Hood, THOMAS, poet and humorist, was born on the 23d of May 1799, at No. 31 the Poultry, in the City of London, where his father carried on the business of a publisher in partnership with a Mr Vernor. Thomas Hood the elder was a native of Scotland, the son of parents in humble circumstances, near Errol, on the north bank of the Tay, between Perth and Dundee. Originally bound apprentice to a bookseller in Dundee, he had proceeded to London, and finally became member of the firm just mentioned. He was himself a man of some turn for authorship, and even wrote a couple of novels now forgotten, so that his more distinguished son was born, as he expressed it, 'with ink in his blood.' The elder Hood married the sister of Mr Sands, an engraver of some repute. To Thomas Hood, the publisher, and his wife, were born a family of six children, two sons and four daughters, of whom Thomas was the second son. There was a tendency to consumption on the mother's side, for the malady was fatal to the elder son James and to two of the daughters, and in the sequel to Mrs Hood, and was at the root of those complicated disorders which made the life of Thomas Hood 'one long disease.' The father contracted a chill while nursing his elder son, and died after a few days' illness in 1811, when Thomas was only twelve years old, leaving the widow and remaining children in reduced circumstances.
In his Literary Reminiscences, a discriptive autobiography written by Hood in 1839, and published in the first series of Hood's Own, he tells us that he owed his earliest instruction to two maiden ladies, of the name of Hogsflesh, who had a small school in Token House Yard; that he was then sent to a suburban boarding-school (the 'Clapham Academy' of his famous Ode), and ultimately to a day-school at Clerkenwell, where his mother went to reside after her husband's death. His education, ordinarily so called, closed at this point; and after the age of thirteen or fourteen his own keen and catholic love of reading was the foundation of that singular versatility and resource which marked both his poetic and his humorous vein. For the next two years of his life there is some uncertainty as to his pursuits. According to his own account, he was now placed, through the influence of a friend of the family, in a merchant's counting-house in the city, but his health proving unable to stand the confinement to the desk, he was shipped off to Dundee, where relations of his father were living, among whom he resided for some three years, from 1815 to 1818.
These three years were important in Hood's life. The threatened consumption was for a time warded off—the boy led the healthiest of outdoor lives in fishing and boating—he had ample leisure besides both for reading and sketching, and he began to practise his pen both in verse and prose in the pages of local newspapers and magazines. In 1818 he returned to London with his health apparently re-established, and entered the studio of his uncle, the engraver. After a short apprenticeship of only two years he began to work on his own account, until, the literary instinct beginning to wax far stronger than the graphic, he seems to have discovered where lay the true field for his genius. About the same time the London Magazine, losing its editor, John Scott, and passing into the hands of Taylor and Hessey, Thomas Hood, then a young man of two-and-twenty, was appointed sub-editor.
Nothing more propitious for Hood's genius could have happened. It emancipated him for ever from the engraver's desk, the drudgery and constraint of which were seriously affecting his health, and it threw him at once into a society of writers best fitted to call forth all that was best in him. He now found himself in daily companionship with such men as Procter, Cary, Allan Cunningham, De Quincey, Hazlitt, and, above all, with Charles Lamb, with whom a close friendship sprung up, destined to be one of the best influences of Hood's literary life. It was, however, the intimacy with John Hamilton Reynolds, whose sister he married three years later, that more than all the rest served to encourage and train Hood's poetic faculty. John Keats had died early in 1821, the year that Hood joined the magazine, and it does not appear that they ever met; but Reynolds had been the close friend and disciple of Keats, and Hood passed at once under the same fascinating influence. Between July 1821 and July 1823, besides other and lighter contributions to the London, Hood wrote and published in the magazine some of the finest of what may be called the poems of his Keatsian period—Lycus the Centaur, the Two Peacocks of Bedfont, the Ode to Autumn, and others—poems which have never materially increased Hood's fame with the ordinary reader, chiefly because Hood the humorist appeals to a larger audience than Hood the poet, and the world is always indisposed to allow credit to a writer for gifts of very opposite kinds. And although in the class of subjects, and in the very titles of these poems, as well as in turns of phrase and versification, the influence of Keats is unmistakable, the poems show quite as markedly the result of an ear and taste formed upon a loving study of the narrative poems of Shakespeare. And 'over all there hung' a tender melancholy observable in all Hood's serious verse, engendered in a personality on which from the beginning there rested the shadow of impending fate. In spite of real and original poetic quality, these poems, issued anonymously, failed to attract notice, and when in 1827 he produced them with others of still finer quality in book-form, the volume fell all but dead from the press.
A different fate attended an earlier venture in 1825, when Hood and his brother-in-law Reynolds published (also anonymously) the little volume entitled Odes and Addresses to Great People. While writing serious poetry in the London it had fallen to Hood's lot to act as 'comic man' or humorous chorus to the magazine, and as such to invent facetious answers to correspondents, real or imaginary. Among these he had inserted a burlesque Ode to Dr Kitchener, exhibiting a verbal wit of quite different flavour from the ordinary. The success of this trifle seems to have suggested a collection of similar odes, to which Reynolds contributed a few. But Hood's was far the more conspicuous share, revealing a wealth of humorous ingenuity that at once attracted notice. Coleridge wrote, attributing the book to Lamb, as the only writer he knew capable of the achievement. The book passed rapidly through three editions, and practically determined the chief occupation of Hood for the remainder of his short life. His musical melancholy verse had brought him no recognition. His first facetious efforts had gained him an audience at once. From that day forth the vein thus opened was to be worked, in health and in sickness, with the grain and against the grain, for twenty years of anxiety and struggle.
For Hood had married in 1824 contrary, it is to be feared, to all counsels of prudence. The marriage was one of truest affection, but it could hardly have been acceptable to Mrs Hood's family, for Hood had no means of support but his pen, and his health was already matter of serious anxiety. The marriage soon produced strained relations with the Reynoldses, and in the end a complete estrangement from Hood's early friend and brother-in-law. The Odes and Addresses were followed in 1826 by the first series of Whims and Oddities, where Hood first exhibited such graphic talent as he possessed (he said of himself that, like Pope's 'tape-tied curtains,' he was 'never meant to draw') in these picture-puns of which he seems to have been the inventor. A second series of Whims and Oddities appeared in 1827, dedicated to Sir Walter Scott, followed without delay by two volumes of National Tales, the least characteristic and noticeable of Hood's writings. In 1829 he edited The Gene, one of the many fashionable annuals then in vogue—a remarkable little volume, for besides Charles Lamb's 'Lines on a Child dying as soon as born,' written on the death of Hood's first child, it gave to the world Hood's Eugene Aram, the first of his poems showing a tragic force of real individuality.
Hood and his wife, who passed the first years of their married life in Robert Street, Adelphi, left London in 1829 for a cottage at Winchmore Hill, a few miles north of the metropolis, where he schemed the first of those comic annuals which he produced yearly and single-handed from 1830 to 1839. In 1832 he left Winchmore Hill for an old-fashioned house at Wanstead, in Essex, forming part of the old historic mansion, Wanstead House, where the romantic scenery of the park and neighbourhood furnished him with a background for his one novel, Tylney Hall, written during the next two years, and published in three volumes in 1834—a story of a conventional melodramatic type, with an underplot of cockney life and manners, not without many touches of Hood's peculiar charm, but on the whole a failure. He never repeated the experiment of prose romance.
In 1834 the failure of a publisher plunged Hood into serious money difficulties by which he was hampered for the rest of his life. After the birth of his second child, a son, in January 1835, and the dangerous illness of Mrs Hood which followed, the family went abroad and settled for two years at Coblenz on the Rhine, and for the next three years at Ostend. During these five years Hood, struggling against the slow progress of a fatal disease, continued to produce his Comic Annals and other lighter matter, and schemed his Up the Rhine, a humorous account of the proceedings of an English family in Germany, told in letters, and too obviously imitated from Humphrey Clinker. This, when published in 1839, at once hit the public taste, but seems to have brought little profit to its author, who, apparently destitute of all business faculty, suffered throughout his career from the misfortunes or the superior sagacity of his publishers. The sufferings of Hood during these five years were very terrible, and are only hinted by his son and daughter in their memoir of their father. In an unpublished letter to his wife in April 1840, written during a temporary visit to England from the house of his generous friend, the first Charles Wentworth Dilke, he writes: 'I find my position a very cruel one—after all my struggles to be, as I am, almost moneyless, and with a very dim prospect of getting any, but by the sheer exercise of my pen. What is to be done in the meantime is a question I ask myself without any answer but—Bruges jail. At the very moment of being free of Bailey, am I tied elsewhere, hand and foot, and by sheer necessity ready to surrender myself that slave, a bookseller's hack!'
By the kindness of friends Hood was enabled to return to England, with security from his creditors, in 1840. Disease of lungs and heart was now so far advanced that the fatal issue was only a question of time, but he continued to struggle on bravely and cheerfully for five years longer. In 1841 he was offered by Colburn the editorship of the New Monthly Magazine at a salary of £300 a year, a post which he filled for two years, when, a difference arising with the proprietor, he resigned the editorship, and in January 1844 started a new periodical of his own, Hood's Monthly Magazine, destined to be his last literary venture. Meantime in the Christmas number of Punch (1843) had appeared the 'Song of the Shirt,' and in Hood's Magazine, during its brief career, there followed the 'Haunted House,' the 'Lay of the Labourer,' and the 'Bridge of Sighs,' proving that, as the darkness of his own prospects deepened, the sympathies with his kind deepened also, and quickened his finest genius. Only a few months after the starting of the magazine a notice to the subscribers had to tell that the health of the editor was rapidly failing. Towards the end of the year his friends used their interest with the government of the day, and in November Sir Robert Peel wrote announcing a pension to Mrs Hood on the civil list of £100 a year. In the number of the magazine for February 1845 appeared Hood's last contribution, the touching lines, prophetic of his approaching end, beginning:
Farewell life—my senses swim,
And the world is growing dim, and ending:
O'er the earth there comes a bloom,
Sunny light for sullen gloom,
Warm perfume for vapours cold—
I smell the rose above the mould!
After three more months of increasing pain and distress, Thomas Hood died at Devonshire Lodge, Finchley Road, on the 3d of May 1845. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. His devoted wife, broken in health with the long attendance on her husband, survived him only eighteen months.
Hood produced in twenty-four years an amount of prose and verse of which at least one half the world might willingly let die. Of the other half, all the serious poetry is remarkable, and a small portion of first-rate excellence. Lyrics such as the 'Song of the Shirt,' the 'Bridge of Sighs,' 'Eugene Aram,' the song beginning 'I remember, I remem- ber, the house where I was born,' and the 'Ode to Melancholy' are of an assured immortality. His humorous verse—and in the best of it, as in 'Miss Kilmansegg,' are often blended poetry, pathos, and even real tragic power—is of a kind that Hood absolutely created. Not only was he the most prolific and successful punster that ever used that form of wit, but he turned it to purposes of which no one had ever supposed it capable. It became in his hands the most natural and obvious vehicle for all his better gifts. The truth is, he brought to it the transfiguring power of real imagination, and, instead of its degrading whatever object it touched, in his hands it ministered to the noblest ends. Even in the 'Song of the Shirt,' when his deepest sympathies were involved, he uses the pun with almost magical effect, as where the poor needlewoman, confined to her squalid garret when all nature is beckoning her forth, exclaims:
And underneath my eaves
The brooding swallows cling,
As if to show me their sunny backs,
And twit me with the spring!
It was Hood's misfortune that the necessity of writing for bread compelled him to write constantly below his better genius. But he has left sufficient to found a durable fame as a writer of rare individuality, who, using a discredited method, made it delightful by the imagination of a true poet and the humanity of a genuine lover of his kind.
The best account of Hood's early life is to be found in his Literary Reminiscences, published in the first series of Hood's Own. The Memoir by his son and daughter is the chief source of information about his later life, but is a poor and unsatisfactory book. Later, in 1885, Mr Alexander Elliot, in a modest work entitled Hood in Scotland, has collected from persons and documents previously unconsulted some very interesting details of Hood's early residence in Dundee, and of a second visit of a few weeks paid by him to that city not long before his death.