WATTS
WATTS-DUNTON
morality not adequate for most people ;
yet Mrs. Barrington suggests that he was
himself an Agnostic. " I think," she says,
" that Watts did not feel so definitely the
sense of the reality of the spiritual life
as he did the sense of moral obligations " (p. 152). Later she classes him with Sir F. Leighton as men to whom "the beauty of nature was a religion in itself." Watts, who twice declined a baronetcy, was placed in the Order of Merit at its foundation ; and he had honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. He left his pictures to the nation, and they form " The Watts Collection " in the National Gallery. D. July 1, 1904.
WATTS, John, brother of Charles Watts, writer. B. Oct. 2, 1834. He was converted to Eationalism by his brother, and he presently entered the Secularist Movement in London. He was for a time sub-editor of the Reasoner, and he after wards edited the National Reformer, In collaboration with " Iconoclast " (Mr. Bradlaugh) he compiled Half Hours with Freethinkers, and he wrote a number of Secularist pamphlets (The Logic and Philo sophy of Atheism, The Origin of Man, Is Man Immortal ?, The Devil, etc.). D. Oct. 31, 1866.
WATTS, John, Ph.D., reformer. B. Mar. 24, 1818. Ed. Coventry elementary school and Mechanics Institution. Watts was the son of a weaver. As he was partly paralysed when he was a child, he could not be put to manual labour, and he became assistant secretary and librarian at the Mechanics Institution (1831-38). He set up a business in 1838, but he was converted to Owenism, and he gave up his business to become an Owenite lecturer. In 1841 he settled at Manchester, where he taught for three years in the Hall of Science. In 1844 he resumed his business. He was so assiduous a student in his leisure that in his twenty-seventh year he succeeded in graduating at Giessen Univer sity. Watts, however, carried his Owenito 877
spirit into public life, and was very promi
nent in the Lancashire Public Schools
Association, which aimed at securing a
national system of purely secular schools.
He had an important share in the estab
lishment of the first Free Library at
Manchester, and fought for the repeal of
the " taxes on knowledge." He was one
of the promoters of the People s Provident
Assurance Society, and he it was who
drafted the Life Assurance Act of 1870.
He was an active member of the Man
chester School Board from its start ; a
zealous Co-operator and contributor to
the Co-operative Neivs ; Chairman of the
Council of the Union of Lancashire and
Cheshire Institutes ; Chairman of the
Council of the Manchester Technical
School and the Council of the Eoyal
Botanical and Agricultural Society ; a
Governor of the Manchester Grammar
School ; Secretary of the Manchester
Eeform Club ; President of the Manchester
Statistical Society ; etc. He was, in a
word, a typical specimen of the men and
women inspired by Eobert Owen s Eation
alism and humanitarianism. D. Feb. 7,
1887.
WATTS-DUNTON, Walter Theodore,
writer. B. Oct. 12, 1832. He was trained in natural history, but he turned to law, and practised as a solicitor for some years in London. He then devoted him self to literature. He was a critic on the Examiner from 1874 onward, and from 1875 to 1898 he was the leading critic on the Athen&um. In 1897 he added his mother s name, Dunton, to that of his father. Watts-Dunton often published verse in the Athenceum, and he issued several volumes of poems and edited a very large number of literary works. He is best known to the public by his beautiful novel, Aylivin (1898), and his Swinburne and Charles Dickens (1913). For thirty years he had Swinburne as an inmate of his house, and was of great service to the poet. Although he gave Swinburne Chris tian burial an artistic outrage he was 878
