Ian Fletcher

Who was Ian Fletcher?

Ian Fletcher was a British scholar who specialized in Victorian literature. He edited definitive editions of the works of John Gray and Lionel Johnson, as well as publishing studies on such seminal fin-de-siècle figures as Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Pater. He spent the last six years of his life teaching at Arizona State University. His collected poems were published in 1998, ten years after his death.

Fletcher was born in a Streatham nursing home in 1920, the only child of John Archibald Fletcher, a farmer and retired army major, and Katherine Margaret Richardson. His parents separated before he was born. He grew up in Catford and Shepher'd Bush and lived with his mother, a woman of forceful character. His family had strong Scottish antecedents and for a while as a young man he spelled his name Iain as a gesture to Scottish nationalism.

Fletcher was educated at Dulwich College. Money was short and Fletcher left school at the age of 15 in order to earn a living. He worked as a librarian in Lewisham Public Library and at the same time he set out to write poetry and read widely. He haunted second hand bookshops and collected a library of works by lesser known and neglected writers of the 1890s. In 1939 he met John Gawsworth, another bibliophile and enthusiast for neglected writers, and remained a loyal friend to him throughout his life.