Ashton Wentworth Dilke

Ashton Wentworth Dilke (August 11 1850 – March 12 1883)was a British traveller and politician.

He was the younger son of Sir Charles Dilke, 1st Baronet, and was educated privately before being admitted to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1868. He was made a scholar in 1870 and was a prominent member of the Cambridge Union Society, although he left before finishing his degree, instead travelling to Russia in 1972. For several months he lived in a Russian village and studied the language, as well as examining the status of the Russian peasantry. He returned in 1973 showing signs of Tuberculosis, the disease which eventually killed him. He began writing a book about Russia, two chapters of which appeared in the "Fortnightly Review" in 1874, but it was never published. [ [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7644?docPos=1 Oxford DNB: Dilke, Ashton Wentworth] ]

In 1875 he bought the "Weekly Dispatch" for £14,000, acting as editor until 1876 and then again between 1878 and 1880. In 1878 he published a translation of Ivan Turgenev's "Virgin Soil".

In 1876 he married Margaret Smith, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In 1880 he was elected as a Member of parliament for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but his ill-health led him to resign in February 1883, spending the last few months of his life in Algiers, where he died in March.

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