Charles Elkin Mathews

Life
1851-1922 [var. 1921]; English bookseller and publisher; fnd. of Elkin Mathews in Exeter, 1885, moving to London in 1887 in partnership and joint company name with John Lane; parted in 1897, with Mathews retaining a greater interest in bookselling; publ. num. titles associated with the Irish literary revival [see sel. titles infra]; papers of the company during 1919-87 are held in Indiana University Library.

 

Works

Titles published by Mathews include:
  • John Todhunter, A Sicilian Idyll (1891) and later his Essays (1920), with foreword by Standish J O’Grady.
  • Wilde’s Poems (1892 Edn.), Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893) and Salomé (1894).
  • The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892) - along with Yeats’s The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) and The Tables of the Law (1904 Edn.).
  • George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893), with Shand and John Lane], ill. Aubrey Beardsley.
  • Katharine Tynan, Cuckoo Song[s] (1894) [with John Lane].
  • Alice Furlong, Rose and Rue (1899).
  • Broadsheets (ill. Jack Yeats) and later Ernest Marriott, Jack B. Yeats (1911).
  • John Millington Synge, The Shadow of the Glen [and] Riders to the Sea (1905) - and other works.
  • Rosa Mulholland, Spirit and Dust (1908).
  • Joyce’s Chamber Music (1911) - though he refused Dubliners earlier on the advice of his reader Dermot Freyer.
  • A. P. Graves, Irish Literary and Musical Studies (1913).
  • Lord Dunsany, Gods of Pegana (1905); Fifty-One Tales (1915), Tales of Wonder (1916), Unhappy Far-off Things (1919), The Old Folk of the Centuries (1930).
  • Maude Godley, In the Land of Breffne (1925).
  • reprint of Frances Sheridan’s History of Nourjahad (1927) [with Marrot].
  • Norreys Jephson O’Conor, There was a Magic in Those Days (1928).
  • Whitford Kane, Are We All Met? (1931) [with Marrot].
  • Dermot Freyer, Not All Joy (1932) [with Marrot].
  • Padraic Colum, Three Men: A Tale (1930) [with Marrot].

 

Criticism
James G. Nelson, Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats Joyce and Pound (Winsconsin UP 1989), 300pp.

 

Notes
Reader! Reader!: Dermot Freyer [q.v.] read Joyce’s Dubliners for Elkin Mathews and noted that they were ‘smooth flowing’, ‘easy and natural’, but ‘lower middle-class’ and ‘almost obscene’ (i.e., “Two Gallants”). (See Critical Heritage; also Florence L. Watzl, ‘Dubliners’, in Bowen & Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies, 1984, pp.162f.)

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