Charles Whitehead

Charles Whitehead (1804 – 5 July 1862) was an English poet, novelist, and dramatist.[1]

Whitehead was born in London, the eldest son of a wine merchant. His most memorable works, which met with popular favour were: The Solitary (1831), a poem, The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (1834), a novel, The Cavalier (1836), a play in blank verse,[2] Richard Savage (1842), perhaps his finest novel; and The Earl of Essex, an historical romance (1843).[1]

Whitehead recommended Charles Dickens for the writing of the letterpress for Robert Seymour's drawings, which ultimately developed into The Pickwick Papers.[2]

Whitehead had problems with alcohol and decided to travel to Melbourne, Australia, hoping for fresh start, arriving in 1857.[1] He already was acquainted with Richard Henry Horne, he befriended James Smith and James Neild and wrote a little for the local press. He applied for admission to the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum in February 1862 in vain, a few months later he was picked up exhausted in a street and taken to the Melbourne hospital, where he died on 5 July 1862 of hepatitis and bronchitis and was buried in a pauper's grave.

Illustration from A romance of real life

Notes

Serle, Percival (1949). "Whitehead, Charles". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). "Whitehead, Charles". A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.

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References

"Whitehead, Charles" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
Clive Turnbull, 'Whitehead, Charles (1804–1862)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 6, MIP, 1976, pp 391–392. Accessed 31 December 2012

Additional resources listed by the Australian Dictionary of Biography:

H. T. M. Bell, A Forgotten Genius; Charles Whitehead (Lond, 1894)
J. Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, J. W. T. Ley ed (Lond, 1928)
C. Turnbull, Australian Lives (Melb, 1965)
My Note Book, vol 3 (1858)
Examiner (Melbourne), 23 August 1862
Australasian, 17 November 1866, 24 September & 18 May 1889, 28 July 1894.

External links

Archival material at

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[Serle-1] Serle, Percival (1949). "Whitehead, Charles". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.

[SBDEL-2] One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). "Whitehead, Charles". A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.