IN MEMORIAM

Richard Wilhelm Francis Kroll

Professor of English

UC Irvine
1953 - 2009

Richard Wilhelm Francis Kroll, much-loved professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and highly-regarded scholar of Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, passed away at home on 5 February due to complications from pneumonia at the age of 56. Although his health had been in decline for some years due to an underlying neurological condition, he maintained a stoical dignity throughout his illness, courageously persisting in his scholarship, and vigorously engaging with the world around him. He was in all things he undertook passionate; an avid classical music lover, gardener, cyclist, traveler, and collector of decorative art, he was also a tremendously loyal friend, as well as a devoted uncle, father, son, and husband, and a man deeply committed to his Christian faith. His death comes as a devastating shock to all who knew him.

Grandson of the renowned classicist Wilhelm Kroll, Richard Kroll was born 14 January 1953 in Nakuru, Kenya, to Philip Wilhelm Ulrich Kroll, Chief Agricultural Officer under the British colonial government, and Thusnelda Kroll (née Welle), founder of the first multi-racial school in East Africa. Kroll attended Pembroke House in Gilgil until 1965, when his father was murdered in his home by an itinerant farm laborer. His family moved to Bristol the following year and Kroll left behind what he always considered his homeland. He attended Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, West Sussex, and would ever after characterize the years he spent there as having saved his life following the traumatic disruption occasioned by his father’s death and the family’s relocation.

Before going up to Cambridge in 1972, Kroll taught for a year at the Starehe School for orphans in Nairobi. He then read law at Downing College for two years, but changed courses to English, under the guidance of Mark LeFanu, completing his BA in 1975. He stayed on at Cambridge a further year to work on a Certificate of Education. Always a keen traveler, Kroll toured the US by Greyhound bus in the summer of 1976. The following year, he began graduate study in English literature in 1977 at UCLA, where he met his first wife, Victoria Silver, a Renaissance scholar.

In 1984, Kroll completed his doctoral degree at UCLA, where he had been a student of one of the world’s leading Dryden scholars, Alan Roper. UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library was at that time the center of the massive editorial project that would result in what remains the definitive edition of Dryden’s work. As a research center, the library brought together philosophers, historians, and literary scholars, and it was at the intersection of these disciplines that Dr. Kroll’s critical imagination was both catalyzed and formed. His dissertation, “Words and Acts: The Naturalization of Discourse in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century,” reflected his early and ardent commitment to the historical study of language as a form of political engagement and ethical practice.

This commitment shaped his teaching career. Dr. Kroll went on to positions at Princeton University, Hofstra University, and, ultimately, the University of California, Irvine, where he taught from 1992 until his death, and where he met his second wife, Allison Kroll (née Garey), a modern British literary scholar. He joined the English and Comparative Literature faculty at Irvine at a time when it was heavily identified with critical theory. Dr. Kroll was determined to hold that theory accountable to history, championing Ciceronian rhetorical practice over Hellenist and romantic models, and countering (he would say correcting) abstract continental styles with the British empirical method. As a teacher, he married a classical intellectual tradition to the democratic values of the American educational system, and he was fiercely dedicated to the public university as an instrument of the ancient ideal of paideia—the cultivation of the entire person as a moral entity and political actor. At Irvine, Dr. Kroll thus oversaw a Master of Arts program designed for secondary school teachers, and taught large introductory courses as well as specialized classes in his areas of scholarly interest. He was affectionately teased for his penchant for bolo ties and Hawaiian shirts, feared for his exacting intellectual standards, admired for his erudition and vibrant critical imagination, and beloved for his untiring work with students on the ground. He inspired several generations of PhDs who have since assumed teaching posts around the world.

Dr. Kroll was the author of two groundbreaking studies on the literature and culture of the English Restoration period. His first book, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (1991), is rigorously argued, meticulously substantiated, and yet epic in scope. In a terminology that was radical at the time, it identifies a new “literate culture, in which all forms of knowledge [ . . . ] were commonly known and confessed to be rhetorical.” The Material Word scrutinizes several such “forms of knowledge,” from theology to natural philosophy and from illustration to poetry. These are seen to have gained new efficacy in the efflorescent print culture of the later seventeenth century, even as they were configured under Epicureanism, a revived classical model previously very little in evidence. Dr. Kroll powerfully redefined neoclassicism in the rhetorical and social terms of Lucretian atomism as mediated by Gassendi and others. His intricate discussions of contemporary intersections of method, image, and action in the work of such figures as Davenant, Hobbes, Rymer, Dennis, and Dryden reveal a socially constitutive symbolic economy that had been previously invisible. The Material Word remains an essential work in its field.

Dr. Kroll’s second book, Restoration Drama and the “Circle of Commerce” (2007), is now making a similar imprint in the discipline. A revisionist study of the symbolic forms at work in the later seventeenth-century English theater, it focuses on the mixed genre of tragicomedy, here seen as continuous with the drama of the earlier seventeenth century. The book makes a strong and original case for theater as a crucible for new forms of economic, political, scientific, and even architectural thought and practice, and casts Restoration drama as the source of several distinctively modern methods of coping with radical uncertainty.

Dr. Kroll was also the author of numerous widely cited articles on Pope, Behn, Dryden, Davenant, Congreve, and others. With Perez Zagorin and Richard Ashcraft he co-edited the essay collection, Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-1700 (1992), and he single-handedly edited two indispensable critical readers, The English Novel, 1700 to Fielding (1998), and The English Novel from Smollett to Austen (1998). At the time of his death, he was at work on a potentially controversial study of the political cosmologies of three seventeenth-century women writers, Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, and Lucy Hutchinson. He intended to approach these writers as thinkers dynamically involved in the intellectual ferment of their times, and as architects of new literary forms designed to withstand that ferment. As a scholar, Dr. Kroll leaves a legacy of forthrightness, intellectual courage, and integrity. He will be remembered for the exceptional insight and imagination with which he brought political and symbolic practices to bear upon one another, conceiving of both as they had not been since the Restoration itself. Few have better understood, or more entirely and robustly lived, the mutual constitution of thought, expression, and ethos.

Richard Kroll is survived by his mother, Thusnelda, his brother, Achim, his sister, Anita David, his son, Theodore, and his wife, Allison. He will be profoundly missed.

Professor Jayne E. Lewis and

Allison Adler Kroll