Imaginary Conversations

Imaginary Conversations is a publication consisting of five volumes of imaginary conversations, mainly between historical people of classical Greece and Rome, composed by the English author Walter Savage Landor.

The Imaginary Conversations were begun when Landor, aged 46, was living with his family in Florence during 1821 where he had rooms in the Medici Palace and later rented the Villa Castigilione. The idea of the compositions began during his childhood as he wrote later: "When I was younger..[a]mong the chief pleasures of my life, and among the commonest of my occupations was the bringing before me such heroes and heroines of antiquity, such poets and sages, such of the prosperous and unfortunate as most interested me … Engaging them in conversations best suited to their characters...". The unenthusiastic reception of Landor's play “Count Julian” demonstrated that Landor, while adept at dialogue, lacked the dramatic capability necessary to convert it to stage performance, and he destroyed another tragedy “Ferranti and Giulio” in frustration at his publishers.

At Florence, Landor was corresponding with Robert Southey, who had planned to write a book of "Colloquies", and they considered collaborating on a project. Landor had finished fifteen dialogues by 9 March 1822, and sent them to Longman's company. Longman would not publish, so by the influence of his friend Julius Hare, he managed to get an agreement with the company of Taylor & Hessey to publish them. Some disputes with the publishers followed in which both Southey and William Wordsworth became involved, not without some embarrassment to Southey as one of the "Conversations" was between Southey and Porson on the merits of Wordsworth's poetry. During 1824, two volumes were published with eighteen conversations in each. The third volume of Imaginary Conversations was published by Henry Colburn during 1828 but Julius Hare was frustrated by Colburn’s delays, and the fourth and fifth volumes were finally published by James Duncan during 1829. Over the succeeding years Landor published occasional Imaginary Conversations as individual publications and collated a number of them during 1853.

Some of the most notable conversations are as follows.

Volume I (1824)

Volume II (1824)

Volume III (1828)

Volume IV (1829)

Volume V (1829)

Published in The Book of Beauty (1844) Aesop and Rhodope.

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