Frederick Locker-Lampson

Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821-1895). Portrait from My Confidences, 1896. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Frederick Locker-Lampson (May 29, 1821 – May 30, 1895) was an English poet, bibliophile, and man of letters.

Life

Overview

Locker-Lampson, son of the secretary of Greenwich Hospital, held appointments in Somerset House and the Admiralty. He wrote a number of clever Vers de société, which were collected as London Lyrics (1857). He also compiled Lyra Elegantiarum, an anthology of similar verse by former authors, and Patchwork, a book of extracts, and wrote an autobiography, My Confidences (1896).

Youth and education

Locker-Lampson was born Frederick Locker on 29 May 1821 at Greenwich Hospital, where his father, Edward Hawke Locker, held the office of civil commissioner. His mother, Eleanor Mary Elizabeth (Boucher), was the daughter of Rev. Jonathan Boucher, vicar of Epsom (a book collector and a former friend of George Washington). Frederick was the 2nd son of his parents (a younger brother being novelist and newspaper editor Arthur Locker).

He received an education at various schools — at Clapham, at Yateley in Hampshire, at Clapham again, and elsewhere.

Career

He became, in September 1837, a junior clerk in a colonial broker's office in Mincing Lane. This uncongenial calling he followed for little more than a year. Then, in March 1841, he obtained from Lord Minto, 1st lord of the admiralty and son of the governor-general of India, a temporary clerkship in Somerset House, and in November 1842 he was transferred to the admiralty, where he was placed as a junior in Lord Haddington's private office, and subsequently became deputy reader and précis writer.

In his posthumous recollections (My Confidences, 1896, 135-50) Locker gives an account of his official life, the tedium of which he had already begun to enliven, apparently with the approval of his chief, by the practice of poetry. A rhyming version of a petition from an importunate lieutenant seems to have sent Lord Haddington into ecstasies (ib. 136). Locker's experiences as an admiralty clerk were prolonged under Sir James Graham and Sir Charles Wood.

In 1849 his health, never good, broke down, and he obtained a long leave of absence. In July 1850 he married Lady Charlotte Bruce, a daughter of Thomas Bruce, 7th earl of Elgin (who brought the famous Elgin marbles to England). Not long afterwards he quit government service.

In 1857 he published, with Chapman & Hall, his debut collection of verse, London Lyrics, a small volume of 90 pages, and the germ of all his subsequent work. Extended or rearranged in successive editions, the last of which is dated 1893, this constitutes his poetical legacy.

In 1867 he published the well-known anthology entitled Lyra Elegantiarum, being "some of the best specimens of vers de société and vers d'occasion in the English language," and in 1879 Patchwork, justly described by Augustine Birrell as "a little book of extracts of unrivalled merit."

During all this time he was assiduously cultivating his tastes as a virtuoso and book lover, of which latter pursuit the Rowfant Library, 1886, is the record. Chronic ill-health and dyspepsia made it impossible for him to follow any active calling. But he went much into society, was a member of several clubs, and enjoyed the friendship of many distinguished persons of all classes. He knew Lord Tennyson, Thackeray, Lord Houghton, Lord Lytton, George Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, Dean Stanley (his brother-in-law), Hayward, Kinglake, Cruikshank, Du Maurier, and others, and he had seen or spoken to almost every contemporary of any note in his own day.

Locker's general characteristics are well summed up by his son-in-law, Mr. Augustine Birrell, in the "Appendix" to the Rowfant Library, 1900. He was "essentially a man of the world"; he devoted his leisure hours to studying the various sides of human nature, and drawing the good that he could out of all sorts and conditions of men. His delicate health prevented him from taking any very active share in stirring events; but he was content, unembittered, to look on, and his energies were continually directed towards gathering about him those friends and acquaintances who, with their intellectual acquirements, combined the charms of good manners, culture, and refinement.'

In April 1872 Lady Charlotte Locker died, and was buried at Kensal Green. 2 years later (6 July 1874) he married Hannah Jane Lampson, only daughter of Sir Curtis Miranda Lampson, bart., of Rowfant, Sussex, and in 1885 took the name of Lampson. He left children by both his wives. Eleanor, his daughter by Lady Charlotte, married, 1st, in 1878, Tennyson's younger son, Lionel, and 2nd, in 1888, Mr. Augustine Birrell K.C. By his 2nd wife Locker had 4 children.

Following his 2nd marriage, Locker-Lampson mainly resided at Rowfant, and he died there on 30 May 1895.

Writing

Frederick Locker (1821-1895). Caricature by Frederick Waddy (1848-1901), from Cartoon portraits and biographical sketches of men of the day, 1872. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

London Lyrics

As a poet Locker-Lampson belonged to the school of Prior, Praed, and Hood, and he greatly admired the metrical dexterity of Barham. His chief endeavor, he said, was to avoid flatness and tedium, to cultivate directness and simplicity both in language and idea, and to preserve individuality without oddity or affectation. In this he achieved success. His work is always neat and clear; restrained in its art, and refined in its tone; while to a wit which rivals Praed's, and a lightness worthy of Prior, he not unfrequently joins a touch of pathos which recalls the voice of Hood.

His work mellowed as he grew older, and departed further from his early models — those rhymes galamment composés which had been his youthful ambition — but the majority of his pieces, at all times, by their distinctive character and personal note, rise far above the level of the mere vers d'occasion or vers de société with which it was once the practice to class them.

London Lyrics, Locker's solitary volume of original verse, has appeared in many forms since its original issue in 1857. A 2nd edition followed in 1862. In 1865 Edward Moxon included a selection from its pages in their Miniature Poets, illustrated by Richard Doyle; a 2nd impression followed in 1868, and the Doyle illustrations were subsequently employed in an issue of 1874 prepared for presentation to the members of the Cosmopolitan Club. In 1868 an edition of London Lyrics was privately printed for John Wilson of Great Russell Street, with a frontispiece by George Cruikshank, illustrating the poem called "My Mistress's Boots." To this succeeded editions in 1870, 1872, 1874, 1876, 1878, 1885 ('Elzevir Series'), 1891 and 1893.

Besides these Locker prepared a privately printed selection in 1881, also entitled London Lyrics, and in 1882 a supplemental volume, also privately printed, entitled London Rhymes. Of the former of these volumes a few large-paper copies were struck off, which contained a frontispiece ('Bramble-Rise') by Randolph Caldecott (sometimes found in 2 "states"), and a tail-piece ('Little Dinky') by Kate Greenaway. In America London Lyrics was printed in 1883 for the Book Fellows' Club of New York, with inter alia some fresh illustrations by Caldecott. There are other American editions, some of which are pirated.

Miscellanous

In 1895 the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, Ohio, a body which had borrowed its name by permission from Locker's Sussex home, put forth a rare little volume of his verse, chosen by himself shortly before his death, and entitled Rowfant Rhymes.' It includes a preface by Henry Austin Dobson and a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lyra Elegantiarum appeared in 1867. The 1st issue was almost immediately suppressed because it included certain poems by Landor which were found to be copyright, and a revised impression, which did not contain these pieces, speedily took its place. An American edition followed in 1884, and in 1891 an enlarged edition was added to Ward, Lock, & Co.'s 'Minerva Library.' In preparing this last, of which there was a large-paper issue, Locker had the assistance of Coulson Kernahan.

Patchwork was first printed privately in quarto for the Philpbiblon Society, and afterwards published in octavo in 1879. No later edition has been published.

In 1886 Locker compiled the catalogue of his books known to collectors as the Rowfant Library. It comprises, besides its record of rare Elizabethan and other volumes, many interesting memoranda, personal and bibliographical. Since Locker's death an appendix to the Rowfant Library has been issued, under the title of A Catalogue of the Printed Books &c. collected since the printing of the first Catalogue in 1886 by the late Frederick Locker-Lampson, 1900. It is inscribed to the members of the Rowfant Club, and has a preface by Augustine Birrell and memorial verses by various hands.

Locker's autobiographical reminiscences were published posthumously in 1896 under the title of My Confidences; the volume was edited by Birrell.

The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica said of him: "As a poet, Locker belongs to the choir who deal with the gay rather than the grave in verse, with the polished and witty rather than the lofty or emotional. His good taste kept him as far from the broadly comic on the one side as his kind heart saved him from the purely cynical on the other. To something of Prior, of Praed, and of Hood he added qualities of his own which lent his work distinction in no wise diminished by his unwearied endeavour after directness and simplicity."

Critical introduction

by Charles L. Graves

Frederick Locker, like Praed, whom he greatly admired and often imitated, was pre-eminently a writer of vers de société, and he is of importance in this context not only as a composer of many fascinating poems, but as an anthologist (in his Lyra Elegantiarum) and critic. He mingled in the world of fashion, and he knew almost everybody worth knowing in the world of letters. Thackeray invited him to contribute to the Cornhill, and he was an intimate friend of Tennyson. He was a man of fastidious and exquisite taste; he had humour, irony, and tenderness, but he lacked animal spirits, and, though generous in his appreciation of others — witness his enthusiastic praise of H.S. Leigh and of W.S. Gilbert as far back as 1870 — was a relentless critic of his own work.

His London Lyrics, as originally published in 1857, contained only 26 short pieces, but in the 10 editions which appeared between that year and 1893 many new poems were added, and many of the older ones withdrawn or revised. But the revision was invariably an improvement; the Cockney rhymes and puns disappeared, redundancies were excised, and the whole gained in terseness, simplicity, and point.

In subject-matter he largely resembled Praed, and he tells us that at one time he tried to write like him; but his Praedian poems are the least successful — faint but graceful echoes of the brilliant antithetical rhetoric of his model. Locker had not gusto, the quality he admired in Suckling; his mood was in his own phrase “rueful-sweet,” a mood at once whimsical and elegiac. He eschewed parody, but showed remarkable skill in his adaptation from the French, and in his handling of short metres, modelled probably on the seventeenth-century lyrists. A few trite Latin tags appear in his verses; but, unlike Calverley, he deals sparingly in literary allusions; he was neither a Latinist nor a Grecian, but he had a “naturally classical” mind, fortified by the study of the best English poetry and modern literature, and was eminently a scholarly poet though he made no parade of his learning. He was, in fine, a most accomplished miniaturist; the Cosway of Victorian light-verse writers.

Recognition

A posthumous volume of his memoirs, entitled My Confidences, appeared in 1896. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James wrote of the 'amiable' personality shown in this book: "This is a complex, a tender, a submissive, and graceful state of mind. For myself, I should have no objection to calling it on the whole a religious state of mind, although I dare say that to many of you it may seem too listless and half-hearted to merit so good a name."

Frederick Locker-Lampson: A character sketch, which includes a selection of his letters, was composed and edited by his son-in-law, Augustine Birrell in 1920. This gives an interesting idea of his personality and literary connections as well as notes on his book collection.

His poem "At Her Window" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Most of his books contain the author's portrait, either from an etching by Sir John Millais, which first saw the light in the Moxon selection of 1865, or a pen-and-ink full-length by George Du Maurier.

The Rowfant Club, a Cleveland-based society of book collectors, is named after his home.

Publications

Poetry

• London Lyrics. London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
• Poems. London: J. Wilson, 1868. (Only 100 copies printed).
  • {with introduction by Austin Dobson). London: Macmillan Publishers, 1904.
• Patchwork. London: Smith, Elder, 1879.
• The Poems of Frederick Locker. New York: White, Stokes & Allen, 1883.
• London Rhymes. London: Chiswick, 1882; New York: White, Stokes & Allen, 1884.
• Rowfant Rhymes (with Austin Dobson). Cleveland, OH: Rowfant Club, 1895.
• Patchwork: Second series. Cleveland, OH: Rowfant Club, 1925.

Non-fiction

• My Confidences: An autobiographical sketch addressed to my descendants.. London: Smith, Elder, 1896.

Collected editions

• [httpa://archive.org/details/selectionfromwor00lockuoft A Selection from the Works of Frederick Locker]. London: Edward Moxon, 1865.

Edited

• Lyra Elegantiarum: A collection of some of the best vers de societe and vers d'occasion in the English language by deceased English authors (with Coulson Kernahan). London: Ward, Lock, 1867.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

To My Grandmother FREE Audio Book

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Dobson, Henry Austin (1901). "Locker-Lampson, Frederick". In Sidney Lee. Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement​. 3. London: Smith, Elder. pp. 105-107. 

Notes

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External links

Poems

• "At Her Window".
• Lampson, Frederick Locker (1821-1895) (3 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• Locker-Lampson in The English Poets: An anthology: "My Mistress's Boots," "The Rose and the Ring," "A Reminiscence of Infancy"
• Frederick Locker-Lampson at PoemHunter (14 poems)
• Frederick Locker-Lampson at Poetry Nook (26 poems)

Audio / video

• Frederick Locker-Lampson at YouTube

Books

• Works by Frederick Locker-Lampson at Project Gutenberg
• Frederick Locker-Lampson at Amazon.com

About

• Frederick Locker in Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (illustrated by Frederick Waddy), London: Tinsley Brothers, 1875.
• Locker-Lampson, Frederick" in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Etc.

• Rowfant Club

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement (edited by Sidney Lee)​. London: Smith, Elder, 1901. Original article is at: Locker-Lampson, Frederick