Austin Dobson collection

Austin Dobson, British poet and author, was born in 1840. He was educated at Beaumaris School, Anglesey; Coventry; and the Gymnase in Strasbourg. He began to work for the Board of Trade in 1856 and rose to the rank of Principal Clerk in the Harbour Department, retiring in 1901. He married Frances Mary Beardmore in 1868, and the couple had five sons and five daughters.

Beginning in 1864, Dobson began to publish verse in the magazine St. Paul's, which was edited by Anthony Trollope. His first volume of poetry, Vignettes in Rhyme, was published in 1873, followed by The Prodigals (1876) and the very popular Old-World Idylls (1883) and At the Sign of the Lyre (1885). Dobson was one of the leaders in the movement to adapt French metrical forms to English, and his poems include rondeaus, rondels, villanelles, and triolets. He was equally well known for his poems in English eighteenth-century styles, including The Ballad of Beau Brocade and the Story of Rosina.

After 1885, Dobson's major publications were in prose, and include biographies of eighteenth-century literary and historical figures, including William Hogarth, Richard Steele, Samuel Richardson, and Fanny Burney, as well as critical and occasional essays on a variety of topics, often related to the eighteenth century as well. He died at home at Ealing, London on September 2, 1921, survived by his wife and all of their children.