Born, at Boston, Lincs., 1820. Active literary life. Died, in Kensington, 20 July 1897. Works: “A Rhyming Chronicle” (anon.), 1850; “Allerton and Dreux” (anon., 2 vols.), 1851; “Tales of Orris” [1860]; “Poems,” 1863 (4th edn. same year); “Studies for Stories, from Girls’ Lives” (anon.), 1864; “Stories told to a Child” (anon.), 1865; “Home Thoughts and Home Scenes” (anon.), 1865; “Little Rie and the Rosebuds” (anon.), 1867; “The Suspicious Jackdaw” (anon.), 1867; “The Grandmother’s Shoe” (anon.), 1867; “The Golden Opportunity” (anon.), 1867; “Deborah’s Book” (anon.), 1867; “A Story of Doom,” 1867; “The Moorish Gold” (anon.), 1867; “The Minnows with Silver Tails” (anon.), 1867; “The Wild-Duck Shooter” (anon.), 1867; “A Sister’s Bye-Hours” (anon.), 1868; “Mopsa the Fairy,” 1869; “The Little Wonder-Horn,” 1872; “Off the Skelligs” (4 vols.), 1872; “Fated to be Free,” 1875; “Poems,” second series, 1876; “Poems” (collected; 2 vols.), 1879; “Sarah de Berenger,” 1879; “Don John,” 1881; “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571,” 1883; “Poems,” third series, 1885; “John Jerome,” 1886; “Lyrical and other poems” (selected), 1886; “The Little Wonder-Box,” 1887; “Very Young; and, Quite Another Story,” 1890.

General

  Many thanks for your kind note. I have just returned to town, and found the “Rhyming Chronicle.” Your Cousin must be worth knowing: there are some very charming things in her book, at least it seems so to me, tho’ I do not pique myself on being much of a critic at first sight, and I really have only skimmed a few pages. Yet I think I may venture to pronounce that she need not be ashamed of publishing them. Certain things I saw which I count abominations, tho’ I myself in younger days have been guilty of the same, and so was Keats. I would sooner lose a pretty thought than enshrine it in such rhymes as “Eudora” “before her,” “vista” “sister.” She will get to hate them herself as she grows older, and it would be a pity that she should let her book go forth with these cockneyisms. If the book were not so good I should not care for these specks, but the critics will pounce upon them, and excite a prejudice. I declare I should like to know her.

  Miss Ingelow—although she knows the niceties of language, the horrors, for example, that Herman Melville tells us enshroud the word “white”—possesses no such drowning surge of splendor, such weltering wealth of words, as Mr. Swinburne has; but her pictures rise from a gray-toned ground into warm and perfect tints of beauty; she wastes no thought on alliteration, and does not deal with the uproarious emotions. Her finest passages wait upon the intellect, and when she addresses the heart, it is through her tenderness and pathos. We might adduce page after page in witness of this were it not obvious to every reader…. Without having so large a nature as Mrs. Browning, she is her equal in many special powers, sometimes, as in her various melody of rhyme, surpassing her, and failing only in that ability which Mrs. Browning held of inspiring her admirers with passionate personal devotion. It has been the habit to class Jean Ingelow with Miss Rossetti and a host of minor singers, but she rises as much above them as some wave that shoots its shaft of spray into the sunlight rises above the level ocean…. The “Story of Doom” is one of the most magnificent things that have been given to this generation.

  As the voice of Mrs. Browning grew silent, the songs of Miss Ingelow began, and had instant and merited popularity. They sprung up suddenly and tunefully as skylarks from the daisy-spangled, hawthorn-bordered meadows of old England, with a blitheness long unknown, and in their idyllic under-flights moved with the tenderest currents of human life. Miss Ingelow may be termed an idyllic lyrist, her lyrical pieces having always much idyllic beauty, and being more original than her recent ambitious efforts in blank verse. Her faults are those common to her sex,—too rapid composition, and a diffuseness that already has lessened her reputation.

  In poems of direct narrative or of simple reflection or description, Miss Ingelow has always had her pen well in hand; and all her best work belongs to one of these classes. From the first, however, she has displayed an unfortunate taste for a kind of poem made up of a skeleton of narrative, the structure of which is all but concealed by a body of description of reflection. When I say unfortunate, I use the word with a distinct personal reference, for as we all know some of the finest poems in the English language may be thus described; but the form does not suit Miss Ingelow, because in leaving the narrative, and then working back to it, she is tempted to the besetting sin of all “natural” poets—the sin of diffuse and formless expatiation.

  It is the best told of all Miss Ingelow’s tales,—the most direct and dramatic and symmetrical; and, in short, Don John is, to our mind, an exceedingly beautiful little story; a finished and charming specimen of that minor English fiction which is often as good, from a literary point of view, as the best produced elsewhere.

  Among the small group of eminent English women-poets that the present century has produced, Jean Ingelow holds a conspicuous place. She is greater than Felicia Hemans or Letitia Landon, for she avoids sentimentality—the characteristic weakness of both these poets. It is true that she does not possess in an equal degree with Elizabeth Barrett Browning that breadth of thought, that strength of passion—that imaginative fervour, and that vigour of execution—which give to the latter the first place among English women-poets, nor has she that peculiarly exalted spirituality tinctured with asceticism which distinguishes the best work of Christina Rossetti. Nevertheless her poems exhibit high qualities of their own…. Jean Ingelow’s verse is always distinguished by graceful fancy, and often by imagination of the more lofty kind. Though it cannot be said that her range is wide, her pictures within this range are vivid, and her verse displays a tender womanliness, a reverent simplicity of religious faith, and a deep touch of sympathy with the pain inherent in human life which are very fascinating.

  Jean Ingelow survived, as did Eliza Cook, to see her verse well-nigh forgotten, and yet it is stated that two hundred thousand copies of her poems have been sold in America alone.

  Her work, though in date it belongs mainly to the years between 1860 and 1870, is typically Early Victorian. She is a Mrs. Hemans who has read Tennyson, an L. E. L. who has read Mrs. Browning. Like those writers, she is definitely a poetess, not a poet. In this at the outset, we see her complete distinction from her less popular contemporary, Christina Rossetti, who is a poet among poets, womanly but not feminine. It is because she is rather feminine than womanly—feminine in the broadest and most honourable sense certainly—that Jean Ingelow has always appealed so widely to women and to that part of the reading public whose judgment in literature is similar to the literary judgment of women…. In her realism, as in her emotion, she still always generalizes; her very descriptions, so true in outline, of English scenes and landscapes, are for the most part lacking in precision; she is vague even among flowers, to which she refers not without a certain felicity; the exact word rarely comes, flashing the exact image. She seems, indeed, almost to seek the ready-made in language, as a visible sign of that spontaneity which she is feminine enough to think the origin and not the result of the “art which conceals art.” Thus she writes in a favorite poem, of raindrops in “genial showers,” of trees “wherewith the dell was decked;” she begins a stanza, “While swam the unshed tear.” Certainly she has the virtues of the improvisatore; but at what a cost!

  There was a great charm for readers in general in the directness and simplicity of her style. Ordinary themes were dealt with in simple Saxon language, yet with a sufficient freightage of thought. When she touched the cords either of some gentle familiar emotion or of some strong passion, it was in a manner convincing and agreeable to the great majority of readers. Her absolute sincerity was beyond all question. But the qualities of a higher gift were there also—imagination, earnestness of feeling, the power to realise the varying moods and aspects of nature, and—her most distinctive quality—an unfailing lyrical gift of exceptional sweetness and melody. Such qualities were more than sufficient to counterbalance her chief fault—an occasional diffuseness.

  Not to read Jean Ingelow is to miss something from our store, a small quantity it may be, a few grains of gold sifted from a sandheap, but genuine gold for all that. And what are they? First a poem without blemish, of complete and sustained art within its limits, of poignant pathos, of dramatic intensity, of perfect tunefulness, I mean of course, “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire;” then two or three songs of a quality rare amongst modern song-writers, showing a complete understanding of the limits and nature of the medium chosen not often found; and many fragments to be gleaned from many pages, flashes of vivid impressionism, the heart of a summer day, the vision of colour, the sound of the tide on the shore, poetic and melodious to a haunting degree, by no means to be spared from our anthology.

  Her verse is mainly characterised by lyrical charm, graceful fancy, pathos, close and accurate observation of nature, and sympathy with the common interests of life. The language is invariably clear and simple. She is particularly successful in handling anapæstic measures. Her poetry is very popular in America, where some 200,000 copies of her various works have been sold. As a novelist she does not rank so high.