Edward Churton and Hugh James Rose: Two Victorian Hispanophiles

Abstract

For some curiosos impertinentes of the Victorian era Spain offered a means of escape and self-discovery. Edward Churton, an Archdeacon and theologian, was a hispanist a distancia who fell in love with Spanish poetry and, in his remote Yorkshire rectory, wrote the first scholarly study of Gongora to be published in England. By contrast, Hugh James Rose, no intellectual, lived «among the Spanish people» (the title of one of his two books), first at Linares and later at Cadiz and Madrid, learning lessons in the art of living. His wide-ranging and sympathetic observations are of value to social historians.