HENLEY, WILLIAM ERNEST

born Aug. 23, 1849, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, Eng. died July 11, 1903, Woking, near London British poet, critic, and editor who in his journals introduced the early work of many of the great English writers of the 1890s. As a child Henley contracted a tubercular disease that later necessitated the amputation of one foot. His other leg was saved only through the skill and radical new methods of the surgeon Joseph Lister, whom he sought out in Edinburgh. Forced to stay in an infirmary in Edinburgh for 20 months (1873-75), he began writing free-verse impressionistic poems about hospital life that established his poetic reputation. These were included in A Book of Verses (1888). Dating from the same period is his most popular poem, "Invictus" (1875), which concludes with the lines "I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul." The rest of his best-known work is contained in London Voluntaries (1893) and In Hospital (1903). Henley's long, close friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson began in 1874 when he was still a patient, and Stevenson based part of the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island on his crippled, hearty friend. Restored to active life, Henley earned his living as an editor, the most brilliant of his journals being the Scots Observer of Edinburgh, of which he became editor in 1889. The journal was transferred to London in 1891 and became the National Observer. Though conservative in its political outlook, it was liberal in its literary taste and published the early work of Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, James Barrie, and Rudyard Kipling. As an editor and critic, Henley was remembered by young writers as a benevolent bully, generous in his promotion and encouragement of unknown talents and fierce in his attacks on unmerited reputations. Henley also edited, with T.F. Henderson, the centenary edition (1896-97) of the poems of Robert Burns, which is still valuable. His biographical preface, in its reaction against the tendency of earlier biographers to idealize Burns, exaggerates the wild side of Burns's character. His later years were saddened by his estrangement from Stevenson (from 1888) and by the death of his daughter, an only child born after 10 years of marriage. He was severely criticized for a "debunking" article on Stevenson written after Stevenson's death.