Frederick Locker-Lampson (as he is usually called), poet, anthologist, and bibliophile, was a prominent member of fashionable literary society in London during the second half of the nineteenth century. Among his acquaintances were Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Trollope, George Eliot, and many others; and his name appears in numerous memoirs of the period. Although his output was small, he was well known as a writer of light verse.

Frederick Locker, second son of Edward and Eleanor Locker, was born at Greenwich, where his father was one of the administrators at the Naval Hospital. After an undistinguished school career at Clapham and elsewhere, he became a civil-service clerk, and it is said that he began to compose light verse in order to relieve the monotony of office life. In 1850 he married Lady Charlotte Bruce, daughter of the Earl of Elgin (who brought the Elgin Marbles to England) and a favorite...