William Watkiss Lloyd Explained

William Watkiss Lloyd (11 March 1813 – 22 December 1893) was an English writer with wide interests. These included fine art, architecture, archaeology, Shakespeare, and classical and modern languages and literature.^[1]

Life

Lloyd was born at Homerton, then in Middlesex, and educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School. At the age of 15 he entered a family tobacco business in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1864. In 1868 he married Ellen Brooker Beale (died 1900). He died in London.^[2]

Works

The work for which Lloyd is best known is The Age of Pericles (1875), which is notable for its scholarship and appreciation of its period, but hampered by a difficult and at times obscure style. He also wrote:

• Xanthian Marbles (1845)
• Critical Essays upon Shakespeare's Plays (1875)
• Christianity in the Cartoons [of [[Raphael]]] (1865), which excited considerable attention from the way in which theological questions were discussed.
• The History of Sicily to the Athenian War with elucidations of the Sicilian odes of Pindar (1872)^[3]
• Panics and their Panaceas (1869)
• An edition of Much Ado about Nothing, "now first published in fully recovered metrical form" (1884) – the author held that all the plays were originally written throughout in blank verse.

A number of his manuscripts remain unpublished. The most important of these were bequeathed to the British Museum, including:

• A Further History of Greece
• The Century of Michael Angelo
• The Neo-Platonists

These are discussed in a "Memoir" by Sophia Beale, prefixed to Lloyd's posthumously published Elijah Fenton: his Poetry and Friends (1894), which contains a list of his published and unpublished works.^[4]

Notes and References

1. Lloyd, William Watkiss.
2. H. R. Tedder, "Lloyd, William Watkiss (1813–1893)", rev. Richard Smail, ODNB, Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 26 September 2014, pay-walled.
3. https://archive.org/details/historysicilyto00lloygoog Online
4. Book: Lloyd, W. W. . In Memoriam. William Watkiss Lloyd, by Sylvia Beale . Elijah Fenton: His Poetry and Friends . 1894 . 125–143 . Hanley . Allbut & Daniel.