Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…
“because it is rather a shy process to send a shoulder of mutton to the owner of a deer park.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, born in 1730 and dead on 13 February 1809, occupies an unusual but revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was a career cavalry officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, a man connected by birth and service to the highest military and courtly circles, and the author of a short poem whose best-known stanza has outlived nearly everything else he wrote. “One crowded ho…
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Sorrow, Longing
