Richard Buckley Litchfield

Richard Buckley Litchfield (6 January 1832, Yarpole – 11 January 1903, Cannes) was a British scholar and philanthropist.

Life

R. B. Litchfield was the only son of Captain Richard Litchfield of Cheltenham, England. He was educated at Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Cambridge,^[1] where he became a friend of James Clerk Maxwell, and where he then taught mathematics. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1854, and was called to the Bar in 1863.^[1]

He was a founder of the Working Men's College, London, where he worked devotedly from 1854 to 1901, being the College's Bursar, and becoming its Vice Principal between 1872 to 1875. In the mid-1850s he was editor of the College magazine.^[2]

Litchfield was a fellow Working Men's College colleague of John Ruskin. He married a daughter of Charles Darwin, Henrietta Emma ('Etty') Darwin, in 1871, but there were no children from the marriage. He wrote a substantial biography of the inventor of photography, Thomas Wedgwood, which was published in the year of his death.

In his niece-by-marriage Gwen Raverat's Period Piece,^[3] she described him thus: "He was a nice funny little man, whose socks were always coming down; he had an egg-shaped waistcoat, and a fuzzy, waggly, whitey-brown beard, which was quite indistinguishable, both in colour and texture, from the Shetland shawl which Aunt Etty generally made him wear round his neck."

He lived at 31 Kensington Square, London.

External links

• Richard Buckley Litchfield at Find a Grave

Works

• The Beginnings of the Working Men's College. London, England, 1902
• Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer: An Account of His Life. London, Duckworth and Co, 1903.

References

• Lichfield, Henrietta Emma (1910). Richard Buckley Litchfield: A memoir written for his friends. University Press, Cambridge. (276 pages).