Henry Curwen (journalist)

Henry Curwen (1845–1892) was an English journalist and author, who became editor of The Times of India.

Life

He was born at Workington Hall, the son of Henry Curwen, rector of Workington in Cumberland; his father was a younger son of Henry Christian Curwen (1783–1860), and his mother Dora Goldie was daughter of Alexander John Goldie.[1][2][3] He was educated at Rossall School, and then worked in London for John Camden Hotten the publisher.[1]

In 1876 Curwen left England for India, and settled there. Nassau Lees, who had recently acquired the Times of India published in Bombay, took on Curwen as assistant editor, under Grattan Geary the editor. Curwen wrote in the paper an account of a tour through districts affected by the Great Famine of 1876–78.[1]

In 1880 Curwen became chief editor of the Times of India, and began to improve its reputation. The will of Lees, who died in 1889, gave him a chance to buy the concern. He became proprietor, with Charles Kane as his manager.[1]

Curwen's health failed, and he died, unmarried, on 22 February 1892. He was on board the P&O ship SS Ravenna, three days out of Bombay, and he was buried at sea. A brass memorial tablet was placed in St Thomas's Cathedral, Bombay.[1]

Works

For Hotten, Curwen was involved in compiling books including The Golden Treasury of Thought. His work under his own name was a volume of translations Echoes from French Poets published by Hotten in 1870, and contained verse translations from Alfred de Musset, Alphonse de Lamartine, Charles Baudelaire, and others. He translated also Baudelaire's Study of Edgar Allan Poe in 1872.[1]

In the Westminster Review Curwen wrote between 1871 and 1873 his own account of Poe's career, and also detailed articles on Henri Murger, Novalis, Sándor Petőfi, Honoré de Balzac, and André Chenier. These articles were collected in two volumes (1874), as Sorrow and Song; Studies of Literary Struggle. Other works were:[1]

  • A History of Booksellers; the New and the Old (1873)
  • Within Bohemia, or Love in London (1876), a volume of short stories, followed by others
  • Plodding on; or, the Jog Trot to Fame and Fortune (1879), novel
  • Zit and Xoe (1886), novel (anonymous), reprinted from Blackwood's Magazine. A novel about two prehistoric Archaic humans.[4]
  • Lady Bluebeard (1888, two vols.), novel (anonymous)
  • Dr. Hermione (1891), novel (anonymous).

Notes
  1. Lee, Sidney, ed. (1901). "Curwen, Henry" . Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  2. "Old Manx Families - Goldie-Taubman's of the Nunnery". Retrieved 18 January 2018.
  3. Foster, Joseph (1886). The royal lineage of our noble and gentle families. Рипол Классик. p. 197. ISBN 9785871806173. Retrieved 18 January 2018.
  4. "Zit and Xoe by Henry Curwen...., the story is about two proto-humans who leapt from ape-form to human-form in one generation". Michael Ruse, Darwinism as religion : what literature tells us about evolution. New York : Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN 0190241020 (p.116).
Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lee, Sidney, ed. (1901). "Curwen, Henry". Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

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