T.W.H. Crosland

Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was born in Leeds on July 21, 1865. He was among the most acerbic men of letters and journalists of his lifetime. An anti-Scottish Tory and Monarchist, a Methodist, Crosland earned his living as a Fleet Street reviewer, critic, and editor for journals like The Outlook, The Academy, and the Penny Illustrated Paper. A close friend of Lord Alfred Douglas, Crosland was notorious for his bitter attack on the Oscar Wilde who wrote De Profundis. His poems, in volumes such as Sonnets (1912), War Poems by X (1916), and Collected Poems (1917), reveal sympathy for the downtrodden, the English soldier, and the sick. A sufferer from diabetes and heart ailments for much of his middle age, he died on December 23, 1924, and was buried in the Finchley and St Mary-le-Bone Cemetery, London.