A Little Bit of Luck

About the Book

Richard Altick, the world-renowned scholar, whom the Washington Post says "probably knows more about Victorian Britain than anyone else" has published his memoir. The author of The English Common Reader, The Scholar Adventurers, and The Shows of London, remembers his prolific career with characteristic wit and telling anecdotes.

About the Author

A chance encounter on a trolley car in a Pennsylvania town, the inadvertent writing of a doctoral dissertation, a miraculously opportune job opening, and what proved to be a perfect match of temperament and occupation—these were among the antecedents of the long career as a writer and academic that Richard D. Altick, the author of a score of well-received books on Victorian literature and life and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English social history, describes in this engaging retrospect. He looks back upon his days as a graduate student before the Second World War, his first teaching position at his alma mater, Franklin and Marshall College, and his subsequent rise to senior status in the English department at the Ohio State University during the great boom in higher education. Along the way, he tells how his insatiable curiosity led him to research and write his books on a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from the development of the English reading public and the topicality of Victorian novels to the literary content of British painting, celebrated Victorian murders, and—drawing from his extensive experience in libraries and in the field—the techniques and pleasures of literary scholarship. In the final chapters we follow him on his many “purposeful pilgrimages” to England and continental Europe, where his professional vocation spun off a delightful avocation as he spent his summers tourist-watching, absorbing the local atmosphere, and cultivating an amateur expertise in the science and art of museum-keeping.