Arthur O’Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy was born in 1844 in London, England. At the age of seventeen he began working at the British Museum, employed as an assistant in the natural history department and specializing in reptitles, on which he became an expert.

His true interest, however, was literature and poetry-writing. His first collection Epic of Women was published in 1870, and more collections followed. After he married at the age of thirty he ceased to write, though his last collection, Songs of a Worker, was published postumously.

Sir Edward Elgar set the ode to music in 1912 in his work entitled The Music Makers.

O'Shaughessy was friendly with the Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. In 1873 he married Eleanor Marston, the daughter of author John Westland Marston and sister of the poet Philip Bourke Marston, and he and his wife wrote a book of children’s stories. They had two children both of whom died in infancy. Eleanor died in 1879, and O'Shaughnessy two years later.