(1824-1874)
Sydney Dobell, the son of a wine merchant, was born at Cranbrook in
Kent. His parents, both persons of strong individuality, believed in
home training, and not one of their eight children went either to
school or to university. They belonged to the Broad Church Community
founded by Sydney's maternal grandfather, Samuel Thompson; a church
intended to recall in its principles the primitive Christian ages. The
parents looked upon Sydney, their eldest-born, as destined to become
the apostle of this creed. He grew up in a kind of religious fervor,
with his precocious mind unnaturally stimulated; a course of conduct
which materially weakened his constitution, and made him a chronic
invalid at the early age of thirty-three. He read whatever books came
to hand, many of them far beyond his years. At the age of eight he
filled his diary with theological discussions.
Entering his father's counting-house as a mere lad, he remained to the
end of his life a business man of great energy. Notwithstanding his
rare poetic endowments, he never seems to have entertained a
single-minded purpose to be a poet and nothing more. On the contrary,
he thought the ideal and the practical life perfectly compatible, and
he strove to unite in himself the poet and the man of affairs. He
wrote habitually until 1856, when regular literary work was forbidden
by his physicians. With characteristic energy he now turned his
thoughts into other channels; identified himself with the affairs of
Gloucester, where he was living, looked after his business, and was
one of the first to adopt the system of industrial co-operation. The
last four years of his life, a period of suffering and helplessness,
he spent at Barton-End House, above the Stroud valley, where he died
in the spring of 1874.
In the work of Dobell it is curious to find so few traces of the
influences under which he grew up. He had every encouragement to
become a writer of religious poetry; yet much of his work is
philosophic and recondite. His delicate health is in a measure
responsible for his failure to achieve the success which his natural
endowments promised. All his literary work was done between the ages
of twenty-three and thirty-three. 'The Roman,' his first long poem,
appeared in 1850. Dedicated to the Italian struggle for liberty, it
showed his breadth of sympathy. In 'Balder,' finished in 1853, Dobell
is at his best both as thinker and as poet. Yet its many fine
passages, its wealth of metaphor, and the exquisite songs of Amy,
hardly counterbalance the remoteness of its theme, and its over-subtle
analysis of morbid psychic states. It is a poem to be read in
fragments, and has aptly been called a mine for poets.
With Alexander Smith he published in 1855 a series of sonnets inspired
by the Crimean War. This was followed in 1856 by 'England in War
Time,' a collection of Dobell's lyrical and descriptive poems, which
possess more general human interest than any other of his books.
After continuous work was interdicted, he still contributed verse and
prose to the periodicals. His essays have been collected by Professor
Nichol, under the title 'Thoughts on Art, Philosophy, and Religion.'
As a poet Dobell belongs to the so-called "spasmodic school," a school
"characterized by an undercurrent of discontent with the mystery of
existence, by vain effort, unrewarded struggle, skeptical unrest, and
an uneasy striving after some incomprehensible end.... Poetry of this
kind is marked by an excess of metaphor which darkens rather than
illustrates, and by a general extravagance of language. On the other
hand, it manifests freshness and originality, and a rich natural
beauty." Dobell's descriptions of scenery are among the finest in
English literature. His senses were abnormally acute, like those of a
savage, a condition which intensified his appreciation of natural
beauty. Possessing a vivid imagination and wide sympathies, he was
often over-subtle and obscure. He strove to realize in himself his
ideal of a poet, and during his years of ill-health gave himself up to
promoting the welfare of his fellow-men; but of his seventeen years of
inactivity he says:--"The keen perception of all that should be done,
and that so bitterly cries for doing, accompanies the consciousness of
all that I might but cannot do."