Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Dobson, Henry Austin
DOBSON, HENRY AUSTIN (1840-1921), poet and man of letters, was born at Plymouth 18 January 1840, the eldest son of George Clarisse Dobson, civil engineer, by his wife, Augusta Harris. He was educated at Beaumaris grammar school and at a private school at Coventry, before being sent to the gymnase at Strasbourg, then a French city. 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 till his retirement. William Cosmo Monkhouse [q.v.] and Samuel Waddington were in the same branch with him, and (Sir) 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, put another view when he wrote of ‘certain civil servants who would have been excellent administrators if they had not been indifferent poets’. It is not contended by Austin Dobson’s friends that Farrer’s unkind observation was not meant to include him, or that he was more than conscientious in his official duties. The Bibliography of Austin Dobson, published in 1900, before he retired, contains over 300 pages and makes it clear that his mind was principally applied to literature. A shy, nervous man, he was always anxious lest the evidences of his unofficial industry should jeopardize his post. After his retirement he received (1904) a civil list pension of £250.
It would be idle to deny that all the work of importance which Dobson did was in literature. For more than half a century he was constantly producing printed work, and during the first twenty years it was almost entirely in rhyme. His first publication, the verses ‘A City Flower’, appeared in Temple Bar for December 1864—immature work, as is also ‘Incognita’ dated 1866. But ‘Une Marquise’, written in 1868, and ‘The Story of Rosina’ in 1869, showed his gift in its perfection. Thetwo last, with much else, appeared in St. Paul’s, and to its editor, Anthony Trollope, was dedicated Dobson’s first volume, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), which reached its third edition in 1875. 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 America in 1880 as Vignettes in Rhyme. In 1883 this selection, again somewhat altered, was published in London as Old World Idylis and achieved immense popularity. Two years later a companion book, At the Sign of the Lyre, had an equal success. The latter contained some of his best things——‘The Ladies of St. James’s’, ‘The Old Sedan Chair’, and the enchanting verses ‘My Books’, written as late as 1883-1884. 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. He had ceased to be a poet, and had become a most industrious journeyman of letters.
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, appeared his William Hogarth in the ‘Great Artists’ series. By this time everybody knew that Dobson had the eighteenth century by heart, and in 1883 John (afterwards Viscount) Morley persuaded him to write the Fielding for the ‘English Men of Letters’ series. He next wrote Thomas Bewick and his Pupils (1884) and biographies of Steele (1886) and 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. Then came a memoir of Horace Walpole (1890), with an appendix giving the books printed at Strawberry Hill, an extended memoir of Hogarth (1891), and a series of Eighteenth Century Vignettes (1892-1894-1896). In 1902 he published Samuel Richardson and in the next year Fanny Burney, both for the ‘English Men of Letters’ series. From this time onwards any publisher intending to reissue an eighteenth-century work went to Austin Dobson for an introduction. Altogether, some fifty such volumes with Dobson’s editorial superintendence are catalogued. Of complete prose works, over and above his Handbook of English literature, there are to his credit eight biographies and ten volumes of collected essays.
Austin Dobson’s immense knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and art should have made the past live again in his biographies, but his achievement varied, and perhaps the slighter the interest of his main subject the better the result. His Fanny Burney shows him at his best, Fielding at his least good. His style, though simple, serviceable, and pleasant, never for an instant suggests a poet’s prose. Perhaps indeed he never was a poet, but only a most accomplished writer of verse. No one ever exceeded his mastery of artificial rhythms, and no verses are more likely than his to appeal to those who care little about poetry. But at his lightest he lacks gaiety; at his gravest he lacks weight; his sentiment is perilously near the mawkish, and he is always a little shocked by the elegance of the French eighteenth century, from which he derived so much enjoyment. In short, what Dobson lacked to be a poet was personality: there is nowhere any strong vibration of his nature. Yet nobody can read the best of his verses—and at least fifty pieces are of his best—without delight in the exquisite finish, the witty invention, and the ease of movement. And for any one with whom he can ‘assume a common taste for old costume, old pictures, books’, Austin Dobson will always be a favourite author.
Dobson died at Ealing 2 September 1921. He married in 1868 Frances Mary, daughter of Nathaniel Beardmore, civil engineer, of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and had five sons and five daughters.
There is a portrait of Dobson by Sylvia Gosse in the National Portrait Gallery.
[The Times, 3 and 5 September 1921; Alban Dobson, Preface to Austin Dobson: An Anthology of Prose and Verse, 1922; private information.]