Watts-Dunton

Theodore Watts-Dunton (12 October 1832 – 6 June 1914) was an English critic and poet. He is often remembered as the friend and minder of Algernon Charles Swinburne, whom he rescued from alcoholism.

Walter Theodore Watts was born at St. Ives in what was then Huntingdonshire. He added his mother's name of Dunton to his surname in 1897. He was originally educated as a naturalist, and saw much of the East Anglian Gypsies, of whose superstitions and folk-lore he made careful study. Abandoning natural history for the law, he qualified as a solicitor and went to London, where he practised for some years, giving his spare time to his chosen pursuit of literature. One of his clients was Swinburne, whom he befriended in 1872.

He contributed regularly to the Examiner from 1874 and to the Athenaeum from 1875 until 1898, being for more than twenty years the principal critic of poetry in the latter journal. He wrote widely for other publications and contributed several articles to the Encyclopædia Britannica, of which the most significant was that on Poetry in the ninth edition. In that article he explored the first principles of poetry.

Watts-Dunton had considerable influence as the friend of many of the leading men of letters of his time; he enjoyed the confidence of Tennyson, and contributed an appreciation of him to the authorized biography. He was in later years Dante Gabriel Rossetti's most intimate friend (Rossetti made a portrait of Watts in pastel in 1874). In 1879 Swinburne's alcoholic dysentery so alarmed him that he moved the poet into his semi-detached home, The Pines, 11 Putney Hill, Putney, which they shared for nearly thirty years until Swinburne's death in 1909. Watts' household included his sister Miranda Mason, her husband Charles (who was also a solicitor), her son, Bertie (born 1874) and later, a second sister. They also employed a live-in cook and a housemaid. Watts-Dunton married Clara Reich in 1905 and she settled into the family with ease.

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