Gilchrist

Gilchrist, ALEXANDER, Blake's biographer, was born at Newington Green, 1828, the son of a Unitarian minister who, conscientiously withdrawing from the office of the ministry, removed, when Alexander was a year old, to a mill near Reading. At the age of twelve Gilchrist entered University College, London, where for four years he was a diligent scholar, and formed a friendship with the Rossettis. Leaving school at sixteen, he entered the Middle Temple in 1846, and was called to the bar in 1849, but never practised. Maintaining himself chiefly by art-criticism, he married in 1851. After collecting in Yorkshire materials for a Life of Etty, he settled in 1853 at Guildford. The Life of Etty, warmly commended by Carlyle, appeared in 1855. The following year he removed to Chelsea, taking a house next door to the Carlyles. Here was composed his Life of Blake, a labour of love engaging all his faculties. Before the task was yet completed, the author, in the full vigour of life, was cut off by scarlet fever on 30th November 1861.—His wife, ANNE GILCHRIST, née Burrows, was born in London, 1828. In 1851 she married; in 1855 began to write for All the Year Round, in 1861 for Macmillan's. On her husband's death she undertook the completion of his Life of Blake (1863), to the second edition of which (1880) is appended a memoir of Alexander Gilchrist. In 1869 she published in the American Radical Review 'A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman;' and it was largely to become personally acquainted with the poet that she spent three years in America (1876-79), when she wrote for Blackwood's 'Glimpses of a New England Village.' In 1883 appeared her Life of Mary Lamb, and in 1885, only a few months before her death that year, her last essay, 'A Confession of Faith.' See Anne Gilchrist: her Life and Writings, by her son (1887).