Arthur Bingham Walkley

Arthur Bingham Walkley (17 December 1855 – 7 October 1926), usually known as A B Walkley, was an English public servant and drama critic. As a civil servant he worked for the General Post Office from 1877 to 1919, in increasingly senior posts; he did not seek the highest official positions, preferring to leave himself time and energy for his parallel career as a drama critic. As a journalist he worked with Bernard Shaw on The Star at the beginning of his newspaper career; he is probably best known for his twenty-six years as theatre critic of The Times. He retired from the Post Office in 1919, and for the last six years of his life concentrated wholly on writing.

Life and career

Early years and civil service career Walkley was born at Bedminster, Bristol, the only child of Arthur Hickman Walkley, a bookseller, and his wife, Caroline Charlotte, née Bingham. There was one daughter of the marriage. One of his juniors wrote, "He was frankly more interested in his literary than his official duties … but what he had to do officially he did with distinction. In June 1919 Walkley retired from the civil service. He remained with The Star until 1900. Under the by-line "Spectator" he wrote not only regular reviews but also occasional essays on the theatre in general.

In 1892 Walkley published his first book, a collection of his theatre reviews. The Times said of it, "Reprints of dramatic criticism are, as a rule, rather unsatisfying reading. But an exception may well be made in favour of Mr. Walkley's Playhouse Impressions." A selection from his miscellaneous essays in The Speaker, The Star, and elsewhere was published as Frames of Mind in 1899. This too was well received: "It is pleasant to wander with a companion so well read and so apt of quotation, and Mr. Walkley has an original way of looking around him."

The Times In September 1899 Walkley contributed his first review to The Times; six months later he was appointed as the paper's drama critic. He contributed in 1900 and 1901 to Literature, a weekly offshoot of The Times, and, from 1902 to its successor, The Times Literary Supplement. In February 1903 he gave three lectures at the Royal Institution, which he printed as Dramatic Criticism (1903). He reprinted some of his articles for Literature and the TLS as his fourth book, Drama and Life (1907).

After his retirement from the Post Office in July 1919 Walkley added to his regular theatre reviews a series of essays published weekly in The Times on a range of subjects close to his heart; these included Jane Austen (whom some thought the only English novelist he truly loved), Dr Johnson, Dickens and Lamb.

In a biographical article on Walkley H H Child writes: Walkley's view of criticism may best be understood from his book Dramatic Criticism. He professed himself an "impressionist", one whose task was to estimate and analyse his own sensations in the presence of a work of art, not to judge it by rule. … This, especially in his earlier years, was of great help to English drama, which was then beginning a new period and breaking free from certain conventions of dramatic form and content. In particular Walkley's welcome of Ibsen, not as a moralist or reformer, but as a great artist in play-making, did much to counteract the abuse and the misunderstanding with which Ibsen's plays were at first received in London. Agate did not name him, but according to the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis it was Walkley.

After a short illness Walkley died, aged seventy, at his country house at Brightlingsea in Essex.