ENGLISH POETRY 1579-1830: SPENSER AND THE TRADITION

Thomas Hood

(1799-1845)

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The son of a Scottish bookseller working in London, Thomas Hood was educated in private schools, worked in an accounting office (1812-15), lived with relatives in Scotland (1815-18), and was an apprentice engraver (1818-20). Hood was an editor at the London Magazine (1821-23) and edited The Gem (1829), Comic Annual (1830-42), the New Monthly Magazine (1841-43) and Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany (1844-45); with C. W. Dilke, J. H. Reynolds, and Allan Cunningham, Hood was part-proprietor of The Athenaeum. The great humorist died of consumption in 1845, deeply impoverished.


TEXT RECORDS:

1823Sonnet: — Death.
1824Ode on a distant Prospect of Clapham Academy.
1824The Two Swans. A Fairy Tale.
1826The Irish Schoolmaster.
1827Sonnet written in Shakspeare.
1827Sonnet. ["By ev'ry sweet tradition of true hearts."]
1827The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies.

PUBLICATIONS:

Odes and addresses to great people [with John Hamilton Reynolds]. 1825.
Whims and oddities. 1826, 1827.
The plea of the midsummer fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur, and other poems. 1827.
National tales. 2 vols, 1827.
The Epping hunt. 1829.
Comic annual. 1830.
The dream of Eugene Aram. 1831.
Tylney Hall: a novel. 3 vols, 1834.
Hood's own, or laughter from year to year. 1838, 1861.
Up the Rhine. 1839.
The loves of Sally Brown and Ben the carpenter. 1840?
Whimsicalities: a periodical gathering. 2 vols, 1844, 1870.
Poems. 2 vols, 1846.
Poems of wit and humour. 1847.
Poetical works. 4 vols, 1856.
Fairy land: by the late Thomas and Jane Hood, their son and daughter. 1861.
Works, ed. T. Hood, Jr. 10 vols, 1869-73.
Poems, ed. Walter Jerrold. 1906.
Letters from the Dilke collection, ed. L. Marchand. 1945.
Selected poems, ed. John Clubbe. 1970.
Letters, ed. Peter F. Morgan. 1973.