Walter Raleigh (professor)



Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (5 September 1861 – 13 May 1922) was an English scholar, poet, and author. Raleigh was also a Cambridge Apostle.

Biography
Walter Alexander Raleigh was born in London, the fifth child and only son of a local Congregationalist minister. Raleigh was educated at the City of London School, Edinburgh Academy, University College London, and King's College, Cambridge.

He was Professor of English Literature at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh in India (1885–87), Professor of Modern Literature at the University College Liverpool (1890–1900), Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at Glasgow University (1900–1904), and in 1904 became the first holder of the Chair of English Literature at Oxford University and he was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford (1914–22). Raleigh was knighted in 1911. Among his works are Style (1897), Milton (1900) and Shakespeare (1907), but in his day he was more renowned as a stimulating if informal lecturer than as a critic.

On the outbreak of World War I, he turned to the war as his primary subject. Raleigh's correspondence during the war revealed strong anti-German beliefs: one letter stated "German University Culture is mere evil", and added that the deaths "of 100 Boche professors ... would be a benefit to the human race". His finest book may be the first volume of The War in the Air (1922), whose volumes II to VI (1928–1937, plus 3 volumes of maps) had to be compiled by Henry Albert Jones after Raleigh's death.

In 1915, he delivered the Vanuxem lectures at Princeton on "The Origins of Romance" and "The Beginnings of the Romantic Revival," and lectured on Chaucer at Brown, which gave him the degree of Litt.D.

Raleigh died at the Acland Nursing Home, Oxford, from typhoid (contracted during a visit to the Near East) on 13 May 1922 (aged 60), being survived by his wife, Lucie Gertrude Jackson (sister-in-law of Catherine Carswell), three of their four sons, and a daughter. His daughter Philippa married the writer Charles Whibley. He is buried in the churchyard of the parish church of St. Lawrence at North Hinksey, near Oxford.

His son Hilary edited his light prose, verse and plays in Laughter from a Cloud (1923). Raleigh is probably best known for the poem "Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914":

"I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I'm introduced to one I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!"

Raleigh Park at North Hinksey, near Harcourt Hill where he lived from 1909 to his death, is named after him. The Department of English at Aligarh Muslim University has an active Raleigh Literary Society, which regularly organises performances of scenes from Shakespeare's plays.