ABSTRACT
Life and works Arthur Hugh Clough was born on 1 January 1819 in Liverpool. The Clough family had been for centuries landed gentry on the Welsh Marches, but Arthur's father, James Butler Clough, was an example of the late CI8 upper middle class trying its hand at trade. He was a cotton merchant, and falling on hard times in the depression following the Napoleonic Wars emigrated to America, and carried on an export business from Charleston. C.'s mother was a cultivated religious woman, with stern ideas on duty. C. accompanied his father on a trip to England in 1825, and came back permanently in 1828, first to attend a school in Chester, then to go to Rugby. It is not surprising that so much sea travel (and he was to undertake more later in life) left its mark on him and his poetry. Biographers have stressed the shock to the young boy of being uprooted and deprived of a close-knit and independent family. The family did not resettle in England until 1836.
