Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Dobell, Bertram
DOBELL, BERTRAM (1842-1914), bookseller and man of letters, was born at Battle 9 January 1842, the eldest son of Edward Dobell, a journeyman tailor, by his wife, Elizabeth Eldridge. His father migrated to London, where he was stricken with paralysis. Bertram began earning his living as errand-boy to a grocer, and afterwards served in the business. Even then he collected old books out of penny boxes on bookstalls. He married Eleanor Wymer in 1869, and with a capital of ten pounds opened a stationer’s and newsagent’s shop at Queen’s Crescent, Haverstock Hill. Here in 1876 he printed his first catalogue of second-hand books. His final move to Charing Cross Road was made in 1887.
In 1874 Dobell first met James Thomson [q.v.], whose City of Dreadful Night was appearing piecemeal in Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer. Dobell arranged for its independent publication in 1880, and steadily befriended the poet till his death in 1882. He edited Thomson’s Voice from the Nile and Shelley (1884), Poetical Works, with memoir (1895), Biographical and Critical Studies (1896), a selection from the poems (1899), and Leopardi’s Essays (1905). He planned facsimile reprints of Shelley, and issued Alastor (1885); the Shelley Society reissued it, and printed his edition of The Wandering Jew (1887). He published Shelley’s Letters to Elizabeth Hitchener (1908). Other pioneer work was his publication of Goldsmith’s A Prospect of Society (the earliest form of The Traveller) in 1902, and Sidelights on Charles Lamb (1908), tracing Lamb’s work in the London Magazine.
Dobell’s great achievement was the recovery of the poetical works of Thomas Traherne (1903), followed by the prose Centuries of Meditations (1908). The manuscripts, originally sold for a few pence, were bought by Alexander Balloch Grosart [q.v.], who intended to publish them as the work of Henry Vaughan; Dobell acquired them, and followed up a clue by which he identified the author. His recovery of Traherne gives him a secure place in literary history. He also collected and edited The Poetical Works of William Strode (1907), and in 1908 printed from manuscript an anonymous play, The Partiall Law (c. 1615-1630). Other discoveries were printed in periodicals: notably, letters of Chapman and Ben Jonson in the Athenæum (March and April 1901) and New Light upon Sir Philip Sidney's ‘Arcadia’ in the Quarterly Review (July 1909). His carefully annotated Catalogue of Books Printed for Private Circulation was completely issued in 1906; and he liked to fill the inner covers of his trade catalogues with criticism, quaint humour, and literary gossip. He always spoke modestly of his own poems—Rosemary and Pansies (1903) and A Century of Sonnets (1910). Cleon in the Palace of Truth, by ‘Lucian Lambert’, was a satire on the politician (1904). Since his death, Sonnets and Lyrics of the Present War, The Close of Life, The Approach of Death, containing some impressive sonnets, The Dreamer of the Castle of Indolence, have been issued by his son (1915), the two last privately. A Lover’s Moods was issued by the Rowfant Club (1923). He died at Haverstock Hill 14 December 1914. He had three sons and two daughters. The business passed to his sons, Percy John and Eustace Arthur Dobell.
There is a process engraving of Dobell in the National Portrait Gallery.
[S. Bradbury, Bertram Dobell, 1909; private information; personal knowledge.]