Clement King Shorter

Clement King Shorter (19 July 1857 – 19 November 1926) was a British journalist and literary critic. After editing the Illustrated London News, Shorter founded and edited The Sketch, The Sphere, and Tatler.

Biography Shorter was born on 19 July 1857 in Southwark, in London, the youngest of three boys. The son of Richard and Elizabeth Shorter, young Clement attended school from 1863 to 1871 in Downham Market, Norfolk. He was still quite young when his father died in Melbourne, Colony of Victoria, where he had gone in an attempt to make a better life for his young family.

Shorter married twice, first to Dora Sigerson, an Irish poet. He married her in 1896, and she died in 1918. In 1920, he remarried, to a woman from Penzance, named Annie Doris Banfield. Survived by his wife and daughter, he died on 19 November 1926, at his home at Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. During this time, Shorter maintained writing his controversial weekly column, 'A Literary Letter'. He described the content of the two papers he edited during this time (first, The Sphere, and shortly thereafter, Tatler) as "on more frivolous lines." He also wrote books about Napoleon, two about George Borrow, and a volume of addresses and essays. His last published work was C. K. S.: an Autobiography, which was edited by John Malcolm Bulloch, and published posthumously, in 1927.