Richard Harris Barham

Rev. Richard Harris Barham (6 December 1788 - 17 June 1845) was an English poet and novelist, and a cleric of the Church of England. He was better known by his pen name of Thomas Ingoldsby.

Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845) as Thomas Ingoldsby, from The Ingoldsby Legends, 1905. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Richard Harris Barham
Born	December 6 1788(1788-Template:MONTHNUMBER-06) Canterbury, Kent
Died	June 17 1845(1845-Template:MONTHNUMBER-17) (aged 56) London
Nationality	English
Other names	Thomas Ingoldsby
Occupation	cleric, novelist, humorous poet
Notable works	Ingoldsby Legends

Life

Overview

Barham, son of a country gentleman, was born at Canterbury, eduated at St. Paul's School and Oxford, entered the church, held various incumbencies, and was Divinity Lecturer and minor canon of St. Paul's. It is not, however, as a churchman that he is remembered, but as the author of the Ingoldsby Legends, a series of comic and serio-comic pieces in verse, sparkling with wit, and full of striking and often grotesque turns of expression, which appeared first in Bentley's Miscellany. He also wrote, in Blackwood's Magazine, a novel, My Cousin Nicholas.

Youth and education

Barham was born at Canterbury, the son of Richard Harris Barham of Tappington Everard in the county of Kent. At 7 years of age he lost his father, who left him a small estate, part of which was the manor of Tappington, so frequently mentioned in the Legends. At 9 he was sent to St Paul's School, but his studies were interrupted by an accident which shattered his arm and partially crippled it for life. Thus deprived of the power of bodily activity, he became a great reader and diligent student.

In 1807 he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, intending at first to study for the profession of the law. Circumstances, however, induced him to change his mind and to enter the church.

Early career

He took orders in 1813, and in 1817 was presented by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the living of Snargate in Romney Marsh.

An accident which confined him to the house directed his active mind to literary composition as a resource against ennui, and in 1819 he produced his first work, a novel entitled Baldwin, which fell dead from the press. Nothing daunted, he began to write My Cousin Nicholas.

In 1821 he was placed in a more favourable position for literary effort by obtaining a minor canonry in St. Paul's Cathedral. His energy, good sense, and good humour soon gained him the esteem and confidence of the chapter, and more especially the friendship of Bishop Copleston, dean of St. Paul's from 1827 to 1849.

In 1824 he was presented to the living of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Gregory, and was made priest in ordinary of the chapels royal. The latter appointment brought him into closer intimacy with the eccentric Edward Cannon, and connection with the press introduced him to other kindred spirits, whose society fostered the talent for humorous composition in verse of which he had already given proof. He contributed to Blackwood and the John Bull, and in 1834 My Cousin Nicholas, which had long lain in his desk, was completed and published in the former periodical.

The Ingoldsby Legends

Illustration by George Cruikshank for the "Dead Drummer of Salisbury Plain", one of the Ingoldsby Legends.

Main article: The Ingoldsby Legends''

Though endowed with indefatigable powers of work, Barham seems to have always required some strong external prompting to composition of any extent. His first novel was the result of an accident; his second was forced into completion by a friend who printed the earliest chapters without his knowledge; and, although he was continually throwing off humorous verse with great freedom and spirit, the Ingoldsby Legends would probably never have existed but for his desire to aid his old friend and schoolfellow, publisher Richard Bentley, in Bentley's Miscellany, commenced under the editorship of Charles Dickens in January 1837.

The magazine was originally intended to have been called The Wits' Miscellany. "Why," urged Barham, when the change of title was suggested to him, "why go to the other extreme?"

The Spectre of Tappington opened the series, and was speedily succeeded by a number of others, at first derived from the legendary lore of the author's ancestral locality in Kent, but soon enriched by satires on the topics of the day and subjects of pure invention, or borrowed from history or the Acta Sanctorum. The later members of the series appeared in the New Monthly Magazine.

The success of the Legends was pronounced from the beginning, and when published collectively in 1840 they at once took the high place in humorous literature which they have ever since retained. A 2nd series was added in 1847, and a 3rd was edited by his son in the same year.

Final years

As a man Barham was exemplary, a pattern Englishman of the most distinctively national type. The associate of men of wit and gaiety, making himself no pretension to any extraordinary strictness of conduct, he passed through life with perfect credit as a clergyman and universal respect as a member of society. He mitigated the prejudices of his education by the innate candour of his disposition, and added to other endowments soundness of judgment and solidity of good sense.

In 1842 Barham was appointed divinity lecturer at St. Paul's, and exchanged his living for St. Faith's, also in the city. In 1840 the death of his youngest son had inflicted a blow upon him from which he never recovered, and in 1844 a cold caught at the opening of the Royal Exchange, and aggravated by his neglect of precautions, laid the foundation of a fatal illness. He died on 17 June 1845, having written his pathetic lines, "As I laye a-Thynkynge," a few days previously.

Writing

Barham owes his honorable rank among English humourists to his having done one thing supremely well. He has thoroughly naturalised the French metrical conte with the adaptations necessary to accommodate it to our national genius. French humour is rather finely malicious than genial: Barham carries geniality to the verge of the exuberant. He riots in fancy and frolic, and his inexhaustible faculty of grotesque rhyming is but the counterpart of his intellectual fertility in the domain of farcical humour.

In variety and whimsicality of rhymes these verses have hardly a rival since the days of Hudibras. But beneath this obvious popular quality there lies a store of solid antiquarian learning, the fruit of patient enthusiastic research, in out-of-the-way old books, which few readers who laugh over his pages detect.

There is, indeed, an element of farce in his fun, an excessive reliance on forced contrasts between the ghastly and the ludicrous, and a not unfrequent straining after cheap effects; nor can the most successful work of the professional jester be compared to the recreation of a great poet, such as Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin."

It is nevertheless true that no English author, with the exception of Thomas Hood, has produced such a body of excellent rhymed mirth as Barham; and that, if his humour is less refined than Hood's, and his gaiety not equally purified and ennobled by being dashed with tears, he excels his rival as a narrative poet.

He may, indeed, be said to have prescribed the norm in our language for humorous narrative in irregular verse, which can now hardly be composed without seeming to imitate him.

Recognition

His last poem, "As I laye a-thynkynge", was set to music by the English composer Edward Elgar and published in 1888.

In popular culture

Barham is a character of George MacDonald Fraser's historical novel, Flashman's Lady. 

Publications

Poetry and songs

• The Ingoldsby Lyrics (edited by R.H.D. Barham the younger). London: Richard Bentley, 1881.

Fiction

• Some Account of My Cousin Nicholas. (3 volumes), London: Richard Bentley, 1846. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III

The Ingoldsby Legends

• The Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth and morals. London: Richard Bentley. 1840.
• (5th edition). London: , 1851. New York: D. Appleton, 1852.
  • (collected First Series).London: Richard Bentley, 1866.
  • (illustrated edition). London: Richard Bentley, 1871.
  • London: George Routledge, 1889; London & New York: Frederick Warne, 1889.
  • London: Walter Scott, [1895?]
  • London: Cambridge Clear-Type, [191?]
• The Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth and morals: Second Series. London: Richard Bentley, 1842.</ref>
• The Ingoldsby Legends; or, Mirth and morals: Third Series. London: Richard Bentley, 1874.
• he Ingoldsby Legends; or, Mirth and morals (combined First, Second, & Third Series). London: Humphrey Milford / New York: Oxford University Press, 1921.</ref>
  • London: J.M. Dent, 1960.
  • Cambridge, UK: Chadwick-Healey, 1992.

Non-fiction

• Personal Reminiscences from Barham, Harness, and Hodder (edited by Richard Henry Stoddard). New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1875.

Juvenile

• The Jackdaw of Rheims. London: Richard Bentley, 1870.
  • London: Raphael Tuck & Sons, 1910.

Collected editions

• Life and Letters; with a selection of his miscellaneous poems (edited by his son). (2 volumes), London: Richard Bentley, 1870, 1880. Volume I, Volume II.

Edited

• The Garrick Club: Notices of one hundred and thirty-five of its former members. London: privately printed, 1896.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Garnett, Richard (1885) "Barham, Richard Harris" in Stephen, Leslie Dictionary of National Biography 3 London: Smith, Elder, p. 188  Wikisource, Web, Dec. 9, 2017.

External links

Poems

• "City Bells"
• Selected Poetry of Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845) at Representative Poetry Online ("The Jackdaw of Rheims")
• Barham in A Victorian Anthology: "The Jackday of Rheims," "Mr. Barney McGuire's Account of the Coronation"
• Richard Harris Barham at PoemHunter (22 poems)
• Richard Harris Barham at Poetry Nook (23 poems)

About

• Barham, Richard Harris in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Memoir of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham
• Ingoldsby, Thomas 1785-1845 at The Literary Gothic
• 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: Barham, Richard Harris.