Henry Arthur Bright

Henry Arthur Bright, who on his mother's side was related to Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, was educated at Rugby School, under Archibald Tait, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he qualified for his degree, but as a nonconformist was unable to make the subscription then required as a condition of graduation.

In May 1852 he travelled with a friend between Liverpool and New York on the SS Great Britain, which was owned by Gibbs, Bright, & Co.[2] Bright was chairman of the sailors' home in Canning Street in 1867, and again in 1877; in the latter year the dispensary in the Custom House arcade was opened mainly through his exertions, and in August 1878 a second sailors' home, projected by him, was opened in Luton Street.

His personal intercourse with literary men and women was very extended and sympathetic, and was sustained by a wide correspondence, in which his own part was characterised by a singular fertility and charm.

In the world of letters he will be best remembered by the frequent allusions to him in the "Note-books" and biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose acquaintance he made at Concord, Massachusetts in 1852.

He tried the effect of a sojourn in the south of France, and a winter at Bournemouth, but returned to Liverpool in the spring of 1884, and died on 5 May at his residence, Ashfield, Knotty Ash.

His publications include: He also contributed a hymn ('To the Father through the Son') to Hymns, Chants, and Anthems, 1858, edited by John Hamilton Thom for Renshaw Street Unitarian Chapel; and wrote (before 1858) 'The Lay of the Unitarian Church,' a spirited poem, originally contributed to a magazine (Sabbath Leisure, edited by John Relly Beard), and issued anonymously and without date as a tract about 1870.

To the same magazine he contributed a prose tale, 'The Martyr of Antioch', illustrating the early history of Arianism; part of this was reprinted in the Christian Freeman.