Oliver Elton

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Oliver Elton (3 June 1861 - 4 June 1945) was an English literary scholar whose extensive publications include A Survey of English Literature (1730 - 1880) in six volumes, criticism and biography of a very wide range of authors, and translations from various languages including Icelandic and Russian. He was King Alfred Professor of English at Liverpool University.

He was the only child of Sarah and Charles Elton, the head of Gresham's School where Oliver was born, and went to Marlborough College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After graduating with a classics degree in 1884, Elton tutored and lectured in London while preparing school editions of Shakespeare and Milton, and translating Einar Hafliðason's "Laurentius Saga" as The life of Laurence Bishop of Hólar in Iceland (Lárentíus Kálfsson) into English. In this he was encouraged by Frederick York Powell, whose biography Elton would publish in 1906.

In 1888 Elton married Letitia Maynard MacColl, the sister of his Oxford friend Dugald Sutherland MacColl. They had three sons, one of whom was the biologist Charles Sutherland Elton. Other friends from university include Leonard Huxley and Michael Sadler.

In 1890 he went to lecture at Manchester University. During his decade there he published a translation of nine books of the Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus, a study of Michael Drayton, and The Augustan Ages (1899) which brought him recognition from the academic literary world. Meanwhile he got to know Charles Edward Montague and wrote for the Manchester Guardian.

He went to Liverpool in 1901 as Professor of English Literature and stayed till his retirement in 1925. While there, he completed two thirds (four volumes) of his Survey of English Literature and lectured and wrote on Milton, Tennyson, Henry James, Chekhov and others.

After retirement he went as visiting professor to Harvard and then settled in Oxford. He completed the Survey, and published a major book on centuries of English poetry: The English Muse: a Sketch (1933). He also continued an interest in Russian and other Slavic literature which had started during the first world war, and published various translations, notably of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1937).

Elton's "encyclopedic range" is impressive and George Sampson, in the Cambridge History of English Literature, brackets him with two of his contemporaries who were also "scholars on the heroic scale of learning ": William Paton Ker and George Saintsbury.