Houghton
| Rt. Hon. Lord Houghton FRS, FRGS, FZS | |||||||||||
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| Born | 1809 | ||||||||||
| Died | 1885 | ||||||||||
| Residence | 16 Upper Brook Street, W. | ||||||||||
| Occupation | aristocracy | ||||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
close friend of Burton
Notes From Elsewhere
Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton FRS (19 June 1809 – 11 August 1885) was an English poet, patron of literature and politician.
Member of the Athenaeum Club from 1838
Poet and politician, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was an early member of the secretive Apostles. He travelled in the East in the 1840s, running into Mansfield Parkyns, recently sent down from Cambridge, on the Nile. Florence Nightingale refused his offers of marriage. He was made Lord Houghton in 1863.
Milnes met Burton at some time in the early 1850s—either through the RGS itself, or perhaps later through Admiral Henry Murray’s sessions for travellers in his Monday evenings at home at “D4, the Albany”—and they formed a lasting and intimate friendship. Milnes, who had a special interest in travelers—he took up Francis Galton for a while on his return from Africa in 1852—hosted a regular “10 o’clock breakfast” for the like-minded at his house in 16 Upper Brook street, London. He brought Burton into contact with figures like Swinburne, Hankey and others. In turn Burton introduced him to characters like Colonel Studholme Hodgson, and possibly Edward Vaux Bellamy (or the other way around). Milnes’ now mostly forgotten poetry included an anonymous set of verses from 1871 on flagellation, the Rodiad, a subject he corresponded extensively with Swinburne about. Burton suggested a better name for its earlier version, the “Betuliad”: “Hankey … showed me also a little poem entitled the Betuliad. I liked much every part except the name—you are writing for a very very small section who combine the enjoyment of verse with the practice of flagellation and the remembrance that betula is a birch. Why not call it the Birchiad? If you want it corrected here I can do so. Hankey and I looked over the copy made at Paris and corrected the several errors.”[174]
Isabel Burton later wrote a reminiscence of Milnes’ country home Fryston in Yorkshire, which the Burtons visited regularly was well-attended by a network of society, as well as literary and bohemian, figures.[175]
The hospitalities of Lord Houghton have long since made Fryston famous. None of those who have had that pleasant experience will forget the hearty reception which awaited them after their drive to the Hall—the figure of the host just about the middle height, his brown hair flowing carelessly from his broad forehead, his blue eyes beaming with gladness at the arrival of his friends, as he stood on the top of the stone steps, in front of the house, with both hands extended. Then followed the cup of tea in the library, a long, handsome, comfortable room, soft carpeted, and replete with ottoman and sofa luxury, but walled with books, as indeed was the whole house, not in formal rows, but in separate cases, each with its own subject—Poetry, Magic, French Revolution, Oriental Thought, Theology and Anti-theology, Criminal Trials, Fiction, from Manon Lescaut to George Eliot. …
In August 1859, soon after Monckton Milnes had become proprietor, there met at Fryston, Mansfield Parkyns of Abyssinia; Robert Curzon of the Monasteries; Richard Burton, just returned from discovering the Lake Tanganyika, Central Africa; Petherick of Khartoum … and other travellers in distant fields and in many paths of practical and ideal life
She does not mention Milnes’ special collection of erotica, much of it supplied by Frederick Hankey, which Milnes liked to show to his guests. In her Life she recalled “Richard cross-legged on a cushion, reciting and reading ‘Omar el Khayyam’ alternately in Persian and English, and chanting the call to prayer, ‘Allahhu Akbar.’” Later the house burned down and Milnes lost his unique collection.
An extensive and revealing correspondence between Burton and Milnes survives in the Houghton Papers at Trinity College Cambridge, see Volumes 1 and 2. The Burtons regularly called on his political influence. Burton dedicated City of the Saints to him—Milnes repaid the favour by reviewing it glowingly, though anonymously, in the Edinburgh Review—and named a peak in the Cameroons Mount Milnes, though the name did not stick.
Publications
External Publications
Milnes has been considered as a possible author of The Rodiad, a pornographic poem on the subject of flagellation.[6][7] His apparently almost unsurpassed collection of erotic literature,[8] now in the British Library, was known to few in his lifetime.