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GEORGE LILLIE CRAIK (1798-1866)

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Originally appearing in Volume V07, Page 362 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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GEORGE LILLIE CRAIK (1798-1866)  ,
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English man of letters, the son of a schoolmaster, was born at Kennoway, Fifeshire, in 1798 . He studied at the university of St Andrews with the intention of entering the church, but, altering his plans, became the editor of a
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local newspaper, and went to
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London in 1824 to devote himself to literature . He became connected with a short-lived
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literary paper called the Verulam; in 1831 he published his Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties among the
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works of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge; he contributed a considerable number of
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biographical and
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historical articles to the Penny Cyclopaedia; and he edited the Pictorial
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History of England, himself writing much of the
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work . In 1844 he published his History of Literature and Learning in England from the Norman
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Conquest to the
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Present Time, illustrated by extracts . Craik is best known for his abridged version of this work, The History of English Literature and the English Language (1861), which passed through several
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editions . In the next
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year appeared his Spenser and his
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Poetry, an abstract of Spenser's poems, with historical and biographical notes and frequent quotations; and in 1847 his Bacon, his Writings and his Philosophy, a work of a similar kind . The two last-mentioned works appeared among Knight's Weekly Volumes . Two years later Craik obtained the chair of history and English literature at Queen's College,
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Belfast, a position which he held till his
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death, which took place on the 25th of
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June 1866 . He had married
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Miss
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Jeannette Dempster (d . 1856) in 1826, and his daughter, Georgiana Marion Craik (Mrs A . W . May), wrote over
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thirty novels, of which Lost and Won (1859) was the best .

Besides the works already noticed, Craik published the History of

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British Commerce from the Earliest Times (1844),
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Romance of the Peerage (1848–1850) and The English of Shakespeare (1856) .

End of Article: GEORGE LILLIE CRAIK (1798-1866)
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