A Russian is produced

Abstract

The latter part of Turgenev’s visit to England in 1857 was strongly coloured by a new-found friendship with Richard Monckton Milnes, afterwards first Lord Houghton. Poet, politician, and collector of erotica, ‘Dicky’ Milnes was one of the most kaleidoscopic figures of the Victorian era. His career had begun auspiciously, with wealth and connexions and an education at Trinity, the most prestigious college in England. While at Cambridge he became an ‘Apostle’, a member of the most exclusive undergraduate society; and Thackeray and Tennyson were among his close associates. His own excursions into literature were pedestrian, perhaps — Carlyle once mockingly enquired why he turned what he wished to express into rhymes, ‘instead of just saying it’ — but works like ‘I wandered by the Brook-side’ and The Flight of Youth brought him some contemporary notoriety. The latter poem, taken as title for the second part of Pope-Hennessy’s biographical study of Milnes, aptly illustrates the gradual decline in energy and creativity which attended not only his writing but his political disappointments of the 1860s and his elevation to the peerage in 1863. This last distinction he himself dubbed ruefully ‘a Second Class in the School of Life’.