Love and loss. An Essex-born poet, essayist and critic, Coventry Patmore would know and write of both. He’d also find that Hampshire suited him. It’s where he’d spend his last 15 years before his death in November 1896 aged 73.
WORDS: Stephen Roberts
Born in Woodford, Essex on July 23, 1823, one of three sons of author Peter George Patmore, who fled to France to dodge his creditors, and Eliza née Robertson, Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore was as a young man an assistant in the library of the British Museum as well as being associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In fact, art was Patmore’s first love, then science but poetry eventually became his passion, his first book of poems being published in 1844 with only limited commercial success and a harsh review which caused Patmore to buy up the remaining copies of the edition and destroy them. Patmore married doctor’s daughter Emily Augusta Andrews in 1847.
Patmore’s magnum opus was The Angel in the House, first published in 1854, and expanded in stages, which was lapped up by the respectable folk of Victorian England as it described in painstaking detail the intricacies of a rectory courtship. Here was a narrative poem exploring the Victorian ideal of what constituted a happy marriage. The Preludes of this poem display a profound knowledge of a lover’s moods and expression, and it is in these that Patmore first shows himself worthy of the epithet ‘major poet’, although perhaps only in glimpses at this stage.
The Angel in the House is a lengthy, narrative and lyric poem with four parts: its original part, The Betrothed (1854); The Espousals (1856) which was in praise of his first wife; Faithful for Ever (1860) and The Victories of Love (1862). Patmore was happy to record his version of the perfect woman, the term ‘The Angel in the House’ becoming synonymous with women who embodied the Victorian feminine ideal, the wife and mother; this was a male version of events though and wouldn’t have appealed much to feminists who were gaining ground. Patmore was in love and his early work was laced through with that.
Emily and Coventry had six children, three daughters and three sons including Henry Patmore (1860-83), another poet, who died aged 22. Emily was herself a writer and composed children’s stories. That Victorian domesticity of ‘The Angel in the House’ was shaken up by a personal tragedy however, when Emily died from tuberculosis following a lengthy illness, on July 5, 1862, aged just 38, which was followed by Patmore’s conversion to the Roman Catholic faith in 1864. This sense of loss would propel Patmore from mere glimpses of worthiness to true poetic greatness, although it wouldn’t happen overnight. His grieving over his beloved Emily’s death would become a major theme of his subsequent poetry. In the same year he converted, however, he also remarried to Marriane (Mary) Byles. In 1865 Patmore resigned his post in the printed book department of the British Museum and bought an estate in Sussex, Heron’s Ghyll.
Patmore’s second wife, Marriane, died in 1880. He’d marry for a third time to Harriet Robson, his children’s governess, in 1881, and he’d have another son by her, Francis born in 1882. He also had a ‘friendship’ with the poet and essayist Alice Meynell (1847-1922) but became too attached forcing her to break off said friendship.
Patmore may have been a Marmite poet who delighted and offended equally but subsequent reviewers have been kind, praising poems such as Tamerton Church Tower, which had first been published in that 1844 collection that bombed but was the best of that bunch and was republished in 1853, and Amelia (1878), Patmore’s own personal favourite, which have been described as ‘true poetry of the rarest and perhaps highest kind’; high praise indeed from Sir Herbert Read. Nevertheless, Patmore won’t necessarily be bedtime reading for the average bod; his output has an arrogance about it and that Biblical eroticism won’t suit everyone. Patmore’s Collected Poetical Works had been published in 1886 with a typical preface that read: ‘I have written little … but it is all my best’.
Having sold his Sussex estate in 1881, Coventry Patmore resided at The Lodge in Lymington for his last 15 years. His last book, The Rod, the Root and the Flower was published in 1895. He died in Lymington on November 26, 1896 aged 73. A small but select gathering assembled in the port town’s Catholic church on December 1 to say farewell to him before he was buried in Lymington churchyard. Coventry by name, Essex by birth, Hampshire by choice.
CHRONOLOGY
1823 – Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore born in Woodford, Essex (July 23).
1847 – Marries Emily Augusta Andrews, a doctor’s daughter.
1854 – First part of ‘The Angel in the House’ published in praise of his wife.
1862 – Death of Patmore’s wife, Emily (July 5), after a long illness.
1864 – Converts to the Roman Catholic religion and marries Marriane Byles.
1877 – Publication of ‘The Unknown Eros’ establishes Patmore’s poetic reputation.
1880 – Death of Patmore’s second wife, Marriane.
1881 – Patmore moves to The Lodge in Lymington with third wife Harriet Robson.
1896 – Death of Coventry Patmore in Lymington, (November 26), aged 73.
