1.
1861 in art
–
Events from the year 1861 in art. February – Hilda Sjölin opens a studio in Malmö, making her one of the first known Swedish female professional photographers. Paul Cézanne and his friend Émile Zola arrive in Paris, berthe Morisot becomes a pupil of Corot. Édouard Manet has his first paintings accepted by the Salon, william Bell Scott concludes his series of murals of Northumbrian history at Wallington Hall with Iron and Coal, the Nineteenth Century
2.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
–
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most prominent English poets of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from about the age of six and her mothers collection of her poems forms one of the largest collections extant of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15 she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life, later in life she also developed lung problems, possibly tuberculosis. She took laudanum for the pain from an age, which is likely to have contributed to her frail health. In the 1830s Elizabeth was introduced to society through her cousin. Her first adult collection of poems was published in 1838 and she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose and she campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence reform in the child labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth, Elizabeths volume Poems brought her great success, attracting the admiration of the writer Robert Browning. Their correspondence, courtship and marriage were carried out in secret, following the wedding she was indeed disinherited by her father. The couple moved to Italy in 1846, where she would live for the rest of her life and they had one son, Robert Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. She died in Florence in 1861, a collection of her last poems was published by her husband shortly after her death. Elizabeths work had a influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe. She is remembered for such poems as How Do I Love Thee. some of Elizabeth Barretts family had lived in Jamaica since 1655. Their wealth derived mainly from Edward Barrett, owner of 10,000 acres in the estates of Cinnamon Hill, Cornwall, Cambridge, Elizabeths maternal grandfather owned sugar plantations, mills, glassworks and ships that traded between Jamaica and Newcastle. What the family believed to be their genealogy in relation to Jamaica is unclear, the family wished to hand down their name, stipulating that Barrett should always be held as a surname. In some cases inheritance was given on condition that the name was used by the beneficiary, given this strong tradition, Elizabeth used Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett on legal documents and before she was married often signed herself Elizabeth Barrett Barrett or EBB. Elizabeths father chose to raise his family in England while his business enterprises remained in Jamaica, the fortune of Elizabeths mothers line, the Graham Clarke family, also derived in part from slave labour, and was considerable. Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett was born on 6 March 1806, in Coxhoe Hall and her parents were Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke, Elizabeth was the eldest of 12 children. All lived to adulthood except for one girl, who died at the age of three, when Elizabeth was eight, the children all had nicknames, Elizabeth was Ba
3.
Robert Browning
–
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, Brownings early career began promisingly, but was not a success. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period, in 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself. So started one of historys most famous literary marriages and they went to live in Italy, a country he called my university, and which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women, the collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive, such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century. Brownings admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about the length and difficulty of his most ambitious poems, particularly The Ring and the Book. Nevertheless, they have included such eminent writers as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, among living writers, Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series and A. S. Byatts Possession refer directly to Brownings work, today Brownings critically most esteemed poems include the monologues Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last Duchess. Robert Browning was born in Walworth in the parish of Camberwell, Surrey and he was baptized on 14 June 1812, at Locks Fields Independent Chapel, York Street, Walworth, the only son of Sarah Anna and Robert Browning. His father was a clerk for the Bank of England. Brownings paternal grandfather was an owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies. Brownings father had sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Brownings mother was the daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee in Scotland, the evidence, however, is inconclusive either way. Roberts father, a collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books. As such, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources and his mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brothers companion in his later years and his father encouraged his childrens interest in literature and the arts
4.
Florence
–
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the Metropolitan City of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants, Florence was a centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of the time. It is considered the birthplace of the Renaissance, and has called the Athens of the Middle Ages. A turbulent political history includes periods of rule by the powerful Medici family, from 1865 to 1871 the city was the capital of the recently established Kingdom of Italy. The Historic Centre of Florence attracts 13 million tourists each year and it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982. The city is noted for its culture, Renaissance art and architecture, the city also contains numerous museums and art galleries, such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Palazzo Pitti, and still exerts an influence in the fields of art, culture and politics. Due to Florences artistic and architectural heritage, it has been ranked by Forbes as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, in 2008, the city had the 17th highest average income in Italy. Florence originated as a Roman city, and later, after a period as a flourishing trading and banking medieval commune. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, it was politically, economically, and culturally one of the most important cities in Europe, the language spoken in the city during the 14th century was, and still is, accepted as the Italian language. Starting from the late Middle Ages, Florentine money—in the form of the gold florin—financed the development of all over Europe, from Britain to Bruges, to Lyon. Florentine bankers financed the English kings during the Hundred Years War and they similarly financed the papacy, including the construction of their provisional capital of Avignon and, after their return to Rome, the reconstruction and Renaissance embellishment of Rome. Florence was home to the Medici, one of European historys most important noble families, Lorenzo de Medici was considered a political and cultural mastermind of Italy in the late 15th century. Two members of the family were popes in the early 16th century, Leo X, catherine de Medici married king Henry II of France and, after his death in 1559, reigned as regent in France. Marie de Medici married Henry IV of France and gave birth to the future king Louis XIII, the Medici reigned as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, starting with Cosimo I de Medici in 1569 and ending with the death of Gian Gastone de Medici in 1737. The Etruscans initially formed in 200 BC the small settlement of Fiesole and it was built in the style of an army camp with the main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, intersecting at the present Piazza della Repubblica. Situated along the Via Cassia, the route between Rome and the north, and within the fertile valley of the Arno, the settlement quickly became an important commercial centre. Peace returned under Lombard rule in the 6th century, Florence was conquered by Charlemagne in 774 and became part of the Duchy of Tuscany, with Lucca as capital. The population began to again and commerce prospered
5.
Julia Ward Howe
–
Julia Ward Howe was an American poet and author, best known for writing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and was a social activist, Howe was born in New York City. She was the fourth of seven born to an upper middle class couple. Her father Samuel Ward III was a Wall Street stockbroker, well-to-do banker and her mother was the poet Julia Rush Cutler, related to Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of the American Revolution. She died of tuberculosis when her daughter was five years old and she was educated by private tutors and in schools for young ladies until she was sixteen. Her eldest brother Samuel Cutler Ward traveled in Europe and brought home a private library and she had access to these modern works, many contradicting the Calvinistic world view presented by her father. She became well read and intelligent, though as much a social butterfly as she was a scholar and she was brought into contact with some of the greatest minds of her time because of her father’s status as a successful banker. She interacted with Charles Dickens, Charles Sumner, and Margaret Fuller, sam married into the prominent Astor family, allowing him great social freedom that he shared with his sister. The siblings were cast into mourning time when their father died in 1839, shortly afterwards, brother Henry died, then Samuels wife Emily died, along with their newborn child. Julia was visiting Boston in 1841 when she met Samuel Gridley Howe and they announced their engagement quite suddenly on February 21. Howe had courted her for a time, but he had recently shown an interest in her sister Louisa. In 1843, they married despite their age difference. She gave birth to their first child while honeymooning in Europe and she bore their last child in 1858 at the age of forty. They had six children, Julia Romana Howe, Florence Marion Howe, Henry Marion Howe, Laura Elizabeth Howe, Maud Howe, Julia was likewise an aunt of novelist Francis Marion Crawford. Howe lived and raised her children in South Boston, while her husband pursued his advocacy work and she hid her unhappiness with their marriage behind a cheerful demeanor and singing at parties, earning the nickname the family champagne from her children. She made frequent visits to Gardiner, Maine where she stayed at The Yellow House and she was unhappy with her surroundings, so she took lectures, and studied foreign languages, and wrote plays and dramas. Julia had published essays on Goethe, Schiller and Lamartine before her marriage to Howe, in the New York Review and her book Passion-Flowers was published in December 1853. The book collected intensely personal poems and was written without the awareness of her husband and her second anonymous collection, Words for the Hour, appeared in 1857
6.
English poetry
–
This article focuses on poetry written in English from the United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The article does not include poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, the earliest surviving English poetry, written in Anglo-Saxon, the direct predecessor of modern English, may have been composed as early as the 7th century. This is generally taken as marking the beginning of Anglo-Saxon poetry and it is possible to identify certain key moments, however. The Dream of the Rood was written before circa AD700, by and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition. While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in breadth, beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnesburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include much religious verse, from works to biblical paraphrase, elegies such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin, and numerous proverbs, riddles. With one notable exception, Anglo-Saxon poetry depends on alliterative verse for its structure, with the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1111 the Anglo-Saxon language rapidly diminished as a written literary language. The new aristocracy spoke predominantly Norman, and this became the language of courts, parliament. While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture, English literature by no means died out, other transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament, the reputation of Chaucers successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied. A group of Scottish writers arose who were believed to be influenced by Chaucer. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland, the main poets of this Scottish group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally accepted start date being around 1509 and it is also generally accepted that the English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660. However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction of the new learning long before this start date. A number of medieval poets had, as noted, shown an interest in the ideas of Aristotle. The introduction of printing by Caxton in 1474 provided the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In addition, the writings of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Elyot helped bring the ideas, the establishment of the Church of England in 1535 accelerated the process of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated intellectual and artistic life
7.
Matthew Arnold
–
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a writer, a type of writer who chastises. The Reverend John Keble, who would one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Thomas Arnold admired Kebles hymns in The Christian Year, only reversing himself with exasperation when this old friend became a Romeward-tending High Church reactionary in the 1830s. In 1828, Arnolds father was appointed Headmaster of Rugby School and his family took up residence. In 1831, Arnold was tutored by his uncle, Rev. John Buckland in the village of Laleham. In 1834, the Arnolds occupied a home, Fox How. William Wordsworth was a neighbour and close friend, in 1836, Arnold was sent to Winchester College, but in 1837 he returned to Rugby School where he was enrolled in the fifth form. He moved to the form in 1838 and thus came under the direct tutelage of his father. He wrote verse for the manuscript Fox How Magazine co-produced with his brother Tom for the enjoyment from 1838 to 1843. During his years there, he won prizes for English essay writing. His prize poem, Alaric at Rome, was printed at Rugby, in 1841, he won an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. During his residence at Oxford, his friendship ripened with Arthur Hugh Clough, Arnold attended John Henry Newmans sermons at St. Marys but did not join the Oxford Movement. His father died suddenly of disease in 1842, and Fox How became his familys permanent residence. Arnolds poem Cromwell won the 1843 Newdigate prize and he graduated in the following year with a 2nd class honours degree in Literae Humaniores. In 1845, after an interlude of teaching at Rugby, he was elected Fellow of Oriel College. In 1847, he became Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne, Lord President of the Council, in 1849, he published his first book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller
8.
Edward Lear
–
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. As an author, he is principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennysons poetry, Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of twenty-one children of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear. He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann,21 years his senior, owing to the familys limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home and live together when he was aged four. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, Lear suffered from lifelong health afflictions. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal seizures, and bronchitis, asthma. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father, the event scared and embarrassed him. Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition and his adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression and he suffered from periods of severe melancholia which he referred to as the Morbids. He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from real live birds, Lears first publication, published when he was 19 years old, was Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots in 1830. One of the greatest ornithological artists of his era, he contributed to John Goulds works and was compared favourably with the naturalist John James Audubon. Unfortunately his eyesight deteriorated too much to work with precision on the fine drawings and etchings of plates used in lithography, thus he turned to landscape painting. Among other travels, he visited Greece and Egypt during 1848–49 and his landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of colour. Between 1878 and 1883 Lear spent his summers on Monte Generoso and his oil painting The Plains of Lombardy from Monte Generoso is in the Ashmolean Museum in the English city of Oxford. Throughout his life he continued to paint seriously and he had a lifelong ambition to illustrate Tennysons poems, near the end of his life a volume with a small number of illustrations was published. In 1842 Lear began a journey into the Italian peninsula, travelling through the Lazio, Rome, Abruzzo, Molise, Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. In personal notes, together with drawings, Lear gathered his impressions on the Italian way of life, folk traditions, and the beauty of the ancient monuments. Of particular interest to Lear was the Abruzzo, which he visited in 1843, through the Marsica, at Castel di Sangro, Lear described the winter stillness of the mountains and the beautiful basilica
9.
Woodcut
–
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that the artist cuts away carry no ink, while characters or images at surface level carry the ink to produce the print, the block is cut along the wood grain. The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with a roller, leaving ink upon the flat surface. Multiple colors can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks, single-leaf woodcut is a term for a woodcut presented as a single image or print, as opposed to a book illustration. Among these the best known are the 16th century Hieronymus Andreae, Hans Lützelburger and Jost de Negker, all of whom ran workshops, the formschneider in turn handed the block on to specialist printers. There were further specialists who made the blank blocks and this is why woodcuts are sometimes described by museums or books as designed by rather than by an artist, but most authorities do not use this distinction. The division of labour had the advantage that a trained artist could adapt to the medium relatively easily, there were various methods of transferring the artists drawn design onto the block for the cutter to follow. Either the drawing would be made directly onto the block, or a drawing on paper was glued to the block, either way, the artists drawing was destroyed during the cutting process. Other methods were used, including tracing, in both Europe and the Far East in the early 20th century, some artists began to do the whole process themselves. In Japan, this movement was called sōsaku-hanga, as opposed to shin-hanga, in the West, many artists used the easier technique of linocut instead. Compared to intaglio techniques like etching and engraving, only low pressure is required to print, as a relief method, it is only necessary to ink the block and bring it into firm and even contact with the paper or cloth to achieve an acceptable print. In Europe a variety of woods including boxwood and several nut and fruit woods like pear or cherry were commonly used, in Japan, there are three methods of printing to consider, Stamping, Used for many fabrics and most early European woodcuts. Used for European woodcuts and block-books later in the fifteenth century, also used for many Western woodcuts from about 1910 to the present. The block goes face up on a table, with the paper or fabric on top, the back is rubbed with a hard pad, a flat piece of wood, a burnisher, or a leather frotton. A traditional Japanese tool used for this is called a baren, later in Japan, complex wooden mechanisms were used to help hold the woodblock perfectly still and to apply proper pressure in the printing process. This was especially helpful once multiple colors were introduced and had to be applied with precision atop previous ink layers, printing in a press, presses only seem to have been used in Asia in relatively recent times. Printing-presses were used from about 1480 for European prints and block-books, simple weighted presses may have been used in Europe before the print-press, but firm evidence is lacking
10.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
–
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt, Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a precursor of the Aesthetic movement. Rossettis art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism and his early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossettis work. Rossettis personal life was linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth. The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, Rossetti was born in London, England and his family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first in honour of Dante Alighieri. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, critic William Michael Rossetti and his father was a Roman Catholic, at least prior to his marriage, and his mother was an Anglican, ostensibly Gabriel was baptized as and was a practicing Anglican. During his childhood, Rossetti was home educated and often read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, the youthful Rossetti is described as self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic but also ardent, poetic and feckless. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended Kings College School and he also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845, when he enrolled in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, after leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life. Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunts painting The Eve of St. Agnes, the painting illustrated a poem by the little-known John Keats. Rossettis own poem, The Blessed Damozel, was an imitation of Keats, together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which they founded along with John Everett Millais. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, the eminent critic John Ruskin wrote, Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a portrait of some living person. Rossettis first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement and his Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini portray Mary as a teenage girl. I saw at once that he was not an orthodox boy, the mixture of genius and dilettantism of both men shut me up for the moment, and whetted my curiosity. Although his work subsequently won support from John Ruskin, Rossetti only rarely exhibited thereafter, in 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters
11.
American poetry
–
Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge, the history of American poetry is not easy to know. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published, by the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets, early examples include a 1616 testimonial poem on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith and Rev. One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet, the poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, edward Taylor wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period. This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the written in the colonies during the 17th. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, a distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. She was one of the poets of her day, at least in the colonies. The 18th century saw an emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. The work of Rebecca Hammond Lard, although old, still apply to life in todays world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, on the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place, as the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative and this can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London. The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant, whose contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairies. Formed the Fireside Poets were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England, the poets primary subjects were the domestic life, mythology, and politics of the United States, in which several of the poets were directly involved. Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Sidney Lanier, and James Whitcomb Riley
12.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
–
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He is notable for his editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, during which he published works by Charles W. Chesnutt. He was also known for his semi-autobiographical book The Story of a Bad Boy, and for his poetry, Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on November 11,1836. When Aldrich was a child, his father moved to New Orleans, after 10 years, Aldrich was sent back to Portsmouth to prepare for college. This period of his life is described in his semi-autobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy. Aldrich abandoned college preparations after his fathers death in 1849, at age 16, he entered his uncles business office in New York City in 1852 and became a constant contributor to the newspapers and magazines. From 1856 to 1859, Aldrich was on the staff of the Home Journal, during the Civil War, he was the editor of the New York Illustrated News. In 1865 Aldrich returned to New England, where he was editor in Boston for ten years for Ticknor, from 1881 to 1890, Aldrich was editor of the important Atlantic Monthly. As editor, he created tension with his publisher Henry Houghton by refusing to publish commissioned articles by his friends, when Houghton chastised Aldrich for turning down submissions from his friend Daniel Coit Gilman, Aldrich threatened to resign and finally did so in June 1890. Meanwhile, Aldrich continued his writing, both in prose and verse. He was well known for his form in poetry, critics believed him to show the influence of Robert Herrick. Aldrichs longer narrative or dramatic poems were not as successful, beginning with the collection of stories entitled Marjorie Daw and Other People, Aldrich wrote works of realism and quiet humor. His novels Prudence Palfrey, The Queen of Sheba, and The Stillwater Tragedy had more dramatic action, the first portrayed Portsmouth with the affectionate touch shown in the shorter humorous tale, A Rivermouth Romance. In An Old Town by the Sea, Aldrich commemorated his birthplace again, travel and description are the theme of From Ponkapog to Pesth. Aldrich married Lillian Woodman and had two sons, mark Twain apparently detested Aldrichs wife, writing in 1893, Lord, I loathe that woman so. She is an idiot—an absolute idiot—and does not know it, and her husband, the sincerest man that walks. Tied for life to this vacant hellion, this clothes-rack, this twaddling, blethering, driveling blatherskite, the Aldriches were close friends of Henry L. Pierce, former mayor of Boston and chocolate magnate. At his death in 1896, he willed them his estate at Canton, in 1901, Aldrichs son Charles, married the year before, was diagnosed with tuberculosis
