December 19, 1861

Constance Garnett (December 19, 1861 to December 17, 1946) was not the first to translate famous Russian writers into English. Frederick Whishaw, for example, translated Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, with a publication date of 1887. But she is the translator we remember, and many of the 70 volumes of Russian classics she provided are still in print.

Her father-in-law, Richard Garnett was Keeper of Printed Material at the British Museum, and she worked as a librarian elsewhere before her marriage. So it is not surprising that what today is an obscure English drama was part of the literary world she inhabited. I am thinking of a play by the Irish dramatist, Charles Macklin: "The Man of the World". It was already 100 years old late in the century.

A drama critic contemporary with Garnett wrote of the play in Sixty Years of the Theater: An Old Critic's Memories (1916): John Ranken Towse said:

The comedy itself possesses no extraordinary merit, but the central figure is a vital bit of satirical writing, which makes very exacting demands upon the comic and tragic powers of the interpreting actor. Briefly, Sir Pertinax is an unscrupulous, heartless, miserly hypocrite, who has achieved wealth and station by his mean subserviency and his disregard of every decent and honorable instinct. Finally, all his schemes fail, his self-degradation recoils upon him, and his end is as tragic as that of Sir Giles Overreach. The fact that the part is in the Scotch dialect increases its difficulty.

Now, the comic character, Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, needs a bit of introduction. At the end of the 19th century, Constance and Edward Garnett could name their cat, 'Sir Pertinax," and know their friends would get the witty joke.