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…
“Indeed, what I am about to give to the world resembles rather a spirit distilled from the vin ordinaire of a life-talk, and bottled for future use, than a literary production.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Winthrop Mackworth Praed was born in London on 28 July 1802 and died there on 15 July 1839, only thirteen days short of his thirty-seventh birthday. His short life encompassed several identities that Victorian readers often preferred to keep distinct: he was a gifted schoolboy journalist, a prize-winning Cambridge classicist, a lawyer, a Conservative politician, a public speaker of exceptional brilliance, and one of…
“I should certainly refuse to occupy any post in which I should be expected to place myself in personal collision with any man.”
Neighbourhood:
Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Peace
