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…
“There were others equally good in their way, of which I remember the outlines, but as they are longer and more elaborate, I could only quote them imperfectly, and, that being so, it is better not to quote them at all.”
Neighbourhood:
Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of buying, selling, accounting, travelling, and maintaining credit would remain an important fact of Sydney’s…
“Hope, in the soul, seems the unconscious witness of this principle of things.”
Neighbourhood:
Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
