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| The Poetical Works of Jean Ingelow Illustrated New York: John Wortele Lovell, 1880 |
Illustrated
Including
the Shepherd Lady and Other Poems
New
York: John Wortele Lovell, 1880
520 pages, Notes
British poet Jean Ingelow is a fascinating woman! She regularly held "copyright dinners" in her home, so-called because royalties from her publications paid for her homeless and poor guests. She was admired by the well-known poet Christine Rossetti, and mystery author Agatha Christie quoted Ingelow in her stories. Most intriguing of all...did Jean have a love so powerful for a man who never returned from an Arctic expedition that she never married, and does her poetry secretly reveal the story?
Brown cloth boards, beveled edges, with black stamped floral design and gilt title box and spine decoration. All pages with red border lines, all edges gilt. Illustrations: Frontis and 5 plates.
Dedication: To George K. Ingelow
Your
loving sister offers you these poems, partly as an expression of her affection,
partly for the pleasure of connecting her effort with your name. Kensington,
June, 1863
A Poem by Jean Ingelow: On the Rocks by Aberdeen
Used in the children's book Mopsa the Fairy (1869): Chapter 11: Good Morning Sister; and, set to music by Sir Alfred Scott (Scott-Gatty).
As well as being an amateur composer, Sir Alfred (1847-1918) was an Officer of Arms at the College of Arms in London.
As well as being an amateur composer, Sir Alfred (1847-1918) was an Officer of Arms at the College of Arms in London.
LINK to Mopsa the Fairy
LINK to On the Rocks by Aberdeen (sheet music)
LINK to Wikipedia article about Sir Alfred Scott-Gatty
On
the rocks by Aberdeen,
Where
the whislin’ waves had been
As
I wandered and at e’en
Was
eerie;
There
I saw thee sailing west,
And
I ran with joy opprest—
Ay,
and took out all my best,
My
dearie,
Then
I busked mysel’ wi’ speed,
And
the neighbors cried “What need?
‘Tis
a lass in any weed
Aye
bonny!
Now
my heart, my heart is sair:
What’s
the good, though I be fair,
For
thou’lt never see me mair,
Man Johnnie!
Jean Ingelow: Biographical Information
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| Jean Ingelow by Elliott & Fry, London Source: Wikipedia |
The edition that is the subject of this blog post, Poetical Works of Jean Ingelow Illustrated Including the Shepherd Lady and Other Poems was published in 1880 by John Wortele Lovell. She dedicated the book to her brother, George Kilgour Ingelow after his death in 1865. He was a sketch artist and banker. This work was first published in London, 1867.
"The interest of several of her poems centers around the idea that there is a magnetic power in love which cannot fail to become, sooner or later, contagious." (Burlington Free Press, October 1881)
The Living Age: A
Weekly Magazine of Contemporary Literature and Thought. Seventh Series. Volume
XIII. No. 2992. Nov. 9, 1901. Pp. 394-397. (As published in The Athenaeum: Some
Recollections of Jean Ingelow. (Wells Gardner and Co.)
This
work is in the public domain.
It
is pleasant to see this unassuming little memoir of the true poet and woman who
lived among us so recently, and will ever be held in kind remembrance. The author does not know very much about Jean
Ingelow and her forbears, but she knows a great deal more than anyone else, and
tells it well and kindly. On her mother’s
side Jean was descended from a family of fairly well-to-do gentlefolks who had
for many generations lived on their own little estates, and were proud of their
descent and of all that belonged to them.
These estates were in Aberdeenshire, and in that country her
great-grandfather Kilgour spent his days in an old house—Kilmundie was its name—with
his wife, his twenty children and his ghosts.
In those days it was the custom for the family to have their meals at
the upper end of the dining hall, and the servants at the lower. In Scotland it was also then common for
families to use peat for fuel, and in the raftered roof of Kilmundie House
piles of these brick-shaped peats used to be stored.
The
ghosts, however, did nothing worse than fling the peats from one end of the
garret to the other at a certain period of the evening, so the Kilgours had all
the distinction of possessing a family ghost without much of the annoyance.
George
Kilgour, Jean Ingelow’s grandfather, was the nineteenth of these twenty
children, and not unnaturally went to London to seek his fortune. He found it, married a Miss Thornborough, and
had twelve children, the second of whom married Mr. Ingelow, and was the mother
of Jean. We are told very little about
Mr. Ingelow, except that he had intellectual tastes and was business like, but
we seem to gather that he was a banker.
George Ingelow took his wife to live in Boston, where on alternate days
he and his bride were expected to dine with his parents, on which occasions the
biographer expresses a hope that the parents looked indulently on their son’s
young wife in her short, very short, sleeves, her fair, uncovered shoulders,
and her embroidered muslins and satins, with their gored, scanty skirts,
sufficiently short to give a glimpse of the white silk stockings and the
sandalled shoes displaying a very pretty foot and ankle.
From
time to time Jean Ingelow’s mother used to tell her daughter little incidents
and memories of these Boston days, one being that she was sometimes allowed to
play in her mother’s room when the maid dressed her mistress for dinner. It was then the fashion for quite young women
to have their hair cut short, in order that they might wear whatever colored
wigs or “heads,” as they were called, might be considered most suitable for the
dress chosen for the occasion. The
little child playing on the floor remembered how the maid would say, “Which
head will you wear today, ma’am, your flaxen head or your auburn head?
and so on.
and so on.
When
her children were young Mrs. Ingelow taught them herself, and very dull some of
the lessons must have been, for they were clever children; and for poetry, she gave
them Cowper’s “Task” to read and learn, and as a French reading book “Telemaque.” Jean appears to have borne this patiently,
but “Hand the fellow, he’s always blubbering!” was her brother’s
exclamation. Even in early childhood,
much earlier than the “Telemaque” days, Jean Ingelow shoed a bent towards
poetry by trying to improve the rhymes of some hymns which dissatisfied her
ear.
From
Boston the Ingelows moved to Ipswich. It
was there that Mrs. Ingelow discovered that her Jean was a poet, for on opening
the shutters of the child’s bedroom windows to keep the sun out and the room
cool, she found that her little daughter had covered the back of them with
verses. Poor little poet! She was brought up by a mother who venerated
Charles Simeon, Legh Richmond, Isaac Taylor, etc., and she had never been
allowed to learn to dance, to go to a theatre or race of any kind, or any other
worldly amusement; only to tea parties at which serious subjects were
discussed, and which ended with supper and prayers.
“When
Jean grew up,” writes the author of the “Recollections,” she, like other
imaginative and romantic girls, had her dreams of love, and she had her lovers…and
I think, though she never said so, that one handsome young sailor nearly won
her heart.
Thus,
writes her friend and biographer, but she says she does not know whether Jean
Ingelow ever loved him or not. We feel
absolutely sure that she did, and so truly that she never married anyone else;
and we further believe, but only from certain of her poems and from her
interest in Arctic* expeditions, and from speeches which fell from her when
talking intimately, the he must have been an officer who sailed with Sir John
Franklin on that last expedition from which there was no return, and that for
love of him she lived single all her days.
All this may be mere fancy, but her poems seem to lend color to it.
*See the last song in Ingelow's poem, "Supper at the Mill,"
*See the last song in Ingelow's poem, "Supper at the Mill,"
When
Miss Ingelow and her family came to London and lived first in Holland Street
and then in Holland Villas Road, she had (or could have had after her poems
were published) almost any society that she wished for, and she did gather a
circle of eminent and pleasant people about her. She was too much of a poet, however, not to
pine for the country very often, and from time to time she stole away to enjoy
it. “I felt I must see something green and a rock or two,” she says in an old
letter to the writer of this review,
“so
I set off by myself to Buxton and explored the valley between that and
Bakewell. How lovely it is! Then I joined my sister and brother-in-law
again in the depths of the Matlock valley just opposite the High Tor. I over-fatigued myself a good deal, but it appeased
my longing for the time, and sometimes if I am pent up in London for a great
many months, I grow quite ill from pining after the sounds and sights of
nature. This is a sweet place not far
from Savernake. We are buried in the
depths of the rural England that does not even read newspapers; a night-jar
came last night and buzzed round the house, and sometimes we see owls. I am sorry D___ is changed; dear creature, it
is the overstrain that she has endured so long.
It occurs to me that I too am changed, I feel so dull and devoid of that
delight which rural life used always to give me. If I can get strong, perhaps it will come
back; in the meantime I feel so dull and deteriorated, and so unable to get
over that one illness. There is a
peculiar joy in hunting over an old library—the books in this house are almost
all of an ecclesiastical order. I do not
like that—religious books are deeply interesting often, but the bones of
theology I cannot pick….Adieu! What a stupid letter!”
Strange
to say, this is much the brightest and best letter her correspondent ever had
from her. She was not a good letter
writer; she talked much better than she wrote.
She
was a very good friend. Her friendship with Calverley enabled her to bear being
very severely parodied by him without
withdrawing her regard. She had a great
deal more to bear on that occasion than most people are aware of, for just
before “Fly Leaves” went to press he happened to be staying in Lincolnshire in
the same country house with her. He told
her something about it during the afternoon, and said he should like her to
read the bit about herself and see if there was anything in it that she
objected to. It came to her just as she
was dressing for dinner. It was longer
and much more severe than as it now stands, and she so very much objected to it
that she could scarcely finish dressing or bear to meet him. “However, I went downstairs,” she said, “and
you may imagine what an evening I spent.”
He, however, partly saw, and she partly told him how very much she
disliked it—anyhow, he took the worst verses out. “He preferred his friend to the poem,” was
what she said; and in her case who would not have done so? Her biographer is wrong in thinking that the copyright
dinners (so called because she spent what she received for her copyrights in
giving them) ended when she left Holland Street. Twelve (or was it six?)
workhouse inmates dined once a week in Holland Villas Road.
O Night of Nights! (last stanza)
A Christmas hymn by Jean Ingelow
It
was so long ago,
But
God can make it now,
And
as with that sweet overflow,
Our
empty hearts endow;
Take,
Lord, those words outworn,
O!
make them new for aye,
Speak—Unto
you a child is born,
Today—today—today.
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| Jean Ingelow (1820-1897 |
Jean
Ingelow’s life on the whole must be considered to have been a very happy one. Independently
of the delight her writings have her, she had the most cheerful of homes with
her two brothers; moreover, her mother was spared to her till she herself had
passed her meridian.
And
after the death of this much beloved mother, Jean still had many years of
cheerful and congenial companionship with her brothers in the home they shared
together.
‘I
do not want to die,’ she once said to a relative she tenderly loved. ‘But I
want to be dead.’ She was, I think, free
from that physical fear of death which causes distress to so many who are yet
strong in faith.
In
1896 Jean’s health visibly failed, and for some months before her death, in
July 1897, she kept to two pleasant rooms upstairs in the house at Kensington,
which she and her youngest and only living brother, considerable her junior,
shared. He had lived with her all his
life and was with her at the last.
What
more is there to tell? So quiet was the
life, so quiet was its close, that those who stood around her bed on that July
morning might almost have said,
‘We thought her dying when she slept,And sleeping when she died.’
Her
friend Dr. Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, read the Service when she was laid
to rest in Brompton Cemetery, his last public appearance officially, for he himself soon followed her
to the grave. Antoinette Sterling, one
of Jean’s warm admirers, and whose friendship she had long reciprocated, sang ‘The
Lord is my Shepherd’ with great beauty and pathos after her funeral as the mourners
stood around the grave.
Selection from an article that appeared in The Burlington Free Press. Burlington,
Vermont. 07 Oct 1881. This work is in the public domain. (Source: Newspapers.com)
"It is supposed that the last song in Supper at the Mills refers to herself."
If a poet’s best and most spontaneous poetry is ever a record of
personal experience, then we may feel sure that Jean Ingelow’s life has not
been free from grief and tears. She has
carefully veiled everything which would reveal her heart history; not courting
either the sympathy or pity of the curious world; and yet she could not have
put such pathos and tenderness into many of her poems if she had not
suffered. It is supposed that the last
song in Supper at the Mills refers to
herself. The interest of several of her
poems centers around the idea that there is a magnetic power in love which
cannot fail to become, sooner or later, contagious.
Supper at the Mill (Last Song)
When sparrows build, and the leaves break forth,
My old sorrow wakes and cries,
For I know there is dawn in the far, far north,
And a scarlet sun doth rise;
Like a scarlet fleece the snow-field spreads,
And the icy founts run free,
And the bergs begin to bow their heads,
And plunge, and sail in the sea.
O my lost love, and my own, own love,
And my love that loved me so!
Is there never a chink in the world above
Where they listen for words from below?
Nay, I spoke once, and I grieved thee sore,
I remember all that I said,
And now thou wilt hear me no more--no more
Till the sea gives up her dead.
Thou didst set thy foot on the ship, and sail
To the ice-fields and the snow;
Thou wert sad, for thy love did nought avail,
And the end I could not know;
How could I tell I should love thee today,
Whom that day I held not dear?
How could I know I should love thee away
When I did not love thee anear?
We shall walk no more through the sodden plain
With the faded bents o'erspread,
We shall stand no more by the seething main
While the dark wrack drives o'erhead;
We shall part no more in the wind and the rain,
Where thy last farewell was said;
But perhaps I shall meet thee and know thee again
When the sea give up their dead.
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