Milnes, Richard Monckton [Baron Houghton] (1809-1885)

Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, was a poet, politician, and the great literary host and patron of his day, a friend of Lewes from at least 1853; Lewes's letters to Milnes survive at Trinity College, Cambridge. Eliot wrote to him in 1870 and again in April 1878, and in the summer of 1877 she was a guest at a breakfast he gave in London, with Browning and Swinburne present. Like Eliot and Lewes, Milnes was among the small circle of British readers who knew Whitman's Leaves of Grass before 1868. He was also famous for his unrivalled private library of erotica, later bequeathed to the British Library.

George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org

Richard Monckton [Baron Houghton] Milnes (1809-1885), Milnes, Richard Monckton [Baron Houghton] (1809-1885), Social Network Gallery, George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett, https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed November 11, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/97222