554. Adelphi: Frank Sidgwick of Sidgwick & Jackson.

7/31/2019 554. Adelphi: Frank Sidgwick of Sidgwick & Jackson.

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MR. FRANKSIDGWICK

PUBLISHERANDWRITEROFVERSEMr. Frank Sidgwick, a publisher with a pleasant gift of light verse, died at his home at

Dallywaters, Keston, Kent, on Sunday, after a brief illness.

His father, Arthur Sidgwick (brother of Henry, the philosopher, who married the sister of

Arthur Balfour), was a Cambridge man who migrated to Oxford, where for several years he was

reader in Greek to the university. Frank, the eldest son, who was born on July 7, 1879, was

brought up at Oxford in a household which tempered the academic routine with a lively sense

of fun and a sturdy devotion to losing causes. From the Dragon School at Oxford he went, like

his father and uncle, to Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge. Students of undergraduate

journalism in the late nineties soon learned to look out for contribut ions s igned Sigma

Minor in the Granta. They were varied in scope. Along with plenty of playful verse of a

standard much above the average, there were the inevitable parodies of Kipling and other

favourites, gaily fanciful paradigms of Greek irregular verbs, and, on the occasion of the Greek

play in 1900, an essay in dramatic criticism in the style of Artemus Ward. The play was the

Agamemnon, and Sidgwick himself was the dignified leader of the chorus in a performance

made memorable by the queenly Clytemnestra of F. H. Lucas, the moving Cassandra of Mr. J.

F. Crace, of Eton, and the ambitious Watchman of a future Secretary of State for India, E. S.

Montagu.

Sidgwicks father and uncle had been famous classics at Trinity; other kinsmen, including

Archbishop Benson and his sons, had reached high academic honours. Frank had modestly to

confess that he was the sole member of his family to fail to achieve a first-class in the Tripos,

though he had no difficulty winning the Chancellors Medal for English Verse in 1900. Onleaving Cambridge he served a five years apprenticeship to publishing as junior partner to A.

H. Bullen, the Elizabethan scholar who contributed many fine articles to the Dictionary of

National Biography. In 1904 the firm embarked on a special edition of Shakespeare to be

printed in Stratford-on-Avon at the Shakespeare Head Press. If the undertaking brought no

tangible profit, it took the junior partner for considerable periods into the Warwickshire

countryside, to which he was devoted, and gave him leisure to produce a judicious text of the

morality playEveryman, and a sound critical study of George Wither, the seventeenth-century

poet best known by his lyric beginning Shall I wasting in despair.

In 1907, when his time with Bullen was up, he set up the existing firm of Sidgwick and

Jackson. Solidly grounded in the printing and other technical knowledge which a publisher

requires, he was content with a standard discerningly competent rather than commerciallycompetitive. Among other well known books the firm produced the poems of Rupert Brooke

and the early narrative verse and plays of Mr. Masefield. Its restricted range of fiction included

the novels of Miss Ethel Sidgwick, the publishers sister, which won their own public,

Who was Frank Sidgwick?

Thanks to Catherine Cooke, curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collection at LondonsMarylebone Library, and The Book of Life, BSI, we are able to provide thefollowing obituary from The Times of London, August 15, 1939.

No doubt there is much more the obituary did not provide. One suggestive item isthe Double Crown Club: a dining club of printers, publishers, book designers andillustrators in London co-founded in 1924 by, among others, Frank Sidgwick and S.C. Roberts. Another early member at the time was Stanley Morison, the printer with

whom a chance meeting in New York in 1926 revived Christopher Morleys fervorfor the Sherlock Holmes stories. More aboutthe Double Crown Club connection.

Today the firm of Sidgwick and Jackson survives as part of Pan Macmillan, withits imprint known for Commercial and popular non-fiction with a strong personalityspecializing in high-profile biography and the history of popular culture. Featuresinclude the acclaimed Sidgwick Military list, supported by an association with theImperial War Museum and National Army Museum.

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particularly in the United States. Another member of the family, his younger brother Hugh,

showed by his Walking Essays, and by an amusing analysis of the joys to be derived from a

season ticket to London concerts, a brilliant promise cut off by untimely death.

Frank Sidgwick himself wrote two novels,Love and Battles in 1909, a high-spirited story of

healthy young people linked by somewhat complicated genealogical ties, and, a few years later,

Treasure of Thule, a romance of Orkney. The name ofB. D. Steward appeared on the title-

page of the latter. That pseudonym paid tribute to many happy odysseys in the Blue Dragon

when the author (and in the later years his wife also) had been part of the small crew of that

cheerfully adventurous skipper, his old headmaster, Lynam, of the Dragon School. In more

studious vein he had also compiled selections of carols, and of early ballads and lyrics, one

volume of which,Ear ly English Lyr ics, was made in collaboration with Sir Edmund K.Chambers. He had kept up, too, the lighter verse-making of his Cambridge days. A devotee of

Savoy musical comedy, he wrote a libretto about a family called Smith which was sufficiently

Gilbertian to have deserved a Sullivan. Some Verse andMore Verse were happy collections of

the best of his fugitive pieces, and his friends were often cheered at Christmastide by a poem,

perhaps hand-printed, in the style of the old ballads, his lifelong love of which bore fruit in an

excellent edition in four volumes. His last book was a wholly admirable primer, The Making

of Verse, the result of an almost accidental collaboration with Mr. Robert Swann, English

master at Cheltenham College. It explained in simple and attractive language with exhilarating

illustrations the mysteries of anapest and spondee, the rules of rhyme and scansion, the

structure of a sonnet and much else which the nascent poet ought to know. A final chapter by

Sidgwick in vers libre, described by The Times as bracing advice to over-sanguine amateurversifiers, contained the candid reminder that Much more poetry is written than ever gets into

print, Even in the local paper, Because the supply is greater than the demand.

A man of wide literary learning, a discriminating but encouraging critic of others, Frank

Sidgwick is one whom his old friends at Oxford, Rugby, Cambridge, and elsewhere, however

rarely they encountered him, found ready to begin again where the acquaintance last left off.

Happy in his home life at first at Great Missenden and afterwards at Keston in Kent, he kept

himself young while watching with a tolerant eye the efforts of the next generation, whether in

scholarship at Cambridge or in literary adventure. Shaken a little by a sharp attack of influenza

last winter, but otherwise apparently in good health, he went on holiday lately in the Upper

Thames in unpropitious weather. He came home last week with a high temperature and, in spite

of the most devoted attention, died after a few days illness.

In 1911 he married Mary Christina, daughter of the late Mr. Albert Crease Coxhead. She,

with two sons and four daughters, survives him.

Go to Sidgwicks groundbreaking1902 essay.

Return to theDisputations department.Go back to theWelcome page.

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554. Adelphi: Frank Sidgwick of Sidgwick & Jackson.

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