Professor Stephen Prickett, scholar of the Romantic movement and the King James Bible – obituary

Professor Stephen Prickett, who has died aged 81, was a world authority on Romanticism, remarkable for his prodigious output, and as the author of such books as Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996) he took a special interest in the Bible as an aesthetic model in literature.

Prickett’s concern with the relationship between literature and religion was apparent from 1970 when his Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth was first published.

His magisterial Romantics and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976) showed how the two poets had reintroduced to the Anglican Church a mode of thought in danger of being steamrollered by the rationalising modernism of the Enlightenment, and expressed his conviction that the literature, criticism and theology of the 19th century England were so interdependent they could not be understood in isolation from each other.

In Britain, he argued, the English of the King James Bible, through the romantic poets and writers it inspired, exerted a gravitational pull on the subsequent development of language, influencing the poetic spirit of the Oxford Movement and feeding into a new “Church English” – “often high-flown and poetic, related to everyday speech but also at one remove from it”.

For many years mainstream academic studies had tended to disregard or downplay the religious and spiritual dimension in the work of the great 19th century writers and poets. Prickett’s challenge to that trend became required reading for students wanting to explore the religious aspects of Romanticism.

Alexander Thomas Stephen Prickett was born on June 4 1939 in Sierra Leone where his father, William, was a Methodist missionary. His mother was Barbara (née Lyne).

From Kent College, Canterbury, he read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating in 1961. He also gained a teaching diploma at University College Oxford and taught in Nigeria before completing a PhD at Cambridge in 1968. His first book, Do It Yourself Doom, published in 1962, was a detective novel.

In 1967 he was appointed assistant lecturer (later reader) at the University of Sussex where he remained for 15 years, during which he published his seminal works on the romantics and religion and also Victorian Fantasy (1979, now in its third edition).

The book, which arose out of a course he taught at Sussex on children’s literature, was an authoritative study of the literary “counterculture” of Victorian England, exploring the way writers and poets used dreams, nonsense, visions and the creation of other worlds to understand their own world.

The book focused (though not exclusively) on six writers – Lear, Lewis Carroll, Kingsley, E Nesbit, Kipling and the Scottish writer George MacDonald, a hitherto neglected figure whom Prickett saw as the founder of religious fantasy literature. Victorian Fantasy stimulated renewed public and academic interest in MacDonald and Prickett served as longtime president of the George MacDonald Society.

In 1983 Prickett moved to Canberra as Professor of English and head of department at the Australian National University where, in 1989, he initiated the establishment of a replica of the Globe Theatre in Canberra near the University, having secured more than Aus $2 million in funding from two local entrepreneurs.

But the project faced opposition from within the University, including from some who (ignoring the fact that Shakespeare was the most-produced playwright in Australia), argued that the Bard was un-Australian. The project was voted down by what Prickett described as “underhand opposition” in the university senate.

By this time Prickett had been offered the Regius Chair of English Language and Literature at Glasgow University, which he had put off to get the project completed, and left Australia to take it up. The failure of the Canberra Globe project was “one of the greatest disappointments of my life,” he wrote later. “I would come back to Australia tomorrow if I thought it could still be done.”

Prickett remained at Glasgow until his official retirement in 2001, though he continued to teach as a visiting professor or guest lecturer in universities around the world. He was director of the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Waco, Texas for five years from 2003 and an honorary Professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury from 2008.

Prickett had a contagious joie de vivre which made him a brilliant lecturer and conversationalist. Yet he was incapable of malice and, because he was noticeably lacking in vanity, personal or academic, he never took offence and was incapable of causing it.

He invested deeply in his students and was fearless in fighting their corner. One (now a professor) recalls how, when he felt he must give up his Glasgow University PhD for lack of funding, Prickett marched straight across to the vice chancellor’s office and secured the grant which enabled the student to continue. He also had a great hatred of cruelty, and on the rare occasions he saw it in colleagues was not afraid to take them to task.

With a trim physique, Prickett had a relish for physical adventure, a trait not always associated with academics: in 1999 he crossed the Great Victoria Desert in Australia with a party of travellers and some camels; other exploits included white-water rafting in Costa Rica, and hiking with his wife through the Amazon.

Prickett’s other books include Words and the Word: language poetics and biblical interpretation, (1986); England and the French Revolution (1988); Reading the Text: biblical criticism and literary theory (1991); Narrative, Religion and Science (2002) and Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition, (2009).

He was editor and consultant for numerous books and series, including OUP’s Oxford World’s Classics Authorized King James Version of the Bible (jointly, 1997); The Bible and Literature: a reader, (jointly,1999); and The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts (2014).

Prickett gave generously of his time to fellow academics and, recognising no boundaries, was brilliant at bringing together experts from different disciplines in a common cause. In 2010 European Romanticism: A Reader, a multilingual project involving 18 universities in 15 countries, of which he was general editor, was awarded the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for best book in Romanticism Studies.

His last book Secret Selves: A History of Our Inner Space, an examination of the human search for identity, will be published next year.

Prickett was a frequent correspondent on topical issues to newspaper letter columns and as editor of Education! Education! Education!: managerial ethics and the law of unintended consequences (2002), he took issue with the new trend in government education policy, whereby education is reduced to those things that can be measured by so-called “objective” tests.

He served as trustee of the Higher Education Foundation and as president of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology. He was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Royal Society of Arts, In 2015 he was honoured with the Conference on Christianity & Literature Lifetime Achievement Award.

He married first, in 1967, Diana Mabbutt, with whom he had a son and a daughter, secondly, in 1983, Maria Alvarez, and thirdly, in 2001, Patricia Erskine-Hill, who survives him with his children.

Professor Stephen Prickett, born June 4 1939, died October 12 2020