Lionel Pigot Johnson
(March 15, 1867 - October 4, 1902) U.K.
Journalist, editor
Poet, writer and journalist, born in Broadstairs, Kent. He was the youngest son of Captain William Victor Johnson, of the 90th Light Infantry, and his wife Catharine Delicia, only daughter of Robert Walters, Esq., barrister-at-law.
He was educated at Winchester College, and at New College, Oxford, where he graduated with honors in 1890. On St. Alban's Day, 1891, he was received into the Catholic Church. From 1891 to 1901 he wrote constantly, living alone in Gray's Inn Square, Lincoln's Inn Square, and Clifford's Inn respectively.
He became an influential man of letters, and one of the notable Catholic converts of his day. His The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894) was one of the first full-length studies of Hardy to appear. His Poems appeared in 1895, Ireland and other poems in 1897, and Post liminium, a posthumous collection of essays, in 1911. There is an account of his personality and decline into alcoholism in Yeat's Autobiographies.
He was a small, frail, young-looking man, with a fine head and brow, quick of foot, gentle of voice, and with manners of grave courtesy. He greatly loved his friends. His profound scholarship, his artistic sensitiveness, his play of wisdom and humor, his absolute literary honour, with its "passion for perfection" from the first, show nobly in his prose work.
He never married. He died from the results of a slight fall at the age of 35, and was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green.
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