David Cecil

British · 1902 to 1986

David Cecil was born Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil on 9 April 1902 at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, the youngest of four children of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 4th Marquess of Salisbury, and Lady Cicely Gore. As a younger son of a marquess he carried the courtesy title Lord for the whole of his life, though friends and students knew him simply as David Cecil. Delicate health kept him from Eton until later than his contemporaries, and he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read Modern History, taking first-class honours in 1924. He was elected a fellow of Wadham College that same year, and in 1929 his first book, The Stricken Deer, a study of the poet William Cowper, won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, establishing him as a literary biographer before he turned thirty. In 1932 he married Rachel MacCarthy, daughter of the critic Desmond MacCarthy, and they had three children, including the actor Jonathan Cecil. His most celebrated work, The Young Melbourne, appeared in 1939, a portrait of the young William Lamb and his catastrophic marriage to Caroline Lamb that Cecil completed fifteen years later with a second volume, Lord M. He returned to New College, Oxford, as a fellow in 1939, and from 1948 to 1970 held the university's chair of English Literature, teaching a generation of writers and critics that included Kingsley Amis. He was an associate of the Inklings, the Oxford circle around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and was appointed a Companion of Honour for his services to literature. He went on writing biography and criticism into his final decade, publishing a life of Charles Lamb in 1983. He died on 1 January 1986 in Cranborne, Dorset, at the age of eighty-three.