Novelist and barrister; educated at Blundell’s school, Tiverton, and Exeter College, Oxford; M.A., 1852; engaged as private tutor; called to bar at Middle Temple, 1852; practised as conveyancer; classical master at Wellesley House school, Twickenham Common, 1853; published “Poems by Melanter,” 1853, and, later, “Epullia,” and other volumes of verse, including “The Farm and Fruit of Old,” 1862; established himself, c., 1858, at Gomer House, Teddington, where he remained till death; produced “Clara Vaughan,” 1864, “Cradock Nowell,” 1866, “Lorna Doone,” 1869, and twelve other novels.

Personal

  Presently the master appeared, my letter unread, save the name, in his hand. He looked me straight in the eye, gave me a warm, hearty grasp of the hand, bade me welcome, and asked me to be seated and to excuse him while he read the letter. During the reading I took my never-to-be-forgotten mental photograph. I had seen just one engraving of his face. Now I know it was a poor one. The face before me is much finer in line and more spiritual. The head is well modelled; long thin hair almost white was combed from one side over the ivory top, though now in artistic disorder, for Mr. Blackmore had just come in from the garden where he had been superintending the planting of some bulbs for next spring’s growing. His face is clean shaven, but the beard is allowed to make a silvery fringe above the long-pointed rolling collar, which is very becomingly unbuttoned at the throat. I was just thinking how my friends in America would like such a picture as a frontispiece for “Lorna” or “The Maid of Sker,” when Mr. Blackmore looked up with a kindly smile.

  I knew Mr. Blackmore intimately during the last ten years of his life, and to know him in that sense was to love him. Genius apart, he was a delightful man—perhaps all the more so because he did not wear his heart upon his sleeve. His outlook on life was singularly independent, his speech was kindly, picturesque and shrewd. His gift of humour flashed forth on the least provocation, and played around almost every subject which arose in the give-and-take of after-dinner talk. He was an uncompromising Conservative in the social even more than in the political sense…. His closing years were spent in strict seclusion. He led the intellectual life, sat lightly on the verdict of the crowd, minded his own business, and cultivated horticulture and the philosophic mood. Although his fame was world-wide, he was not known even by sight to the majority of the worthy inhabitants of Teddington, and as years went on he more and more hugged his own seclusion, much to the chagrin of Villadom…. Blackmore was by no means easy of access, a circumstance that was due in part to his own proud shyness. Few great writers were more kind, however, to younger men, especially novelists, and I could give instances of this, but to do so would be to violate the confidences of intimate unguarded talk.

Lorna Doone, 1869

  Mr. Blackmore’s “Lorna Doone” seems to us, on the whole, the best novel of the second class produced in England in our time. That is to say, we rank it distinctly below the great novels of Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, but above any novel produced by any writer short of these, and above the inferior works of these great artists themselves.

  The assumed narrator of the tale is great, strong, modest, God-fearing, clumsy, romantic, poetic, John Ridd himself. He so tells the story of his whole life that the reader feels as if he were listening to a human voice, brought down by phonographic miracle from the seventeenth century, and now uttered audibly in the nineteenth. We see the sights, we hear the sounds, we feel the pains and pleasures of the past. It is a grand achievement of genius to make the life of those old days and nights real and living, so that the observer loses the thought of art, and fancies he is looking at breathing nature.

  “Lorna Doone,” his masterpiece, has many fine qualities of genius. It describes with extraordinary fidelity and minuteness of detail the borderland between Devon and Somerset; and no one who has read this book can ever forget its powerful description of the great snowstorm. Local character and dialect Mr. Blackmore is able to give with a much nearer approach to accuracy than even Mr. Hardy can lay claim to. Poetic feeling and the glamour of romance hang around this picture of England as it was two hundred years ago. The brave and nobly-born but bloody Doones of Bagworthy Forest, the redoubtable, and, in contrast with them, even respectable highwaymen, Tom Faggus, and John Ridd himself, the hero of the story, such a delightful mixture of honest simplicity, native shrewdness, Herculean strength, and almost womanly gentleness—to say nothing of such charming female characters as Lorna and Ruth—go to make up a work which after Scott it would be hard to beat among the historical romances of English Literature.

  Whatever else one may say of Mr. Blackmore’s most widely known novel, none can deny that it possesses atmosphere. The style may be over-strenuous and artificial, the characters and episodes of the story may speedily be forgotten, but there will always remain some impression of the wonderful picture of Exmoor as Blackmore conceived it to be in the days of the second Charles and the second James.

  There are other stories of his which are not without charming qualities, but on this romance alone he has put the stamp of beauty and individuality. “Lorna Doone” cannot be regarded as a great story; it is, rather, a lovable story—one of those pieces of art that live by reason of their close touch upon the most intimate and tender of human relations; a story which, upon analysis, reveals serious faults of construction and defects of style, but which nobody is willing to analyze. It is too long; it drags in places; the manner, under the guise of great simplicity, is sometimes artificial; and yet it captivates, and its charm is likely to abide.

General

  A style racy and quaint, without excessive affectation; a good old-fashioned scholarship; a perpetual fount of humour; a store of English patriotism, sense, and sanity—these are some of the good things which Mr. Blackmore always gives us, but which he seems (we do not know whether it is by contrast or not) to give us in “Perlycross” to an extent surpassing most of his later gifts…. A certain complication too, and in-and-outness of sub-plots and minor interests, which is not uncommon with Mr. Blackmore, may offend those who like either a very simple and straightforward story or else one the ravelments of which are unravelled in a strictly mathematical and orderly fashion. But these are mere technical objections; the merits of the book for reading are as indisputable as ever, more so indeed, as we have hinted, than those of some of its immediate predecessors. The author’s gift, not merely of creating a character or two, but of filling a whole village and almost a whole district with live people, has seldom been better shown…. And it is a proof of Mr. Blackmore’s strength that one has some difficulty in deciding whether his most elaborate or his slightest sketches are the best…. The story of “Perlycross” is too complicated and the characters too numerous for it to be possible to do anything like justice in such a notice as this. But what we have said of it is equivalent to saying that the intending reader need fear no mistake in it, seeing that he is in the hands of a master.

  It is common report that “The Maid of Sker,” and not “Lorna Doone,” was of all his novels the late Mr. Blackmore’s favourite, and many have been puzzled by his preference. There was much, however, to account for it in the circumstances under which the novel was written, though perhaps it was more especially due to the pride which Mr. Blackmore felt in the drawing of one of the chief characters…. I have lived for several years past just two miles away from the “vast lonely house” of Sker and in the very parish of Newton Nottage where Davy Llewellyn schemed and preached; and my love for the book, which began in the old novel-room of the Oxford Union some twenty-five years ago, has of late been ever deepened and widened, till it is no longer to me a subject of wonder that Mr. Blackmore set “The Maid of Sker” on the highest pinnacle of his esteem…. It cannot be said the “The Maid of Sker” is popular in the parish of Newton Nottage. There are two small circulating libraries at Porthcawl, but neither of them contains it, though “Lorna Doone” and “Alice Lorraine” are there, and we boast our acquaintance with the novels of popular authors which it is fashionable to read.

  Absolutely without fear, Blackmore answered to none but his own ideal, and no critic ever handled his work with such severity as he did himself. His humor kept him sound on all self-estimates; his modesty alone led him to rate himself too low. His work will surely endure…. Full of the very sap and scent of country life are all his stories, and long before the advent of Richard Jefferies, you shall find Blackmore noting the details of rural scenery through the procession of the seasons and setting them forth, as only an artist can, in their due relation to the mass of mountains, to the volume of rivers, to the life of men and women. Indeed, while to appreciate the greatest in Blackmore one need only to be a student of our common nature, there is another quality in which he stands absolutely alone; and for understanding his achievement in this sort, a man must know the country and know it well. The love and appreciation of green growing things is a fruitful secret of his inspiration. His harvests of the years are painted in such mellow colors as only autumn knows, and his fruit pieces have not been equalled in the language.

  His first novel, “Clara Vaughan,” appeared in 1864, when he had entered his fortieth year, and it marked the beginning of his renown. In spite of the dramatic situations of the book and the remarkable powers of observation which it revealed, “Clara Vaughan” was regarded as a curiously unequal sensational story, dealing with the unravelling of crime, and yet lit up by exquisite transcripts from nature…. “Cradock Nowell” was described by its author as a tale of the New Forest. It was the only book in which he laid himself open to a charge of a parade of classical scholarship. It gave him a vogue with people who, as a rule, care little for fiction, but its allusions proved caviare to the general, and taxed the patience of the circulating libraries. Cradock Nowell, notwithstanding this, is one of the best of Blackmore’s heroes, and in Amy Rosedew he gave the world one of the most bewitching of heroines. It was in 1869, with his third attempt in fiction, that Blackmore rose suddenly to the front rank of English novelists with the publication of “Lorna Doone.” Some of the critical journals, he used to say, damned the book at the outset with faint praise; but it eventually took the great reading world by storm, for Lorna herself was resistless in her beauty and grace, and John Ridd was made to tell his own story with manly simplicity and dramatic force. The novel of manners was in ascendency when “Lorna Doone” appeared, and Blackmore was the pioneer of the new romantic movement, which, allying itself more or less closely with historical research, has since won a veritable triumph.