Ashton Wentworth Dilke

Who was Ashton Wentworth Dilke?

Ashton Wentworth Dilke was a British traveller and radical Liberal politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1880 to 1883.

He was the younger son of Sir Charles Dilke, 1st Baronet, and was educated privately before being admitted to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1868. He was made a scholar in 1870 and was a prominent member of the Cambridge Union Society, although he left before finishing his degree, instead travelling to Russia in 1872. For several months he lived in a Russian village and studied the language, as well as examining the status of the Russian peasantry. He returned in 1873 showing signs of tuberculosis, the disease which eventually killed him. He began writing a book about Russia, two chapters of which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1874, but it was never published.

In 1875 he bought the Weekly Dispatch for £14,000, acting as editor until 1876 and then again between 1878 and 1880. In 1878 he published a translation of Ivan Turgenev's Virgin Soil.

In 1876 he married Margaret Smith, eldest daughter of Thomas Eustace Smith, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In 1880 he was elected as a Member of Parliament for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but his ill-health led him to resign in February 1883, spending the last few months of his life in Algiers, where he died in March.