Quotations
Alas! for the rarityOf Christian charityUnder the sun!
The Bridge of Sighs, st. 9
Never go to FranceUnless you know the lingo,If you do, like me,You will repent, by jingo.
French and English, st. 1 (1839)
Oh, God! that bread should be so dear,And flesh and blood so cheap!
St. 5
Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives!It is not linen you're wearing out,But human creatures' lives!
St. 4
There's not a string attuned to mirthBut has its chord in melancholy.
Ode to Melancholy, st. 8
They went and told the sexton, andThe sexton tolled the bell.
, st. 17 (1826)
More Quotes >>
Encyclopedia
Thomas Hood was a
British humorist and poet.
Biography
The son of Thomas Hood, a bookseller, he was born in
London. "Next to being a citizen of the world," writes Thomas Hood in his
Literary Reminiscences, "it must be the best thing to be born a citizen of the world's greatest city." On the death of her husband in 1811, Mrs Hood moved to
Islington, where Thomas Hood had a schoolmaster who, appreciating his talents, "made him feel it impossible not to take an interest in learning while he seemed so interested in teaching." Under the care of this "decayed dominie", he earned a few guineas--his first literary fee--by revising for the press a new edition of
Paul and Virginia.
Admitted soon after into the counting house of a friend of his family, he "turned his stool into a
Pegasus on three legs, every foot, of course, being a dactyl or a spondee"; but the uncongenial profession affected his health, which was never strong, and he was sent to his father's relations at
Dundee, Scotland. There he led a healthy outdoor life, and also became a large and indiscriminate reader, and before long contributed humorous and poetical articles to the provincial newspapers and magazines. As a proof of his literary vocation, he used to write out his poems in printed characters, believing that that process best enabled him to understand his own peculiarities and faults, and probably unaware that
Samuel Taylor Coleridge had recommended some such method of criticism when he said he thought "print settles it." On his return to London in 1818 he applied himself to
engraving, enabling later him to illustrate his various humours and fancies by quaint devices.
In 1821, John Scott, the editor of the
London Magazine, was killed in a
duel, and the periodical passed into the hands of some friends of Hood, who proposed to make him sub-editor. His installation into thispost at once introduced him to the literary society of the time; and in becoming the associate of
Charles Lamb, Henry Cary,
Thomas de Quincey, Allan Cunningham, Bryan Procter, Serjeant Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, the peasant-poet John Clare and other contributors to the magazine, he gradually developed his own powers.
He had married in 1825, and
Odes and Addresses--his first work--was written in conjunction with his brother-in-law J.H. Reynolds, a friend of
John Keats. S. T. Coleridge wrote to Charles Lamb averring that the book must be his work.
The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies and a dramatic romance,
Lamia, published later, belong to this time.
The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies was a volume of serious verse. But he was known as a humorist, and the public rejected this little book almost entirely.
The series of the
Comic Annual, dating from 1830, was a kind of publication at that time popular, which Hood undertook and continued, almost unassisted, for several years. Under that somewhat frivolous title he treated all the leading events of the day in caricature, without personal malice, and with an under-current of sympathy. The attention of the reader was distracted, by the incessant use of puns, of which Hood had written in his own vindication:
"However critics may take offence,
A double meaning has double sense."
He was probably aware of this danger. As he gained experience as a writer, his diction became simpler. In another annual called the
Gem appeared the poem on the story of Eugene Aram. He started a magazine in his own name, for which he secured the assistance of many literary men, but which was mainly sustained by his own iactivity. From a sick-bed, from which he never rose, he conducted this work, and there composed well known poems, such as the "Song of the Shirt" , the "Bridge of Sighs" and the "Song of the Labourer". They are plain, solemn pictures of conditions of life. Woman, in her wasted life, in her hurried death, here stands appealing to the society that degrades her, with a combination of eloquence and poetry, and with great metrical energy and variety.
Hood was associated with the
Athenaeum, started in 1828 by
James Silk Buckingham, and he was a regular contributor for the rest of his life. Prolonged illness brought on straitened circumstances; and application was made to
Sir Robert Peel to place Hood's name on the pension list with which the British state rewarded literary men. This was done without delay, and the pension was continued to his wife and family after his death.
Nine years later a monument, raised by public subscription, in the
cemetery of Kensal Green, was inaugurated by
Richard Monckton Milnes.
Examples of his works
Hood wrote humorously on many contemporary issues. One of the most important issues in his time was grave digging and selling of corpses to anatomists . On this serious and perhaps cruel issue, he wrote humorously thus:
Don’t go to weep upon my grave,
And think that there I be.
They haven’t left an atom there
Of my anatomie
-Thomas Hood Bibliography
The list of Hood's separately published works is as follows:
- Odes and Addresses to Great People
- Whims and Oddities
- The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur and other Poems , his only collection of serious verse
- The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer
- Tylney Hall, a novel
- The Comic Annual
- Hood's Own, or, Laughter from Year to Year
- Up the Rhine
- Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany
- National Tales , a collection of short novelettes
- Whimsicalities , with illustrations from John Leech's designs; and many contributions to contemporary periodicals.
References
External links
