Wentworth Dilke

Dilke was born in London,Chisholm, 1911 the son of Charles Wentworth Dilke, proprietor and editor of the Athenaeum, by his wife Maria Dove Walker.[http://www.thepeerage.com/p37020.htm#i370195 thepeerage.com Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 1st Bt.]{{unreliable source?|date=October 2016}} He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge.{{acad|id=DLK827CW|name=Dilke, Charles Wentworth}} He helped pass the Reform Act 1832, enacted under the Whig administration of Lord Grey. He studied law, and in 1834 took his degree of LL.B., but did not practise.

File:The Royal Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851.jpg by Henry Wyndham Phillips. Dilke is on the left of the group portrait]]

Dilke assisted his father in his literary work, and was for some years chairman of the council of the Society of Arts, besides taking a prominent part in the affairs of the Royal Horticultural Society and other bodies. In 1841 he co-founded The Gardeners' Chronicle alongside Joseph Paxton, John Lindley and William Bradbury. He was one of the most zealous promoters of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (of which Paxton was again an integral part), and a member of the executive committee. At the close of the exhibition, he was honoured by foreign sovereigns, and the queen offered him knighthood, which, however, he did not accept. He also declined a large remuneration offered by the royal commission. In 1853 Dilke was one of the English commissioners at the New York Industrial Exhibition, and prepared a report on it. He again declined to receive any monetary reward for his services.

Dilke was appointed one of the five royal commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1862. Soon after the death of the prince consort he was created a baronet, of Sloane Street in the County of Middlesex.{{London Gazette |issue=22590 |date=17 January 1862 |page=275 }} In 1865 he entered parliament as member for Wallingford,{{London Gazette |issue=22996 |date=1 August 1865 |page=3780 }} a seat he held until 1868. In 1869 he was sent to Russia as a representative of England at the horticultural exhibition held at St Petersburg. His health, however, had been for some time failing, and he died suddenly in that city, on 10 May 1869. A selection from his writings, Papers of a Critic (2 vols., 1875), contains a biographical sketch by his eldest son Charles.

File:Dilke Achievement.png

Dilke married Mary Chatfield, daughter of William Chatfield, in 1840. She died in September 1853. Dilke was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, Charles, whose promising political career was destroyed by a well-publicised divorce case in the 1880s. Dilke's younger son Ashton Wentworth Dilke was also a politician.

{{Infobox COA wide

|escutcheon = Gules a lion rampant per pale Argent and Or.

|crest = A dove Proper.

|motto = Leo Inimicis Amicis Columba; Love And Honour{{cite book|title=Burke's genealogical and heraldic history of peerage, baronetage and knightage |date=1914}}}}

In 1871, English botanist Maxwell T. Masters published a genus of plants from tropical South America called Dilkea after Wentworth Dilke.{{cite web |title=Dilkea Mast. {{!}} Plants of the World Online {{!}} Kew Science |url=https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:31752-1 |website=Plants of the World Online |access-date=27 August 2021 |language=en}}{{cite book | last=Burkhardt | first=Lotte | title=Verzeichnis eponymischer Pflanzennamen – Erweiterte Edition |trans-title=Index of Eponymic Plant Names – Extended Edition | publisher=Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum, Freie Universität Berlin | year=2018 | isbn=978-3-946292-26-5 | url=https://doi.org/10.3372/epolist2018 |language=German |location=Berlin | doi=10.3372/epolist2018}}

{{Reflist}}

• {{EB1911|wstitle = Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth|volume=28}}
• {{cite DNB|wstitle = Dilke, Charles Wentworth (1810-1869)|first=Norman |last=MacColl|volume=15}}
• {{cite ODNB|first=John R.|last= Davis|title=Dilke, Sir (Charles) Wentworth, first baronet (1810–1869)|id=7646}}

• {{Hansard-contribs | sir-charles-dilke-1 | Sir Wentworth Dilke, Bt }}
• {{UK National Archives ID}}

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{{succession box

| title = Member of Parliament for Wallingford

| years = 1865–1868

| before = Richard Malins

| after = Stanley Vickers

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| title = Baronet
(of Sloane Street)

| years = 1862–1869

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{{s-aft | after = Charles Dilke }}

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Category:1810 births

Category:1869 deaths

Category:Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for English constituencies

Category:UK MPs 1865–1868

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Wentworth

Category:Alumni of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

Category:People educated at Westminster School, London