Martin Farquhar Tupper (17 July 1810 – 29 November 1889) was an English poet and novelist. He was one of the most widely-read English-language authors of his day with the poetry collection Proverbial Philosophy, which was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and North America for several decades.
Tupper found great success in Victorian Britain at a relatively early age, with a second series of the poetry collection Proverbial Philosophy in 1842. The work's fame later spread to the US and Canada, and it continued to be popular for several decades. The author capitalised on this success with scores of editions in various formats and tours in his homeland and in North America, and as one of Queen Victoria's favourite poets he was once a serious contender for the position of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. However, Proverbial Philosophy eventually fell out of fashion, and its previous eminence made the poetry and its author popular targets for satire and parody.
Despite his prodigious output and ongoing efforts at self-promotion, Tupper's other work did not achieve anywhere close to the bestseller status of Proverbial Philosophy, and even towards the end of the poet's own lifetime he had become obscure. Nevertheless, the style of Proverbial Philosophy (which Tupper referred to as "rhythmics" rather than poetry) had an influence on admirer Walt Whitman, who was also experimenting with free verse. Considered by later generations to be artefacts of their time, Tupper's works have largely been forgotten, and had been out of print for over a century.
Early life
Martin Farquhar Tupper was born on 17 July 1810 at 20 Devonshire Place, London. He was the eldest child of Dr. Martin Tupper, an esteemed doctor from an old Guernsey family, and his wife Ellin Devis Marris, the daughter of landscape painter Robert Marris (1749–1827) and granddaughter of Arthur Devis.
Martin F. Tupper received his early education at Eagle House School and Charterhouse, going on to attend Christ Church, Oxford where he received a BA in 1832. At university he was the classmate of many distinguished men, including future politicians James Broun-Ramsay, James Bruce, Henry Pelham-Clinton, Charles Canning, George Cornewall Lewis and William Ewart Gladstone, as well as literary figures Francis Hastings Doyle, Henry Liddell and Robert Scott. He maintained a close friendship with Gladstone until the final years of his life.
From a young age Tupper suffered from a severe stammer, which precluded him from going into the church or politics. Having taken the further degree of MA, Tupper became a student at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the bar in 1835, but did not ever practise as a barrister.
On 26 November of the same year Tupper married his first cousin Isabella Devis, daughter of Arthur William Devis, in St Pancras Church, having proposed to her before leaving for university seven years previously. He acquired a house on Park Village East, near Regent's Park, and the couple was financially supported by his father. While living here, Tupper attended St James' Chapel on Hampstead Road (now demolished), where he became acquainted with its minister Henry Stebbing. An author and former editor of the literary magazine the Athenaeum, Stebbing's encouragement of Tupper's writings eventually led to the publication of Proverbial Philosophy.
Career Early works While at Oxford, Tupper's literary career commenced; his first important publication was a collection of 75 short poems entitled Sacra Poesis (1832). In the same year he wrote a long poem partially in blank verse, "A Voice from the Cloister", but this was only published, anonymously, in 1835.
In the summer of 1838 Tupper penned a continuation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, naming it Geraldine and publishing it alongside various other pieces in the latter half of that year in the collection Geraldine, a sequel to Coleridge's Christabel: with other poems. The poem Geraldine itself met with some critical reprobation, although in his contemporary notes Tupper attributes this largely to it being a continuation of an early version of Coleridge's poem: "When Coleridge first published Christabel ... it was positively hooted by the critics ... Coleridge left behind him a very much improved and enlarged version of the poem, which I did not see till years after I had written the sequel to it: my Geraldine was composed for an addition to Christabel, as originally issued." The other poems in the collection were more warmly received.
Proverbial Philosophy
Tupper's most successful work had its genesis in 1828, shortly before his Oxford matriculation. At this time he was engaged to Isabella, and he decided to write his "notions on the holy estate of matrimony" for her, "in the manner of Solomon's proverbs". Isabella showed them to Hugh M'Neile, who suggested seeking publication, but Tupper chose not to do so at the time.
In 1837, on the encouragement of Henry Stebbing, Tupper began to revise these writings and expand them into a book, working on them at home and in his workplace, Lincoln's Inn, over the subsequent 10 weeks. The work takes the form of free verse meditations on morality ("OfHumility", "OfPride"), religion ("OfPrayer", "TheTrain of Religion"), and other aspects of the human condition ("OfLove", "OfJoy"). Tupper did not refer to the pieces as poetry, preferring his own description of "rhythmics".
Stebbing referred Tupper to the publisher Joseph Rickerby, who agreed to publish the work on a profit-sharing basis, and this first official version appeared on 24 January 1838 entitled Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, originally treated, by Martin Farquhar Tupper, Esq., M.A. at a price of 7s. It met with moderate success in Britain; a second edition was commissioned, to which Tupper added more material, and sold for 6s. A third edition emerged, but this failed to sell well; the unsold copies were sent to America, where it was received poorly. "Americans scarcely knew what to make of it at all; one of the few stateside reviewers to read Proverbial Philosophy, the powerful editor N.P. Willis, was so perplexed by the form of the book that he guessed it to have been written ... in the seventeenth century."
Despite the lack of interest in the third edition, in 1841 Tupper was spurred to write a second series of Proverbial Philosophy at the suggestion of John Hughes, who he had met in a chance encounter in Windsor two years previously. This series was to be serialised in the new publication Ainsworth's Magazine, William Harrison Ainsworth being a friend of Hughes. Tupper and his family temporarily moved to Brighton where he produced some initial pieces for the magazine, as well as some essays. However, being "too quick and too impatient to wait for piecemeal publication month by month", Tupper collated his new "rhythmics" and had the second series of Proverbial Philosophy published as a whole, on 5 October 1842 by John Hatchard.
The second series was sold alongside the fifth edition of the first series, and proved to be immediately popular. The two were soon combined into one collection, still entitled Proverbial Philosophy, and this iteration became an enormous success over the subsequent decades:
In the 1850s the work was translated into several languages, including German, Swedish, Danish, Armenian, and a French version by George Métivier. By 1866 it had sold over 200,000 copies in the United Kingdom, through forty editions.
Tupper did go on to write a third and fourth series in 1867 and 1869 respectively, published by Edward Moxon in his Moxon's Popular Poets series (which had previously included luminaries such as Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Milton). However, by this time Tupper had fallen out of fashion, and these latter series did not sell well. Moxon had already been in bad financial straits, and Tupper's new works did not change his fortunes; the publisher was shortly taken over.
Over the course of the author's lifetime it is estimated that between one quarter and half a million copies were sold in England, and over 1.5 million in the United States, across 50 editions. Due to the lack of international copyright laws, the US market was dominated by pirated copies; consequently, Tupper made almost no money from the work's enormous American sales. However, he did manage to capitalise on his fame in North America by undertaking two tours of the US and Canada, in 1851 and 1876-1877.
Candidate for Poet Laureate Upon the death of William Wordsworth in 1850, Tupper began to suggest his willingness to fill the now-vacant position of Poet Laureate to influential friends and acquaintances such as William Gladstone and James Garbett, who further gathered support. He continued to write poems for public events in order to demonstrate his capability, marking occasions such as the deaths of Robert Peel and the Duke of Cambridge, as well as the Great Exhibition, for which he published Hymn to the Exhibition in over sixty languages (set to music by Samuel Sebastian Wesley). It appears that his candidacy had popular support, from both sides of the Atlantic. However, the eventual selection was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, partly due to Prince Albert's admiration of the poem In Memoriam A.H.H.
First tour of America
Despite making almost no money from his written works in North America, Tupper recognised the potential of his enormous popularity on the other side of the Atlantic. Having overcome his stammer at the age of 35, he embarked on a "wildly successful" reading tour of the Eastern USA and Canada, setting off from Liverpool on 2 March 1851 and landing in New York City two weeks later. His arrival was announced in American newspapers, and while based in the city he met a variety of literary figures including William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Parker Willis, James Gordon Bennett Sr., James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving. He was generally warmly received by the people he met, although his tendency to quote his own poetry was "deemed unseemly at the time" and criticised in the press, as was his perceived "patronising attitude and sentimentalism" towards Americans.
An indication of Tupper's popularity in the US is given by his dealings with one of his publishers in Philadelphia:
The highlight of the American tour was a dinner at the White House on 8 May with President Millard Fillmore and members of his cabinet, Fillmore himself being an admirer of the poet. In his autobiography Tupper quotes his contemporaneous notes:
After stops in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Tupper returned to New York, where he was noticed in a concert crowd by its promoter P. T. Barnum and brought backstage to meet Jenny Lind. The Swedish Nightingale was an admirer - "she sat holding Tupper's hand and crying with emotion while the management of the theatre frantically tried to get her on stage for a bow." He set off on his return trip to Liverpool on 24 May 1851, seen off by a group of admirers and "regretful paragraphs" in the New York newspapers.
Middle years