Stephen Roberts explores the life and love of Lorna Doone author, Oxfordshire boy RD Blackmore.
The author of a novel a lot of people will have heard of, Lorna Doone, he was a notable storyteller born at Longworth in Berkshire. For this month’s Cotswold Great, however, I’m claiming this fellow as one of ours. He was born Richard Doddridge (R.D.) Blackmore (1825-1900) and would become one of this nation’s most famed novelists of the second half of the 19th century, building up a world following, and is sometimes dubbed the ‘Last Victorian’. He was born six years after the Queen.
Longworth, Blackmore’s birthplace, was in Berkshire back in 1825, but is a part of Oxfordshire today (since 1974) so his Cotswold credentials begin to develop some lustre. He was born at the Old Rectory, his father briefly the curate-in-charge of the parish which lies in the Vale of the White Horse which may have subliminally inspired the future author. He was born a year after his older brother Henry (1824-75), an eccentric in later life, and was the son of John Blackmore (1794-1858), the curate, and a mother, Anne née Knight, a clergyman’s daughter, who died just a few months into his life on October 4, 1825, during a typhus outbreak. Following this tragedy Richard’s father took up a peripatetic lifestyle whilst the youngsters were taken in by their aunt, Mary Knight, who married the Rev. Richard Gordon, which saw the lads moving into Elsfield Rectory close to Oxford. This village has literary pretensions. John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps lived in the manor (1919-35) and had his ashes buried in the churchyard. Blackmore picked up a stepmother along the way too when his father remarried in 1831.
Educated at Blundell’s (Tiverton) where he was head boy and then Exeter College, Oxford, Blackmore was a clever cove who sat for his degree in 1847. It was during a break from uni that he first dabbled at writing a novel, the beginnings as it turned out of The Maid of Sker which would eventually be published more than a quarter century later in 1872. This is the one Blackmore rated his magnum opus, perhaps challenged by Springhaven (1887) although lovers of Lorna Doone would disagree. Literary traditions tend to cluster around Blackmore and Exeter College has quite the alumni, including J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings), novelist, memoirist, essayist and screenwriter Martin Amis, and Phillip Pulman (His Dark Materials).
Having left Oxford and had a bash at some private tutoring, Blackmore’s next foray was into jurisprudence, a.k.a. the law. He entered the Middle Temple (1849) and was called to the Bar in 1852, when he would have been in his mid to late 20s. Blackmore married in November 1853 to Lucy Maguire, a happy marriage if one bereft of children. He was 28, she was 26. It was also the year that he published for the first time (Poems by Melanter, 1853, but he was soon to work out that novels would be his forte). Although he practiced law for a while, Blackmore soon realised that this profession was not for him, poor health obliging him to take up a position as a classics master in 1854, a job he didn’t enjoy, before a legacy from an uncle in 1857 enabled Richard to get himself a country house and begin living the life of an English gent, whiling his time away on a combination of market gardening (summer) and literature (winter). It was said that he was prouder of his fruit trees than his novels. This all took place in Teddington which was his ‘Dunroamin’; it would be the place where he’d die and be buried.
Blackmore published his poetry first, several collections in fact, but would soon find his true vocation as a novelist, churning out 15 works of fiction beginning with Clara Vaughan (1864), which was moderately successful. His stories mostly came with a Devonshire background, this being his father’s native county, and his third and most famous and successful novel, Lorna Doone (1869) is typical of this genre, but much more besides as it represents his magnum opus, his masterpiece, which has been accepted as a classic of West Country literature. Exmoor’s Blackmore is certainly right up there as far as purveyors of the West Country literary tradition are concerned. Sometimes an author puts a place on the map and Blackmore did this for Exmoor; it’s down to him that so many Americans come here. Lorna Doone has certainly been on High Schools’ required reading list of 19th-century English Lit in the States and, if most Americans have any impression of England at all, well, it’s likely to be based on this single work that they were forced to read. Apparently, in 1906, students at Yale, the male fraternity, voted Lorna Doone their favourite work.
The book has maybe lost some of its popularity. It has a sniff of anti-Catholicism about it, prevalent at the time, but less palatable nowadays. It’s not all downhill though for the book was also responsible for the Christian name Lorna, one which Judy Garland adopted for her daughter. Even if Lorna Doone doesn’t rock your literary boat, it’s worth paying Exmoor a visit to just see where it was set, and many do, although there’ll find that this particular moor is nowhere near as gloomy and wild as Blackmore would have us believe. Literary licence, eh? If you’re unsure about Lorna Doone, it’s an historical romance with its principals being the yeoman John Ridd, and Lorna Doone, a ‘beautiful maiden’, no less. The course of true love is not exactly certain; more circuitous. Just to add some oomph to proceedings there’s adventure, drama, love’s obstacles, and ‘bloody villainy’. Blackmore has Exmoor brooding as backdrop. It was the author’s countryside descriptions that set his work apart, an eye for nature, and an empathy with the natural world that put him on a par with another renowned novelist/poet of the South West, Thomas Hardy.
Blackmore’s other novels included his second novel Cradock Nowell (1866), The Maid of Sker (1872), Alice Lorraine (1875), Cripps the Carrier (1876) which was set in Oxfordshire, the county that had played a key role in his development and advanced education, and Tommy Upmore (1884). Not all of his work has met with equal success in terms of its longevity and enduring popularity. Lorna Doone remains in print to this day, but apparently nothing else of Blackmore’s. If we judge Blackmore by the words used to describe him then we have an enigma: Shy, reticent and sweet-tempered on the one hand, proud, strong-willed and self-centred on the other. Given that he pioneered the sort of romantic revivalist fiction utilising regional settings that was continued by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, then it’s entirely apt that we seem to have a man who had a bit of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ about him. The locals in Teddington reckoned him a bit reclusive and irascible; typical author.
Blackmore’s wife was the first to go, in January 1888. And the ‘Last Victorian’? Blackmore died two years later, on January 20, 1900, almost a year to the day before Queen Victoria herself. If he wasn’t the last, he was certainly among the last. He was 74 and was buried next to his wife in Teddington.
CHRONOLOGY
1825 – Birth of Richard Doddridge Blackmore in Longworth, Berks (June 7).
1847 – Blackmore sits for his degree at Exeter College, Oxford.
1852 – Having entered the Middle Temple in 1849, Blackmore is called to the Bar.
1853 – Marries Lucy Maguire, a happy marriage but one bereft of children.
1854 – Having given up the law, Blackmore ‘enjoys’ a brief career as a classics master.
1857 – A legacy from an uncle enables Blackmore to focus on market gardening and writing.
1864 – The first of Blackmore’s 15 novels, ‘Clara Vaughan’, is published.
1869 – Blackmore’s most famous and successful work, ‘Lorna Doone’, is published.
1888 – Death of Blackmore’s wife Lucy. Blackmore is looked after by two nieces.
1900 – Death of R.D. Blackmore in Teddington (January 20), aged 74.
References
Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1974)
Treasured Island: A Book Lover’s Tour of Britain (F. Barrett, 2015)
Exmoor National Park (exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk)
Victorian Web (victorianweb.org)
Britannica (britannica.com)
Fantastic Fiction (fantasticfiction.com)
Good Reads (goodreads.com)
The Twickenham Museum (twickenham-museum.org.uk)
