Richard Monckton Milnes

Here's a bicentenary worth noting. Richard Monckton Milnes (born on this day in 1809) was one of those giant figures of the Victorian age, who seem so much larger than life as we conceive it in our narrower, enervated times. As well as being a very active politician (mostly in sound causes), mover and shaker, and friend of the great and good - indeed, he was one of them - he also pursued a productive and, in its time, successul literary career, his output including two volumes of poetry and the first biography of Keats, the book that launched the revival of Keats's literary reputation. Monckton Milnes was also a friend and patron to many writers, including Tennyson, Emerson, Richard Burton and the young Swinburne. The two latter names hint at the breadth of Milnes's literary interests, for this pillar of Victorian society (and persistent suitor of the secular saint Florence Nightingale) was also an ardent devotee of erotic literature, whose huge collection of erotica now resides in the British Library. This piece on the pornographic publisher Leonard Smithers touches on it. Intriguing to think of this gifted and extremely active public man devoting time to seeking out the rarest and finest of dirty books, and writing a mock-heroic epic on the joys of flagellation, The Rodiad. Oh those Victorian lives...