Item 21 - Notebook 21: Practical Criticism lecture series (I.A. Richards)

Ivor Richards was born at Hillside, Sandbach, Cheshire , and was he son of William Armstrong Richards, a chemical engineer originally from Swansea, and his wife, Mary Anne, daughter of William Haigh, a Yorkshire wool manufacturer. On his father's death in 1902 Richards moved with his mother and brothers to Bristol, where he attended Clifton College from 1905 to 1911. In 1907 he had an attack of tuberculos which kept him away from school for over a year.

In 1911 he matriculated from Magdalene College with an exhibition to study history. Within a few months he switched to moral sciences and studied ethics, logic, and psychology.

In 1922 he became a College Lecturer in English and Moral Sciences.

In 1926, when a separate English faculty was created as part of a general restructuring of the University's teaching arrangements, he was appointed a University Lecturer. In the same year he was made a Fellow. He immediately took a year's leave and travelled to America, Japan, and China. In Honolulu, on 31 December 1926, he married Dorothy Eleanor (1894–1986). The couple had first met on a climbing holiday in Wales in 1917, and they shared a lifelong passion for mountaineering.

In 1944 he became a Professor at Harvard, but returned to Magdalene in his retirement. He became an Honorary Fellow in 1964.

In 1979 he returned to China again for a lecture tour, but was taken seriously ill there and had to be flown back to England. He died in Cambridge on 7 September 1979.

He was a founding father of the English Faculty and originator of ‘practical criticism’. He was a brilliant literary critic and linguistic philosopher, a very good poet, a distinguished mountaineer, a tireless promoter of ‘Basic’ English (on which he collaborated with C. K. Ogden, a Magdalene man slightly his senior), and something of an intellectual guru in the USA.

Commemorative tablet at Wentworth House.

Further reading:
College Magazine, No. 23 (1978-79) pp. 1-7 (Sir William Empson, W. Hamilton)
Book Review, College Magazine, No. 34 (1989-90) pp. 60-63 (R. Luckett and J. E. Stevens)