Title page from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Cambridge and London: Macmillan and Co., 1861. From the London Library.
From 1850 to 1856, Francis Turner Palgrave was a vice-principal at Kneller Hall in Whitton, Twickenham, which was then a training college for teachers of children in the workhouses (now home to the Royal Military School of Music). When the school closed, he worked for the Education Department, writing literary and artistic criticism in his free time. In 1860, while on a walking tour of Cornwall with his friend Alfred Tennyson, he suggested that the pair compile a collection of the best poetry. The result was The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), a book so successful that it has remained in print ever since. He was buried in the cemetery at Barnes Common.
Telling Trails 