William Ernest Henley

William Ernest Henley was born in Gloucester in 1849, the son of a bookseller, and was taught at the Crypt School by the poet T. E. Brown. As a boy he developed tuberculosis of the bone, and in his late teens his left leg was amputated below the knee. When doctors proposed taking the other leg, he went to Edinburgh to be treated by Joseph Lister and spent much of 1873 to 1875 in the Royal Infirmary, where he wrote the poems later called In Hospital and the poem now known as ‘Invictus’. There he met Robert Louis Stevenson, who became a close friend and later said Henley was the model for Long John Silver. Henley married Anna Boyle in 1878. He edited the Scots Observer, later the National Observer, where he published Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads, and he compiled the anthology Lyra Heroica. His daughter Margaret died in 1894 at the age of five. He died in Woking in 1903.

William Ernest Henley is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Henley was known in his lifetime for outspoken and controversial unbelief. Invictus thanks ‘whatever gods may be’ rather than God and borrows the strait gate and the scroll of judgment from Scripture in order to defy them; it is a statement of stoic self-reliance, not of Christian hope. His ashes were placed in his daughter’s grave in the churchyard at Cockayne Hatley, Bedfordshire. Source: OUPblog, “Bloody but unbowed” (October 2013)

See also: Robert Louis Stevenson · Joseph Lister · J. M. Barrie