Journalist

Born March 17, 1832, in Percy, Northumberland, Joseph Skipsey was a colliery worker at seven years of age. He made himself educated, publishing verse in local newspapers until he was gradually able to leave harsh labour behind him. He earned a living as caretaker to schools and colleges. He and his wife Sara Ann Hendley, married in 1854, had eight children. Skipsey had several literary positions: Assistant Librarian, Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society (1863), and custoldian of Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon (1889-91). He was awarded a annual civil list pension in 1880 for his literary work, which included preparing popular editions of important poets. Skipsey died at Gateshead on Sept. 3, 1903, and was interred in Gateshead Cemetery.

• Langton, John. "Skipsey, Joseph (1832–1903)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
• Skipsey, Joseph. A Book of Miscellaneous Lyrics. Bedlington: George Richardson, 1878.
• --. Carols from the Coalfields. London: Walter Scott, 1886.
• --. The Collier Lad, and Other Lyrics. 1864.
• --. Poems. Blyth: William Alder, 1871
• --. Poems, Songs, and Ballads. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1862.
• --. Selected Poems. Ed. Basil Bunting. Sunderland: Ceolfrith Press, 1976. PR 5452 S74A17 1976 Robarts Library
• --. Songs and Lyrics. London: W. Scott, 1892. PR 5452 S8S6 1892 Robarts Library
• Watson, Robert Spence. Joseph Skipsey, his Life and Work. London: T.F. Unwin, 1909. PR 5452 .S8Z96 Robarts Library

Robert Fuller Murray was born Dec. 26, 1863, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, of John and Emmeline Murray. In 1869 John took his son to Kelso, England, and then to York. He was educated at grammar schools in Ilminster and in Crewkerne. Murray then attended his beloved University of St. Andrews from 1881, succeeding more in English than in classical Greek. Lacking other opportunities, he became a research assistant to Professor John M. D. Meiklejohn in 1886, published poems in popular journals, and took to journalism in Edinburgh briefly in mid-1889. He returned to St. Andrews in 1890, his consumption then pronounced. 1891 brought him two diversions, a brief visit to Egypt, and the publication of The Scarlet Gown, but Murray succumbed, not long afterwards, to the disease in St Andrews. His friend Andrew Lang carried his second volume of poems into print in 1894, the year of his death, and in 1909 the St. Andrews Students' Representative Council subvented a second edition of The Scarlet Gown, as Lang then said, "by piety."

• Murray, Robert Fuller. The Scarlet Gown; being Verses by a St. Andrews Man. 2d edn. Intro. by Andrew Lang. Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1909. LE M9837sc Robarts Library
• --. Robert F. Murray: his Poems. Memoir by Andrew Lang. London: Longmans, Green, 1894. PR 5101 M5A6 1894 Robarts Library

Mary Ann Evans was born on Nov. 22, 1819, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, to Robert Evans and Christiana Pearson. She was educated at Nuneaton and Coventry (1841-). Her first publication was a poem in the Christian Observer (Jan. 1840). After leaving the Church, she moved to London in 1849 and edited The Westminster from 1851 to 1853. From 1854 to his death in 1878, she lived with George Henry Lewes, editor of the Leader, a married man. Under her pen name, George Eliot, beginning in 1857, she published the novels for which she is famous: Scenes from Clerical Life (1857), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her two books of verse are The Spanish Gipsy (1868) and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). After Lewes' death, she married Johnnie Cross on May 6, 1880. Her death followed quickly, on Dec. 22.

• Eliot, George. Collected Poems. Ed. Lucien Jenkins. London: Skoob Books, 1989. PR 4650 A17 1989 Robarts Library
• --. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78. 7 vols. PR 4681 .A3H3 Trinity College Library
• --. The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, 1874. B-12/1065 Fisher Rare Book Library
• --. The Spanish Gypsy; the Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New. New York Worthington, 1890. PR 4666 S6 1890 Robarts Library
• Haight, Gordon Sherman. George Eliot: a Biography. London, Clarendon P., 1968. PR 4681 .H27 Trinity College Library
• Pangallo, Karen L. George Eliot : a Reference Guide, 1972-1987. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1990. Z 8259 P36 1990 Robarts Library

Adela Florence Cory was born on April 9, 1865, at Stoke Bishop, Gloucestershire, to Colonel Arthur Cory and Fanny Elizabeth Griffin. She was brought up by relations in England and attended school in Richmond near London while her father, in the Bombay army, was posted in Lahore, India. Once she reached sixteen, she joined him first in Lahore and then in Karachi, where she and her sisters, Isabell and Vivian (a novelist whose pen-name was to be Victoria Cross), helped him edit the Sind Gazette. Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson, a Bombay army veteran, and Adela (at 23, half his age), wed in 1889; and she accompanied him as he served in the northwest. They settled down in Army headquarters in Mhow once he was promoted to General. There, using the pseudonym Laurence Hope, she wrote much of her verse. Between 1900 and her death on Oct. 4, 1904, she and Nicolson lived alternately in England, South Africa, and India. Her first book of poems, The Garden of Kama (1901) -- the Indian god of love -- brought her immediate celebrity and the admiration of writers like Thomas Hardy. Two months after her husband died in an operation, Adela took poison and died, 39 years old, in Madras, leaving a son who was to edit her selected poems in 1922. She left a volume of Last Poems yet unpublished, dedicated to her late husband with a poem that closed:

Small joy was I to thee; before we met
Sorrow had left thee all too sad to save.
Useless my love -- as vain as this regret
That pours my hopeless life across thy grave.

• Bickley, F. L. “Nicolson , Adela Florence (1865-1904).” Rev. Sayoni Basu. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
• Hope, Laurence. Collected Love Lyrics. 1929.
• --. The Garden of Kama And othe Love Lyrics from India. 1901; London: William Heinemann, 1917. PR 6027 I37G3 1917 Robarts Library. Also India's Love Lyrics, Including The Garden of Kama. New York: John Lane, 1901.
• --. Last Poems: Translations from the Book of Indian Love. 1905; New York: John Lane, 1912. PR 6027 I37L3 Robarts Library. Also Indian Love. London: William Heinemann, 1905.
• --. Selected Poems from The Indian Love Lyrics of Laurence Hope. London: William Heinemann, 1922. PR 6027 I37A6 1922 Robarts Library
• --. Laurence Hope's Poems. New York: Paul R. Reynolds, 1907.
• --. Stars of the Desert. 1903; New York: John Lane, 1914. PR 6027 I37S7 1914 Robarts Library
• Marx, Edward. "Laurence Hope Web Site." Kyoto University, 2001-.
• --. "Laurence Hope (Adela Florence Cory Nicolson)." Late Nineteenth- And Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 240). Ed. William Thesing. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. 88-93.
• --. "Violet Nicolson." An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Ed. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter. New York: Garland, 1999.

Born in 1809, Kasiprasad Ghose graduated from Hindu College, Calcutta, in 1828, and went on to edit a weekly newspaper, The Hindu Intelligence. His only volume of poems, The Shair and Other Poems, came out in 1839. He died in 1873.

• Ghose, Kasiprasad. The Shair and Other Poems. Durrumtollah (Calcutta): Scott, 1839.
• Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. 2nd edn. Bombay: Asia, 1973.

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, described by P. Lal as a "Calcutta Eurasian of Portuguese Indian ancestry," was born on April 18, 1809, and educated in a private English-speaking school in the Dharmatala or (today) Esplanade area around the Shahid Minar in Calcutta. A journalist who contributed verse to the India Gazette and brought out a book of English poetry, The Fakeer of Jungheera in 1828, Derozio by that year had joined Hindu College (founded in 1817, now Presidency College), Calcutta. Institutional outrage at his charismatic and radical, or rather open-minded, teaching caused him to resign in 1831. The College auditorium is today called Derozio Hall. He then established the East Indian daily newspaper but died shortly afterwards, on Dec. 26, 1831, of cholera.

• Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian. The Fakeer of Jungheera: A Metrical Tale. Calcutta: Samuel Smith, 1828.
• --. Poems. London: Oxford University Press, 1923.
• --. Poems. Ed. P. Lal. Intro. Susobhan Sarkar. Pref. C. Paul Verghese. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1972. PR 9480.9 .D38A17 1972 Robarts Library
• Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1808-1831), Anglo-Indian Patriot and Poet; A Memorial Volume. Ed. Mary Ann Das Gupta. Calcutta: Derozio Commemorative Committee, 1973. PR 9499.3 .D38Z6 Robarts Library

Alexander Macgregor Rose was born August 17, 1846, in Tomantoul, Banffshire. He graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1867 and became, in 1870, Master of the Free Church School in Gairloch, Rossshire. After returning to Aberdeen to study Divinity from 1871, he was ordained on Sept. 9, 1875, and became minister at the Free Church of Evie and Rendall, Orkney. Bankrupt, and in disgrace, Rose left Scotland, his wife, and his family on June 10, 1879, for New York. In America he became a journalist, notably at the San Diego Daily Bee and then on the San Franciso Examiner, the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, and the Daily Call. By 1891 he had left California and was wandering northwards, at first to Toronto by 1895, and at last to Montreal by 1896, where he worked for the Gazette and the Montreal Herald. He died on May 10, 1898, at Notre Dame Hospital, evidently of a paralytic stroke, and was buried in the lot of the St. Andrews Society in Mount Royal Cemetery.

Although Rose had written poems for some years, he only achieved fame for occasional comic verse written in the last two years of his life and published in Montreal newspapers. "Hoch der Kaiser" became so popular in decades before World War I that his very authorship of the poem was forgotten. In Canada, his two squibs on Liberal and Conservative politics under Sir Wilfrid Laurier won Rose an honour granted, as far as is known, to no other poet. Rose wrote P. J. Anderson on Nov. 27, 1897:

I may tell you that after the publication of the latest ballad in the Witness, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who is a very good fellow all round, wrote me a very pleasant letter, full of the most complementary expressions, and asked me to run up to Ottawa to see him. I did so, had an interview with him in his private room in the Government House, and dined with him and Lady Laurier. Afterwards he told me that when the Witness containing my verses reached Ottawa, Solicitor-General Fitzpatrick brought a copy to the meeting of the Privy Council that morning, and asked for a suspension of the rules while he read the verses aloud. `The first time,' said Sir Wilfrid, `so far as I know, that poetry was ever mixed up with affairs of State in the proceedings of Her Majesty's Canadian Privy Council.' (Poems, 29)

Rose's imitation of the French-Canadian colloquial English, what we might call "franglais," was no doubt inspired by the success of William Henry Drummond "habitant" poems.

• Rose, Alexander MacGregor. Hoch der Kaiser: Myself und Gott. Illustrated by Jessie A. Walker. London: Abbey Press, 1900. PS 8485 O37H6 Robarts Library
• --. Poems of A. MacGregor Rose (Gordon). Ed. Robert Dey. London: John Heywood, no date. British Library. PR 9199 .2 R66 A17 1900a Victoria College Rare Books
• --. Sir Wilfrid's progress through England and France in the Jubilee year. Illustrated by J.C. Innes. Montreal: Sterling, 1897. F 5081 L38R6 Robarts Library

Born November 4, 1771, in Ayrshire, Scotland, James Montgomery was brought up and educated by Moravians near Leeds after his parents left for America, never to return. He became an editorial assistant to the Sheffield Register in 1792. Acquiring the newspaper himself, he renamed it the Isis and in it advocated reformist causes at an unpopular time, during the French Revolution, and went to jail for his trouble twice in 1795-96. He returned to his journalism then and published a book of poems about his imprisonment. This led to an avocation in poetry and letters. He brought out volumes of poems and hymns from 1797 until the mid-19th-century. After 25 years in the news business, Montgomery retired from journalism and lived on a Literary Fund pension until his death on April 30, 1854. Throughout his life he actively worked for humanitarian causes and gained the respect and affection of his fellow poets.

• Ferguson, James, ed. The Chimney-Sweeper's Friend and Climbing-Boy's Album.. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824. Garland facsimile, intro. by Donald H. Reiman. HD 6247 C482G73 1978 Robarts Library
• --. The Christian Psalmist; or, Hymns, Selected and Original. Glasgow: Chalmers and Collins, 1825. 6th edn. 1829: VP40 1829 Victoria College Library
• --. Greenland and Abdallah. Intro. by Donald H. Reiman. New York: Garland, 1978. PR 5032 .G6 1978 Robarts Library
• --. Greenland and Other Poems. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819. 2nd edn.: PR 5032 G6 1819 Robarts Library
• --. Lectures on Poetry and General Literature. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1833. Intro. by John Valdimir Price. 1995. PN 511 M44 1995 Victoria College Library
• --. Original Hymns For Public, Private, and Social Devotion. London: Longman, Brown, Green, 1853. PR 5032 O96 1853 Victoria College Library
• --. Prison Amusements, and Other Trifles: Principally written during Nine Months of Confinement in the Castle of York, as Paul Positive. London: Joseph Johnson, 1797.
• --. The Pelican Island. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827. 2nd edn. 1828: PR 5032 P4 1828 Robarts Library
• --. The Poems of James Montgomery. Intro. by George Wiley. Sheffield: Hallamshire, 2000. PR 5031 .W56 Robarts Library
• --. Poems of James Montgomery. Ed. Robert Aris Willmott. London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1860 [i.e. 1859]. ptz Z9 M65 P64 Fisher Rare Book Library
• --. The Poetical Works., 4 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1826-27. PR 5030 A2 1841 Robarts Library.
• --. The Poetical Works of James Montgomery. Collected by Himself. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850. British Library 11611.f.12
• --. A Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture of the United States of America; and the State of the Cotton Manufacture of that Country Contrasted and Compared with that of Great Britain; with Comparative Estimates of the Cost of Manufacturing in both Countries. Glasgow: J. Niven, 1840. Ec.H M7876p Robarts Library
• --. Prose by a Poet., 2 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824.
• --. Sacred Poems and Hymns: for Public and Private Devotion. New York: Appleton, 1854. VT M766s Victoria College Library
• --. Songs of Zion. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1822. 2nd edn.: PR 5032 S7 1824 Robarts Library
• --. Thoughts on Wheels. London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817. [Published with Samuel Roberts' The State Lottery.] D-11 1230 Fisher Rare Book Library
• --. Verses to the Memory of the Late Richard Reynolds, of Bristol. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1816.
• --. The Wanderer of Switzerland, and Other Poems. London: Vernor and Hood, and Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806. 1813 edn.: LE M7876w Robarts Library
• --. The Whisperer; or, Tales and Speculations, as Gabriel Silvertongue. London: J. Johnson, 1798.
• --. The West Indies, and Other Poems. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1810. 5th edn.: PR 5032 W2 1819 Robarts Library
• --. The World Before The Flood, A Poem, in Ten Cantos; with Other Occasional Pieces. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1813. 4th edn.: PR 5032 W6 1815 Robarts Library
• --, and E. Benger. Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade. London: R. Bowyer, 1809. E-10/121 Fisher Rare Book Library. 1814 edn.: E-10/1512 Fisher Rare Book Library
• Tolley, G.. "Montgomery, James (1771–1854)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

Born March 31, 1844, in Selkirk, Scotland, Andrew Lang was educated at Selkirk Grammar School, Edinburgh Academy, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Glasgow, and Balliol College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a B.A. (honours) in 1866. He took up a fellowship at Merton College in Oxford from 1868 to 1875, in which year he married Lenora Blanche Alleyne. Over his lifetime, Lang brought out nine books of verse, beginning with Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), as well as translations of Homer and other classical poets. His writing career, however, expanded into journalism once he settled in London at his marriage. He wrote as anthropologist, historian, fairy story teller, literary historian, sportsman, novelist, and biographer and had a prolific output. Honours came his way readily: he received doctorates from St. Andrews University in 1888 and Oxford University in 1904, was a fellow in the British Academy, and presided over the Society for Psychical Research. Lang died, without children, of angina pectoris, July 20, 1912, in Aberdeen.

• Demoor, Marysa. Friends over the ocean: Andrew Lang's American correspondents, 1881-1912. Gent: Rijksuniversiteit Gent, 1989. PR 4877 .A4 1989 Robarts Library
• G., S. G. ""Lang, Andrew." Dictionary of National Biography 1912-21. 319-23.
• Green, Roger Lancelyn. Andrew Lang, a critical biography, with a short-title bibliography of the works of Andrew Lang. Leicester: E. Ward, 1946. PR 4877 .G68. Robarts Library
• Homer. The Homeric Hymns. Trans. Andrew Lang. London: Allen, 1899. PA 4025 .H8L3 1899. Robarts Library
• --. The Iliad. Trans. Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers. London: Macmillan, 1883. PA 4025 .A2L3 Institute of Mediaeval Studies
• --. The Odyssey. Trans. Andrew Lang and Samuel Henry Butcher. London: Macmillan, 1887. PA 4205 .A5B8 1887 St. Michael's College
• Lang, Andrew. Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, with Other Poems. London: Longmans, Green, 1872. PR 4876 .B29 1872. Robarts Library
• --. Ballades and Verses Vain. New York: Scribner, 1884.
• --. Ban and Arrière Ban: A Rally of Fugitive Rhymes. 2dn edn. London: Longmans, Green, 1894. PR 4876 .B3 1894 Robarts Library. Also Project Gutenberg.
• --. Grass of Parnassus: Rhymes Old and New. London: Longmans, Green, 1888. PR 4876 .G7 1888. Robarts Library
• --. Helen of Troy. New York: Scribner, 1882. PR 4876 .H4 1882. Robarts Library
• --. New Collected Rhymes. London: Longmans, Green, 1905. PR 4876 .N48 1905 Robarts Library
• --. Rhymes à la Mode. London: Kegan Paul, 1885. PR 4876 .R5 Robarts Library
• --. XXII Ballades in Blue China. London: Kegan Paul, 1880. PR 4876 .T5 1885 Robarts Library
• --. XXII and X: XXXII Ballades in Blue China. 1881. London K. Paul, Trench, 1883. PR 4876 .T5 1883 Robarts Library
• Langstaff, Eleanor De Selms. Andrew Lang. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
• Ormerod, James. The Poetry of Andrew Lang. Philadelphia: R. West, 1978.
• Webster, A. Blyth. Andrew Lang's poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937. Pamph LE L Robarts Library

Romesh Chunder Dutt was born in Calcutta on August 13, 1848, and received his education there and at University College and the Middle Temple, London. He was called to the bar and in 1869 passed the examination for entrance to the Indian civil service, in which he served -- as the only native Indian in the nineteenth century to rise to executive authority -- from 1871 to 1897. His positions included collector of Backerganj, acting commissioner of Burdwan, and commissioner of Orissa. Created a C.I.E. in 1892, Dutt returned to England and became lecturer in Indian history at University College in London from 1898 to 1904. In India he had written works on Bengal history and literature, done school primers, penned half a dozen romances in his own tongue, and translated into Bengali the Rig Veda in 1886. At London, in 1899-1900, Dutt published an English translation of excerpts from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, which in time came out in the Everyman's Library series. He wrote political and social tracts to influence British colonial policy and from 1904 to his death of a heart attack in 1909 served as revenue and then prime minister of Baroda. Dutt and Nobo Gopal Bose wed in 1864 and had a son and five daughters.

• Dutt, Romesh Chunder. Cultural Heritage of Bengal; a Biographical and Critical History from the Earliest Times Closing with a Review of Intellectual Progress under British Rule in India. 3rd edn. Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1962. PK 1701 8 962 Robarts Library
• --. Early Hindu civilisation: B.C. 2000 to 320, Based on Sanskrit Literature. 4th edn. Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1963. DS 451 D97 1963 Robarts Library
• --. The Economic History of India under Early British Rule; from the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. 2nd edn. London K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906. Ec.H D9793e Robarts Library
• --. England and India: a Record of Progress during a Hundred Years, 1785-1885. New Delhi, India: Mudgal Publications, 1985. DS 463 D86 1985 Robarts Library
• --. Famines and Land Assessments in India. Delhi: B.R. Pub., 1985. HJ 4392 I4D88 1985 Robarts Library
• --. India in the Victorian age; an Economic History of the People. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1904. Ec.H D9793ind Robarts Library
• --. The Lake of Palms: a Story of Indian Domestic Life. 2nd edn. London: Fisher Unwin, 1903. DS 421 D88 1903 Robarts Library
• --. Later Hindu Civilisation, A.D. 500 to A.D. 1200, based on Sanskrit Literature. 4th edn. Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1965. DS 425 D87 1965 Robarts Library
• --. Lays of Ancient India: Selections from Indian Poetry Rendered into English Verse. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894. British Library 2318.h.9
• --. The Literature of Bengal: a Biographical and Critical History from the Earliest Times, Closing with a Review of Intellectual Progress under British Rule in India. Calcutta: T. Spink, 1895. PK 1701 K8 1895 Victoria College Library
• --. Open Letters to Lord Curzon and Speeches and Papers. Intro. D.N. Gupta. Delhi, India: Gian, 1986. HC 434 D88 1986 Robarts Library
• --. Reminiscences of a Workman's Life. Calcutta: privately printed, 1896.
• --. Sivaji; a Historical Tale of the Great Mahratta Hero and Patriot. Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1944. PK 1718 D887M313 Robarts Library
• --, trans. Maha-Bharata, Epic of the Bharatas. London: Ballantyne, Hanson, 1898. PK 3633 A2D8 Robarts Library
• --. Mahabharata Condensed in English Verse. Calcutta: Elm Press, 1906. BL 1138.2 1906 Robarts Library
• --. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, condensed into English verse. London: Dent, 1929. LSansk D9789r Robarts Library