Robert Barnabas Brough

Robert Barnabas Brough (10 April 1828 – 26 June 1860) was an English writer. He wrote poetry, novels and plays and was a contributor to many periodicals.

Brough was born on 10 April 1828 in London, the son of Barnabas Brough (c. 1795-1854), a brewer and wine merchant and Frances Whiteside, a poet. His brothers were William, also a playwright, John Cargill Brough (1834–1872), a science writer, and Lionel, a comic actor. The family moved to Pontypool in Monmouthshire, where his father ran a brewery and public house. His father was briefly kidnapped by the Chartists in 1839 and was a crown witness at the trial of the Chartist leader John Frost, which resulted in Frost's deportation to Australia. The family was ostracized and ruined financially as a result, and moved to Manchester in 1843, where Brough worked as a clerk in order to contribute to the family income.

In 1847, Brough established the Liverpool Lion, a comic periodical, writing satiric articles and drawings. He worked with his brother William to write a Victorian burlesque play, The Enchanted Isle, which was produced in Liverpool in 1848 before transferring to London. Moving to London, he wrote other successful burlesques including Medea (1856) and Masaniello (1857), as well as other collaborative productions with his brother William including The Sphinx (1849) and The Last Edition of Ivanhoe (1850).

Brough also wrote essays and poems for journals and newspapers, including for a period being the Brussels correspondent of the Sunday Times. Songs of the Governing Classes (1855), a book of radical poems, is his best known work. In it, Brough critiqued the handling of the Crimean war and launched an attack on the upper classes through his satiric fictional portraits of aristocratic figures.

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