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Alaric Alexander Watts

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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ALARIC ALEXANDER WATTS (1797-1864), English journalist and poet, was the son of John Mosley Watts and grandson of William Watts, a Leicester physician of repute. After leaving school he made his living for a short time by teaching, and in 1818 joined the staff of the New Monthly Magazine in London, becoming about the same time a contributor to the Literary Gazette. In 1822 he was made editor of the Leeds Intelligencer, in the columns of which he was one of the first to advocate measures for protecting workers in factories against accidents from machinery. In 1823 he published his first volume of verse, Poetical Sketches, and in 1824 he became the editor of the Literary Souvenir, of which he also became the proprietor two years later, and in the conduct of which he secured the co-operation of some of the most famous men of letters of the period. In 1825 he went to Manchester as editor of the Manchester Courier, a position which he resigned a year later; in 1827 he assisted in founding the Standard, of which the first editor was Stanley Lees Giffard; and in 1833 he started the United Service Gazette, which he edited for several years. Watts was also interested in a number of provincial Conservative newspapers which were not financially successful, and he became bankrupt in 1850, but was awarded a civil service pension by Lord Aberdeen in 1854. In 1856 he edited the first edition of Men of the Time. Watts died in London on the 5th of April 1864. In 1867 a collection of his poems was published in a volume entitled The Laurel and the Lyre. See A. A. Watts, Alaric Watts (2 vols., London, 1884).