Give a brief life-sketch of E. V. Lucas.

Ans.

E. V. Lucas was born in Eltham, Kent. He was the second son of the four sons and three daughters of Alfred Lucas and his wife, Jane Drewett. The Lucases were a Quaker family, and the young Lucas was educated at Friends School in Saffron Walden. His father’s financial incompetence prevented Lucas from going to a university, and at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a bookseller.

In 1889. Lucas joined the staff of the Sussex Daily News. The following year he published, anonymously, his first volume of poetry. Sparks from a Flint. With financial help from an uncle, he moved to London to attend lectures at University College. after which he joined the staff of The Globe, one of London’s evening papers. His duties there allowed him a great deal of spare time, anu ne read extensively in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In 1897, he married (Florence) Elizabeth Gertrude, daughter of Colonel James Theodore Griffin, of the United States army: there was one child, Audrey, of the marriage. Elizabeth Lucas was a writer, and husband and wife collaborated on several children books.

Lucas Quaker background led to a commission from the Society of Friends for a biography of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet and friend of Charles Lamb. The success of the book was followed by further commissions from leading publishers; the most important of these commissions was a new edition of Lamb’s works which eventually amounted to several volumes, with an associated biography, all published between 1903 and 1905. His biographer Katharine Chubbuck writes, “These works established him as a critic, and his Life of Charles Lamb (1905) is considered seminal.” In 1904, while in the middle of his work on Lamb, he joined the staff of Punch. remaining there for more than thirty years. Lucas introduced his Punch colleague Milne to the illustrator E. H. Shepard with whom Milne collaborated on two collections of verse and the two Winnie the-Pool Books.

Lucas’ out was prolife: by Max Beerbohm’s estimation he spoke fewer words than he wrote. Lucas Punch colleague E. V. Knox commented, “Lucas’ publications include many anthologies and about thirty collections of light essays on almost any subject that took his fancy, and some of the titles which he gave to them. Lustener’s Lure (1905), One Day and Another 1909, Old Lamps for New (1911), Loiterer’s Harvest (1913), Cloud and Silver (1916). A Rover I Would Be (1928), indicate sufficiently the lightness, gaiety, and variety of their contents.” He wrote travel books, parodies, and books about painters.

Lucas had a great appetite for the curious, the human, and the ridiculous. If he were offered a story, an incident or an absurdity, his mind instantly shaped it with wit and form. He read a character with wisdom, and gravely turned it to fun. He versified a fancy, or concentrated in an anecdote or instance all that a vaguer mind might stagger for an hour to express. But his was the mind of a critic and a commentator; and the hideous sustained labour of the ambitious novelist was impossible to him.

Before the First World War, Lucas was for a while interested in the theatre; his play The Visit of the King was produced at the Palace Theatre in 1912, but was not well received. A more enduring interest was cricket. Lucas was a member of J. M. Barrie’s team the ‘Allahakbarries’, along with La Thangue and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rupert Hart-Davis collected and published a collection of Lucas’ essays, Cricket All His Life, which John Arlott called the best written of all books on cricket.

Lucas has a long association with the publishing house Methuen and Co.. who published his edition of Lamb. From 1908 to 1924 he was a reader for the firm. In 1924, he was appointed its chairman, a post he occupied with considerable success. Lucas received the honorary degrees from the Universities of St. Andrews and Oxford, and was appointed Companion of Honour in 1932. He was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England in 1928, and from 1933 until his death he was a member of the Crown Lands Advisory Committee.

In his later years Lucas cut his domestic ties and lived alone, spending his evenings in restaurants and clubs. He was a member of the Athenaeum, Beefsteak, Buck’s and the Garrick. When he was stricken with his final illness he steadfastly refused to allow his friends into his sick room. Lucas died in a nursing home in Marylebone, London at the age of seventy.

Some of His Principal Works

The Open Road (1899). Highways and Byways in Sussex (1904), A Wanderer in London (1906), Over Bemerton (1908), Good Company (1909). Old Lamps for New (1911), Fixed Vintages (1919). Giving and Receiving (1922), Encounters and Diversions (1924), Reading, Writing and Remembering (1932).