Thomas Hood

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Thomas Hood (23 May 1799 – 3 May 1845) was an English poet, author and humorist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt".

Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, Athenaeum, and Punch.

He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works.

Hood, never robust, lapsed into invalidism by the age of 41 and died at the age of 45.

William Michael Rossetti in 1903 called him "the finest English poet" between the generations of Shelley and Tennyson.

Hood was the father of playwright and humorist Tom Hood (1835–1874).

Early life

Thomas Hood was born to Thomas Hood and Elizabeth Sands in the Poultry (Cheapside), London, above his father's bookshop. His father's family had been Scottish farmers from the village of Errol near Dundee. The elder Hood was a partner in the business of Vernor, Hood and Sharp, a member of the Associated Booksellers. Hood's son, Tom Hood, claimed that his grandfather had been the first to open up the book trade with America and had had great success with new editions of old books.

"Next to being a citizen of the world," writes Thomas Hood in his Literary Reminiscences, "it must be the best thing to be born a citizen of the world's greatest city." On the death of her husband in 1811, Hood's mother moved to Islington, where he had a schoolmaster who in appreciating his talents, "made him feel it impossible not to take an interest in learning while he seemed so interested in teaching." Under the care of this "decayed dominie", he earned a few guineas – his first literary fee – by revising for the press a new edition of the 1788 novel Paul and Virginia.

Hood left his private schoolmaster at 14 years of age and was admitted soon after into the counting house of a friend of his family, where he "turned his stool into a Pegasus on three legs, every foot, of course, being a dactyl or a spondee." However, the uncongenial profession affected his health, which was never strong, and he began to study engraving. The exact nature and course of his study is unclear: various sources tell different stories. Reid emphasizes his work under his maternal uncle Robert Sands, but no deeds of apprenticeship exist and his letters show he studied with a Mr Harris. Hood's daughter in her Memorials mentions her father's association with the Le Keux brothers, who were successful engravers in the City.

The labour of engraving was no better for his health than the counting house had been, and Hood was sent to his father's relations at Dundee, Scotland. There he stayed in the house of his maternal aunt, Jean Keay, for some months. Then on falling out with her, he moved on to the boarding house of one of her friends, Mrs Butterworth, where he lived for the rest of his time in Scotland. In Dundee, Hood made a number of close friends with whom he continued to correspond for many years. He led a healthy outdoor life, but also became a wide and indiscriminate reader. At the same time he began seriously to write poetry and he appeared in print for the first time, with a letter to the editor of the Dundee Advertiser.

Family life

Hood married Jane Reynolds (1791–1846). on 5 May 1824. They settled at 2 Robert Street, Adelphi, London. Their first child died at birth, but a daughter, Frances Freeling Broderip (1830–1878), was born soon after they moved to Winchmore Hill, and after they had then moved in 1832 to Lake House, Wanstead, a son, Tom Hood (1835–1874), was also born. Both children took up in Hood's profession: Frances became a children's writer and Tom a humorist and playwright, and they later collaborated in collecting and publishing their father's work. Although constantly worried about money and health, the Hoods were a devoted, affectionate family, as Memorials of Thomas Hood (1860), based on his letters and compiled by his children, testifies.

Odes and Addresses – Hood's first volume – was written in conjunction with his brother-in-law John Hamilton Reynolds, a friend of John Keats. Coleridge wrote to Lamb averring that the book must be the latter's work. Keats wrote two poems for Jane Reynolds: "O Sorrow!" (October 1817) and "On a Leander Gem which Miss Reynolds, my Kind Friend, Gave Me" (c. March 1817). Also from this period are The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827) and a dramatic romance, Lamia, published later. The Plea was a book of serious verse, but Hood was known as a humorist and the book was ignored almost entirely.

Hood was fond of practical jokes, which he was said to have enjoyed inflicting on members of his family. In the Memorials there is a story of Hood instructing his wife Jane to purchase some fish for the evening meal from a woman who regularly came to the door selling her husband's catch. But he warns her to watch for plaice that "has any appearance of red or orange spots, as they are a sure sign of an advanced stage of decomposition." Mrs Hood refused to purchase the fish-seller's plaice, exclaiming, "My good woman... I could not think of buying any plaice with those very unpleasant red spots!" The fish-seller was amazed at such ignorance of what plaice look like.

The series of the Comic Annual, dating from 1830, was a type of publication popular at the time, which Hood undertook and continued almost unassisted for several years. He would cover all the leading events of the day in caricature, without personal malice, and with an undercurrent of sympathy. Readers were also treated to an incessant use of puns, of which Hood had written in his own vindication, "However critics may take offence,/A double meaning has double sense", but as he gained experience as a writer, his diction became simpler.

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