William Watkiss Lloyd (11 March 1813 – 22 December 1893) was an English writer with wide interests. These included fine art, architecture, archaeology, Shakespeare, and classical and modern languages and literature.[1]
Lloyd was born at Homerton, then in Middlesex, and educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School. At the age of 15 he entered a family tobacco business in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1864. In 1868 he married Ellen Brooker Beale (died 1900). He died in London.[2][3]
The work for which Lloyd is best known is The Age of Pericles (1875), which is notable for its scholarship and appreciation of its period, but hampered by a difficult and at times obscure style. He also wrote:
Xanthian Marbles (1845)
Critical Essays upon Shakespeare's Plays (1875)
Christianity in the Cartoons [ofRaphael] (1865), which excited considerable attention from the way in which theological questions were discussed.
The History of Sicily to the Athenian War with elucidations of the Sicilian odes of Pindar (1872)[4]
Panics and their Panaceas (1869)
An edition of Much Ado about Nothing, "now first published in fully recovered metrical form" (1884) – the author held that all the plays were originally written throughout in blank verse.[5]
A number of his manuscripts remain unpublished. The most important of these were bequeathed to the British Museum, including:
A Further History of Greece
The Century of Michael Angelo
The Neo-Platonists
These are discussed in a "Memoir" by Sophia Beale, prefixed to Lloyd's posthumously published Elijah Fenton: his Poetry and Friends (1894), which contains a list of his published and unpublished works.[5][6]
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Lloyd, William Watkiss". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 832.
