W.Cosmo Monkhouse

London, 1840 - 1901, Skegness

BiographyLC name authority rec. n88068164
Biography:
Monkhouse, William Cosmo (1840–1901), poet and art critic, born in London on 18 March 1840, was the son of Cyril John Monkhouse, a solicitor, and his wife, Amelia Maria Delafosse, who was of a Huguenot family which came to England after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He entered St Paul's School, London, on 3 October 1848 and left in 1856 to take up a nomination to a supplementary clerkship in the Board of Trade, then under the presidency of Lord Stanley of Alderley.

Monkhouse's literary career began early. He wrote much verse while at school, and he was an early contributor to Temple Bar, The Argosy, the Englishwoman's Review, and other magazines. In 1865 he married Laura, daughter of John Keymer of Dartford, Kent, but they appear to have divorced soon afterwards. It was also in 1865 that Moxon published his first volume of poetry, A Dream of Idleness, and other Poems. The volume was of promise, and poems such as ‘The Chief Ringer's Burial’ and ‘The Night Express’ found their place in anthologies. But it had no great success, pecuniary or otherwise, and the moment was perhaps unfavourable to Monkhouse, who was a disciple of Wordsworth and Tennyson. After an attempt at the three-volume novel with A Question of Honour (1868), he for some years practically abandoned poetry for literary and art criticism. He became a frequent contributor to The Academy, the Magazine of Art (then under the editorship of W. E. Henley), and eventually the Saturday Review. In 1869 he published Masterpieces of English Art; in 1872 he edited and prefaced a photographic edition of William Hogarth's works; in 1877 he produced a Handbook of Précis Writing; in 1879 an excellent short life of Turner for Cundall's Great Artists; and in 1887 a guidebook on the Italian Pre-Raphaelites in the National Gallery. He published a significant volume, Earlier English Water Colour Painters, in 1890 (2nd edn 1897). His analysis of the life and works of Edwin Landseer was reprinted in 1990.

Meanwhile Monkhouse continued to rise through the ranks in the Board of Trade; at his death in 1901 he was assistant secretary to the finance department. In 1870–71 he was sent to South America in connection with seamen's hospitals; and in 1894–6 he was a member of the committee on the mercantile marine fund. In 1873 he married his second wife, Leonora Eliza, the daughter of Commander Blount RN; they had two sons and six daughters.

Corn and Poppies, some portions of which had appeared in the Magazine of Art, marked Monkhouse's return to poetry in 1890. This volume contained many of his best pieces, perhaps the most famous of which is ‘Dead March’. A limited edition was issued of the ballad ‘The Christ upon the Hill’, with etchings by William Strang in 1895; after his death the ballad was included in the publication of a slender volume entitled Pasiteles the Elder and other Poems. His other works included A Memoir of Leigh Hunt (1893) in the Great Writers series, In the National Gallery (1895), British Contemporary Artists (1899; chiefly from contributions to Scribner's Magazine), and A History of Chinese Porcelain (1901). He was also a diligent contributor of lives of artists to the Dictionary of National Biography, including the biographies of Turner and Sir Joshua Reynolds. As a critic, he had the happy faculty of conveying a well-considered and weighty opinion without suggesting superiority or patronage; as a poet, though he lacked the leisure to realize his full ambition, he left much of value. Monkhouse died at Skegness on 2 July 1901; he was survived by his second wife.

Austin Dobson, rev. Sayoni Basu
(Austin Dobson, “Monkhouse, William Cosmo (1840–1901),” rev. Sayoni Basu, 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 September 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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