Geoffrey Tillotson, FBA (30 June 1905 – 15 October 1969) was an English literary scholar and academic. He was Professor of English Literature at Birkbeck College, London, from 1944 to 1969.
Biography The son of a millworker, he attended Keighley Grammar School before reading English at Balliol College, Oxford, on a county scholarship (graduating with a BA in 1927 and the BLitt in 1930), after which he worked briefly as a teacher, before lecturing at University College London from 1931 to 1944.
He was principally interested in the works of Alexander Pope and in 18th- and 19th-century literature and poetry; especially Victorian literature.
Some of the work was carried out with his wife, the literary scholar Kathleen Tillotson.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1967.
Selected works A View of Victorian Literature (1922; reprinted 1978) On the Poetry of Pope (1938; 2nd ed. 1950) Essays in Criticism and Research (1942) English Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (1945) The Moral Poetry of Pope (1946) The Manner of Proceeding in Certain Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Poems (1948) Poets, Scientists and Men: An Inter-Faculty Lecture Delivered on 7th December 1948 (1948) Criticism and the Nineteenth Century (1951) Thackeray the Novelist (1954) Pope and Human Nature (1958) Augustan Studies (1961) Augustan Poetic Diction (1964) Mid-Victorian Studies (1965) with Kathleen Tillotson Thackeray. The Critical Heritage (1968) editor with Donald Hawes
References
Further reading Mary Lascelles, "Geoffrey Tillotson, 1905–1969", Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 56 (1970), pp. 351–362.