Y DOBELL

(1824-1874)

Sydney Dobell, the son of a wine merchant, was born at Cranbrook in
Kent. His parents, both persons of strong individuality, believed in
home training, and not one of their eight children went either to
school or to university. They belonged to the Broad Church Community
founded by Sydney's maternal grandfather, Samuel Thompson; a church
intended to recall in its principles the primitive Christian ages. The
parents looked upon Sydney, their eldest-born, as destined to become
the apostle of this creed. He grew up in a kind of religious fervor,
with his precocious mind unnaturally stimulated; a course of conduct
which materially weakened his constitution, and made him a chronic
invalid at the early age of thirty-three. He read whatever books came
to hand, many of them far beyond his years. At the age of eight he
filled his diary with theological discussions.

Entering his father's counting-house as a mere lad, he remained to the
end of his life a business man of great energy. Notwithstanding his
rare poetic endowments, he never seems to have entertained a
single-minded purpose to be a poet and nothing more. On the contrary,
he thought the ideal and the practical life perfectly compatible, and
he strove to unite in himself the poet and the man of affairs. He
wrote habitually until 1856, when regular literary work was forbidden
by his physicians. With characteristic energy he now turned his
thoughts into other channels; identified himself with the affairs of
Gloucester, where he was living, looked after his business, and was
one of the first to adopt the system of industrial co-operation. The
last four years of his life, a period of suffering and helplessness,
he spent at Barton-End House, above the Stroud valley, where he died
in the spring of 1874.

In the work of Dobell it is curious to find so few traces of the
influences under which he grew up. He had every encouragement to
become a writer of religious poetry; yet much of his work is
philosophic and recondite. His delicate health is in a measure
responsible for his failure to achieve the success which his natural
endowments promised. All his literary work was done between the ages
of twenty-three and thirty-three. 'The Roman,' his first long poem,
appeared in 1850. Dedicated to the Italian struggle for liberty, it
showed his breadth of sympathy. In 'Balder,' finished in 1853, Dobell
is at his best both as thinker and as poet. Yet its many