Robert Buchanan is now remembered neither as a poet nor as a novelist, only as the attacker of D. G. Rossetti and A. C. Swinburne. His biographers have argued, as he did, with some justice, that his literary eclipse was due to the fact that most late nineteenth-century arbiters of literary taste were sympathetic to Rossetti, and hence his work never received objective appraisal. In many ways, however, Buchanan was his own worst enemy, and he was certainly too careless of his talents, and thus with his reputation, to enjoy the sympathy of those, including Robert Browning and R. H. Hutton, who admired him and encouraged him at the beginning of his career but were profoundly disappointed by his shifts to earn money later.

Robert Owen, pioneer of British socialism, gave away the bride at the wedding of Robert Buchanan, Sr., and Mary Williams, daughter of a well-known...