HOUGHTON (OF GREAT HOUGHTON), RICHARD MONCKTON ...

born June 19, 1809, London, Eng. died Aug. 11, 1885, Vichy, Fr. eclectic English Victorian poet and man of letters who considerably influenced public taste in literature in his day. At Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his M.A. degree in 1831, Houghton joined the socially and artistically progressive Apostles Club, which included among its members the poets Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam. From 1837 to 1863 he served as member of Parliament, becoming involved in such questions as copyright and the establishment of juvenile reformatories. He was made a peer in 1863 with the aid of the prime minister, Lord Palmerston. In the House of Lords he defended the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, and he favoured reform of the franchise. Houghton was a generous and discriminating patron of writers. He published the pioneer Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848), secured a pension for Tennyson, made the American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson known in England, and was an early champion of the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. Considered a capable writer, he published two volumes of poetry (1876) and numerous journal articles on a range of subjects from politics to travel.