Richard Alfred Davenport (1777–1852) was an English miscellaneous writer.
Davenport was born in Lambeth on 18 January 1777,[1] and started work as a writer in London at an early age. In the late 1790s he knew John Britton and Peter Lionel Courtier through a debating society, the "School of Eloquence".[2] [3]
Davenport wrote large portions of the history, biography, geography, and criticism in Rivington's Annual Register for several years (1792 to 1797, according to John Britton).[2] He edited, with lives, a number of the British poets for the Chiswick Press edition in 100 volumes (1822); the biographies were supplied from the existing ones Samuel Johnson, with Davenport, Samuel Weller Singer, and some others, writing the rest.[4] Later he did much work for Thomas Tegg.[2]
For the last 11 years of his life Davenport lived at Brunswick Cottage, Park Street, Camberwell, a freehold house of which he was the owner. Here he lived and working alone, drinking large quantities of laudanum, in some squalor at the end. On Sunday, 25 January 1852, a passing policeman was attracted by someone moaning. He broke into the house and discovered Davenport unconscious, with a laudanum bottle in his hand. He died before anything could be done for him. An inquest found his death to be an accidental overdose.[5]
Besides his work for the Chiswick Press Poets, Davenport compiled A Dictionary of Biography (1831), and produced an edition of Matthew Pilkington's General Dictionary of Painters (1852).[5]
Davenport also wrote:[5]
To Murray's Family Library Davenport contributed:
Davenport translated many works, and contributed to periodical literature articles on biography, poetry, criticism, and other subjects. He was also a writer of verse.[5] Some of it was set to music, by his friend Timothy Essex.[6]
Editorial roles included the works of William Robertson the historian, with life, 1824; William Mitford's History of Greece, with continuation to the death of Alexander, 1835; and some works like William Guthrie's Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar, and William Enfield's Speaker.[5]
Davenport married in 1800;[1] they later separated, and she became a novelist under her married name Selina Davenport. They had two daughters together; a son Theodore Alfred Davenport was not from this marriage.[7] Elizabeth Gaskell encountered Selina Davenport in Knutsford around 1850.[8]