Virginius Dabney

Background

Virginius Dabney was born on February 15, 1835 at his father’s plantation, “Elmington, ” in Gloucester County, Virginia, United States. He was a son of Thomas Smith Gregory and Sophia (Hill) Dabney. His father, an exemplar as near as might be of the legendary Southern gentleman, removed in 1835 from Virginia to Mississippi, to a plantation in Hinds County, named “Burleigh. ”

Education

Virginius was educated at home by tutors and was later sent to school in Richmond.

From eighteen to twenty-three, with the exception of the fourth of these years, when he was traveling in Europe, he studied at the University of Virginia.

Career

Virginius practised law in Memphis. Then he went back to Virginia, the outbreak of the Civil War interrupted his at best half-hearted intention of returning to his office. He entered the Confederate army immediately upon its organization and continued with it till it was disbanded, having the rank of captain when he was mustered out. After the war he established the Loudoun School in Middleburg, Va.

During 1873-74 he was in charge of a preparatory school at Princeton, and afterward he conducted the New York Latin School in New York City.

He was on the editorial staff of the New York Commercial Advertiser and he acted as literary adviser to several prominent publishers.

The Story of Don Miff (1889) written, according to the title-page, by John Bouche Whacker, and edited by Virginius Dabney, is a record of Virginia from about 1860 to 1865 addressed by one still a bachelor to his supposititious descendant of the year 2200. Regarded at the time of its appearance as exceedingly profound, it in some degree justifies such an estimate. It is conventional at base, but in many important matters its author is revealed as a whimsical, shrewd, and wise critic of the social order he saw making itself paramount in America.

He abandoned his school in 1887, and till the fall of 1893, when he became an official in the New York Custom House, devoted himself entirely to literature. His second novel, Gold that did not Glitter (1889), omitting the philosophic elements of Don Miff, attained neither popularity nor distinction.

Achievements

• Virginius Dabney established the Loudoun School in Middleburg, Virginia and conducted the New York Latin School in New York City.

Works

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  • Richmond: The Story of a City

    ( Richmond: The Story of a City chronicles the growth of ...)

  • Virginius Dabney's Virginia: Writings About the Old Dominion

    (Essays discuss the history of Virginia, the Revolution, t...)

  • Gold that did not Glitter: A Novel

    (Gold that did not Glitter - A Novel is an unchanged, high...)

  • Virginia: The New Dominion, A History from 1607 to the Present

    (The task of compressing the history of Virginia into a si...)

  • The story of Don Miff: as told by his friend John Bouche Whacker. A symphony of life

    (The story of Don Miff, as told by his friend John Bouche ...)

  • RICHMOND The Story of a City

    (1 HARDCOVER BOOK)

Personality

Circumstance forbade that in its externals his life should be identical with the romantically feudal lives of his father and his grandfather, and he was more sophisticated than they, more tolerant and humorous—but in the essential matter of his high if often unpractical attitude toward life he was never far removed from them.

Connections

Virginius Dabney married Ellen Maria Heath who died in April 1860. In February 1867 he married Anna Wilson Noland.

Father:

Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney

Mother:

Sophia (Hill) Dabney

Second wife:

Anna Wilson Noland

First wife:

Ellen Maria Heath