Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 15.djvu/261

 completed until some thirty years later. The earliest result of his labour was the publication of the first edition of his ‘Synonymic List of British Lepidoptera,’ which appeared at intervals between 1847 and 1850. A second and much more complete edition was brought out in 1859. This, with supplements which appeared in 1865 and 1873 respectively, brought up the number of recognised British species to nearly 2,100. The completion of this list, commonly known as ‘Doubleday's List,’ almost marks an epoch in British entomology. In or about 1838 Doubleday had attempted to render a somewhat similar service to English ornithologists by publishing ‘A Nomenclature of British Birds,’ which quickly ran through several editions. He never published any other separate works. Nevertheless, his scientific correspondence was very extensive, and his liberality in supplying specimens and information almost unbounded. He was an excellent shot, and was able to stuff his own specimens. In 1866 he sustained a heavy pecuniary loss. For a time he struggled on, but a crisis came in 1870. For three months, early in 1871, he had to be placed in the Retreat at York, where the balance of his mind, upset by his anxieties, was soon restored. Through the kindness of friends, his books and his lepidoptera were preserved to him, and he was enabled to end his days in his old home. Doubleday was never married. He was throughout life a quaker. Among scientific men at large he cannot hold a high place; but, as a lepidopterist simply, he was, in the words of his friend Newman, ‘without exception the first this country has produced.’ He died on 29 June 1875, and was buried in the ground adjoining the Friends' meeting-house at Epping. His collections of British and European lepidoptera have probably never been excelled in their richness and variety. In February 1876 they were deposited on loan by his executors in the Bethnal Green branch of the South Kensington Museum, where they have ever since been preserved intact, and known as the ‘Doubleday Collections.’ In 1877 a catalogue of them (South Kensington Museum Science Handbooks) was published by the lords of the committee of council on education.

[Obituary notices in Entomologist (with photograph), x. 53; Entomologist's Monthly Mag. xii. 69; Proc. Entomological Soc. 1875, p. xxxi; also personal acquaintance.]  DOUBLEDAY, THOMAS (1790–1870), poet, dramatist, biographer, radical politician, political economist, born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in February 1790, was the son of George Doubleday, head of the firm of Doubleday and Easterby, soap and vitriol manufacturers. His uncle Robert, a distinguished classical scholar, theologian, and philanthropist inspired him with a taste for literature, to which he decided to devote himself. When twenty-eight years of age he published a small book of poems, and five years later a tragedy, both attracting attention and expectation by their ability. At the death of his father he became a junior partner of the firm, but took no active part in it. Doubleday devoted himself entirely to the cause of the people, and aided the whig party by voice and pen in helping forward the reform agitation of 1832. He was secretary to the northern political union, and prominent in the agitation which the union prosecuted in aid of Earl Grey and the reforming party in parliament. At a great meeting held in Newcastle in 1832 he moved one of the resolutions. Warrants were drawn out for the arrest of Doubleday and others on the charge of sedition, but were never served, as the government went out of office in a few days. After the Reform Bill Doubleday, unlike many whigs, maintained his old position. His unbending integrity won for him the respect of both sides. He and Charles Attwood presented an address to Earl Grey on behalf of the northern political union, declaring the Reform Bill unsatisfactory to the people, and advocating some of the points afterwards adopted by the chartists. Doubleday vigorously opposed the Poor Law Amendment Act. As early as 1832 he published an ‘Essay on Mundane Moral Government,’ maintaining the theory of the existence of law in the moral as in the physical world. In 1842 he wrote ‘The True Law of Population shown to be connected with the Food of the People.’ The outline of the argument was first given in a letter to Lord Brougham, and appeared in ‘Blackwood's Magazine.’ The work, attacking some Malthusian principles, was the cause of considerable controversy. He was a laborious student, and worked in almost every department of literature. Besides dramas and poems he wrote tracts on money. He wrote three dramas—‘The Statue Wife,’ ‘Diocletian,’ and ‘Caius Marius,’ at the suggestion, it is said, of Edmund Kean. He criticised Tooke's ‘Considerations;’ he published ‘A Political Life of Sir Robert Peel, an Analytical Biography,’ a defence of Bishop Berkeley, and ‘The Eve of St. Mark, a Romance of Venice,’ in two volumes. One of his later works, ‘Touchstone,’ being his letters of ‘Britannicus,’ were prefixed by a letter to James Paul Cobbett, of whose father Doubleday was the most remarkable and cultivated