BUCHANAN, ROBERT WILLIAMS Brit ish poet, novelist and dramatist, son of Robert Buchanan (1813 66), Owenite lecturer and journalist, was born at Caverswall, Staffordshire, and was educated at the high school and the Univer sity of Glasgow. After a period of struggle and disappointment in London Buchanan published Undertones in 1863.
The article which, under the nom de plume of Thomas Mait land, he contributed to the Contemporary Review for Oct. 1871, entitled "The Fleshly School of Poetry," is chiefly remembered by the replies it evoked from D. G. Rossetti in a letter to the Athe naeum (Dec. 16 entitled "The Stealthy School of Criticism," and from Swinburne in Under the Microscope (1872). Buchanan himself afterwards regretted the violence of his attack, and the "old enemy" to whom God and the Man is dedicated was Rossetti. In 1876 appeared The Shadow of the Sword, the first and one of the best of a long series of novels. Buchanan was also the author of many successful plays, among which may be mentioned Lady Clare, produced in 1883 ; Sophia (1886), an adaptation of Tom Jones; A Man's Shadow (1890) ; and The Charlatan (1894). In collaboration with Harriett Jay he wrote the melodrama Alone in London. He died at Streatham on June Io 1901.
See his Complete Poetical Works (19o1) ; Harriett Jay, Robert Buchanan; some Account of his Life (1903) ; and A. Symons, Some Studies in Prose and Verse (1904)•