Lord David Cecil

Lord David Cecil
CH
Born Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil
(1902-04-09)9 April 1902
Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, England
Died 1 January 1986(1986-01-01) (aged 83)
Cranborne, Dorset, England
Nationality British
Education Eton College
Alma mater Christ Church, Oxford
Occupation
Employer
Parent(s)
Relatives

Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, CH (9 April 1902 – 1 January 1986), was a British biographer, historian and academic. He held the style of "Lord" by courtesy, as a younger son of a marquess.

Early life and studies

David Cecil was the youngest of the four children of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury, and the former Lady Cicely Gore (second daughter of Arthur Gore, 5th Earl of Arran). His siblings were Beatrice Edith Mildred Cecil (afterwards Baroness Harlech), Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury (1893–1972) and Mary Alice Cecil (afterwards Mary Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire). Cecil was a delicate child, suffering from a tubercular gland in his neck at the age of 8 years, and after an operation he spent a great deal of time in bed, where he developed his love of reading.

Because of his delicate health his parents sent him to Eton College later than other boys, and he survived the experience by spending one day a week in bed. After school he went on to Christ Church, Oxford, as an undergraduate.

Career

Cecil read Modern History at Oxford and in 1924 obtained first-class honours. From 1924 to 1930 he was a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. With his first publication, The Stricken Deer (1929), a sympathetic study of the poet Cowper, he made an immediate impact as a literary historian. Studies followed on Walter Scott, early Victorian novelists and Jane Austen.

In 1939 he became a Fellow of New College, Oxford, where he remained a Fellow until 1969, when he became an Honorary Fellow.[1]

In 1947 he became Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, for a year; but in 1948 he returned to the University of Oxford and remained a Professor of English Literature there until 1970. There his pupils included Kingsley Amis, R. K. Sinha, John Bayley, the Milton scholar Dennis Burden, and Ludovic Kennedy; and for a time he was an associate of the literary group known as the "Inklings." Neil Powell describes Amis's relationship with him, or lack of a relationship, as follows:

[Amis's] allocated supervisor was Lord David Cecil, who seemed disinclined to supervise anything at all; after a term and a half had passed without any contact between them, Kingsley decided to go in search of him at New College. This caused much amusement at the porters' lodge, as if he had asked for the Shah of Persia: 'Oh no, sir. Lord David? Oh, you'd have to get up very early in the morning to get hold of him. Oh dear, oh dear. Lord David in college, well I never did.'

During his academic career Cecil published studies of Hardy, Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Dorothy Osborne and Walter Pater. As well as his literary studies he also published a two-volume historical biography of Lord Melbourne (to whom he was distantly related) and appreciations of visual artists - Augustus John, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones. In retirement he published further literary and biographic studies of Walter de la Mare, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb and Desmond MacCarthy, as well as a history of his own family, The Cecils of Hatfield House and an account of Some Dorset Country Houses. His anthology of writers who had given him special pleasure, Library Looking Glass, appeared in 1975.

Family and personal life

In 1932 Cecil married Rachel MacCarthy, daughter of the literary journalist Sir Desmond MacCarthy. They had three children - actor Jonathan Hugh (1939–2011), who was married to actress Anna Sharkey, a second son actor and journalist, Hugh Peniston (b. 1941) (the historian) and Alice Laura (b. 1947) (the literary agent, who in 1975 married A. Hornak). Rachel Cecil died in 1982.

Joyce Grenfell mentions that Lord David Cecil was bisexual.[2]

Publications

The Young Melbourne
Pan Books edition, 1948

See also

The Uffizi Society, Oxford, c. 1920. Ralph Dutton (wearing glasses) is seated third from left. Also in the front row are Lord Balniel, later 28th Earl of Crawford (2nd from left); Anthony Eden, subsequently Prime Minister and Earl of Avon (4th from left); and Lord David Cecil (5th from left). Second row: later Sir Henry Studholme (5th from left).

Notes

  1. ↑ "Cecil". Who Was Who. Oxford University Press. December 2007. Retrieved 5 February 2009.
  2. ↑ Katharine Moore and Joyce Grenfell, An Invisible Friendship: An Exchange of Letters, 1957-1979, London: Futura, 1982, p. 239.

References

Further reading

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