Queer Places:
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ
21 Wimpole St, London W1G 8GG, UK
Highgate Cemetery West, Swain's Ln, London N6 6PJ, United Kingdom
Arthur Thomas Malkin (1803 – November 18, 1888) was an English author, civil engineering investor, alpinist, and sportsman.
Born in Hackney, London, in 1803, he was the third son of Benjamin Heath Malkin (a prominent scholar and headmaster with close ties to William Blake). Arthur entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1820, graduating with a B.A. in 1825 and an M.A. in 1828.
Malkin was a prolific writer, contributing extensively to historical and biographical literature during the Victorian era. His published works include Historical Parallels (1831), The History of Greece, and multi-volume biographical collections such as Biographies of Eminent Men in Literature, Arts, and Arms (1850). Briefly venturing into civil engineering, he entered a partnership that was dissolved in 1829. Later in life, he purchased an estate at Corrybrough in Tomatin, Inverness-shire, where he served as a Deputy Lieutenant, while maintaining a residence on Wimpole Street in London. He was also an avid mountaineer, posthumously celebrated for his travel and alpine notebooks (Leaves from the Alpine Notebooks, 1890).
Malkin played a single recorded first-class cricket match for Cambridge University in 1826. He was also notable for his physical endurance; in 1827, he participated in an ambitious rowing expedition that navigated a boat from Cambridge down to King’s Lynn, and then across the hazardous open waters of The Wash to Boston, Lincolnshire, alongside fellow intellectuals John Mitchell Kemble and Kenelm Digby.
Malkin married twice: first to Mary Anne Carr in 1833, and later to Thomasine Gill. He passed away in Inverness in 1888 at the age of 84.
Malkin was elected in 1826 to the Cambridge Apostles.
The Apostles was—and remains—an elite, secret intellectual university society founded in 1820. During Malkin's era, the society fostered deep homosocial bonds, intense philosophical debate, and lifelong friendships among undergraduates who would shape Victorian public life, literature, and academia. Notable contemporaries of Malkin's broader circle in the society included figures like John Mitchell Kemble, Arthur Hallam, and Alfred Tennyson.
Regarding specific LGBTQ connections, the historical record notes the following context:
There is no biographical or historical evidence indicating that Arthur Malkin engaged in same-sex relationships or identified outside the strict heteronormative standards of Victorian society. His marriages to women and established domestic family life align entirely with the conventional norms of his class and era.
Malkin's primary link to LGBTQ history is structural rather than personal—stemming entirely from his membership in the Cambridge Apostles. In later decades and centuries, the Apostles developed a well-documented reputation as a haven for same-sex desire, romantic male friendships, and queer intellectualism (with prominent later members including figures like Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, and classicists/poets who challenged Victorian sexual morality). However, during Malkin’s undergraduate years in the 1820s, the society functioned primarily as a forum for philosophical and theological radicalism rather than the distinct homosocial counter-culture it evolved into by the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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