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.
Life
Lloyd was born at
Homerton
Homerton ( ) is an area in London, England, in the London Borough of Hackney. It is bordered to the west by Hackney Central, to the north by Lower Clapton, in the east by Hackney Wick, Leyton and by South Hackney to the south. In 2019, it had ...
, then in
Middlesex
Middlesex (; abbreviation: Middx) is a Historic counties of England, historic county in South East England, southeast England. Its area is almost entirely within the wider urbanised area of London and mostly within the Ceremonial counties of ...
, 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.
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
f Raphael">Raphael.html" ;"title="f Raphael">f 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)
*''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A number of his manuscripts remain unpublished.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
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
, 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posthumously published ''Elijah Fenton: his Poetry and Friends'' (1894), which contains a list of his published and unpublished works.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lloyd, William Watkiss
1813 births
1893 deaths
People educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme School