Imaginary Conversations

The Imaginary Conversations were begun when Landor was living in Florence and were initially published as they were completed between 1824 and 1829, by which time they filled three volumes. The dialogues, not yet divided into categories, were initially given the composite title Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen. With their success Landor continued to write more, as well as to polish and add to those already published. Some appeared first in literary reviews, as for example the conversation between "Southey and Porson" on William Wordsworth's poetry in 1823, predating the first published series of conversations in the following year. Various supplemented editions followed each other until there were five volumes containing nearly 150 conversations.Sidney Colvin, Landor (1881), ch. V, p. 98ff]

Placing the conversations in the context of his complete works, the reviewer of The Athenaeum commented that "his prose style is poetical in conception and dramatic in utterance; his conversations are, as has been said, one-act dramas, and his dramas are but dialogues in verse."{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VVhDAQAAMAAJ&dq=Landor+%22dialogues+in+verse%22&pg=PA167 |title=The Athenaeum |date=1876 |publisher=J. Lection |language=en}} His biographer Sidney Colvin, too, saw in "the excellence of Landor's English, the strength, dignity, and harmony of his prose style, qualities in which he was obviously without a living rival."Colvin 1881, p.107 Against acceptance of the arguments there, however, must be set the evident bias of the author's viewpoint, a tendency satirised in a parody of the time{{Cite book |last=Agnew |first=John Holmes |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aVUCAAAAIAAJ&dq=Landor+Colloquies&pg=PA311 |title=Eclectic Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art |date=1843 |publisher=E. Littell |language=en}} and confirmed by subsequent criticism.{{Cite journal |last=Williams |first=Stanley T. |date=December 1923 |title=Walter Savage Landor as a Critic of Literature |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/walter-savage-landor-as-a-critic-of-literature/81C81AA35BD2002B451DC8F6269F07FD |journal=PMLA |language=en |volume=38 |issue=4 |pages=906–928 |doi=10.2307/457312 |issn=0030-8129}}

{{details|List of Landor's Imaginary Conversations}}

In later editions, the conversations were grouped as follows:

:* Classical Dialogues, Greek and Roman.{{Cite book |last=Landor |first=Walter Savage |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=E9myBUfrtKwC |title=Imaginary Conversations: Classical dialogues, Greek and Roman |date=1883 |publisher=Roberts brothers |language=en}}

:* Dialogues of Sovereigns and Statesmen.{{Cite book |last=Landor |first=Walter Savage |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=eW4JAAAAQAAJ |title=The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor: Second series of Imaginary conversations:Dialogues of soverigns and statesmen. Five dialogues of Boccaccio and Petrarca [the Pentameron |date=1876 |publisher=Chapman and Hall |language=en}}

:* Dialogues of Literary Men,{{Cite book |last=Landor |first=Walter Savage |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0psHAQAAIAAJ |title=Imaginary conversations. Third series : Conversations of literary men (First series) |date=1876 |publisher=Chapman and Hall |language=en}}

:* Dialogues of Literary Men (contd); Dialogues of Famous Women.{{Cite book |last=Landor |first=Walter Savage |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OL8dAAAAMAAJ |title=The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor: Conversations of literary men (continued) Dialogues of famous women. Pericles and Aspasia. Minor prose pieces |date=1876 |publisher=Chapman and Hall |language=en}}

:* Miscellaneous Dialogues.{{Cite book |last=Landor |first=Walter Savage |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=UW4JAAAAQAAJ |title=The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor: Miscellaneous conversations |date=1876 |publisher=Chapman and Hall |language=en}}

The possibility has been mentioned that Landor was speaking biographically when, in the course of a later work, he has Petrarch describe how, "among the chief pleasures of my life, and among the commonest of my occupations, was the bringing before me such heroes and heroines of antiquity, such poets and sages, such of the prosperous and unfortunate as most interested me"...to engage them in imaginary conversation.Colvin 1881, p.100{{Cite book |last=Landor |first=Walter Savage |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=b3oRAAAAYAAJ |title=The Longer Prose Works of Walter Savage Landor: The Pentameron. Imaginary conversations: Ovid and a prince of the Getæ. Ines de Castro, Don Pedro, and Dona Blanca. Pio-Nono and Antonelli. Nicholas and Diogenes. Nicholas and Nesselrode. Criticisms: The idyls of Theocritus. The poems of Catullus. Francesco Petrarca. Index |date=1893 |publisher=J.M. Dent |language=en}} This is further suggested by the fact that two decades before the commencement of Imaginary Conversations, Landor had unsuccessfully submitted a dialogue between William Grenville and Edmund Burke to The Morning Chronicle.Colvin 1881, p.99 However, such dialogues had been an established European genre with Classical precedents for some two centuries before he came to write his. Even as he wrote them, his friend Robert Southey was working on his own Colloquies (1829), a coincidence on which Landor remarked during the course of their correspondence.{{Cite book |last=Wallbank |first=Adrian J. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IJVECgAAQBAJ&dq=Landor+Colloquies&pg=PA214 |title=Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute: Literary Dialogues in the Age of Revolution |date=2015-10-06 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-317-32146-0 |language=en}}

As a keen Classicist, Landor would have been aware of the prior example of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead and its revived influence on European literature. In fact, a new translation of the Greek work by William Tooke had appeared in 1820 and Landor was later to include a sceptical Lucian in debate with the dogmatic Christian Timotheus in his own Conversations.{{Cite book |last=Hopkins |first=David |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Bby6BwAAQBAJ&dq=Landor+%22dialogues+in+verse%22&pg=PA42 |title=The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature |last2=Martindale |first2=Charles |last3=Vance |first3=Norman |last4=Copeland |first4=Rita |last5=Cheney |first5=Patrick |last6=Wallace |first6=Jennifer |last7=Hardie |first7=Philip R. |date=2012 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-959460-3 |language=en}} Recognising the debt, Henry Duff Traill later included a dialogue between Plato and Landor himself (who had no great opinion of the philosopher) in his The New Lucian (1884).{{Cite book |last=Traill |first=Henry Duff |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=l6EIAAAAQAAJ&dq=Landor+%22dialogues+of+the+dead%22&pg=PA59 |title=The new Lucian, a ser. of dialogues of the dead |date=1884 |language=en}}

Lucian's work had been a cheerful and satirical deformation of Socratic dialogue, imagined as taking place among the inhabitants and personnel of the Greek Hades. Revived in the Renaissance, it served as the model for Giovanni Boccaccio, in whose De casibus virorum illustrium (The Downfall of the Famous), members of the 1st century Roman imperial clan quarrel over whose behaviour among them had been the most infamous.[https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvfxv8zd Book 7, "A Quarrel between Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, and Valeria Messalina"] Later in France, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle composed New Dialogues of the Dead (Nouveaux dialogues des morts, 1683) in which the exchange of ideas between a range of Classical and later personalities illustrate their relativity over time in a more concentrated Socratic form than Lucian's. He was followed by François Fénelon, whose Dialogues des Morts (1712) included a consideration of political themes as well. In their wake, dialogues of the dead spread as a genre across Europe.{{Cite journal |last=Kelly |first=George Armstrong |author-link=George Armstrong Kelly |date=1986 |title=Tales Told by the Dead |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23232311 |journal=Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques |volume=13 |issue=1 |pages=75–102 |issn=0315-7997}}

In England there appeared a set of contemporary dialogues titled English Lucian in 1703,{{Cite web |date=1703 |title=English Lucian or, modern dialogues between a vintner and his wife. A reformer of manners and his wife, and a captain of the Guards. A master of arts, and a lady's woman. May. |url=https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/eco01:T113226 |access-date=2025-05-29 |website=lib.ugent.be}} well before English translations of Fontenelle and Fénelon{{Cite web |title="Dialogues, English" {{!}} Search |url=https://wellcomecollection.org/search?query=%22Dialogues,%20English%22 |access-date=2025-05-29 |website=Wellcome Collection |language=en}} and George Lyttelton's elegant imitation of them in his own Dialogues of the Dead (1760).[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17667/17667-h/17667-h.htm Gutenberg] But by the time of the Asian contributions among the "Miscellaneous Conversations" in Landor's work, other models had offered themselves. In the case of the eight sections of "The Emperor of China and Tsing-ti", with their humorous comments on the idiosyncrasies of the time as viewed from the point of view of an outsider from another culture, they included such works as Lyttleton's Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan (1735){{Cite book |last=Lyttelton |first=George Lyttelton |url=https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100115370 |title=Letters from a Persian in England, to his friend at Ispahan. |date=1735 |publisher=J.Millan |location=London}} and Oliver Goldsmith's Letters from a Citizen of the World to his Friends in the East (1760),{{Cite book |last=Goldsmith |first=Oliver |url=http://archive.org/details/citizenworld04goldgoog |title=The citizen of the world, or, Letters from a Chinese philosopher residing in London to his friends in the East |date=1804 |publisher=Philadelphia : Printed by Tesson and Lee, for J. Conrad & Co. |others=New York Public Library}} themselves following previous French models.Woo-Lih Dun Ho, Goldsmith's Chinese Letters through Chinese Eyes, Boston University Graduate School 1950, [https://open.bu.edu/bitstream/handle/2144/4771/Lo_Woo-Lih_1950_web.pdf?...1 p.3] Landor's work, therefore, can be perceived as a prolongation and bringing to perfection of already established modes of contrasting ideas and personalities in a more immediate way than the formal essay.

Algernon Charles Swinburne concluded his essay on the author in the 1882 volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with the opinion that "the very finest flower of his dialogues is probably to be found in the single volume Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans; his command of passion and pathos may be tested by its success in the distilled and concentrated tragedy of Tiberius and Vipsania, where for once he shows a quality more proper to romantic than classical imagination: the subtle and sublime and terrible power to enter the dark vestibule of distraction, to throw the whole force of his fancy, the whole fire of his spirit, into the shadowing passion (as Shakespeare calls it) of gradually imminent insanity. Yet, if this and all other studies from ancient history or legend could be subtracted from the volume of his work, enough would be left whereon to rest the foundation of a fame which time could not sensibly impair."{{Cite web |title=Volume 14, Kaolin-LON – Encyclopaedia Britannica – National Library of Scotland |url=https://digital.nls.uk/encyclopaedia-britannica/archive/193676496 |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20241214162014/https://digital.nls.uk/encyclopaedia-britannica/archive/193676496 |archive-date=2024-12-14 |access-date=2025-05-29 |website=digital.nls.uk |language=en}}

In section 92 of "The Gay Science" (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche declared that "I look only on Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Merimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy to be called masters of prose."{{Cite book |last=Nietzsche |first=Friedrich |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g9_kDwAAQBAJ&dq=Landor+%22The+Gay+Science%22&pg=PA79 |title=The Gay Science |date=2020-05-21 |publisher=Courier Dover Publications |isbn=978-0-486-84701-6 |language=en}}

In chapter 2 of Howards End (1910), Margaret Schlegel runs to comfort her brother Tibby, who is ill in bed with hay fever: "The only thing that made life worth living was the thought of Walter Savage Landor, from whose Imaginary Conversations she had promised to read at frequent intervals during that day.”{{Cite book |last=Forster |first=E. M. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IxOKDwAAQBAJ |title=Howards End: Howards End by E. M. Forster: Class, Connection, and Culture in Edwardian England |date=2020-01-01 |publisher=Prabhat Prakashan |language=en}}

In Rudyard Kipling's account of "An English School" (1923), he mentions one boy who found in the library "a book called Imaginary Conversations which he did not understand, but it seemed to be a good thing to imitate."{{Cite web |title=An English School - Land & Sea Tales - For Scouts and Guides - Rudyard Kipling, Book, etext |url=http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/LandandSea/englishschool.html |access-date=2025-05-29 |website=www.telelib.com}}

Colvin, Sidney. [https://books.google.com/books?id=PXMRAAAAYAAJ Landor], Macmillan & Co. 1881.

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Category:Literature of England

Category:Dialogues