Doughty, Charles Montagu (1843-1926), a British author, traveled in western and southern Europe and in Asia, writing on geology and collecting inscriptions. He wrote Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), a vivid picture of the Middle East during the 1870’s. Doughty collected the information on which this work is based while living and traveling among the Arabs, dressed as an Arab Christian and speaking Arabic. His journey lasted from 1876 to 1878, when he returned to the United Kingdom, exhausted. The book is best known for its highly personal style, which was influenced by the language of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer of the 1300’s and the Elizabethan writers of the 1500’s.
Doughty himself preferred his poetry to his prose, but his verse is largely forgotten today. He wrote the epics The Dawn in Britain (six volumes, 1906) and Mansoul, or The Riddle of the World (1920, revised in 1923). Doughty was born on Aug. 19, 1843, in Suffolk and studied at Cambridge University in the early 1860’s. He died on Jan. 20, 1926.
