Robert William Victor Gittings

Sitter in 4 portraits
Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge where he gained a first in History in 1933. Then made a research fellow and history supervisor there in 1938. He spent twenty-three years at the BBC producing programmes for schools and on poetry. As a poet he published twelve volumes starting with Wentworth Place (1950). Gittings, who also wrote plays and gave literary readings, was best known as a literary biographer whose works include John Keats: The Living Year (1954) and The Mask of Keats (1956). In the 1970s he wrote three Hardy related biographies, The Young Thomas Hardy (1975), The Older Hardy (1978) and, with his second wife Jo Manton, The Second Mrs Hardy (1979).