| Martin Farquahar Tupper | |
| Birth Date: | 17 July 1810 |
| Birth Place: | 20 Devonshire Place, London, England |
| Death Place: | Underhill, 13 Cintra Park, Upper Norwood, London, England |
| Genre: | Victorian literature |
| Period: | 1832–1886 |
| Notable Works: | Proverbial Philosophy |
| Alma Mater: | Christ Church, Oxford (BA, MA, DCL) |
| Children: | 8 |
| Relatives: | Martin Tupper (father) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By 1851 Tupper had fathered eight children, and had moved his large family into the spacious Albury House in Albury, Surrey approximately ten years previously. However, his financial position became precarious by the mid-1850s. His wife Isabella had fallen ill, and he wrote to Gladstone (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) to request an office or public pension, to no avail. His eldest son, Martin Charles Selwyn (born 1841), was made the youngest Captain in the British Army by purchase in 1864, but it fell upon his father to settle his many drinking and gambling debts, and fund a spell in an asylum in St John's Wood, until he was relocated to Rio de Janeiro in 1868. These financial strains were compounded by a series of poor investments. Tupper managed to stay afloat by continuing to publish poetry, and bringing out new editions of Proverbial Philosophy, including an illustrated version, but he was compelled to let out Albury House from 1867 to generate additional income.
Tupper was already a favourite poet of Queen Victoria, and in June 1857, having written sonnets for each of the engaged couple Victoria, Princess Royal and Prince Frederick, was granted the honour of being "summoned to Buckingham Palace, to be received by the Queen herself and Prince Albert, and to present special copies of 'Proverbial Philosophy' with his own hands to the young betrothed." The circumstances of this audience were highly unusual, as Tupper was instructed to meet the Royal Family on a Sunday after church – "the Royal Family had never entertained a private individual in this way since George III had summoned Dr Johnson." Tupper's work was already well known to the family, having been appreciated by the children's governess and their drawing master Edward Henry Corbould (who also happened to be Tupper's friend), and he had written pieces for the children to perform for their parents previously.
Tupper continued to write poetry for periodicals and publications of his own work, but none of these came close to the popularity of Proverbial Philosophy. By the mid-1860s he and his work were being persistently satirised by a new generation of Victorians, the victims of changing tastes (see).
Deciding to focus on readings of his works instead of continuing to pen new material to be satirised or ignored, Tupper began touring south-west England in April 1873. These events were somewhat popular, although apart from the "fair-sized audiences, largely composed of ladies" there were also "many who only came to satisfy themselves that such a fabulous being as Martin Tupper really existed". The most popular of his works were "Love" and "Marriage" from Proverbial Philosophy, as well as the poems "Never Give Up" and "All's for the Best". Later in the year he also toured Scotland, to a warmer reception.
After his Scottish success, Tupper decided to undertake a second American tour; delayed by illness, he arrived in October 1876 and stayed in New York as the guest of Thomas De Witt Talmage, an admirer of Proverbial Philosophy. Much like in Britain, this tour was filled with public readings of his works; while his American popularity had also declined, it was not to the extent that it had in his home country, and he delivered a reading of "Immortality" to his largest-ever audience, between five and six thousand – the congregation of Talmage's church. However, Tupper often failed to attract large crowds on the merit of his readings alone; he performed to several thousand at one event in Philadelphia, but only a few hundred at various events in New York State and Canada. After the huge success of his first American tour, this one "proved a pale shadow". Nevertheless, it was profitable, and his stature was such that he was invited to the inaguruation and White House reception of President Hayes.
By the time of his return from his second American tour on 16 April 1877, Tupper had fallen into obscurity in his home country. His attempts to publish a complete collection of his works failed; each of the 26 publishers he approached had declined. Continually short of money, in 1880 was obliged to mortgage his longtime home of Albury House to the Duke of Northumberland. He and his family moved to a small rental property in Upper Norwood.
Tupper made a final attempt at a new printing of Proverbial Philosophy in 1881, a large illustrated quarto, but this failed to sell. He continued to write articles and plays, managing to publish Dramatic Pieces in 1882, and he also delivered occasional lectures and readings. Around this time he and Gladstone, friends since childhood, fell out over Gladstone's views on the circumstances that led to the Oaths Act 1888, and his refusal to continue to support the author financially.
In late 1885 Tupper started to write an autobiography, which was published in May 1886 under the title My Life as an Author. His wife Isabella had died during its composition, in December 1885, from apoplexy, and he included a tribute to her in the work. It received fairly warm reviews, but never ran to a second edition, despite the author working on improvements and corrections after publication.
Tupper's last published work was the booklet "Jubilate!", which contained new poems for the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria as well as the work he had written in honour of her coronation fifty years earlier.
In November 1886 Tupper suffered an illness of several days which robbed him of the ability to read and write. He remained in a fragile state for his remaining three years, being cared for by his children, never learning that during that period Albury House had been foreclosed by the Duke of Northumberland. Eventually he died, on 29 November 1889, and was buried in Albury churchyard in the same grave as his wife and son Martin Charles Selwyn, with an epitaph reading "He being dead yet speaketh".
Tupper was a passionate lifelong Protestant:
The contrast between his beliefs and those of his close friend William Gladstone, who was raised Evangelical but sympathised with the Oxford Movement later in life, became a frequent source of friction between the two. Tupper at one point challenged him with the question "are you a hearty friend of the Protestant Reformation?", and the difference of views was a contributing factor to their eventual falling out.
Tupper's religion played a large role in his works, both in terms of the genesis and reception of Proverbial Philosophy ("There was room for a work of moral principle, and of Evangelical temper, that would have a wide appeal"), as well as later in life, when he wrote "extreme Protestant ballads" for the Church of England paper The Rock. Additionally, he was an early supporter of the Student Volunteer Movement, which was founded to encourage missionary work abroad.
During a time of increasing concern about the state of the British Empire's military forces, Tupper was a key voice in creating the Volunteer Force, a movement which bolstered the army and helped lead to its professionalisation; he himself became the secretary of the "Blackheath Rifles" in 1859. He wrote jingoistic poems in support of the allied troops in the Crimean War and, controversially, urging severe punishment of those responsible for the Indian Rebellion of 1857. His ballads in the Globe captured a popular mood of outrage at the delay in relief for General Gordon at the Siege of Khartoum, and earned the appreciation of Gordon's family.
Tupper had an interest in the legacy of the Anglo-Saxons; he arranged an event to mark the thousandth anniversary of the birth of Alfred the Great in the king's birthplace of Wantage, and was an erstwhile contributor to the short-lived magazine Anglo-Saxon (1849-1851), which was "devoted to the cause of friendship between the English-speaking peoples". However, this interest has overtones of racial superiority, as evinced by his 1850 ballad "The Anglo-Saxon Race": "Break forth and spread over every place / The world is a world for the Anglo Saxon race!". Critic Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that Tupper's views on race were informed and limited by their time, quoting this poem as an example of the predominant colonialist understanding of "race" in the nineteenth century. Appia calls Tupper a "racialist": "He believed, as did most educated Victorians by the mid-century, that we could divide human beings into a small number of groups, called "races," in such a way that all members of these races shared certain fundamental ... characteristics with each other that they did not share with members of any other race."
Tupper was a proponent of abolitionism. While studying at Oxford he refused to eat sugar "by way of somehow discouraging the slave trade", and in 1848 he wrote a national anthem for Liberia and advocated for the republic in communications with Lord Palmerston and President Fillmore. He received presidents Roberts and Benson in his home as they came to thank him for his support. In addition he created a specific prize in order to encourage African literature, "biennially to be competed for by emancipated slaves".
Regarding the American Civil War, however, he was not entirely supportive of the anti-slavery Union. While he wrote to President Lincoln in May 1861 with the sentiment "May this Revolution bear the good fruit of total abolition of slavery all over the American continent ...!" and to Gladstone that "The South are responsible for this civil war", his later works demonstrate a sympathy for the Southern cause. During his second American tour, Tupper published a sympathetic "Ode to the South", beginning
Tupper's autobiography, written towards the very end of his life, recounts visiting a formerly slave-owning friend during the same tour:
Tupper had no doubts as to his place in the pantheon of English literature. As Murphy (1937) notes, the closing lines of his autobiography are a confident indication of this, quoting from the epilogue of Ovid's Metamorphoses:
Having enjoyed huge success for almost two decades, by the end of the 1850s Proverbial Philosophy started to fall out of favour in Britain as tastes and social attitudes changed. The first sign of this was an article by the influential National Review in its 1858 article "Charlatan Poetry: Martin Farquhar Tupper". Acknowledging that the poet's popularity was "one of the most unquestionable facts of the day ... We are quite aware that it would be utterly beyond our strength to displace him from his stronghold in public favour", the article proceeds with a lengthy criticism of his poetry: "[we] belong to that small but respectable minority who regard Mr. Tupper's versicular philosophy as superficial and conceited twaddle".
Although it remained popular for many years, the ultimate challenge to the work's further longevity was that Proverbial Philosophy presents a style and viewpoint that are inextricably linked and of interest only to those who lived during the early-to-mid Victorian period. In his biography of Tupper, Hudson (1949) contends that "the success of 'Proverbial Philosophy' ... sprang primarily from the moral and religious movement of early Victorian days which gradually lost its impetus as the reign proceeded. It was the belief that art must be linked with morality that furthered the astonishing advance of Tupper's book". Dingley (2004) agrees: "He presented as vatic wisdom the established convictions of his readership, which responded by venerating him as a sage. But as those convictions themselves began to crumble in the 1860s, under the pressure of scientific advance and social change, so Tupper’s status declined and he came to seem an embarrassing survival from a superseded past, a victim of the progress he had so earnestly celebrated." Collins (2002) adds that the work was a victim of its own success: "The children who had once received gift book editions of Tupper for their birthdays were heartily sick of the man." As a piece of art that spoke only to people of its own time, the work has never experienced a revival of interest: "It put the weight of tradition and common sense behind social values and interpretations which were in reality peculiar to Victorianism."
Given that Proverbial Philosophy was published by the author when he was a young man, who went on to live a long life and write prolifically, he was an easy target for satire from new generations and changing tastes – "Tupper's visage was everywhere ... His very generosity and omnipresence worked against him. By the 1870s, each week began to bring fresh pummelings by clever young men in humor magazines like Punch, Figaro and The Comic." Hudson (1949) quotes examples dating from 1864:
Once the satire was played out, Tupper's work was forgotten., none of his works have been in print since the final edition of Proverbial Philosophy in 1881, although digital transcriptions and facsimiles can now be found.
Renowned American poet Walt Whitman was an enthusiastic supporter of Tupper while acting as editor for the Brooklyn Eagle (1846–1848) – for example, in his 1847 review of Probabilities: An Aid to Faith he commends the work's "lofty ... august scope of intention! ... The author ... is one of the rare men of the time. He turns up thoughts as with a plough ... we should like well to go into this book ... but justice to it would require many pages." Contemporary readers noted similarities between Proverbial Philosophy and Whitman's writings (not always intending this to be a flattering comparison), and it seems likely that the work influenced the style of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, although the two had many ideological differences. Coulombe (1996) suggests that Whitman also
In later years, however, Whitman distanced himself from Tupper; Tupper had by then become highly unfashionable, and Whitman was seeking to create a separate style of art for the New World: "His disagreement with Tupper, who considered the States as a literary adjunct to England, underscores his desire to create a distinctly American poetry." The influence from Britain continued, however, as Snodgrass (2008) notes that Whitman's style in later works such as Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking "was less influenced by homiletic writers such as Martin Tupper in favor of the more musical efforts of such poets as Tennyson."
W. S. Gilbert alludes to Tupper in Bab Ballads. In the poem Ferdinando and Elvira, or, The Gentle Pieman (1866), Gilbert describes how two lovers are trying to find out who has been putting mottoes into "paper crackers" (a sort of 19th Century fortune cookie). Gilbert builds up to the following lines, eventually coming up with a spoof of Tupper's own style from Proverbial Philosophy:
Such was Tupper's fame that the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry Tupperian: "Of, belonging to, or in the style of Martin F. Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy", or "An admirer of Tupper. So Tupperish a., Tupperism, Tupperize v.". The entry attests references dating from 1858.
On 10 April 1845 Tupper was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on merit of being "the author of 'Proverbial Philosophy' and several other works", and "eminent as a literary Man, and for his Archaeological attainments". A key contribution to archaeology was his excavation of Farley Heath on Farley Green, Surrey, done piecemeal at periods between 1839 and 1847, and as an organised project in 1848, which uncovered a Romano-Celtic temple as well as a number of "coins, brooches and other metal objects". Tupper's interpretation of what he found, however, was of questionable accuracy.
He received the 1844 Gold Medal for Science and Literature from the King of Prussia as a mark of the King's admiration for Proverbial Philosophy.