Phrase and Fable
On returning to England in 1856, Brewer started on the work that was to become Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The dictionary was derived in part from correspondence with readers of his previous book. The first edition was published in 1870, and a revised edition appeared in 1894.
Of his methodology, Brewer wrote in the preface to the Historic Note-Book: "I have been an author for sixty years, have written many books, and of course have been a very miscellaneous reader. In my long experience I have remarked how little the range of "literary" reading has varied, and how doubt still centres on matters which were cruces in my early years. So that a work of this kind is of as much usefulness in 1891 as it would have been in 1830. I have always read with a slip of paper and a pencil at my side, to jot down whatever I think my be useful to me, and these jottings I keep sorted in different lockers. This has been a life-habit with me..."
The Reader's Handbook has had an extended subsequent history. With detailed revisions by editor Henrietta Gerwig it formed the nucleus of Crowell's Handbook for Readers and Writers which in turn provided the nucleus of William Rose Benet's The Reader's Encyclopedia, "veritably a new book", as Benet remarked; in revised form, it is still in print.
Brewer's Reader's Handbook was re-edited by Marion Harland (1830–1922) and published in the United States, with numerous illustrations as Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, 4 vols., New York 1892. Other works by Brewer include A Dictionary of Miracles: Imitative, Realistic and Dogmatic (1884?), and The Historic Notebook, With an Appendix of Battles.
Read more about this topic: E. Cobham Brewer
Famous quotes containing the words phrase and/or fable:
“It is, after all, very interesting that sound can reflect like water, like a mirror. And notice that Vinteuil’s phrase only shows me that to which I did not pay attention at the time. Of my worries, of my loves at that time, it does not recall a thing, it has made the exchange.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)