Austin Dobson collection

English poet, author, and civil servant (Henry) Austin Dobson (1840-1921) was one of several authors employed at the English Board of Trade in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in addition to Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), William Cosmo Monkhouse (1840-1901), and Samuel Waddington (1844-1923), who contributed to its description as a "nest of singing birds."

Dobson's tenure at the Board of Trade lasted from 1856 until his retirement in 1901, during which the majority of his work was conducted in the marine department; he was appointed a principal clerk in 1884. Dobson's literary career began in the 1860s with the publication of his poetry in various magazines, including Anthony Trollope's St. Paul's Magazine. Trollope was influential in encouraging the young poet's work, and Dobson dedicated his first volume of poetry, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), to Trollope. Dobson's poetry, which showed a fondness for French verse forms such as the triolet and the rondeau, enjoyed a popularity that kept many of his volumes running through numerous editions.

Dobson ceased writing much new verse in the mid-1880s and turned his attention to prose work. Dobson was considered a leading authority on eighteenth-century literary and artistic figures such as Oliver Goldsmith, Horace Walpole, William Hogarth, and Henry Fielding. He authored volumes on Fielding, Hogarth, Samuel Richardson, and Goldsmith, and his reputation as a biographer and essayist led to his writing many prefaces and introductions to new volumes on these figures, as well as shorter entries for the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Dobson even wrote the DNB entry for his friend and Board of Trade colleague Cosmo Monkhouse.

In 1868, Dobson married Frances Mary Beardmore (d. 1927), daughter of prominent engineer Nathaniel Beardmore (1816-1872), who also wrote children's fiction under the pen name Franc Mari. The couple had ten children, all of whom survived their father.

SOURCES:

Gwynn, S.L. Revised by Nilanjana Banerji.Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/32845. Accessed 14 October 2011.