Author: Hobhouse, John Cam
Biography:
HOBHOUSE, John Cam (1786-1869: ODNB)
Best known now as a loyal college friend of Byron’s (q.v.), Hobhouse had an impressive public career of his own. He was the eldest of nineteen children (by two wives) of Sir Benjamin Hobhouse, first baronet, a wealthy brewer and MP. He inherited his father’s title in 1831; in 1851 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Broughton and in 1852 was made KCB for his services to government. He was born at Redland, Bristol, on 27 June 1786. Both parents were dissenters and he was raised a Unitarian. His mother Charlotte Cam died in 1791. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge (BA 1808, MA 1811). It was at Trinity, where he founded a Whig Club, that he met Byron. They made verses together and Hobhouse became an occasional contributor to Byron’s works, starting with some lines included in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Byron in turn contributed to Hobhouse’s collection of Imitations and Translations. Their travels from Portugal to Turkey in 1809 inspired the early cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and Hobhouse’s prose Journey through Albania, and Other Provinces of Turkey (1813); Hobhouse later contributed some prose notes for Byron’s Canto Four. He was best man at Byron’s ill-fated marriage in 1815, saw Byron off when he left England in 1816, visited him in Switzerland, and travelled with him into Italy. He last saw his friend at Pisa in 1822 but was called on later as an executor of his will. In the meantime, he had been active in radical circles calling for political reform. He eventually secured election as MP for Westminster in 1820 and thereafter served in a sequence of Whig administrations, with mixed success. On 28 July 1828 he married Julia Tomlinson Hay (d 1833), with whom he had three daughters. He retired from politics in 1858 and wrote his memoirs, Some Account of a Long Life (1865), for private circulation; one of his daughters later published an expanded version as Recollections of a Long Life (1909-11). Hobhouse died at his London home on Berkeley Square on 3 June 1869 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. (ODNB 8 Sept. 2022) HJ
Other Names:
- J. C. Hobhouse