Dilke, CHARLES WENTWORTH, an English critic and journalist, was born December 8, 1789, graduated at Cambridge, and served for twenty years in the navy pay-office. In 1830 he became proprietor of the Athenæum, and from that year until 1846 he filled also its editor's chair. He took over the Daily News in 1846, and managed it for three years. He died at Alice Holt, Hants, August 10, 1864. A collection of his articles contributed to the Athenæum and Notes and Queries between 1848 and 1863 appeared in 1875 as The Papers of a Critic: with biographical sketch by his grandson, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Bart.,
M.P. (2 vols.); the first volume treating Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Swift; the second, Junius, Wilkes, the Grenville Papers, and Burke. He is known also by his Old English Plays (6 vols. 1814).—SIR CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE, only son of the preceding, was born in London, February 18, 1810, and educated at Westminster School, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He studied law, graduating as LL.B. in 1834, but did not enter upon the practice of his profession. One of the most active originators, as well as member of the executive committee, of the Great Exhibition of 1851, he was offered a knighthood by the Queen and a large pecuniary reward by the royal commission, but both offers he declined. In 1853 he was sent as a commissioner to the New York Industrial Exhibition, and in 1862 he was one of the five royal commissioners for the second exhibition, in the January of which year he accepted a baronetcy. In 1865 he was returned to parliament for Wallingford, and in 1869 he was sent to Russia as the representative of England, to the horticultural exhibition held at St Petersburg. Here he died suddenly, 10th May of the same year.—SIR CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE, son of the preceding, was born at Chelsea, September 4, 1843. He studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1866, being soon after called to the bar. His travels in Canada and the United States, Australia and New Zealand, he described in his Greater Britain: a Record of Travel in English-speaking Countries during 1866-67 (2 vols. 1868). He was returned to parliament for Chelsea in 1868. He is a doctrinaire Radical in politics, and was once at least an avowed Republican, yet he held office as Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs, and afterwards President of the Local Government Board under Mr Gladstone. In 1885 he married the widow of Mark Pattison, herself the author of Claud Lorrain, sa Vie et ses Œuvres (Paris, 1884), and The Shrine of Death (1886), a collection of stories. About the same time his name was much before the public in connection with a divorce case, and this led to his defeat at the Chelsea election in 1886, and temporary retirement from public life. He still continued to influence public opinion through the press, as by his European Politics (1887), a collection of striking essays, and his Problems of Greater Britain (2 vols. 1890). He returned to parliament in 1892 as member for the Forest of Dean.