Frederick Temple Blackwood [Lord Dufferin]

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Bibliographical details
Letters from High Latitudes: being some account of a voyage in 1856 in the Schooner Yacht “Foam” to Iceland, Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen (London: John Murray 1857 [3 edns.]); Do. [3th to 11th edns.] (London: John Murray 1857, 1858, 1867, 1879, 1883, 1887, 1891, 1895, 1903), xxiii, 248pp.; Do. (NY: Worthington 1878), xvi, 268pp., ill. [1 port.; t.p. ‘a yacht voyage’]; Do. [copyright edn.; Coll. of British Authors, 2743] (Leipzig : Bernard Tauchnitz 1891), 302pp., and Do., with an introd. by R. W. Macan, and notes by F. A. Cavenagh (London: OUP 1910, 1915), xxxv, 322pp., ill. [16cm.]; Do. [another edn.], with an introduction by Jon Stefansson (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; NY: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1910)xv, 252, 8°; Do., with a foreword by V. Finnbogdottir [facs. of 11th Murray edn.] (London: Merlin 1990), 228pp.

See also Travels by Land and Sea (London [1915]) - 3 pts. being extracts from works of three authors - viz., A Cruise in Northern Seas [from Letters from High Latitudes], by Lord Dufferin; In the Forests of Brazil, by H. W. Bates; A Trip up the Nile, by E. Warburton.)

Lectures Delivered before the Dublin Young Men’s Christian Association: in connexion with the United Church of England and Ireland: during the year 1864 (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., 104 Grafton Street, booksellers to the University, 1865), [i-v] vi-viii, [1-3] 4-356, [1-5] 6-32, [1] 2-3 [4] p., [1] leaf of plates : port. ; 20 cm. CONTENTS: Lord Dufferin, ‘Notes on Ancient Syria’; James Whiteside, ‘Cleanliness: Prudence: Industry’; Patrick Fairbairn, ‘The Christ of scripture, and the Christ of modern theorists’; Lord Archbishop of Dublin, ‘Gustavus Adolphus’; Sir William R. Wills Wilde, ‘Ireland-Past and present: the land and the people’; James M’Cosh, ‘The present tendancy of religious thought’; John Elliott Cairnes, ‘Colonization and colonial government’; William Alexander, ‘The apocryphal gospels’. Report of the association for 1863-64 [pag. separately and dated 1864]. Publisher’s catalogue (December 1864) on pp.[1-4], at end.

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Commentary
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984), A. Lyall, The Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 2 vols. (London 1905); includes account by Dufferin of his childhood indifference to Greek, and his learning it as any other modern language, and its becoming his chief delight, in adult life. Letter to his son’s tutor, Lyall, 1, p.27; also his rectorial address to Univ. of St. Andrews.

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John Metcalf, ‘North Down’s Literary Associations’: Letters from High Latitudes, ‘being some account of a voyage in 1856 in the Schooner Yacht ‘Foam’ to Iceland, Jan Meyn, and Spitzbergen’ (11th edn. held in Belfast Public Library) was a best seller-written in an enviably easy style. His mother’s marriage to the stolid Blackwood’s of Clandeboye alarmed the bridegroom’s parents. On completing Helen’s Tower, he invited Tennyson, Browning and others to contribute verses, now engraved on brass plaques in it. Harold Nicholson was a nephew. (Short notice in Supplement to Fortnight, Sept. 1993.)

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References
D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912); lists Letters from High Latitudes (1857). See also Irish Book Lover, 1.

Bernard Share, ed., Far Green Fields, 1500 Years of Irish Travel Writing (Belfast: Blackstaff 1992), contains extract from Dufferin, Letters from High Latitudes, 11th ed. (London: Dent ‘Everyman’ 1903; first pub. 1857; also 1925 edn.).

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Belfast Central Library holds Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 2 vols. (1905), by Sir A. Lyall; also C. E. D. Black, The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, 1906; also Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Land in Ireland (1867) [see Dalton’s answer, Irish Peers and Irish Peasants, an Answer to Lord Dufferin and the Earl of Rosse.

Linen Hall Library (Belfast) holds Letters from High Latitudes. [Ref. in Mark Bence-Jones, Viceroys of India (1982)]; also Irish Peers and Irish Peasants, an Answer to Lord Dufferin and the Earl of Rosse, by G. T. Dalton.

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Notes
Problem-solver: Lord Dufferin wrote a paper recommending emigration as a solution to the Irish land problem and was answered by G. T. D’Alton in Irish Peers and Irish Peasants, an Answer to Lord Dufferin and the Earl of Rosse (Belfast Linenhall Library) and Isaac Butt in Irish People, Irish Land, a letter to Lord Lifford ... comments on the publications of Lords Dufferin and Rosse (1867) [Copies in University of Ulster Central Library [HL257 I6 B98].)

Genealogy: Dufferin’s preface to his edition of the Poems of Lady Dufferin, his mother (q.v.), contains a history of the Sheridan family, incl. Thomas the Elder, Thomas the Younger, Richard, his son Thomas, Caroline and Helen Sheridan, his daughters.

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Selling up: Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple Blackwood, Lord Dufferin, rooted in Co. Down; retired in 1880s to a comfortable but unpretentious late-Georgian house which he set about altering with wings extensions and alterations. Harold Nicholson visited at the turn of the century, and admired the Marquess’s curiosities including a Red Indian fertility god and a mummy case. The Dufferins had a foothold on another Co. Down seat at Killyleagh, the home of the Rowan-Hamilton. He ended a feud with them by giving up the house to the Rowan-Hamilton’s at a quit-rent of a pair of silver spurs each year (alternating with a gold rose), and married Archibald Rowan-Hamilton’s dg. Asilver Freedom Casket presented to Dufferin by the City of London is expected to fetch £12,000 at Sotheby’s (Auction notice, Irish Times, Sat. 1 Feb. 1992.)

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Russian spy?: George “AE” Russell wrote to Madame H. P. Blavatsky in her capacity as editor of Lucifer (issue of 15 Jan. 1889) notifying her that a novel by A. de Grasse Stevens (Miss Hildreth: A Novel, 3 vols., London 1888) refers at p.141 to ‘a Russian spy who was ejected from India by Lord Dufferin’ and adds: ‘I have never before seen this curious slander in print, and, although you may consider it beneath contempot, I think it a pity to allow it altogether to escape notice.’ Russell upbraids the publishers for allowing an author ‘to libel a living person, and that person a woman’. Alan Denson, the editor of Russell’s letters, quotes that HPB’s signed “Reply” in a note: ‘As to the authoress of this would-be politico-social novel, a rather green than young American, it is said her exceptional claim to disctinction from other trans-Atlantic writers of her sex, would seem to be an intimate acquaintance with the lobby and the back stairs of politics’ - and further notes that Madame Blavatsky answered the libel in Pall Mall Gasette (3 Jan. 1889).

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H. S. Cousins wrote a poem to a son of Dufferin who died in the Boer War, in Ben Madighan (1894); see also references to the management of his estate during the Land Acts in Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Ascendancy; his grandson died in Burma in 1943, ironically near the Ava from which his title derives; the last holder of the title was portrayed by Derek Bell and died of AIDS in [?]1990.

Lost comment, ‘I received from him a copy of that delightful book of poems of Helen, Lady Dufferin, with a memoir written by him, in which I think there is the most charming and beautiful passage illustrative of the love of a son for his mother which has ever been written in the English language’ (Q. source.)

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High-time: Lord Dufferin liked Kipling’s mother and used to drop in for tea at Simla. (Cited in Tom Paulin, review of David Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, London: John Murray, in Times Literary Supplement 8 March 2002, p.4.)

Chancellor: James Joyce received his BA (Pass) degree from the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava on 30 [or 31] Oct. 1902. (See Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1992, p.181.)

Kith & Kin (1): His second son Lord (Ian) Basil Gawaine Blackwood, who succeeded to the title, , was a protegée of Kilmer in S. Africa; held various colonial offices in A. Africa; illustrated Belloc’s books as “BTB”; seriously wounded with the 9th Lancers in World War I, 1916; acted as sec. to Lord Wimbourne in Ireland, 1916, afterwards killed on returning to the Front in 1917.

Kith & Kin (2): A grandson was killed near Ava in Burma (ironically the locale of the family title) during the Second World War. Lady Dufferin, lived to old age and was the recipient of the ‘blessing’ of the women of India in verses by Rudyard Kipling (“Lady, lo, they know and love ...”). Caroline Blackwood, the novelist and sometime wife of Robert Lowell, was his grand-daughter; the life of one of her sons was blighted by heroine.

George Meredith: A copy of Diana of the Crossways (1891), the novel by Meredith, supposedly modelled on Lady Caroline Norton [q.v.] which was formerly owned by Lord Dufferin, is held in the British Library [or Oxford UL?]

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