Trevelyan was the second son of
Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and his wife Caroline
née Philips, who was the daughter of
Robert Needham Philips MP, a Liberal
Member of Parliament and textile merchant from Lancashire. Trevelyan was the brother of
Sir Charles Trevelyan, 3rd Baronet, and of the historian
G. M. Trevelyan. He was born in
Weybridge and educated at
Wixenford (where he was known as "the Dodo" and was a particular friend of
Frederick Lawrence), then at
Harrow. From 1891 to 1895 he studied at
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became one of the
Cambridge Apostles. He studied Classics and then law; his father wanted him to follow a career as a
barrister, but his ambition was to be a poet. Described as a "rumpled, eccentric poet", and sometimes considered a rather ineffectual person, he was close to the
Bloomsbury Group, who called him 'Bob Trevy'. He had a wide further range of social connections:
George Santayana from 1905;
Isaac Rosenberg;
Bernard Berenson;
Bertrand Russell;
G. E. Moore;
E. M. Forster with whom he and
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson travelled to
India in 1912. His
pacifist principles extended to sheltering
John Rodker, "on the run" as a
conscientious objector during
World War I; when he became liable to
conscription by the raising of the maximum age in 1918, he volunteered for the Friends' War Victims Relief Service, serving in
France, August 1918 to March 1919. Trevelyan married in 1900 the Dutch musician Elizabeth van der Hoeven; ==Works==