Allingham, WILLIAM

Allingham, WILLIAM, a popular poet, of English origin, born at Ballyshannon in Ireland in 1824. He contributed to the Atheneum, Household Words, and other journals, while doing the duties of a commissioner of taxes in London, and in 1874 he succeeded Froude as editor of Fraser's Magazine. His first volume of poems appeared in 1850; his second, Day and Night Songs, in 1854, and in an enlarged form, illustrated by Rossetti and Millais, the year after. In 1864 first appeared in book form Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, a narrative poem of nearly 5000 lines, in decasyllabic couplets, on contemporary Irish life. He published in 1877, Songs, Ballads, and Stories, a collection of new pieces, together with revised versions of earlier poems; and in 1887, Irish Songs and Poems. In 1874 he married Helen Paterson, who, born in 1848, entered the schools of the Academy in 1867, and made herself a name by her book-illustrations and her water-colours. Allingham died 18th November 1889.