Doughty, Charles Montagu

(1843-1926)

   Born at Suffolk, the son of a clergyman landowner, he was educated at both Caius College and Downing College, Cambridge, where he read geology. His paper on the Jostedal-Brae glaciers in Norway, read at the 1864 meeting of the British As108 sociation, was a summation of nine months alone in Norway studying glacier action. From a deep interest in sixteenth-century literature and a study of Teutonic languages, he determined that his life-work would be poetry in the style of Chaucer and Spenser. Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) relates his experiences of several years in Arabia, where he lived like an Arab and spoke the language; Edward Garnett published the abridged version Wanderings in Arabia in 1908. He was an honorary doctor of letters of both Oxford and Cambridge universities and an honorary fellow of the British Academy. He died at Sissinghurst, Kent. Some of his poetry publications: Under Arms, 1900. The Dawn in Britain, 1906/1907 (six volumes). Adam Cast Forth, 1908. The Cliffs, 1908. The Titans, 1916. The Clouds, 1912. Mansoul, 1920.

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author. html). Poets of the English Language. Vol. V. W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, ed. Viking Press, 1950. Stanford University libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.