Austin Dobson: A Reappraisal of his Poetry

Abstract

Austin Dobson (1840-1921), the English poet and essayist, was well regarded during his lifetime as an author of vers de société and a leading figure of the English Parnassian Movement in poetry, although later his reputation slipped from view. However, following a series of important archival discoveries, this thesis argues that Dobson’s work demands urgent reappraisal. The discovery of a commonplace book that Dobson kept as a young writer, as well as hitherto unpublished poems and new details of his family history, reveal Dobson to be a figure divided between conflicting possibilities: Renaissance or Reformation, corrupt or innocent, Catholic or Protestant, French or English. Dobson was drawn to the French Parnassian poets because of his desire to write poetry in formally precise structures, but over time he relaxed his style, with some poems containing an about-face that underscores the untenability of his earlier propositions. Dobson was neither wholly nostalgic nor future-oriented and progressive. His ambivalent relationship to his French heritage (with ancestors including refugees, an alleged traitor and a bigamist), his poetic formalism, and a deeply religious wife placed him in an odd relation to some of the major trends of his period, including the Aesthetic Movement. Dobson was an unrecognised influence on Oscar Wilde as well as modernist writers, making him more than simply the “English Parnassian”: his poetry reveals a sustained and formally accomplished effort to bring order to confusion, and stability to division.