Author. Educated at Rugby and at Oxford; did not take degree. Published his first volume of poems in 1795 and his last, Heroic Idyls, in year before his death; two volumes of Imaginary Conversations, 1824, followed by additional volumes in later years. Contributed to the annuals Book of Beauty and Keepsake, and to many periodicals, e.g., Athenaeum, Monthly Repository, Examiner, Foreign Quarterly Review, Blackwood's, Leigh Hunt's Journal.

Landor and Dickens first met, apparently, in January 1840 (Super, WaIter Savage Landor, p. 563). Their friendship remained unbroken to the end of Landor's life. Landor, in his letters and in conversation with friends, extravagantly praised Dickens and his writings; he published verse tributes to him; in 1853 he dedicated to him, in laudatory language, Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans. Dickens named his second son WaIter Landor Dickens. His article in A.Y.R., July 24, 1869, on Forster's biography of Landor, gave him occasion to pay tribute to Landor's fine qualities and to express his admiration for his old friend. According to Dickens, Landor took "in hearty good-humor" Dickens's depiction of him as Boythorn in Bleak House and "seemed rather proud of the picture" (Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, p. 371); according to Eliza Lynn Linton (My Literary Life, p. 73), Landor did not relish the picture.

Landor was a reader of H.W. from the first year of its publication to within a year of the termination of the periodical, when a niece cancelled his subscription on his leaving England in July 1858 (Super, p. 602). The year before, he had written to a friend that his reading at the time consisted chiefly of Punch and H.W.: "I want amusing ideas, not serious ones" (Letters and Other Unpublished Writings, ed. Wheeler, pp. 118-119). Landor's admiration for H.W. was one of his typically extravagant admirations. It was a publication, he wrote in 1854, "which I think will have imparted more of pure pleasure and of useful knowledge than any since the invention of letters" (note accompanying "A Modern Greek Idyl"). One of Landor's letters published in the Examiner and two of his poems (one in the Examiner, the other in the Athenaeum) owed their motivation to H.W. articles: "Professor KinkeI" was motivated by the H.W. article "Gottfried Kinkel" and "On the Death of M. D'Ossoli and His Wife Margaret Fuller" by the article "Margaret Fuller"; "A Modern Greek Idyl" was suggested by a story related in "Modern Greek Songs."

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography