| Claude Colleer Abbott | |
| Birth Place: | Broomfield, Essex, England |
| Occupation: | Academic |
Claude Colleer Abbott (1889–1971) was an English poet, scholar and university lecturer, the 'C. C. Abbott' of academic publications. He is principally known as the editor of Gerard Manley Hopkins' correspondence.
The son of a butcher[1] and brother of the poet H. H. Abbott, Claude Colleer Abbott (who usually signed himself 'C. Colleer Abbott') was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford,[2] and the University of London (B.A. 1913, M.A. 1915). He taught at Sudbury Grammar School,[3] and Middlesbrough High School, before being conscripted, after an appeal, late in the War, in 1918.[4] He joined the Artists Rifles O.T.C. and then served in the Irish Guards Special Reserve as second lieutenant.[3] [5] After the War he studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (B.A. 1921, Ph.D. 1926), then lectured in English Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen (1921–1932) and at Durham University (1932–1954), where he became Professor of English.[3]
Between October 1930 and March 1931, while searching for papers of the poet James Beattie that he had been told might be at Fettercairn House, Kincardineshire, Abbott discovered, in attics and outhouses there, 118 letters by Samuel Johnson and quantities of James Boswell's papers, including the latter's London Journal of 1762–3, believed lost, two other missing Boswell diaries, and over three hundred letters, as well as four manuscripts of published Boswell works. After completing cataloguing Abbott broke news of the finds in 1936. They amount to about a third of the total Boswell archive. Boswell's London Journal, 1762–3 became a best-seller when it was first published in F. A. Pottle's edition of 1950.[6] [7] [8]
Abbott was the literary executor and editor of Gordon Bottomley's poems and plays. He is also remembered as an art collector and benefactor of galleries and libraries.[9]
"Thankful for his country upbringing," Abbott, in his most typical poems, "tried to understand with greater love the existence and savour of country folk in Essex and Suffolk."[10] His poems frequently focus on local characters – eccentrics and solitaries in Essex and Suffolk villages – on people in inns, on rural labourers, on rustic lovers.
Fulfilled love came to Abbott comparatively late in life,[11] and briefly. It was the subject of his most ambitious poem, the long retrospective sequence called Summer Love, begun in the 1930s but not printed till 1958. It describes, in a variety of verse-forms, the pivotal love affair of his life, conducted during a long summer revisit to East Anglia with an unnamed woman from the North unfamiliar with the area and enchanted by it. "You who loved in July the drooping elms along these Essex lanes, / The willows fledging every idle stream ..." The affair was consummated high up inside an old elm, "the massive hollow trunk grotesquely bossed, with mighty boughs above."[12] [13]
The poems also contain much sensitive observation of wildlife and landscape. The numerous references to the elmscapes and waterways of East Anglia make Abbott a sort of verse Constable. His poems were occasionally anthologised, 'Stallion', for example, appearing in Younger Poets of To-day (1932), edited by J. C. Squire. Among others there are poems dedicated to Robert Bridges and Edmund Blunden. Despite Abbott's admiration for Hopkins, there is no trace in his poems of any theology.