William Ernest Henley (23 August 1849 11 July 1903) was an English poet, writer, critic, and editor. Though he wrote several books of poetry, Henley is remembered most often for his 1875 poem "Invictus". A fixture in London literary circles, the one-legged Henley was an inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's character Long John Silver (Treasure Island, 1883), while his young daughter Margaret Henley inspired J. M. Barrie's choice of the name Wendy for the heroine of his play Peter Pan (1904).Green, Lancelyn Rogers. Fifty Years of Peter Pan. P. Davies, 1954. p. 36.

Early life and education

Henley was born in Gloucester on 23 August 1849, to mother, Mary Morgan, a descendant of poet and critic Joseph Warton, and father, William, a bookseller and stationer. William Ernest was the oldest of six children, five sons and a daughter; his father died in 1868.

Henley was a pupil at the Crypt School, Gloucester, between 1861 and 1867. A commission had recently attempted to revive the school by securing as headmaster the brilliant and academically distinguished Thomas Edward Brown (1830–1897). Though Brown's tenure was relatively brief (–1863), he was a "revelation" to Henley because the poet was "a man of geniusthe first I'd ever seen". After carrying on a lifelong friendship with his former headmaster, Henley penned an admiring obituary for Brown in the New Review (December 1897): "He was singularly kind to me at a moment when I needed kindness even more than I needed encouragement".Connell, John (1949), W. E. Henley, London: Constable, page numbers as indicated. Nevertheless, Henley was disappointed in the school itself, considered an inferior sister to the Cathedral School, and wrote about its shortcomings in a 1900 article in The Pall Mall Magazine.

Much later, in 1893, Henley also received an LLD degree from the University of St Andrews, but two years after that, he failed to secure the position of professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Health issues and Long John Silver

From the age of 12, Henley had tuberculosis of the bone that resulted in the amputation of his left leg below the knee in 1868 or '69.Connell, op. cit., dates this as 1865, but Mehew, op. cit. suggests 1868–69, in the period when Henley was being treated in St Bartholomew's Hospital, London. The early years of Henley's life were punctuated by periods of extreme pain due to the draining of his tuberculosis abscesses. Henley's younger brother Joseph, though, recalled how after draining his joints, the young Henley would "Hop about the room, laughing loudly and playing with zest to pretend he was beyond the reach of pain". According to Robert Louis Stevenson's letters, the idea for the character of Long John Silver was inspired by Stevenson's real-life friend Henley. In a letter to Henley after the publication of Treasure Island (1883), Stevenson wrote, "I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver ... the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you."The Story of the House of Cassell. Cassell & Co., 1922. p. 211. Stevenson's stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, described Henley as "... a great, glowing, massive-shouldered fellow with a big red beard and a crutch; jovial, astoundingly clever, and with a laugh that rolled like music; he had an unimaginable fire and vitality; he swept one off one's feet."Bell, Ian. Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson. Macmillan, 1993, p. 86.

Frequent illness often kept Henley from school, although the misfortunes of his father's business may also have contributed. In 1867, Henley passed the Oxford Local Schools Examination. Soon after passing the examination, Henley moved to London and attempted to establish himself as a journalist. His work over the next eight years was interrupted by long stays in hospitals, because his right foot had also become diseased. Henley contested the diagnosis that a second amputation was the only means to save his life, seeking treatment from pioneering late 19th-century surgeon Joseph Lister at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, commencing in August 1873. Henley spent three years in hospital (1873–75), during which he was visited by the authors Leslie Stephen and Robert Louis Stevenson and wrote and published the poems collected as In Hospital. This also marked the beginning of a 15-year friendship with Stevenson.

Physical appearance Throughout his life, the contrast between Henley's physical appearance and his mental and creative capacities struck acquaintances in completely opposite, but equally forceful ways. Recalling his old friend, Sidney Low commented, "... to me he was the startling image of Pan come to Earth and clothed—the great god Pan...with halting foot and flaming shaggy hair, and arms and shoulders huge and threatening, like those of some Faun or Satyr of the ancient woods, and the brow and eyes of the Olympians."Low, Sidney. "Some Memories and Impressions – William Ernest Henley". The Living Age (1897–1941), vol. 239, no. 3093, 1903, p. 150. After hearing of Henley's death on 13 July 1903, the author Wilfrid Scawen Blunt recorded his physical and ideological repugnance to the late poet and editor in his diary, "He has the bodily horror of the dwarf, with the dwarf's huge bust and head and shrunken nether limbs, and he has also the dwarf malignity of tongue and defiant attitude towards the world at large. Moreover, I am quite out of sympathy with Henley's deification of brute strength and courage, things I wholly despise."Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen. My Diaries: 1888–1900. pt. 2. 1900–1914. A. A. Knopf, 1921, p. 63.

Personal life Henley married Hannah (Anna) Johnson Boyle (1855–1925) on 22 January 1878. Born in Stirling, she was the youngest daughter of Edward Boyle, a mechanical engineer from Edinburgh, and his wife, Mary Ann née Mackie.Parish: Edinburgh St Mary; ED: 45; p: 8; Line: 18; Roll: CSSCT1861_126. Ancestry.com. 1861 Scotland Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, US: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006. In the 1891 Scotland Census, William and Anna are recorded as living with their two-year-old daughter, Margaret Emma Henley (b. 1888), in Edinburgh.Parish: Edinburgh St Cuthberts; ED: 66; p: 2; Line: 13; Roll: CSSCT1891_342. Ancestry.com. 1891 Scotland Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, US: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007. Scotland. 1891 Scotland Census. Reels 1-409. General Register Office for Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Margaret was a sickly child, and became immortalised by J. M. Barrie in his children's classic, Peter Pan.Christopher Winn (2012). I Never Knew That About England, London: Random House, , pp. 3–4, see , accessed 9 May 2015. Unable to speak clearly, young Margaret had called her friend Barrie her "fwendy-wendy", resulting in the use of the name "Wendy" for a feminine character in the book.Flora, Joseph M. William Ernest Henley. Twayne Publishers, 1970, p. 55. Margaret did not survive long enough to read the book; she died in 1894 at the age of five and was buried at the country estate of her father's friend, Harry Cockayne Cust, in Cockayne Hatley, Bedfordshire. In a letter of sympathy, the childless Stevenson wrote to Henley: ‘There is one thing I always envied you, and that I envy you still’.

After Robert Louis Stevenson received a letter from Henley labelled "Private and Confidential" and dated 9 March 1888, in which the latter accused Stevenson's new wife Fanny of plagiarising his cousin Katharine de Mattos' writing in the story "The Nixie", the two men ended their friendship, though a correspondence of sorts did resume later after mutual friends intervened.The Selected Letters of W. E. Henley. Edited by Damien Atkinson. Routledge, 2016.Frank McLynn. Robert Louis Stevenson: a Biography. Hutchinson, 1993. . P. 290.

Hospital poems As Andrzej Diniejko notes, Henley and the "Henley Regatta" (the name by which his followers were humorously referred) "promoted realism and opposed Decadence" through their own works, and, in Henley's case, "through the works... he published in the journals he edited." Henley published many poems in different collections including In Hospital (written between 1873 and 1875) and A Book of Verses, published in 1891. He is remembered most for his 1875 poem "Invictus", one of his "hospital poems" that were composed during his isolation as a consequence of early, life-threatening battles with tuberculosis; this set of works, one of several types and themes in which he engaged during his career, are said to have developed the artistic motif of the "poet as a patient" and to have anticipated modern poetry "not only in form, as experiments in free verse containing abrasive narrative shifts and internal monologue, but also in subject matter."

Forming the subject matter of the "hospital poems" were often Henley's observations of the plights of the patients in the hospital beds around him. Specifically, the poem "Suicide" depicts not only the deepest depths of the human emotions, but also the horrid conditions of the working class Victorian poor in Britain. As Henley observed firsthand, the stress of poverty and the vice of addiction pushed a man to the brink of human endurance. In part, the poem reads:

Publishing career

After his recovery, Henley began by earning his living as a journalist and publisher. The sum total of Henley's professional and artistic efforts is said to have made him an influential voice in late Victorian Britain, perhaps with a role as central in his time as that of Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. As an editor of a series of literary magazines and journals, Henley was empowered to choose each issue's contributors, as well as to offer his own essays, criticism, and poetic works; like Johnson, he was said to have "exerted a considerable influence on the literary culture of his time."

For a short period in 1877 and 1878, Henley was hired to edit The London Magazine, "which was a society paper", and "a journal of a type more usual in Paris than London, written for the sake of its contributors rather than of the public." In addition to his inviting its articles and editing all content, Henley anonymously contributed dozens of poems to the journal, some of which were described by contemporaries as "brilliant" (later published in a compilation by Gleeson White). In his selection, White included a considerable number of pieces from London, and only after he had completed the selection did he discover that the verses were all by one hand, that of Henley. In the following year, H. B. Donkin, in his volume Voluntaries For an East London Hospital (1887), included Henley's unrhymed rhythms recording the poet's memories of the old Edinburgh Infirmary. Later, Alfred Nutt published these and others in his A Book of Verse. From 1882-1886, Henley worked as editor for the British transatlantic illustrated journal, The Magazine of Art, published in London and New York City.

In 1889, Henley became editor of the Scots Observer, an Edinburgh journal of the arts and current events. After its headquarters were transferred to London in 1891, it became the National Observer and remained under Henley's editorship until 1893. The paper had almost as many writers as readers, as Henley said, and its fame was confined mainly to the literary class, but it was a lively and influential contributor to the literary life of its era. Serving under Henley as his assistant editor, "right-hand man", and close friend was Charles Whibley.Hughes, Linda K. Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters. Ohio University Press, 2005. P. 81. The journal's outlook "found utterance for the growing imperialism of its day", and among other services to literature it published Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads (1890–92).