BIOGRAPHY

The 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has the following entry for Robert Buchanan:

“BUCHANAN, ROBERT WILLIAMS (1841—1901), British poet, novelist and dramatist, son of Robert Buchanan (1813—1866), Owenite lecturer and journalist, was born at Caverswall, Staffordshire, on the 18th of August 1841. His father, a native of Ayr, after living for some years in Manchester, removed to Glasgow, where Buchanan was educated, at the high school and the university, one of his fellow-students being the poet David Gray. His essay on Gray, originally contributed to the Cornhill Magazine, tells the story of their close friendship, and of their journey to London in 1860 in search of fame. After a period of struggle and disappointment Buchanan published Undertones in 1863. This “tentative” volume was followed by Idyls and Legends of Inverburn (1865), London Poems (1866), and North Coast and other Poems (1868), wherein he displayed a faculty for poetic narrative, and a sympathetic insight into the humbler conditions of life. On the whole, Buchanan is at his best in these narrative poems, though he essayed a more ambitious flight in The Book of Orm: A Prelude to the Epic, a study in mysticism, which appeared in 1870. He was a frequent contributor to periodical literature, and obtained notoriety by an article which, under the nom de plume of Thomas Maitland, he contributed to the Contemporary Review for October 1871, entitled “The Fleshly School of Poetry.” This article was expanded into a pamphlet (1872), but he subsequently withdrew from the criticisms it contained, and it is chiefly remembered by the replies it evoked from D. G. Rossetti in a letter to the Athenaeum (16th December 1871), entitled “The Stealthy School of Criticism,” and from Mr Swinburne in Under the Microscope (1872). Buchanan himself afterwards regretted the violence of his attack, and the “old enemy” to whom God and the Man is dedicated was Rossetti. In 1876 appeared The Shadow of the Sword, the first and one of the best of a long series of novels. Buchanan was also the author of many successful plays, among which may be mentioned Lady Clare, produced in 1883; Sophia (1886), an adaptation of Tom Jones; A Man’s Shadow (1890); and The Charlatan (1894). He also wrote, in collaboration with Harriett Jay, the melodrama Alone in London. In 1896 he became, so far as some of his work was concerned, his own publisher. In the autumn of 1900 he had a paralytic seizure, from which he never recovered. He died at Streatham on the 10th of June 1901.

Buchanan’s poems were collected into three volumes in 1874, into one volume in 1884; and as Complete Poetical Works (2 vols., 1901). Among his poems should also be mentioned: “The Drama of Kings” (1871); “ St Abe and his Seven Wives,” a lively tale of Salt Lake City, published anonymously in 1872; and “ Balder the Beautiful” (1877); “ The City of Dream (1888); “The Outcast: a Rhyme for the Time” (1891); and “The Wandering Jew” (1893). His earlier novels, The Shadow of The Sword, and God and the Man (1881), a striking tale of a family feud, are distinguished by a certain breadth and simplicity of treatment which is not so noticeable in their successors, among which may be mentioned The Martyrdom of Madeline (1882); Foxglove Manor (1885); Effie Hetheringlon (1896); and Fathcr Anthony (1898). David Gray and other Essays, chiefly on Poetry (1868); Master Spirits (1873); A Poet’s Sketch Book (1883), in which the interesting essay on Gray is reprinted; and A Look round Literature (1887), contain Buchanan’s chief contributions to periodical literature. More valuable is The Land of Lorne (2 vols., 1871), a vivid record of yachting experiences on the west coast of Scotland.”

(Robert Buchanan’s wife, Mary)

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The fullest account of the life of Robert Buchanan is the biography written by his sister-in-law, adopted daughter, long-time companion and literary collaborator, Harriett Jay. Robert Buchanan. Some account of his life, his life's work and his literary friendships was published in 1903, two years after Buchanan’s death and has long been out of print. I have added it to the site and it can be accessed from the link below. It is by no means a critical biography; more an affectionate portrait of the man. Harriett Jay attempts to let her subject speak for himself wherever possible, frequently using extracts from his own unpublished autobiography and his letters.

Robert Buchanan. Some account of his life, his life's work and his literary friendships

The book also includes contributions from several of Buchanan’s friends, including G. R. Sims and Henry Murray. Sims collaborated with Buchanan on several plays and he devoted a chapter to him in his own autobiography My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London (1917) and there is a section on Buchanan in Sims’ Among My Autographs (1904). Following Buchanan’s death, Henry Murray published Robert Buchanan: A Critical Appreciation And Other Essays (1901) (which is available in the Critical Writings section of the site) and he also included a long section about his friendship with Buchanan in A Stepson of Fortune: The Memories, Confessions, and Opinions of Henry Murray (1909). Hall Caine includes a chapter on Buchanan in his autobiography, My Story (1908), John Coleman’s Fifty Years of an Actor’s Life (Vol.2) has an account of his first encounter with Buchanan and Jay, and in Recollections of Fifty Years, Isabella Fyvie Mayo recalls a meeting with Buchanan in February, 1872 (she was not impressed). The full texts are available at the Internet Archive but the Buchanan extracts are available here:

My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London and Among My Autographs by G. R. Sims.

Stepson of Fortune: The Memories, Confessions, and Opinions of Henry Murray.

My Story by Hall Caine.

Fifty Years of an Actor’s Life by John Coleman.

Recollections of Fifty Years by Isabella Fyvie Mayo.

Apart from the Jay biography there have only been two books devoted solely to Robert Buchanan. Archibald Stodart-Walker’s Robert Buchanan, the Poet of Modern Revolt, published the year Buchanan died, is concerned with Buchanan’s poetry. John A. Cassidy’s Robert W. Buchanan, published in America in 1973, relies on Harriett Jay to provide most of the details of Buchanan’s life, although Cassidy uses other sources to expand the section on the ‘Fleshly School’ controversy.

Harriett Jay’s biography also seems to be the main source for many of the shorter biographical sketches of Robert Buchanan. Some of these emphasize certain periods of Buchanan’s life, or aspects of his character, and merely serve to add to the confusion surrounding his reputation. The chapter on Buchanan in M.J.W. Rogers’ history of Caverswall, The Spirit Of The Place (published by Three Counties Publishing Limited, ISBN 0 9535239-3-4) concentrates on the ‘Pooterish’ elements, painting a picture of Buchanan as a slightly comical figure, stumbling from one misfortune to the next, an inveterate gambler and a keen cyclist whose last words were “I should like a good spin down Regent Street.” A far cry from the fiery literary provocateur who appears in John Sutherland’s The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (published by Longman (1988) ISBN 0-582-49041-3 PPR). Then there’s the strange character in Frederick Hackwood’s Staffordshire Worthies, published in 1911, who seems to have just stepped out of a play by Oscar Wilde. I’ve included this on the site, as well as the chapter on Robert Buchanan in Staffordshire Poets and The Bitter Life of Robert Buchanan from Arthur Mee’s guide to Staffordshire, which was the first ‘biography’ of Buchanan I happened to read.

Robert Williams Buchanan (Staffordshire Poets)

A Stormy Petrel of Letters (Staffordshire Worthies)

The Bitter Life of Robert Buchanan (The King’s England: Staffordshire)

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During my own research I have discovered several inconsistencies in Harriett Jay’s biography and also several gaps in the narrative. In an attempt to correct these, I have constructed a timeline of the life of Buchanan, which also contains copies of several documents including his birth certificate and some census returns:

Robert Buchanan Timeline

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Also, to give some idea of the state of Buchanan’s reputation at the time of his death I’ve added a page of

Buchanan Obituaries