Merivale, Herman Charles

(1839-1906)

   The only son of Herman Merivale, permanent under-secretary of the India office, and grandson of John Herman Merivale (see entry), he was educated at Harrow School and graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1861. Called to the bar in 1864, he was junior counsel for the government on Indian appeals and in 1867 boundary commissioner for North Wales under the Reform Act. From 1870 to 1880 he edited the Annual Register (a year-by-year record of world events, started in 1758). He died suddenly of heart failure and was buried in his father's grave in Brompton cemetery, Kensington, London. After his father's death in 1874 he gave up the law and devoted himself to literature, sometimes writing under the pseudonym of Felix Dale. He wrote farces, dramas, novels, a fairy tale for children, Binko's Blues (1884), A Life of Thackeray (1891), and Bar, Stage and Platform, Autobiographic Memories (1902). Some of his poems: "A Lost Morning," "A Sprig of Heather," "Aetate XIX," "Darwinity," "Ready, Ay, Ready," "The Lay of the Lifeboat," "The Storm," "The Heart of Midlothian," "Rorke's Drift," "Spinning-Wheel Song."

   Sources: A Nonsense Antholog y. Carolyn Wells, ed. Scribner's; paperback edition, 1930. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. 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 Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. Oxford University Press, 1971. The Home Book of Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953. Through the Year with the Poets. Oscar Fay Adams, ed. D. Lothrop and Company, 1886.