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…
“Like champagne, the brightest iridescences of wit depend upon the surrounding atmosphere, and cease to shine when they cease to reflect its immediate influence.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Richard Monckton Milnes, later Lord Houghton, was born on 19 June 1809 in London, into a family whose wealth, political standing, and Yorkshire connections gave him access to the governing and literary worlds of nineteenth-century Britain. He died on 11 August 1885 at Fryston Hall, near Pontefract in Yorkshire, the family seat that remained both a refuge and a symbol of his inherited position. During his long life he…
“I think gatherings representative of literary homage, and also of personal interest in the poets in whose works we still take delight, are not only very just in themselves, but extremely useful in the cause of literature.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Wonder
