Blackmore

Blackmore, RICHARD DODDRIDGE, a well-known novelist, was born at Longworth, Berkshire, in 1825, and educated at Blundell's School (Tiverton), and Exeter College, Oxford. He graduated in 1847, afterwards studied law, was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1852, and practised for a time as a conveyancer. Ere long he united the pursuit of literature with the management of a market-garden and orchard at Teddington-on-Thames, and there he died 20th Jan. 1900. His first publications were Poems by Melanter (1854), Epullia (1855), The Bogle of the Black Sea (1855), followed by The Fate of Franklin (1860), and a translation of the first and second books of Virgil's Georgics (1862). Other volumes of verse have followed these, as well as a complete translation of the Georgics in 1871. His first novels were Clara Vaughan (1864) and Cradock Nowell (1866), but his first distinct success was Lorna Doone, a Romance of Exmoor (1869), which reached a 38th edition in 1893. Lorna Doone is almost a great novel. The plot is good and well developed; the style has the quaint and pleasing flavour of its age, the time of James II., with Sedgemoor for its point of highest interest; and the figures have much more life and movement than in any other of his novels. His plots are usually defective in construction, and the human interest in his books is a much weaker element than that rare insight into and sympathy with inanimate life in which he stands alone among English novelists. He has described for us with absolute truth the Devonshire farmer as he lives and speaks; and many of his women, if somewhat shadowy in outline, are yet figures of rare tenderness and grace. His other novels are: The Maid of Sker (1872), perhaps his second-best story; Alice Lorraine (1875); Cripps the Carrier (1876); Erema (1877); Mary Anerley (1880); Christowell, a Dartmoor Tale (1882); Tommy Upmore (1884); Springhaven (1887); Perlycross (1894); Tales from the Telling House (1896); and Daniel (1897).