HOOD 



767 



catholic love <>f I.M.IlllL' WHS till- full inlill lull of that 



singular versatility and resource which marked 

 l>tli his poetic ami his humorous vein. For the 

 ne\t two years of his lite tin-re is some uncertainty 

 .is to liis pursuits. According to his own account, 

 h>- was now placed, through the influence of a 

 friend of the family, in a merchant's counting- 

 house in the city, but liis health proving unahle to 

 stand the confinement to the desk, he was shipped 

 oil' to Dundee, where relations of his father were 

 living, among whom he resided for some three 

 from IKl.'i to 1818. 



These three years were important in Hood's life. 

 The threatened consumption was for a time warded 

 off the hoy led the healthiest of outdoor lives in 

 fishing and boating he had ample leisure besides 

 l>oth 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 

 t ban the graphic, he seems to have discovered where 

 lay the true h'eld for his genius. About the same 

 time the London Magazine, losing its editor, John 

 Scott, and passing into the hands of Taylor and 

 ll-'-sey, 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, Gary, 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 

 \ears 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. Be- 

 tween July 1821 and July 1823, besides other and 

 lighter contributions to the Lomton, Hood wrote 

 and published in the inaga/ine some of the finest 

 of what may be called the poems of his Keatsian 

 period --1,1/ntx the Centaur, the Two Peacocks of 

 Kedfnnt, 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 in- 

 disposed to allow credit to a writer for gifts of very 

 opposite kinds. And although in the class of sub- 

 jects, 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 

 a> 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 



anonymously) the little volume 

 entitled < tilis mill .\ildn-tini-i fn 'mil l'ii,li. 

 While writing serious jMH-try in the Lmtilnn it had 

 fallen to Mood's lot to act a.s 'comic man* or 

 humorous chortiH to the magazine, and aft tmch to 

 invent facetious answers to corrapondentH, real or 

 imaginary. Among these lie had inserted a bur- 

 lesque (tdf. to Dr Kitchener, exhibiting a verbal 

 \\ii of quite different flavour from the ordinary. 

 The .success of this tritle seems to have suggested a 

 collection of similar odes, to which Reynolds con- 

 tributed a few. But Hood's wan far the more 

 conspicuous share, revealing a wealth of humorouK 

 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 

 tor the remainder of his short life. His musical 

 melancholy verse had brought him no recognition. 

 .His first facetious efforts had gained him an audi- 

 ence at once. From that day forth the vein thus 

 opened was to be worked, in health and in sick- 

 ness, 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 estrange- 

 ment 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 <m<l 

 Oddities appeared in 1827, dedicated to Sir Walter 

 Scott, followed without delay by two volumes of 

 National Tales, the least characteristic and notice- 

 able of Hood's writings. In 1829 he edited T/ie 

 Gem, one of the many fashionable annuals then in 

 vogue a remarkable little volume, for l>esi<les 

 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 individu- 

 ality. 



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 lie 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 In- 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 thrw 

 years at Ostend. During these five years Hood. 



