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WILLIAM KNIGHTON LLD (1823 – 1901)

Author, Educator, Indian Civil Servant

William Knighton was an English journalist and author whose career in the 19th century included periods in Ceylon and in India and work in coffee-planting, teaching, and public administration which provided material for his writing. His interests included geography, history, philosophy, and politics. His best-known work, the Private Life of an Eastern King, was translated into several languages and has been reprinted in modern times, as have other works of his including the History of Ceylon and Forest Life in Ceylon. He should not be confused with Sir William Knighton, the physician who became private secretary of King George IV and was created a baronet, who was a cousin of his father.

EARLY LIFE
William Knighton, the youngest of three sons, was born on 16th January 1824 in Dublin, where his father Captain Richard Knighton, whose family came from Devonshire, was serving with the British army. His father died three years later and his mother took the boys back to her home town of Hull where two years later she also died. It seems Knighton was taken in and brought up by a relation, Richard Ingham Knighton. All that is known of his education was that he wrote that he attended Glasgow University at the age of fourteen and, during that time ‘made two hurried trips to the Continent’. He would subsequently obtain a degree from the University of Giessen in Germany.

Ceylon
In 1844 he set sail for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to manage a coffee plantation near Kandy belonging to an uncle ‘a mercantile man’ in Colombo. Growing bored and lonely in the jungle he began contributing articles to the Colombo Herald and when offered its editorship he accepted. At the same time he became secretary of the newly formed Ceylon branch of the Asiatic Society and editor of its journal to which he contributed articles and wrote a History of Ceylon.

After leaving Ceylon, he published two semi-autobiographical works based on his time there, Tropical Sketches and Forest Life in Ceylon, which were well received.

Calcutta
Restless ambition took him to Calcutta in 1846 where he taught History and Logic to ‘a fine, intelligent body of young men who crowded the upper classes of the Hindu College’ (now Presidency College), wrote articles for ‘the Calcutta Review about Confucius, and Lord Wellesley’s India Sporting Review about the bagging of alligators and elephants and for one of the daily papers about politics and the Sikh War’ and later became editor of a new Calcutta newspaper. He also continued to write articles for the journal of the Calcutta Asiatic Society.

Temporary return to England
In 1852, back in England on leave and living in Chelsea, he became part of the literary circle that included Thomas Carlyle and Waldo Emerson. . He contributed two articles to Chales Dickens' Household Words. He wrote Edgar Bardon, a semi-autobiographical novel in three parts.

His best-selling book was the Private Life of an Eastern King published in 1855 which detailed the flamboyant but corrupt and often cruel life of the Nawab of Oudh, and gave an argument in support of the annexation of Oudh by the British which took place in 1856.

Public administration in India
In 1860 he returned to India on being appointed Assistant Commissioner in the newly annexed province of Oudh perhaps on the strength of the success of his book. This was a post which involved overseeing the civil administration of a district, tax-raising and acting as a judge in civil and criminal cases, under the oversight of the Commissioner of the province.

In parallel to his work as an administrator, he wrote a sequel called "Elihu Jan's Story, or The Private Life of an Eastern Queen" based on tales told to his wife by her maid formerly of the royal household. He also, unusually for a civil servant, later published a book critical of Lord Cranborne’s policies as Secretary of State for India.

Return home to England
WK resigned his post in the Oudh Commission in 1867, perhaps as a result of the critical book. But also by this time WK had ‘made enough money to be self supporting and from then on devoted his life to literature.’

William Knighton was a fellow, member of Council and vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature in London and also of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale (ALAI; International Literary and Artistic Association) founded in Paris in 1878 by Victor Hugo.

He commissioned a bronze statue of Shakespeare by the sculptor Paul Fournier which he presented to the city of Paris, where it was erected in a prominent position on the Boulevard Haussmann. It was melted down on the orders of the Vichy government in 1941, as were a large number of other bronze statues in France, and the metal was sent to Germany.

His final long work was Struggles for Life in 1888 which he considered his magnum opus.

FAMILY LIFE
WK married Louisa Duhan, daughter of an East India Company civil servant, in Calcutta in 1847. They had three boys and one girl. One boy died of tuberculosis aged 14 and the others died in infancy. The daughter Emma Louisa born in 1849 lived until the age of 93, having married James Hunt Condon, an Irish army doctor, in India on her 17th birthday with her father’s consent. There were eight children of that marriage, and their grand-daughter Pamela Condon (1918-2006) married Major-General Roy Urquhart of Arnhem fame. After her first husband’s death, Emma Louisa was married a second time, to Dr. Samuel J. Rennie, another army doctor.

Louisa died of TB in 1882 and was buried in St Nicolas Cemetery in Rochester. WK married again a year later, a widow Charlotte Marshall nee Drake who came with five children and a major share in an Australian sheep station, Glengallan on the Darling Downs in Queensland. WK spent his last years in St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex where he died on 31 March 1900.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
History of Ceylon from the earliest period to the present 1845 one volume (Google Books) reprinted Cambridge University Press 2013 DOI

The Utility of the Aristotelian Logic; or, the Remarks of Bacon, Locke, Reid and Stewart on That Subject Considered; Being the Substance of Three Lectures, Etc: 1847 one volume

Forest Life in Ceylon 1847. Hurst and Blackett 2nd edn 1854 vol I vol. II (Google Books)

Tropical Sketches 1855. Hurst and Blackett Vol 1. Vol 2 (Google Books)

European Turkey, its people, provinces history and origins of the present war 1854 John Cassell one volume (Google Books)

Training System of Education, particularly as adapted for Large Towns 1854 The Journal of the Society of Arts, vol. 2, no. 90, 1854 pp. 651–666 Accessed 2 July 2024 (JSTOR)

Training in Streets and Schools. A lecture 1855 Longmans & Company one volume (Google Books)

Private Life of an Eastern King 1855 3rd revised edition 1856 (Google Books). see also under SELECT SOURCES the OUP combined edition of the two "Private Lives" of 1921.

Edgar Bardon – autobiographical novel in 3 volumes 1856 Vol 1 (Google Books) vol 2 (Google Play) vol 3 (Google Play)

Elihu Jan's Story; or, The Private Life of an Eastern Queen 1865 Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green one volume (Google Books). see also the additional material in the OUP combined edition of the two "Private Lives" of 1921, reference under FURTHER READING

The Policy of the Future in India: A Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Cranborne  1867 Longmans, Green & Co one volume (Google Books)

Two lectures in Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature ser.2 v.14 1881 :


 * The philosophy of Epicurus and modern agnosticism [Read June 24, 1885] pp. 41-67
 * Cleon, the demagogue [Read May 25, 1887] pp. 256-277

Struggles for Life 1888 Williams and Norgate one volume (Google Books)