Charles William Dalmon is a fugitive figure rarely noticed in accounts of the Nineties, yet sufficient is known to claim him as one of the most unique contributors to The Yellow Book (1894-1897). Marginalized by his class, sexual orientation, and possibly his cultural ethnicity, Dalmon is also distinctive for his political commitments, which culminated in membership in the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s. Admired by a select band of his contemporaries, Dalmon deserves to be more widely known today, not only as the author of five collections of poetry, but also for the network of fin-de-siècle literary and artistic contacts that his biography brings into view.

It is perhaps his working-class origins that most clearly distinguish Dalmon from his fellow Yellow Book contributors, who were almost exclusively from the educated middle and upper classes. He was born in June 1862 at Old Shoreham, West Sussex, where both of his parents worked as domestic servants. Raised in the nearby village of Washington, he received an elementary education at the local church school, claiming in later life that most of his early learning “came from his mother and from the shepherds and farm-laborers around him in his boyhood” (Untermeyer 402). On leaving school at age fifteen he became a booking hall clerk at a nearby railway station. Within a few months, however, he was sacked for incompetence and thereafter followed his parents into service.

Dalmon was further marginalised by his claim to Romany – or “Gypsy” – heritage at a time when the Romany community endured widespread and pernicious discrimination. First described in a 1905 poem as an “ancestral secret” lately discovered, Dalmon’s cultural ethnicity became an important part of his identity, which friends such as Edward Thomas (1878-1917) and Arthur Ransome (1884-1967) apparently accepted at face value (Dalmon, “Ancestral Secret,” 492). That said, such “exotic” associations were a literary fashion at the turn of the century. In 1898, Theodore Watts-Dunton had found considerable success with his “Gypsy” novel Aylwin, reinvigorating an interest in Romany culture stimulated in the 1850s by the novels of George Borrow (1803-1881). Notably, Dalmon engaged in other self-romanticising claims that are similarly difficult to substantiate. Through the maternal line he claimed descent from the Vinings of Somerset, to his mind a Jacobite family denuded of possessions and status following the English Civil War. On the paternal side he claimed descent from the Elizabethan composer and court musician, William Damon (d. 1591).

There is also the matter of Dalmon’s sexual orientation. In his lifetime all homosexual acts between men were criminalized; consequently, this aspect of his identity needed to remain largely closeted. Indeed, it is only on account of an aspiration ascribed to him by the memoirist Michael Davidson (1897-1975) – “‘My dear,’ he once said to me, ‘my ambition is to be crushed to death between the thighs of a guardsman!’” (Davidson 134) – that Dalmon’s sexual orientation is deemed to be confirmed. Significantly, homoeroticism in his poetry, when present at all, is carefully veiled.

There are few details to explain how the fifteen-year-old dismissed as a railway clerk in 1876 became a contributor to The Yellow Book in 1894. An 1893 newspaper article claimed that Dalmon “owe[d] his poetic sensibility to nature and his culture to his own unaided exertions,” adding that his occupation “gave him some little opportunity of travel and of being in reach of good books” (“Notes about Authors,” 176). So it seems he was largely self-educated, making the most of his career as a gentleman’s servant to access a variety of private libraries and cultural experiences. In 1881 he remained in Sussex as footman to a retired clergyman. In 1888, he became a steward aboard an ocean liner operating between Liverpool and New York, a job that exposed him to transatlantic culture. In 1891, he moved to London’s exclusive St. James’s district as valet to a retired army officer. The first direct evidence of Dalmon’s emerging literary aspirations is found in the same source that attests to his time at sea. In a breathless fan letter to Walt Whitman (1819-1892) in September 1888, Dalmon begged leave to visit the poet at Camden, New Jersey when his ship returned to New York the following month, a wish that seems to have remained unfulfilled. The letter also shows that Dalmon was amassing a collection of his own verses, which he offered to Whitman for his consideration (Dalmon to Walt Whitman).

Dalmon’s possession of Whitman’s personal details in 1888 and his situation as valet in 1891 may share a common denominator: the bisexual poet and essayist Roden Noel (1834-1894). Noel was one of Whitman’s earliest British advocates – the pair corresponded – and he was a relation of Dalmon’s employer, Lieutenant-General John Jocelyn Bourke (both were descendants of Robert Jocelyn, 1st Earl of Roden). Noel was instrumental in helping Dalmon make literary contacts such as Walter Besant (1836-1901) and William Sharp (1855-1905), also paving the way to the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), whom Dalmon visited at Aldworth in September 1892. The aged and ailing Tennyson generously perused a near final draft of Dalmon’s forthcoming debut collection of verse, Minutiae, which included the poem entitled “The End is Failure.” Tennyson challenged Dalmon’s pessimism. “How can there be failure,” he commented, “if the divine speak through the human, be it through the voice of prince or peasant?” (Tennyson 417). The “peasant” poet’s reply is not recorded. When Minutiae was published in November 1892, Dalmon retained “The End is Failure” and added an elegy to Tennyson, who had died the previous month.

Reviews of Minutiae were favourable but qualified. Sharp, for example, wrote in The Academy: “His song is a slight one, but it has a rare and sweet note,” adding a reference to Dalmon’s “limited education and humble position” (Sharp 124). As regards the latter, Dalmon and his advocates were making concerted efforts to remedy his situation. In February 1893, the London edition of The Literary World ran a piece pleading for the newly published poet to be found “some occupation, however lowly, where he could be with books” (“Notes about Authors,” 176). Sharp himself sought a position for Dalmon at the British Museum through family connections. And a letter in a Sussex newspaper from Noel in May 1894 requested “almost any kind of clerkly or office work” for Dalmon that might free his evenings for literary pursuits (Noel 1894). Ultimately, Dalmon found employment at a Brighton printing works. The meagre 15 shillings per week he earned here was only 5 shillings more than he had earned as a fifteen-year-old in the 1870s, and he continued to search for a better paid position.

Dalmon’s literary prospects received a boost in June 1894 when a draft of his second poetry collection Song Favours was warmly welcomed by Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947), John Lane’s reader at the Bodley Head. Lane (1854-1925) probably viewed Dalmon as another, possibly more rurally authentic Norman Gale (1862-1942), whose Orchard Songs had sold well the previous year and in whose pastoralising footsteps the newcomer determinedly trod. Two appearances in Lane’s The Yellow Book followed. Volume 3 in October 1894 contained “Parson Herrick’s Muse,” a “drinking song” honouring one of Dalmon’s greatest literary influences, the early modern poet and cleric Robert Herrick (1591-1674). The poem is something like a Nineties “protest song,” raising a toast to “parson Herrick’s Muse” (i.e. beer) in defiance of an unnamed local parson disdainful of those choosing to spend their time in the pub rather than his church: “The landlord shall our parson be;/The tavern door our churchyard gate;/And we will fill the landlord’s till/Before we fill the parson’s plate.” Volume 4 in January 1895 contained “An Autumn Elegy,” a meditation on the passage of time typical of Dalmon’s pastoral manner. In contrast to the pessimism of “The End is Failure,” however, the elegy concludes on a more hopeful note: “‘That still to live is Death’s most sweet surprise!’” Both poems were included in Song Favours when Lane published it in October 1895, making Dalmon one of Lane’s fin-de-siècle “nest of singing birds” (Housman 162).

Once again Dalmon’s verses received largely positive albeit qualified reviews. One of the most positive, written by the Reverend Percy Dearmer (1867-1936), appeared in the socialist newspaper Clarion. Dearmer was co-dedicatee of Song Favours along with his wife, Mabel Dearmer (1872-1915), who was also a Yellow Book contributor. Dalmon likely encountered the Dearmers via Roden Noel. Percy Dearmer and the Reverend Conrad Noel (1869-1942), Roden’s son, were friends and committed Christian socialists in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church of England. In his review, Dearmer describes Dalmon as “a modest, but poetic presence [at the] Socialist Club in Holborn,” one of numerous socialist groups in London during the late Victorian period (Dearmer, Review). Dearmer’s remark is notable as the earliest indication of Dalmon’s political affiliations, beyond what might be detected in his poetry. Despite the implications of a poem such as “Parson Herrick’s Muse,” Dalmon was not a secular socialist. Like Dearmer and Noel, he was interested in Christian socialism, his discontent with the Church rooted in socio-political concerns.

Having secured a suitably “bookish” position as sub-librarian at the General Post Office Library, Dalmon made a permanent move to London in 1895. His financial position remained precarious, however, especially after a period of illness left him in significant debt, and he had to turn to the Royal Literary Fund in 1896 to relieve the immediate situation. He continued to publish, though never prolifically, in periodicals ranging from serious literary and political journals such as The Speaker to fashion and society magazines such as The Queen. In January 1900 Dalmon’s third poetry collection Flower and Leaf appeared, with a cover design by Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966). By now Dalmon’s reviews almost wrote themselves. Le Gallienne wrote in The Idler: “Mr. Dalmon’s danger is a be-ribboned prettiness which is apt to hide the more serious poetic inspiration of his work. But his artificial pastoral manner cannot quite obscure his genuine love and knowledge of the country” (Le Gallienne 84).

The dedicatee of Flower and Leaf was Frank (Franklin) Dyall (1870-1950), an increasingly significant figure in Dalmon’s life. Dyall would become an established stage actor in the Edwardian era before further success in radio and film. But he was also involved in a famous piece of Nineties folklore. In January 1895, as a young member of George Alexander’s company at the St. James’s Theatre, London, Dyall played a servant in Henry James’s critical and commercial flop, Guy Domville. In February, Dyall created the part of the butler Merriman in the first stage production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Coincidentally, Dalmon too was to become involved in the British premiere of one of Wilde’s dramatic works. As an amateur dramatist, in May 1905 he played The Cappadocian in the New Stage Club’s private production of Salome at the Bijou Theatre, London.

At the end of the Nineties Dalmon and Dyall lived together in Holborn, London, moving in a bohemian circle that brought them into contact with Dalmon’s most influential literary admirer, the poet and critic Edward Thomas. The pair were friends before drifting apart sometime after 1905, though Dalmon’s impact on Thomas both as a personality and a poet remained. The character of Mr Aurelius in The Happy Go-Lucky Morgans (1913) is largely based on Dalmon, and in 1915 Thomas wrote an essay on his old friend’s verse, “A Modern Herrick.” In Thomas’s view, Dalmon’s verse “[springs] from a reunion of the pastoral and the rustic, […]. Not content to give England some of the attributes of Arcady, he enriched Arcady with the birds and flowers, and some of the sweetest place names, of England, particularly of the Weald and the Downs [i.e. rural Sussex].” In sum, Thomas concluded: “The feeling is Arcadian, the detail English” (Thomas 74). This proved to be an enduring judgment.

In the 1900s Dalmon tried his hand at playwriting. At Dundee in 1916 Dyall played in Dalmon’s one-act play The Picture on the Wall, which appears to be the only occasion one of his dramatic works was professionally produced. Dalmon also wrote songs for John Martin-Harvey’s Shakespearian productions at His Majesty’s Theatre, London. In 1907 Dyall married the actress and model Phyllis Logan (1885-1962), who the following year gave birth to a son, Valentine (1908-1985). However, in 1909 Logan left Dyall for the actor and photographer Cavendish Morton (1874-1939), after which Dalmon appears to have become Valentine’s principal carer, enabling Dyall to continue his acting career. At the end of the First War, Dalmon followed Dyall into the film industry as an art director, principally for George Clark Productions at their studio in Ebury Street, London. Dalmon lived in an adjacent boarding house run by the mother of Noël Coward (1899-1973), though whether he was ever more than an acquaintance of Coward’s is unconfirmed. Dalmon did not publish another volume of poetry until Poor Man’s Riches in 1922, followed five years later by Singing As I Go. The reception of both volumes was framed by Thomas’s identification of Dalmon with Herrick, Sussex, and Nineties nostalgia; Thomas’s “A Modern Herrick” was reprinted as a foreword to Poor Man’s Riches. Since his income from literary work was negligible and from film work intermittent, in 1927 Dalmon made a further but this time unsuccessful application to the Royal Literary Fund. In December 1934 the former Christian socialist joined the British Union of Fascists. The announcement in The Blackshirt highlights Dalmon’s descent from a “Tudor Court Favourite” (the musician William Damon) but omits reference to his similarly speculative claim to Romany heritage, which unsurprisingly the new recruit seems not to have mentioned (The Blackshirt, 10).

Late the following year Dalmon entered Charterhouse, a London almshouse, his application sponsored by the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), who was a longstanding admirer of his verse. He died there on 7 March 1938. His obituarist in The Times – likely the author and journalist Harold Child (1869-1945), a friend from the 1890s – wrote that “From the first Dalmon’s poetry had appealed to other poets by its beautiful delicacy, simplicity, and lyrical purity. […] His glass was small but he drank in it consistently, true to his own genius and entirely unaffected by other men’s theories or practice” (“Mr. Charles Dalmon”). Child’s appreciation contains the reasons for Dalmon’s subsequent neglect: his abiding commitment to increasingly unfashionable rural themes and Victorian verse forms. Still, the absence of contemporary scholarly attention paid to Dalmon is too conspicuous. Charles Dalmon demands greater attention if only for the aspects of his biography that set him apart from his Yellow Book contemporaries. In addition, there are the charms of his finest verse.

©2023, D. J. Sheppard.

D.J. Sheppard is Senior Academic Mentor and teacher of philosophy at Oakham School, Rutland. He is the author of Plato’s Republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009) and Theodore Wratislaw: Fragments of a Life (High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2017).

Selected Works by Charles Dalmon

• A Poor Man’s Riches. London: Methuen & Co., 1922.

• “The Ancestral Secret.” The Academy, May 1905, p. 492.

• “Autumn Elegy.” The Yellow Book, vol. 4, January 1895, pp. 247-48. Yellow Book Digital Edition, https://1890s.ca/ybv4_dalmon_autumn/

• Flower and Leaf. London: Grant Richards, 1900.

• Minutiae. London: Digby, Long & Co., 1892.

• “Parson Herrick’s Muse.” The Yellow Book, vol. 3, October 1894, pp. 241-42. Yellow Book Digital Edition, https://1890s.ca/ybv3_dalmon_parson/

• Singing as I Go. London: Constable & Company, 1927.

• Song Favours. London and Chicago: John Lane and Way & Williams, 1895.

Selected Publications about Charles Dalmon

• Cockman, George. Charles Dalmon: The Forgotten Poet Laureate of Sussex. Horsham District Council, 2012.

• Dalmon, Charles William to Walt Whitman. ALS, 27 September 1888. The Walt Whitman Archive,
  Charles William Dalmon to Walt Whitman, 27 September 1888 (Correspondence) – The Walt Whitman Archive

• Davidson, Michael. The World, The Flesh, and Myself. London: Arthur Barker, 1962.

• Dearmer, Percy (“P.D.”). Review of Charles Dalmon, Song Favours. Clarion, 30 November 1895.

• Housman, Laurence. The Unexpected Years. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936.

• Le Gallienne, Richard. “The Books of Two Worlds.” The Idler, February 1900, p. 84.

• “Mr. Charles Dalmon: A Poet’s Poet.” The Times, 30 March 1938.

• Noel, Roden. “A Sussex Poet.” Letter to the Editor of the Sussex Daily News, 22 May 1894.

• “Notes about Authors.” The Literary World, 24 February 1893, p. 176.

• Sharp, William. Review of Charles Dalmon, Minutiae. The Academy, 11 February 1893, p. 124.

• “Sussex Poet Joins the Blackshirts.” The Blackshirt. 7 December 1934, p. 10.

• Tennyson, Hallam. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. 2. London: Macmillan, 1897.

• Thomas, Edward. The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans. London: Duckworth, 1913.

• Thomas, Edward. “A Modern Herrick: The Lyrics of Charles Dalmon.” T.P’s Weekly, 11 July 1914, pp. 71-77.

• Untermeyer, Louis, ed. Modern British Poetry: A Critical Anthology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930.