Clough’s first meeting with Emerson

Arthur Hugh Clough’s first meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson was in March 1848, during Emerson’s second visit to England. Prompted by his sister Anne, who had met Emerson at the house of a family friend the previous autumn, Clough invited Emerson to Oriel College (click for geospatial location), where he was a Fellow and tutor. Emerson gladly accepted, having been much impressed by a reading of Clough’s lecture “A Consideration of Objections against the Retrenchment Association at Oxford during the Irish Famine in 1847,” an appeal to Oxford undergraduates to reduce their excessive expenditure on champagne, claret and breakfast parties in order to relieve the sufferings of the English and Irish poor. The brief meeting, during which Clough gave Emerson a tour of the Oxford colleges was the start of a life-long friendship. Image: Engraving of Arthur Hugh Clough. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or less.

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