INTRODUCTION

Thomas Hood's place in English literary history is secure. It depends upon his originality in romantic, comic, and humanitarian verse, and also upon his place in the traditions of such writings. In his twenties Hood writes in the romantic, lyrical mood of his period. In particular in his volume entitled The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827) he reflects with uncanny skill the romanticism of Keats; he stands in the line between Keats and Tennyson, here as well as in such limpid lyrics as 'I remember,' 'The Death-Bed,' and 'Farewell, Life!' As a prolific comic writer Hood takes his place in a tradition that goes back to Shakespeare, but burgeons in the eighteenth century with Pope and Swift, Smollett, Sterne, and Fielding. From the more recent past he shares in the verse exuberance of Christopher Anstey, John Wolcott, and the brothers Smith, and looks forward to that of W.S. Gilbert. He belongs to the generation of comic prose writers, Theodore Hook amongst them, which nourished the early work of Dickens. He also looks forward to the achievement of Lewis Carroll. In his humanitarian writing - grotesque as in 'The Last Man,' serious as in 'The Dream of Eugene Aram,' 'The Song of the Shirt,' and 'The Bridge of Sighs' - Hood does not, as Wordsworth does, identify himself with the poor and outcast for the sake of the human spirit only (if one dare say only), but for the sake of social protest. Here he appeals most strongly to those modern readers who sym- pathize with the writer's attempt to combine his art with the expression of social conscience. The attempt was eagerly made in the years of crisis after the accession of Queen Victoria; it was made in the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Norton, Barry Cornwall, and Hood himself, and led to the didactically inclined prose fiction of Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Elizabeth Gaskell. The originality of Hood's comic contribution lies in his crackling puns, at which Xll INTRODUCTION

he is uniquely adept - see for example 'Faithless Nelly Gray' - and the teeming extravagance of his fancy which finds full and formal expression in a characteristic early Victorian work like 'Miss Kilmannsegg and her Precious Leg.' In his romantic writing Hood sets out on a mythological exploration of his own but, owing to personal limitations, economic necessities, and an unfavourable social climate, the exploration remained uncompleted. However, what is unique to Hood is the way in which the horrific elements of his romantic verse pass through his comic writing and are taken over in the later humanitarian work. The grotesque images of the per- fervid youthful romantic imagination reappear to the maturer artist in the actual world of the early I 840s. It is worth collecting the letters of a man whose work is of fascinating interest on these three levels, different but united through his personality. Yet the interest of the letters is not confined to Hood's personality. He participated in the commer- cialized movement which produced the literary annuals of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This phenomenon has not received a great deal of attention, though many of the literary men of the time were involved in it, and one wonders whether it is not a particularly characteristic creation of an age of cultural uncer- tainty yet growing wealth. Secondly, Hood participated in tentative movements again characteristic of the age, to achieve professional status for literature. His in- volvement in the movement to change the terms of copyright in favour of the author is documented in the letters, together with his share in attempts to organize authors to ensure their economic security. This edition of Hood's letters should enlarge and clarify the view provided by his children's Memorials (1860) and by his later biographers Walter Jerrold (1907), J.C. Reid (1963), and John Clubbe (1968). The new view presented in this edition is one of the age, the writer, and the man. Admittedly the age is seen very quietly, with few of its political, economic, intellectual, and aesthetic highlights in the fore- ground. The picture is primarily a quiet but fascinating personal one, with an interest not only for the close student who must have the information here presented, but also for the general reader who sees a human life running its course across many obstacles, with humour and heroic determination.

My main purpose in this introductory essay is to evaluate Hood's character as it appears and develops in his correspondence, and to indicate the range of this correspondence. In the first place, however, notice should be taken of his immediate background, which was bourgeois and professional. His mother was the daughter of an engraver, and his father was a largely self-made and successful publisher. His INTRODUCTION Xlll

father and brother died when he was twelve years of age, and his mother when he was twenty-two. These deaths left a family comprising himself and four sisters. There seems to have been a strange coolness between him and them. His sister Betsy was a religious zealot and on this account antipathetic to him; Jessie was confined because of mental unbalance brought on, in his view, by similar enthusiasm. The death of his father probably deprived Hood of a decent education, and the early atmosphere of death is reflected in his own sickly life and morbid humour. At the age of sixteen Hood was sent off to relatives at Dundee, his father's home, and from there his first family letters were sent. They show him at this tender age already a humorist, the admirer of Hogarth, Smollett, and Christopher Anstey. Hood remained the duteous nephew until the end of his life, as the late letters to his uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs Keay, show (650, 684). In Dundee he made several youthful friendships, and their extent is indicated in the letters written on his return to London. Here some hints are given concerning his activities as a busy engraver, learning something of the harsh business world, and as an amateur of letters, facile but not dedicated. In his literary attempts Hood was encouraged by John Taylor, the publisher of Keats. Taylor saw him not only as a bright young writer but also as a potentially useful lad about the office. His letter to Taylor on the death of his mother ( 25) shows real gratitude formally expressed and a strength of feeling which is evident elsewhere in the letters. Work for Taylor on his London Magazine introduced Hood to two groups of acquaintances, and hence to two sets of correspondents: the contributors to the magazine, and the family of one of these contributors, John Hamilton Reynolds, who had been Keats's friend. The London Magazine provided Hood with a perfect introduction to the world of letters. The drudgery of sub-editing was more than compensated for by the amiabilities ofliterary intercourse. The character of Hood's life work was fixed, and friendships made. These are not immediately documented, but their strong hold is indicated by letters written much later. In particular, the friendship between Hood and Charles Lamb leaves behind few epistolary relics, partly because the two men lived so close together that they did not need to corre- spond with each other. However, Hood gives a revealing account of the relationship in a letter to T.C. Grattan in 1837 (327), and there is a pleasant glimpse of Mary Lamb in her old age in a letter to J.T.J. Hewlett (473). Hood probably met Charles Wentworth Dilke, another friend of Keats, as a fellow contributor to the London Magazine, but their correspondence does not begin until the early 1830s, when Dilke was editor of the weekly Athenaeum. Thomas Noon Talfourd was another contributor to the London Magazine; Hood corresponded with him about 1841 on XIV INTRODUCTION the subject of literary copyright, reform of which they both favoured. H.F. Cary, another contributor and the translator of Dante, is a correspondent of I 844 (594); so is Mary Russell Mitford, author of Our Village. B.W. Procter, the poet 'Barry Cornwall,' is the object of a pathetic appeal made in Hood's last months (683). Hood's early letters to Reynolds' mother and to his sisters Charlotte and Marianne show a warmth which seems to have been but newly released, the playfulness and even passion which are his best characteristics as a letter writer, and a loquacity which shows his delight in writing for the delight of friends. (They contrast with the cool letters to his sister Betsy.) The one surviving letter to John Reynolds leaves us to regret the loss of the rest of this part of the correspondence. The letter to Jane Reynolds before their marriage shows Hood, already a sick man, amazingly easy in his wit, and restrained in his courtship. The floodgates of passion are only released in the earnest solicitude of the letters written during their later separations. At this earlier period, whatever the later developments, it was doubtless the Reynolds circle which fed that flame of romanticism in Hood which led to the production of the Keatsian Plea of the Midsummer Fairies volume and the melodramatic National Tales. Once Hood had settled on making his living by writing, much of his correspon- dence took on a professional character. He writes, generally without enthusiasm, to publishers and editors. Amongst general publishers, he writes to Blackwood, Constable, Murray, Bentley, Bradbury, and Smith and Elder. He also writes to the unfortunately less well-known publishers who were mainly responsible for issuing his own work, Charles Tilt and A.H. Baily, as well as Lupton Relfe. He writes to the agents of publishers: Hurst acting for Colburn, and Edward Moxon acting for Longman. Hood also knew Moxon as a young friend of Lamb. In particular, Hood corresponds with the publishers of the literary annuals, the celebrated Ackermann and the forgotten James Fraser. These annuals illuminated with their superficial glitter the drawing-room tables of polite England and America from the early 1820s, and Hood contributed freely to them in these early years. He corresponded not only with their publishers but also with their editors, for example, Watts of The Literary Souvenir, Frederic Shober! of The Forget Me Not, and Hall of The Amulet. At the end of 1829 Hood brought out his own annual, The Gem, and as importunate editor widened the range of his correspondents still further, appealing inter alia for the contributions of John Clare and John Poole, former contributors to the London Magazine; he also wrote to James Hogg, William Howitt, C.B. Tayler, Thomas Gent, Thomas Moore, and Sir Walter Scott. Hood's tones of appeal range from the INTRODUCTION xv playful towards Gent, through the slightly patronizing towards the Northampton- shire peasant, to the deferential towards Moore and Scott. He deferred to these last not only on account of their literary prestige but also because of their social standing. Hood corresponded not only with the editors of annuals, but also with those of more frequent periodicals. This group included William Hone, editor of the Every Day Book and a friend of Lamb. It also included William Jerdan, editor of the long-lived weekly Literary Gazette, whose friendship Hood needed on account of his puffing reviews, with whom he quarrelled, yet whom we can finally name amongst his 'distant friends.' Hood also corresponded with Charles Oilier, sub-editor of the New Monthly Magazine and another friend of Lamb, and later with R.S. Surtees, creator of Jorrocks; Hood wrote to Surtees in his capacity as editor of the New Sporting Magazine, in which concern his brother-in-law Reynolds played an impor- tant part. He also corresponded with W.H. Ainsworth, editing Ainsworth's Magazine, and with Mark Lemon, editor of Punch. Hood's editorship of The Gem brought him into contact with the artistic world as well as the literary for, in the annuals, plate illustrated text and vice versa. On this principle Hood's literary direction of The Gem was paired with the artistic direction of Abraham Cooper RA, who thus became a correspondent. One of the plates in The Gem was from a typically grandiose painting by John Martin, whom one unex- pectedly finds as a friend ofHood. A peripheral member of the artistic world of those days was Robert Balmanno, who receives several pleasant, witty, and conversational letters from Hood. In league with Balmanno, Hood writes a lavishly witty letter to Sir Thomas Lawrence in order to gain access to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The aim of this visit, which did not take place, was to gain material to provide a text to match the engravings of W.B. Cooke, another artistic collaborator and friend, and the recipient of one particularly sympathetic letter (142). There is also a letter to the printseller and publisher F.G. Moon. Later, Hood corresponds with the en- gravers Wright and Folkard. John Wright did most of the illustrative work on the Comic Annuals and acted as Hood's business representative in London during his long absence abroad, and so receives from Hood letters anxious and friendly and exuberant by turns. In later years Hood corresponds with other artists: William Harvey, a pupil ofBewick,John Leech, a fellow-contributor to Punch, and Clarkson Stanfield, friend of Dickens. In 1829, as well as editing The Gem, Hood attempted a connection with the theatre. One or two indifferent pieces by him were indifferently performed. And we have the impatient letters to R.W. Elliston, formerly manager of Drury Lane and now of the Surrey Theatre, and to Frederick Yates, part-owner, with the inimitable mimic XVI INTRODUCTION

Mathews, of the Adelphi Theatre. There is also an earlier letter to Stephen Price, the American who was, for a time, manager of Drury Lane. Mention has already been made of Hood's bourgeois origin and background. His own awareness of this is shown in the tone of deference which his correspondence takes on when it is addressed to social superiors. We have seen this in the letters to Sir Walter Scott, and it is apparent, though less markedly, in the pyrotechnic letter to Sir Thomas Lawrence ( 113). It reappears in letters to Sir Francis Freeling, the Duke of Devonshire, and the Prince Consort. Hood dedicates to Freeling, Secretary of the Post Office, the first volume of the Comic Annual (124), and he forwards to the Prince Consort a German translation of 'The Dream of Eugene Aram' (453). Hood is grateful for the patronage of the Duke of Devonshire, to whom the second volume of the Comic Annual is dedicated. In later years, Hood's spirit of deference is evident in a letter to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, expressing gratitude for his con- descending to contribute to Hood's Magazine and for his help in obtaining Hood a pension, and in letters to Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, acknowledging the granting of the pension. During his stay abroad (1835-40), which was enforced by financial embarrass- ment, Hood had seven chief correspondents: his wife, Jane, when he was separated from her; his English friends, Mr and Mrs Dilke and Dr and Mrs Elliot; his new Anglo-German friend, Philip de Franck; and his collaborator and friend, John Wright. Hood's letters to Jane show the strength of his love for her. When he quits her to visit Berlin in the company of Franck and his regiment, he delights in every aspect of the trip and in his own unaccustomed role as attentively remarked camp follower, but his deepest thoughts are always unwaveringly with her. The same is true of the later letters from Scotland. Hood's long impassioned letter to Dilke before leaving for Germany shows the independent and stalwart Dilke's role as his trusted and confidential adviser. The expansiveness and the compulsive anti-German grumblings of Hood's later letters to the Dilkes from Germany show his loneliness there. These letters make one wonder what could have caused the sad break between the two men which occurred after Hood's return to England. Though Hood's friendship with Dilke came to an end, the friendship with his physician Dr Elliot and his wife grew more and more strong. He writes to them loquaciously and facetiously; he writes of them in terms of deep gratitude and even love. To their young children, as to his own dear daughter, he pens playful letters which show a delightful fancy and the ability to enter into the mind and spirit of the child. Hood's loneliness in Germany was happily relieved by the genial friendship with Philip de Franck, who, like Jane most of the time, was the good-humoured object of Hood's sometimes INTRODUCTION xvii elaborate practical jokes and waggery. The business letters to Wright from abroad show how harassed Hood was by the distance separating them, particularly under the stress imposed by the monthly publication of Hood's Own, in 1838. (Hood's Own was largely a reissue of materials published in the Comic Annuals of the preceding years.) In 1840 Hood returned to England alone, glad to be back in his homeland, saddened by memories, stricken by illness, but solaced by the attention of his friends. Jane followed him, and a financial crisis ensued. It was with difficulty that the children left behind in Ostend were extricated from the grasp of Hood's Belgian creditors. Hood proudly refused help offered by the Literary Fund but then had to swallow his pride and apply for what he had rejected. A tentative publishing ar- rangement with Bentley was only partially successful, but then Hood entered on a regular engagement as contributor to Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, of which he later became editor. Hood's life as an editor provided him, at least at first, with a degree of economic security. It exposed his delicate health to a damaging strain, recurrent with the preparation of each issue of the magazine. However, in spite of his sickness, this life brought him to play a more public and active role in literary society, to which his correspondence attests. Hood had a special sympathy for his fellow men of letters as members of a hard- working and unappreciated fraternity. In Ostend this feeling probably led him to seek, though without great success, the acquaintance ofT.C. Grattan. In England there is no warmth, but neither is there coolness, in letters to Shirley Brooks of the Punch circle and to Captain Marryat. The thesis of'fellow author, therefore dear to me' is stated in letters to Douglas Jerrold and Bulwer Lytton,and one is sure that this principle made these men Hood's friends even though their social life was different and apart from his. The principle is exemplified in a letter to Thomas Noon Tal- fourd, to whom Hood wrote forcefully on the topic ofliterary copyright. Hood valued the brotherhood of literature, and he felt the need for this brotherhood to take some tangible form and achieve some legal recognition. This is shown also in his letters to Dickens. At the same time, Hood was obliged to appeal pathetically to the brotherhood in his letters to Octavius Blewitt and the Committee of the Literary Fund. To the broad category of authors and friends more or less distant belong John Britton, the antiquary, an acquaintance of Hood's father, and Manley Hopkins, the father of the great poet. To this category also belong Thackeray and Dickens. To the latter Hood writes at first with generous encouragement and always open- xvm INTRODUCTION

heartedly. However, that such literary bonhomie is not always as deep as one could wish is shown in Hood's relation with Laman Blanchard. They exchange fulsome letters, but elsewhere Hood refers to Blanchard, less soupily, as 'one of the Marl- boro' street gang' (5 70). A large group of literary correspondents is made up of would-be and actual contributors to the magazines of which Hood was editor: the New Monthly and then his own. Would-be contributors included William Gaspey, Sheridan Knowles, and William Hazlitt the younger. Actual contributors included Charles Mackay, Cyrus Redding, and Sir Charles Morgan, husband of the volatile Lady Morgan, slightly beyond Hood's social range. Contributors who were also friends more or less distant included Hannah Lawrance whom Hood had known as a youthful dilettante of literature, H.F. Cary, an old London Magazine contributor, Mrs S.C. Hall and David Moir whom he had known in the atmosphere of the annuals, and the humorists Horace Smith and the Reverend R .H. Barham, the latter of whom exerted his influence to help Hood obtain financial assistance through the Literary Fund. Other correspondents in this last category of contributors and friends are W.J. Broderip, magistrate, naturalist, and man ofletters,J.T.J. Hewlett, clergyman and humorist, to whom Hood writes encouragingly, whimsically, and often, and Samuel Phillips, who in Hood's last days became something more than a contributor, that is, a friend and collaborator. F.O. Ward was also a collaborator, stepping in to help when Hood's Magazine and its editor were teetering on the verge of collapse. A final group of correspondents of Hood's later years is more amorphous in character. Hood writes to autograph hunters, particularly genially to W.F. Watson who later bequeathed his large collection to the National Library of Scotland, and he writes to dozens of poetical 'ladies, old and young; and prosaic gentlemen' (549) anxious to blossom in print. He writes business letters to officials, not only those of the Literary Fund, but also, in his role as important contemporary man ofletters, to the secretaries of the Manchester Athenaeum, and to the secretary of the Liverpool Anti-Monopoly Association.

So much for Hood's correspondents. What of his character as shown in the letters which he wrote to them? In brief, he felt deep love, at times passionately expressed, for his wife, children, and intimate friends. He felt dutifully to his more distant relatives and to those men to whom he felt himself to be fairly indebted. He had every honourable intention of paying back his debts. He was sympathetic to his friends in their sickness and bereavement. He was hospitable to them when he had a chance to entertain them. It was his love of his family rather than his ill health which made INTRODUCTION XIX his life domestic in character. He was buoyed up by a simple, undogmatic, optimis- tic, and firm faith, expressed rarely, though more frequently towards the end of his life. He was predominantly a humorist, his humour expressing itself in an outpouring of puns, a love of practical jokes and of teasing those closest to him. Humour was predominant in him: with it as his staff he met sickness and death itself. Hood's misfortunes were not entirely inflicted from without. Though he would not admit to dilatoriness in himself, this characteristic was remarked in him by H.F. Chorley, an assistant on Dilke'sAthenaeum, in his Autobiography ( 1873, 1, 109-10), and by John Wright in a letter to Hood (in the Bristol Public Library). Furthermore, Hood seems to have suffered from a more than ordinary inability to get along with publishers. He writes of them with a harshness which he applies elsewhere only to religious bigots. He snarlingly compares the apparently innocent Hessey, of Taylor and Hessey, to a snake, and writes with similar vituperation but perhaps more justification of Henry Colburn. Hood's interest in politics as well as his editorship will be considered more closely, because they present an unusually complicated situation which has not before been unravelled and which shows itself effectively in the letters. Hood's political attitude has three aspects. On the one hand, he holds himself aloof and apart from party politics. When someone publishes a weak political satire in his name he is horrified and pens an indignant letter of protest to The Times. As editor of the New Monthly Magazine and Hood's Magazine he abjures the intrusion of political controversy. At the same time, Hood is not indifferent to politics. He is upset about the satire just mentioned, not merely as a satire, but because it represents him as a partisan of the right rather than of the left. Indeed, he is hopeful of moderate social improvement. Chorley calls him a liberal, and he accepts the label. In one epistolary outburst he goes so far as to call himself a republican. In later poetical effusions he expresses sympathy for the poor, particularly the outcast harlot, the downtrodden sempstress, and the unemployed agricultural labourer. In the last instance his protest is aimed directly against the government. He tentatively associates himselfwith the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League, which he is led to denominate their 'great cause' (595). At the end of his life, another attitude towards politics is apparent: Hood is influenced, firstly, subconsciously by the generosity of Sir Robert Peel in the matter of his pension and, secondly, by his acute awareness of the proximity of his own death. He writes finally with full seriousness of the folly of party divisions and the need of a united national spirit to face the problems of the age. As a political man, Hood thought that right feeling could do much to solve social problems; this is what he admired so much in Dickens. As a man ofletters, Hood's xx INTRODUCTION

attitude was more practical. He felt that the status of his own profession could be improved by association and legislation. He suffered from piracy and plagiarism and the inadequate copyright law, and against them he wrote wittily, sensitively, fully, and with a sense of the importance of the position of the man of letters in society. As editor, Hood felt that it was his duty to maintain the respectability of his profession. This was one reason for his rupture with Colburn in 1843, for the latter did not allow him the full control over the New Monthly Magazine which he felt a self-respecting man of letters should have had. Colburn bought serials which he decided to publish in the magazine; he inserted laudatory reviews by his own staff of books published by himself; and there is little doubt that he knowinglyvictimized his own editor by publishing and having reviewed in the New Monthly a novel con- containing plagiarisms of Hood and others. Hood freed himself from Colburn and took the audacious step of inaugurating a magazine untrammelled by association with a large publishing house. Unfortunately he was injudicious in his choice offinancier. Flight's support proved to be fraudulent. Hood himself succumbed to illness. He and the magazine were rescued by F.O. Ward, who secured the safe financial backing ofSpottiswoode, the Queen's printer. During the summer of 1844 Hood recovered his health very slowly; Ward sent him to recuperate at Blackheath. However, serious differences in editorial policy arose between the two men, as the correspondence shows. Hood's scruples were not merely artistic - concerning, for example, the hard-won contributions from Browning - but also political. Ward sought to enliven with an infusion from Young England what Hood conceived of as a politically neutral entertainment. As his vitality returned Hood objected more strongly. Now he disagreed with Ward not only on artistic and political, but also on religious and moral grounds. Ward's policy was to arouse and stimulate; Hood's, less courageous, more delicate and difficult, was what we tend to think of as the typically early Victorian one of entertaining without giving offence to any section of his readers. At the same time Ward was working hard to obtain a pension for Hood. When he succeeded, Hood complained about the meagreness of the award. When Ward made a move to have the amount increased, Hood objected to his interference. When Ward sought to publish Peel's letter offering the pension to Hood, Hood refused. He struggled almost as against death itself to retain control over the magazine and over his own affairs against a young, energetic man who was both greatly helpful and tiresomely interfering. Ward's impassioned assistance continued to the end, as did Hood's petulant reaction to it, inevitable because of his mortal sickness. However, Ward described Hood's INTRODUCTION xxi last days in convincing and calm terms which indicate their final reconciliation: He saw the on-coming of death with great cheerfulness, though without anything approaching to levity; and last night, when his friends, Harvey and another, came, he bade them come up, had wine brought, and made us all drink a glass with him, 'that he might know us for friends, as of old, and not undertakers.' He conversed for about an hour in his old playful way, with now and then a word or two full of deep and tender feeling. When I left he bade me good-bye, and kissed me, shedding tears, and saying that perhaps we should never meet again.1

1/ Quoted in Samuel Carter Hall A Book of Memories (1871), 144