Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon
British civil servant and baronet (1811–1872)
Sir Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon, 3rd Baronet (3 February 1811 – 27 October 1872) was a British civil servant and Baronet of Halkin. He was the husband of Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon, a translator and writer best known for her correspondence on Egypt.
Early life
Duff-Gordon was born on 3 February 1811 the eldest son of Sir William Duff-Gordon, a younger son of the House of Aberdeen and his mother, Caroline, who was a daughter of Sir George Cornewall. He succeeded to his father's title on 8 March 1823.
Marriage
At a society ball at Lansdowne House, the London home of the Marquess of Lansdowne, in 1838, he met Lucie Austin who was ten years his junior. Lucie was the daughter of literary translator Sarah Austin and legal philosopher John Austin. The couple married on 16 May 1840 in Kensington Old Church, despite the initial objections of his mother over Lucie's lack of a dowry.
Following their marriage, the couple lived at 8 Queen Square, Westminster, a house with a statue of Queen Anne at one end, since renumbered as 15 Queen Anne's Gate. Here a circle of friends and acquaintances frequently met: Lord Lansdowne, Lord Monteagle, Caroline Norton, Dickens, Thackeray, Elliot Warburton, Tom Taylor, Tennyson, Alexander Kinglake, and Henry Taylor were habitués.
Every foreigner of talent and renown regarded the house as a centre of interest.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexander Cornewall Duff-Gordon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.