Landor, Walter Savage (1775–1864)

Abstract

Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick in 1775. As a writer he was highly regarded by a few, but was known to most of his contemporaries as a ‘character’: an impetuous and headstrong man (caricatured as Boythorn by Dickens in Bleak House) holding in his youth extreme radical views. He left Oxford without a degree after being involved in a fracas. Later, he became bankrupt as a result of his over-bold management of the estate he had inherited in Monmouthshire, and went into exile in Italy in 1813. He resided in Florence, then Fiesole, returning to England in 1835 after breaking with his wife, and had to leave Bath again in 1858 under the threat of a trial for defamation of character in a private feud. He spent his last days in Florence, in a solitude cheered by the friendly protection of Robert Browning, and died there in 1864.