfH
— Guy Cuthbertson (@guywjc) April 21, 2018
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(photo: Edward Thomas Fellowship)
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Recommended reading:
Richard Emeny, Edward Thomas: A Life in Pictures (Enitharmon, 2017).
Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber and Faber, 2011).
Helen Thomas, Under Storm’s Wing (Paladin,1990).
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Edward Thomas, Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford University Press, 1968).
Edward Thomas, The Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna Longley (Bloodaxe, 2008).
Edward Thomas, The Happy-go-lucky Morgans (Duckworth, 1913).
Edward Thomas, The Heart of England (J. M. Dent, 1906).
Edward Thomas, The Icknield Way (Constable, 1913).
Edward Thomas, Walter Pater: A Critical Study (Martin Secker, 1913).
Also see:
Edward Thomas Prose Writing Selected Edition
Edward Thomas archive, Cardiff
First World War Poetry Digital Archive
by Ernest Henry Thomas
pencil, 1905
NPG 2892
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Terrific Chatterton lecture on Edward Thomas and the value of simplicity in poetry by @guywjc @BritishAcademy_ @E_Hayward pic.twitter.com/LOfTVYg2UM
— Matthew Bradley (@Bradders953) November 1, 2018
'A Return to Nature: The pursuit of "the simple life", from Edward Thomas to the present day'. The video recording of my lecture is now available on YouTube: https://t.co/GbTa0waYlk
— Guy Cuthbertson (@guywjc) April 28, 2022
Edward Thomas died on this day, 9 April, in 1917. One of his last books was The Flowers I Love. It ends with ‘Eager Spring’ by his friend Gordon Bottomley. pic.twitter.com/XZp85xcrhE
— Guy Cuthbertson (@guywjc) April 9, 2020