Martin Farquhar Tupper

While at Oxford, Tupper's literary career commenced. He contributed to the periodicals of the day, but his first important publication was a collection of 75 short poems entitled Sacra Poesis (1832).[14] In addition he wrote a long poem partially in blank verse, "A Voice from the Cloister", but this was only published, anonymously, in 1835.[15]

The first page of "Of Hatred and Anger" from the 1854 edition

Tupper's most successful work had its genesis in 1828, shortly before his Oxford matriculation. At this time he was engaged to Isabelle, and he decided to write his "notions on the holy estate of matrimony" for her, "in the manner of Solomon's proverbs". Isabelle showed them to Hugh M'Neile, who suggested seeking publication, but Tupper chose not to do so at the time.[16]

In 1837, on the encouragement of Henry Stebbing, Tupper began to revise these writings and expand them into a book, working on them at home and in his workplace, Lincoln's Inn, over the subsequent 10 weeks. Stebbing referred Tupper to the publisher Joseph Rickerby, who agreed to publish it on a profit-sharing basis.[17][18]

This first official version of the work was published on 24 January 1838 with the title Proverbial Philosophy: A Book of Thoughts and Arguments, originally treated, by Martin Farquhar Tupper, Esq., M.A. and priced at 7s. It met with moderate success in Britain; a second edition was commissioned, to which Tupper added more material, and sold for 6s.[19] A third edition emerged, but this was not successful, and the unsold copies were sent to America, where it was received poorly: "Americans scarcely knew what to make of it at all; one of the few stateside reviewers to read Proverbial Philosophy, the powerful editor N.P. Willis, was so perplexed by the form of the book that he guessed it to have been written ... in the seventeenth century."[20]

Despite the initial lack of interest in the third edition, in 1841 Tupper was spurred to write a second series of Proverbial Philosophy at the suggestion of John Hughes, who he had met in a chance encounter in Windsor in 1839. This series was to be serialised in the new publication Ainsworth's Magazine, William Harrison Ainsworth being a friend of Hughes. Tupper and his family temporarily moved to Brighton where he produced some initial pieces for the magazine, as well as some essays. However, being "too quick and too impatient to wait for piecemeal publication month by month",[21] Tupper had the second series published as a whole, on 5 October 1842.[22]

The second series was immediately popular, and boosted sales of the fifth edition of the first series as well. The works were soon combined together into one, still entitled Proverbial Philosophy, and this collection became an enormous success over the subsequent decades. By 1866 it had sold over 200,000 copies in the United Kingdom, through forty editions.[23] In the author's lifetime it is estimated that between one quarter and half a million copies were sold in England,[24] and over 1.5 million in the United States.[25] Due to the lack of international copyright laws, the US market was dominated by pirated copies; consequentially, Tupper made almost no money from the work's enormous American sales.[24]

Upon the death of William Wordsworth in 1850, Tupper began to suggest his willingness to fill the now-vacant position of Poet Laureate to influential friends and acquaintences such as William Gladstone and James Garbett, who further gathered support. He continued to write poems for public occasions, such as the deaths of Robert Peel and the Duke of Cambridge in order to demonstrate his capability. It also appears that his candidacy had popular support, from both sides of the Atlantic.[26] However, the eventual selection was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, partly due to Prince Albert's admiration of the poem In Memoriam A.H.H..[27]

In the summer of 1838 Tupper penned a continuation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, naming it Geraldine and publishing it alongside various other pieces in the latter half of that year in the collection Geraldine, a sequel to Coleridge's Christabel: with other poems. The poem Geraldine itself was widely panned, although in his contemporary notes Tupper attributes this largely to it being a continuation of an early version of Coleridge's poem: "When Coleridge first published Christabel ... it was positively hooted by the critics ... Coleridge left behind him a very much improved and enlarged version of the poem, which I did not see till years after I had written the sequel to it: my Geraldine was composed for an addition to Christabel, as originally issued."[28] The other poems in the collection were more warmly received.[29]

In 1839, Tupper published A Modern Pyramid: To Commemorate a Septuagint of Worthies, a collection of sonnets and essays on seventy famous historical figures; in 1841 An Author's Mind containing skeletons of thirty unpublished books; in 1844, The Crock of Gold, The Twins, and Heart tales illustrative of social vices, and which passed through numerous editions; in 1847, Probabilities, an Aid to Faith, giving a new view of Christian evidences; A Thousand Lines, Hactenus, Geraldine, Lyrics, Ballads for the Times, Things to Come, A Dirge for Wellington, Church Ballads, White Slavery Ballads, American Ballads, Rifle Ballads, King Alfred, a patriotic play; King Alfred's poems, translated from Anglo-Saxon into corresponding English metres. In 1856, Paterfamilia's Diary of Everybody's Tour, The Rides and Reveries of Æsop Smith, and Stephan Langton a biographical novel, which sought, with much graphic painting, to delineate England in the time of King John. He also published Cithara, a collection of Lyrics; Three Hundred Sonnets, A Phrophetic Ode and many other fugitive pieces, both verse and prose which appeared in various newspapers and magazines. In 1886, he published My Life as an Author.

As a contribution to the Great Exhibition of 1851, Tupper wrote the piece Hymn to the Exhibition, which the author had translated and printed in over sixty languages.[30]

After enjoying huge success for over two decades, by the end of the 1860s Proverbial Philosophy had fallen dramatically out of favour in Britain. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica describes his "didactic moralisings" as "essentially prose cut up into suitable lengths", albeit acknowledging that it "contained apt and striking expressions and appealed to a large and uncritical section of the public."[14] Similarly, in his biography of Tupper, Hudson (1949) contends that "the mass of middle-class early Victorian readers saw that the design and intention were great; and for years they blindly accepted the cratsmanship. But Tupper ... lacked the genius that could illumine a great work. There are lines of real observation and force, but there are also vast wastes of elaboration and of wordy rhetoric that never come to life."[38] Harrison (1957) argues that despite its pretensions to timeless wisdom, Proverbial Philosophy was simply a product only of its specific time: "It put the weight of tradition and common sense behind social values and interpretations which were in reality peculiar to Victorianism."[39]

Collins (2002) writes that the work was a victim of its own success: "The children who had once received gift book editions of Tupper for their birthdays were heartily sick of the man." Given that Proverbial Philosophy was published by the author when he was a young man, who went on to live a long life and write prolifically, he was an easy target for satire from new generations and changing tastes - "Tupper's visage was everywhere ... His very generosity and omnipresence worked against him. By the 1870s, each week began to bring fresh pummelings by clever young men in humor magazines like Punch, Figaro and The Comic."[40]

Once the satire was played out, Tupper's work was forgotten. None of his works have been in print since the final edition of Proverbial Philosophy in 1881,[32] although digital transcriptions and facsimiles can now be found.[41][42]

Renowned American poet Walt Whitman was an enthusiastic supporter of Tupper while acting as editor for the Brooklyn Eagle (1846–1848).[25] Contemporary readers noted similarities between Proverbial Philosophy and Whitman's writings (not always intending this to be a flattering comparison),[43][44][45] and it seems likely that the work influenced the style of Whitman's Leaves of Grass,[46][47][48] although the two had many ideological differences.[49] In later years, however, Whitman distanced himself from Tupper, who had by then become highly unfashionable.[50]

Tupper was quoted with some prominence in the biographical movie, The Life of Charles Spurgeon (2011) In the scene, Spurgeon reads from Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy on marriage and passes the book to his future wife (Susannah Thompson), to read the following quotation from the book:

Seek a good wife of thy God, for she is the best gift of his providence;

Yet ask not in bold confidence that which he hath not promised.

Thou knowest not his good-will :—be thy prayer then submissive thereunto; And leave thy petition to his mercy, assured that he will deal well with thee.

If thou art to have a wife of thy youth, she is now living on the earth ;

Therefore think of her, and pray for her; yea, though thou hast not seen her.'

Sir William Schwenk Gilbert alludes to Tupper in Bab Ballads. In the poem Ferdinando and Elvira, or, The Gentle Pieman, Gilbert describes how two lovers are trying to find out who has been putting mottos into "paper crackers" (a sort of 19th Century "fortune cookie"). Gilbert builds up to the following lines, eventually coming up with a spoof of Tupper's own style from Proverbial Philosophy:

"Tell me, Henry Wadsworth, Alfred, Poet Close, or Mister Tupper,

Do you write the bonbon mottoes my Elvira pulls at supper?"

"But Henry Wadsworth smiled, and said he had not had that honour;

And Alfred, too disclaimed the words that told so much upon her."

"Mister Martin Tupper, Poet Close, I beg of you inform us";

But my question seemed to throw them both into a rage enormous."

"Mister Close expressed a wish that he could only get anight to me.

And Mr. Martin Tupper sent the following reply to me:--"

"A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit."

Which I think must have been clever, for I didn't understand it."

The three other references are also recognisable (the Bab Ballad was from 1869 or so). They are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lord Tennyson (both still read and remembered), and "Poet" John Close, a well-meaning scribbler of the mid-Victorian period who wrote hackwork to honour local events (some samples are in the classic volume of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl, as is a good sample of Tupper's own work).

Tupper was one of the worthies mentioned in the "Heavy Dragoon" song in Gilbert's libretto for the Savoy Opera Patience (1881)::"Tupper and Tennyson, Daniel Defoe"

In Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1871), Lucy Morris attempts to read "Tupper's great poem" out of boredom when she's first at Lady Linlithgow's house.

Karl Marx likens the "bourgeois" economic theories of Jeremy Bentham to Tupper's poetry. In Das Kapital (1867-1883), Marx writes: "Bentham is among the philosophers what Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England." In March 1865, Marx filled in a page in the Confession book of his daughter Jenny; under "Aversion" he writes: "Martin Tupper, violet powder".[51]

Edmund Clerihew Bentley wrote flippantly: "Martin Tupper / Sang for his supper. / Though the supper wasn't nice, / It was cheap at the price."

G.K. Chesterton mentions him in The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908).

In the video game, Alice: Madness Returns (2011), Alice retrieves a memory of her mother stating, "Whoever said 'There is no book so bad, but something good may be found in it' never read Martin Farquar Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy."

John Rogers Thomas wrote a song using "All's for the Best" as the lyrics.

Such was Tupper's fame that the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry Tupperian: "Of, belonging to, or in the style of Martin F. Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy", or "An admirer of Tupper. So Tupperish a., Tupperism, Tupperize v.". The entry attests references dating from 1858.[52]