His grandfather, Richard Herne Shepherd (1775–1850), was from 1818 to 1848 a well-known Christian revivalist preacher at the Ranelagh Chapel, Chelsea, and published, besides sermons and devotional works, a volume of meditative verse entitled Gatherings of Fifty Years (1843).
[1] Richard Herne Shepherd the younger was educated largely at home, developed a taste for literature, and published at the age of sixteen a copy of verses entitled Annus Moriens (1858).
[1] In 1869 Shepherd published Translations from Baudelaire (reissued 1877, 12mo); in 1873 he printed, with notes, Coleridge's tragedy Osorio, and in 1875 The Lover's Tale (of 1833) and other early uncollected poems of Tennyson (unearthed from albums and periodicals).
[1] In 1878 Shepherd published Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Earlier Poems without the assent of the writer's living representatives, who keenly resented his action.
In the like character of literary chiffonnier, he prepared editions in the same year of the Juvenilia of Longfellow and Moore; and Sultan Stork, a volume of juvenile pieces by Thackeray, in 1887.