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Charles Whitehead

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Solitary, the

Charles Whitehead (1804-1862), The Solitary (1831). Kessinger, 2008. Courtesy Loot.

Charles Whitehead (1804 - 5 July 1862) was an English poet, novelist, and dramatist.

Life[]

Overview[]

Whitehead is specially remembered for 3 works, all of which met with popular success: The Solitary (1831), a poem; The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (1834), a novel; and The Cavalier (1836), a play in blank verse. He recommended Dickens for the writing of the letterpress for R. Seymour's drawings, which ultimately developed into The Pickwick Papers.[1]

Career in England[]

Whitehead, the son of a wine merchant, was born in London in 1804. He began life as a clerk in a mercantile house, but soon adopted literature as his profession. In 1831 he published The Solitary, a poem in Spenserian stanzas, showing genuine imagination. The poem won the approval of Prof. Wilson in the "Noctes Ambrosianæ," and of other critics of eminence.[2]

In 1834 appeared Whitehead's Lives and Exploits of English Highwaymen’(probably written some years earlier, the least worthy of his productions), and The Autobiography of Jack Ketch, a burlesque biography of the hangman, which contained a remarkable episodical story of serious intent, 'The Confession of James Wilson.’ Whitehead's vivid blank verse drama, '‘The Cavalier,’' the plot of which is laid in Restoration times, was produced at the Haymarket Theatre on 15 September 1836, with Ellen Tree and Vandenhoff in the principal parts, and was revived more than once, notably at the Lyceum Theatre in 1856.[2]

Owing to the success of Whitehead's Jack Ketch, Chapman & Hall invited him to write the letterpress to a monthly issue of a humorous kind, to which Robert Seymour was to furnish the illustrations. Pleading inability to produce the copy with sufficient regularity, Whitehead recommended his friend Charles Dickens for the work. The publishers acted on the recommendation, and the result was the Pickwick Papers. A further point of contact between Whitehead and Dickens consisted in Whitehead's revising in 1846 The Memoirs of Grimaldi, which had been edited by Dickens in 1838 under the pseudonym of "Boz."[2]

Whitehead's masterpiece, Richard Savage (1842), illustrated by Leech, a romance partly founded on Dr. Johnson's life of Savage, was much admired by Dickens. It was dramatised, and the play ran for nearly 30 nights at the Surrey Theatre. A new edition of the novel, with an introduction by Harvey Orrinsmith, was published in 1896.[2]

The Solitary, and other poems (1849), a collected edition of Whitehead's poetical work, included his most remarkable sonnet beginning "As yonder lamp in my vacated room," which Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as "very fine."[2]

Whitehead belonged to the Mulberry Club, of which Douglas Jerrold and other wits were members, and was acquainted with all the famous men of letters of his day. His publisher and warm well-wisher, George Bentley, described him as a "refined scholarly man … with thoughtful, almost penetrating eyes." When Richard Savage appeared he had every prospect of success in literature, but intemperance wrecked his career.[2]

In Australia[]

Whitehead went to Australia in 1857, with the hope of recovering his position. He contributed to the Melbourne Punch, and he printed in the Victorian Monthly Magazine the "Spanish Marriage," a fragment of poetic drama possessing considerable merit.[2]

Whitehead's personal qualities, despite his infirmities of disposition, endeared him to those who knew him well, and an admirer of his literary talent gave him an asylum at his house in Melbourne, but he furtively made his escape from the restrictions of respectability.[2]

He sank into abject want, and died miserably in a Melbourne hospital on 5 July 1862. He was buried in a pauper's grave, and the authorities refused the request made by friends, when they heard for the first time of his sad end, to remove his remains to a fitting tomb.[2]

Writing[]

Critical introduction[]

by George Saintsbury

It was, perhaps, not surprising that, in 1831, with the great poets of the early 19th century all dead, silent or producing things hardly worthy of them, and with Tennyson and Browning but just visible to any, and actually seen by few, the Spenserians of the 3rd Whitehead’s Solitary should have seemed to promise a poet. But, if the poem be examined carefully, it will be found to be little more than a clever mosaic of variously borrowed fancy, phrase and cadence, super-excellent as a prize poem, but, like most prize poems, possessing hardly any symptomatic or germinal evidence in it.

At any rate, though before his dry-and wet-rot in the Bohemia of fancy and, latterly, the Australia of fact, Whitehead wrote one successful play, The Cavalier, 1 or 2 quasi-historical tales or novels of some merit (Jack Ketch, Richard Savage) and some other work; even his eulogists have only discovered in his later pieces a sonnet or 2 of distinction ("As younder Lamp in my Vacated Room" is that usually quoted).[3]

Recognition[]

His poem "As Yonder Lamp" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918.[4]

In popular culture[]

Whitehead's life is the subject of English writer H.T.M. Bell's A Forgotten Genius (1884) and of Australian writer Clive Turnbull's Mulberry Leaves (1945).[5]

Publications[]

Richardsavagerom01whit 0053

from Richard Savage

Poetry[]

  • The Solitary: A poem in three parts. London: Effingham Wilson, 1831.
  • Victoria Victrix: Stanzas addressed to Her Majesty, the Queen. London: 1838.
  • The Solitary, and other poems; with 'The Cavalier'. London: Bentley, 1849.

Plays[]

  • The Cavalier: A drama in three acts. London: J. Duncombe, 1836.
  • Woman's Worth; or, The three trials: A play in four acts. London: 1846.

Novels[]

Non-fiction[]

Edited[]

  • The Library of Fiction; or, Family Story-teller (periodical). London: Chapman & Hall, 1836-1837.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[6]

See also[]

References[]

  •  Bell, Henry Thomas Mackenzie (1885–1900) Dictionary of National Biography London: Smith, Elder, pp. 95-96  . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 9, 2017.

Notes[]

  1. ↑ John William Cousin, "Whitehead, Charles," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 404. Wikisource, Web, Mar. 18, 2018.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Bell, 96.
  3. ↑ George Saintsbury, "Margaret Veley," V. Lesser Poets, 1790-1837, Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume XII, New York: Putnam / Cambridge, UK: Cambrige University Press, 1907–21. Bartleby.com, Web, Mar. 7, 2017.
  4. ↑ Charles Whitehead, "As Yonder Lamp"
  5. ↑ Charles Whitehead, Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Oxford University Press, 1994. Answers.com, Web, May 15, 2021.
  6. ↑ Search results = au:Charles Whitehead 1804-1862, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Dec. 9, 2013.

External links[]

Poems
Books
About

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Whitehead, Charles

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