Martin Farquhar Tupper (July 17, 1810 in London - November 1889 in Albury, Surrey) was an English writer, and poet, and the author of Proverbial Philosophy.
He was the eldest son of Dr. Martin Tupper (1780 - 1844), a medical man highly esteemed in his day who came from an old Guernsey family, by his wife Ellin Devis Marris (d. 1847), only child of Robert Marris (1749 - 1827), a landscape painter (by his wife Frances, daughter of the artist Arthur Devis).
Martin Tupper received his early education at the Charterhouse. In due course of time he was transferred to Christ Church, Oxford where he took his degree of B.A. in 1832, of M.A. in 1835 and of DCL in 1847. At Christ Church, as a member of the Aristotle Class, he was a fellow student of many distinguished men, the Marquess of Dalhousie, the Earl of Elgin, William Gladstone and Francis Hastings Doyle.
Having taken his degree of M.A., Tupper became a student at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the Bar in the Michaelmas Term, 1835. He did not, however ever practice as a barrister. In the same year he married his first cousin once-removed Isabella Devis, daughter of Arthur William Devis, by whom he was to have four sons and four daughters. About the same period commenced Tupper's literary career. He contributed to the periodicals of the day, but his first important essay in literature was a small volume entitled Sacra Poesis.
In 1837 appeared the first series of Proverbial Philosophy, long series of didactic moralisings composed in a lawyer's chambers in Old Square, Lincoln's Inn, during part of the previous year. A typical example is: "Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech". His work, which spread its author's name far and wide, was met at first with moderate success in England, while in the United States it was almost a total failure. It slowly picked up steam, however, and within thirty years it had passed through forty large editions in England by 1867, while nearly a million copies were sold in the United States. The commonplace character of Tupper's reflections is indubitable, and his blank verse is only prose cut up into suitable lengths; but the Proverbial Philosophy was full of a perfectly genuine moral and religious feeling, and contained many apt and striking expressions. By these qualities it appealed to a large and uncritical section of the public.
In 1839, Tupper published A Modern Pyramid to commemorate a Septuagint of Worthies, being sonnets and essays on seventy famous men and women; 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.
In 1845 Tupper was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He received the gold medal for science and literature from the King of Prussia.
A genial, warm-hearted man, Tupper's humane instincts prompted him to espouse many reforming movements; he was an early supporter of the Student Volunteer Movement, and did much to promote good relations between Britain and America. He tried to encourage African literature and was also a mechanical inventor in a small way. Critic Kwame Anthony Appiah, however, has used a quote from Martin Tupper's ballad "The Anglo-Saxon Race" 1850 as an example of the predominant understanding of "race" in the nineteenth century. Tupper's ballad appeared in the journal The Anglo-Saxon containing the lines: "Break forth and spread over every place/The world is a world for the Anglo Saxon race!"
At the end of his life he vanished into obscurity and nowadays his work is forgotten, despite the words on his grave-stone: "Although he is dead, he will speak."
Tupper survives if at all as a second-rate, puffed up poet whose success was only possible in a literary market where "philistines" might be able to approve of his platitudes. However, he also survives as a worthy target for a better poet: Sir William Schwenk Gilbert in his Bab Ballads. In the poem Ferdinando and Elvira, or, The Gentle Pieman, Gilbert is describing 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:
The three other references are also recognizable (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 honor 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).
He was also one of the worthies mentioned in the "Heavy Dragoon" song in Gilbert's libretto for the Savoy Opera "Patience":
Martin Farquhar Tupper (July 17, 1810 – November 1880) was an English writer, and poet, and the author of Proverbial Philosophy.
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MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER (1810-1889), English writer, the author of Proverbial Philosophy, was born in London on the 17th of July 1810. He was the son of Martin Tupper, a doctor, who came of an old Huguenot family. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a prize for a theological essay, Gladstone being second to him. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, but never practised. He began a long career of authorship in 1832 with Sacra Poesis, and in 1838 he published Geraldine, and other Poems, and for fifty years was fertile in producing both verse and prose; but his name is indissolubly connected with his long series of didactic moralisings in blank verse, the Proverbial Philosophy (1838-1867), which for about twenty-five years enjoyed an extraordinary popularity that has ever since been the cause of persistent satire. The first part was, however, a comparative failure, and N. P. Willis, the American author, took it to be a forgotten work of the 17th century. The commonplace character of Tupper's reflections is indubitable, and his blank verse is only prose cut up into suitable lengths; but the Proverbial Philosophy was full of a perfectly genuine moral and religious feeling, and contained many apt and striking expressions. By these qualities it appealed to a large and uncritical section of the public. A genial, warm-hearted man, Tupper's humane instincts prompted him to espouse many reforming movements; he was an early supporter of the Volunteer movement, and did much to promote good relations with America. He was also a mechanical inventor in a small way. In 1886 he published My Life as an Author; and on the 29th of November 1889 he died at Albury, Surrey.
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