Author: Le Gros, W. B.
Biography:
LE GROS, W. B. (1801-50: findmypast.com)
The path of his literary career is relatively easy to follow, his private life much less so. As “W. B. Le Gros, Esq.” he published only one verse collection, Fables and Tales (London: Bentley, 1835), inspired by wall paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum; engravings based on line drawings apparently by the author himself illustrate the volume. A later similarly ekphrastic poem, “The Love-Merchant,” included in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1838, is dated from Naples, and the same magazine printed his poem “A Rambling Cruise along the Coasts of Posilypo and Balae” in Feb. 1840. Evidently Le Gros was a gentleman connoisseur who lived by preference on the Continent. Charles Dickens, who joined a party led by Le Gros that made the ascent of Vesuvius in 1845, described him as “an English gentleman . . . who has been here many years, and has been up the mountain a hundred times” (Letters 1:161). On that occasion, unfortunately, he slipped on ice and fell hundreds of feet down the mountainside; he was badly bruised but suffered no broken bones. Dickens was sorry to hear of his death five years later. Le Gros had left Italy and died of an epidemic fever in Alexandria, Egypt, in the first week of Nov. 1850. Newspapers at the time identified him as “Private Secretary to the Consul-General.” He was most probably William Beaufoy Le Gros, son of William and Elizabeth Le Gros, who was baptised at St. James, Hackney, London, on 10 Sept. 1801. His father may have been Essex gentry with a London house: William Beaufoy Legros (sic), son of William Legros of Cooper’s Epping, entered Rugby School on 18 Aug. 1816, his age given as 14. It is not clear whether he ever married. He was certainly not the William Le Gros of the 1841 and 1851 censuses who was a publican on the island of Jersey. (findmypast.com 16 Dec. 2023; ancestry.com 16 Dec. 2023; rugbyschoolarchives.co.uk; MH 31 Jan. 1840; Bentley’s Miscellany 4 [1838], 61-4; Charles Dickens, Letters [1879], 1: 161-3; Globe 19 Nov. 1850; Examiner 23 Nov. 1850)