By Allan Wilcox
The former head of English at the University of Birmingham who oversaw the landmark publication of DH Lawrence’s letters has died.
Professor James Boulton, who has passed away at his home in Nant Peris, North Wales at the age of 89, was Professor of English Studies and Head of the Department of English at the University of Birmingham from 1975 to 1989. He also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and as the university’s public orator. A dedicated researcher as well as an inspired teacher and formidable administrator, he maintained an office in the university library for many years after his retirement, having already founded the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences to provide encouragement and facilities for other senior and retired academics.
He was also a man of deep Christian faith, and throughout his time in Birmingham he was an active member of the congregation of All Saints, Kings Heath, and chaired the university’s chaplaincy committee.
From 1985 until 2006 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the King Edward VI schools in Birmingham.
Born in Pickering, North Yorkshire on February 17 1924, he was a wartime RAF volunteer, spending one year studying English at the University of Durham before training as a pilot in Rhodesia, Egypt, India and Malaya, an experience which he maintained had been fundamental in ‘growing up’.
When Flight Lieutenant Boulton returned to resume his studies he graduated with first class honours in 1948 and went on to Lincoln College, Oxford to read for a BLitt, having married Margaret Leary, whom he had met as a student in Durham, in 1949.
In 1951 he joined Nottingham University as a specialist in 18th-century literature, gaining his PhD in 1960 and was awarded a professorship in 1964.
Prof Boulton was invited to head the English Department in Birmingham in 1975. His research interests lay primarily in the 18th century, especially the political writing of that period. His 1958 edition of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful has been continuously in print, and his 1960 edition of Masterman’s Condition of England was recently reprinted. Prof Boulton became very closely associated with controversial 20th-century novelist, poet and playwright, DH Lawrence.
That connection began in Nottingham, Lawrence’s birthplace, when the university was bequeathed a collection of letters written by the author to his former fiancée, Louie Burrows.
When the opportunity arose to work on a series of love-letters by an author whose works included Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he seized upon it, publishing Lawrence in Love: Letters from D. H. Lawrence to Louie Burrows in 1968.
When Cambridge University Press launched its project to produce a new edition of Lawrence’s complete works (including the letters) in 1973, they turned to Prof Boulton to take personal responsibility for the letters and also to oversee the entire project as general editor. It was such an enormous project that Prof Boulton never thought he would live to see it completed, but 30 years later – in early 2013 the last volumes – the poems – were published. Prof Boulton left Birmingham in 2006 to join his daughter in North Wales where he was an honorary professor at Bangor University.
The night before he died, he was at a meeting of the village book club in the local pub, with a glass or two of red wine, discussing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with neighbours who were never in any doubt as to what an inspiring teacher he must have been. He is survived by his wife, Margaret, his brother, Robin, two children, Andrew and Helen, five grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
