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Author: Landor, Walter Savage

Biography:

LANDOR, Walter Savage (1775-1864: ODNB)

The eldest son of Walter Landor, a physician, and his second wife Elizabeth Savage, he was baptised on 30 Jan. at St. Nicholas, Warwick, Warwickshire. (Robert Eyres Landor, q.v., was a younger brother.) His father was a physician. Both parents came from wealthy families and inherited considerable land and property. Walter was sent to boarding school at the age of four and proved a precocious, talented, but quarrelsome student. He started at Rugby School in 1783 but was asked to leave in 1791; matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, in Nov. 1792 but was sent down in 1794 for aggressive behaviour, and although he could have returned after two terms he did not, choosing instead to try his fortunes as a writer in London. By then at odds with his father, he was nevertheless granted a modest annual allowance. In counterpoint to fallings-out with neighbours and family throughout his life he had the loyal support of such eminent literary figures as Dr. Samuel Parr (1747-1825) of Warwick, Robert Southey, Leigh Hunt, Robert Browning (qq.v.), and John Forster (1812-76) who later wrote his biography. His publications include political pamphlets and several volumes of Latin verse as well as poetry and prose in English—the best known being Gebir (1797) and a series of Imaginary Conversations (1824-9). In 1846 he issued his Collected Works in two large volumes. Landor came into his inheritance in 1805 but imprudent investments and mismanagement left him in debt from which he was periodically rescued by his estranged family. On 24 May 1811 he married Julia Thuillier, a minor, with the permission of her father, at St. James’s, Bath. In the course of a difficult marriage they had four children born between 1818 and 1825 and lived mostly abroad in France and Italy until 1835, when he left the family in Fiesole, just outside Florence, and returned as a literary lion to Bath. In 1858, however, the combination of poor health and an expensive libel suit drove him once again from England. He returned briefly to Fiesole and then settled, with the help of the Brownings, in Florence, where he wrote his final volume of poetry, Heroic Idylls (1863) and died in his rooms on 17 Sept. 1864. He was buried in the Protestant (Acattolico) Cemetery on Sept. 19. (ODNB 3 Dec. 2023; ancestry.com 3 Dec. 2023; findmypast.com 3 Dec. 2023; Alumni Oxonienses) 

 

Other Names:

  • W. S. Landor
 

Books written (10):

London: Cadell and Davies, 1795
London: Rivingtons, 1798
Warwick/ London: printed by H. Sharpe/ Rivingtons, 1800
London: Rivington, 1802
2nd edn. Oxford/ London: Slatter and Munday/ R. S. Kirby, 1803
Bath: [no publisher: printed by Meyler], [1806]
London: [no publisher: printed by W. and T. Darton], 1808
London: John Murray, 1812
London: Edward Moxon, 1831