Sir Wentworth Dilke, 1st Baronet

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 1st Baronet (18 February 1810 – 10 May 1869), was an English art patron, horticulturalist and Whig politician. He is best remembered as one of the chief promoters of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Background and education Dilke was born in London, the son of Charles Wentworth Dilke, proprietor and editor of the Athenaeum, and his wife Maria Dove Walker.

He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He helped pass the Reform Act 1832, enacted under the Whig administration of Lord Grey. He studied law, and in 1834 took his degree of LL.B., but did not practise. In 1865 he entered parliament as member for Wallingford, a seat he held until 1868. In 1869 he was sent to Russia as a representative of England at the horticultural exhibition held at St Petersburg. His health, however, had been for some time failing, and he died suddenly in that city, on 10 May 1869. A selection from his writings, Papers of a Critic (2 vols., 1875), contains a biographical sketch by his eldest son Charles. Mary died in September 1853. Dilke was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, Charles, whose promising political career was destroyed by a well-publicised divorce case in the 1880s. Dilke's younger son Ashton Wentworth Dilke was also a politician.

Honours In 1871, English botanist Maxwell T. Masters published a genus of plants from tropical South America called Dilkea after Wentworth Dilke.