David Lester Richardson

author

David Lester Richardson

1801–1865

A British poet, journalist, and teacher who built much of his literary life in India, he moved between military service, magazine editing, and the classroom. He is especially remembered for helping shape English literary culture in colonial Calcutta and for influencing the young Michael Madhusudan Dutt.

1 Audiobook

Flowers and Flower-Gardens With an Appendix of Practical Instructions and Useful Information Respecting the Anglo-Indian Flower-Garden

Flowers and Flower-Gardens With an Appendix of Practical Instructions and Useful Information Respecting the Anglo-Indian Flower-Garden

by David Lester Richardson

About the author

Born in London in 1801, David Lester Richardson joined the East India Company service as a young man and went to India in 1819. Alongside that career, he steadily pursued writing, publishing poetry early and contributing to literary journalism.

Richardson became known in Calcutta as an energetic man of letters. He edited and ran literary periodicals, wrote poetry and prose, and later taught English at Hindu College. Accounts of his life consistently note that he was an admired teacher there, and that his influence reached students including Michael Madhusudan Dutt, who would become one of the major figures of modern Bengali literature.

His career moved between Britain and India, shaped partly by health and partly by literary opportunity, but writing remained at the center of it. He died on November 17, 1865, and is remembered today as a poet, editor, and educator whose work linked British and Indian literary worlds in the nineteenth century.