Austin Dobson

LC name authority rec.n50030908

Biography:

Dobson, (Henry) Austin (1840–1921), poet and author, born at Plymouth, Devon, on 18 January 1840, was the eldest son of George Clarisse Dobson, civil engineer, and his wife, Augusta Harris. He was educated at Beaumaris grammar school and at a private school in Coventry before being sent to the gymnase at Strasbourg, then a city belonging to France. At the age of sixteen he came home and entered the Board of Trade, in which he served from 1856 to 1901. His service was chiefly in the marine department, of which he was a principal clerk from 1884 until his retirement. William Cosmo Monkhouse and Samuel Waddington were in the same branch with him, and Edmund Gosse was attached to the commercial department as translator, so that the Board of Trade of those days was lyrically described by an American observer as ‘a nest of singing birds’. Lord Farrer, one of the official heads, propounded an alternative view when he wrote of ‘certain civil servants who would have been excellent administrators if they had not been indifferent poets’.

Dobson's first publication, the poem ‘A City Flower’, appeared in Temple Bar for December 1864—an immature work, as is also ‘Incognita’ dated 1866. But ‘Une marquise’, written in 1868, and ‘The Story of Rosina’, in 1869, showed the perfection of his talents. These appeared in St Paul's, and to its editor, Anthony Trollope, Dobson dedicated his first volume, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873). It contained some of his most characteristic pieces, mixed with inferior stuff. Proverbs in Porcelain, published in 1877, was almost all in his best vein. These two works, blended in one volume with certain additions and omissions, appeared in the United States in 1880 as Vignettes in Rhyme. In 1883 this selection, again somewhat altered, was published in London as Old World Idylls and achieved immense popularity. Two years later a companion book, At the Sign of the Lyre, was equally successful. The latter contained some of his best compositions—‘The Ladies of St James's’, ‘The Old Sedan Chair’, and the enchanting verses ‘My Books’, written as late as 1883–4. But though he continued to write verse intermittently for the rest of his life, and at least a quarter of his collected Poetical Works is dated after 1885, none of this later verse has much importance.

Dobson's first prose volume, The Civil Service Handbook of English Literature, published in 1874, was probably written as a piece of hack work. But in 1879, when he was at his best in verse writing, his William Hogarth, part of the Great Artists series, appeared. By this time his acquaintance with the eighteenth century was becoming well known, and in 1883 John Morley persuaded him to write Fielding for the English Men of Letters series. He next wrote Thomas Bewick and his Pupils (1884) and biographies of Richard Steele (1886) and Oliver Goldsmith (1888). In 1890 he reprinted, under the title Four Frenchwomen, essays on Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, the Princesse de Lamballe, and Madame de Genlis, which had appeared as early as 1866 in the Domestic Magazine. This was followed by a memoir of Horace Walpole (1890) with an appendix listing the books printed at Strawberry Hill, Walpole's home, an extended memoir of Hogarth (1891), and a series of Eighteenth Century Vignettes (1892–6). In 1902 he published Samuel Richardson and in the following year Fanny Burney, both for the English Men of Letters series. From this time any publisher intending to reissue an eighteenth-century work went to Dobson for an introduction. Altogether, some fifty such volumes with his editorial superintendence have been catalogued. Of his complete prose works, over and above The Civil Service Handbook of English Literature, there are eight biographies and ten volumes of collected essays to his credit.

Dobson's immense knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and art should have made the past live again in his biographies, but his achievement varied. His style, though simple, serviceable, and pleasant, never for an instant suggested a poet's prose. His mastery of artificial rhythms was excellent, but at his lightest he lacked gaiety; at his gravest he lacked weight; as a poet he lacked personality. Yet nobody could read the best of his verses—and at least fifty pieces were of his best—without delight in the witty invention, the ease of movement, and the exquisite finish in the style of Restoration poetry that had his verses likened to ‘Dresden china’.

In 1868 Dobson married Frances Mary, the daughter of Nathaniel Beardmore, civil engineer, of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire. They had five sons and five daughters, all of whom survived their father when he died at his home, 75 Eaton Rise, Ealing, London, on 2 September 1921. His funeral was held on 6 September at St Peter's Church, Ealing, and his remains were interred at the Kensington Hanwell cemetery, Ealing.

S. L. Gwynn, rev. Nilanjana Banerji

(S. L. Gwynn, “Dobson, (Henry) Austin (1840–1921),” rev. Nilanjana Banerji, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, 2004. Accessed August 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)