Alfred Austin

Artist Info

Alfred AustinHeadingley, England, 1835 - 1913, Ashford, England

LCNAF identifier is n82158324.

Alfred Austin (1835–1913)

by Frederic G. Hodsoll, pubd 1903

Austin, Alfred (1835–1913), poet, was born at Headingley, near Leeds, on 30 May 1835, the second son and third child of the six children of Joseph Austin (d. 1857), wool-stapler, of Leeds, and his wife, Mary Locke, sister of Joseph Locke (1805–1860), railroad engineer and MP for Honiton, Devon. Of a Roman Catholic family, Austin at the age of about six attended a day school in Headingley run by two Misses Summers, and then at the age of eight went to St Edward's, at Everton, near Liverpool, where he stayed for six years. In 1849 he enrolled at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, and then transferred to the Roman Catholic Oscott College, near Birmingham. In 1853 he graduated with a BA from London University. In 1854 he decided upon law as his profession and entered the Inner Temple, London; he joined the northern circuit in 1857 and established quarters first in Figtree Court and later in Tanfield Court.

Upon receiving an inheritance on the death of his uncle, Joseph Locke, in 1860, Austin gave up his fledgeling law career to devote himself entirely to the writing of literature. Earlier he had published a verse tale, Randolph: a Tale of Polish Grief (1854), which had sold only seventeen copies (Autobiography, 1.74), and a two-volume, overly sentimental and moralizing novel, Five Years of it (1858). Strongly influenced by Byron's poetry, Austin wrote his first major poetic work, The Season: a Satire (1861), dedicated to Disraeli, whom he admired. He followed it with the vitriolic My Satire and its Censors (1861), mainly aimed at The Athenaeum (which had harshly reviewed The Season) and its editor, William Hepworth Dixon. In 1862 he published the first draft of The Human Tragedy, an epic-type narrative poem. He revised and expanded this work several times, and issued the final version, set partly in the Risorgimento and the Franco-Prussian War, in 1891, but this first draft reflected his long-term spiritual struggles and religious doubts which he narrated more fully in his much later autobiographical poem, The Door of Humility (1906). Although he never officially left the Roman Catholic faith, Austin's Roman Catholicism did not seem to play a major role in his poetry or his life. The extended version of The Human Tragedy and the dramatic poem Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892) he considered to be his best works (Autobiography, 2.238).

Disappointed with the cold reception of the 1862 version of The Human Tragedy, Austin temporarily stopped writing poetry and travelled several times to Italy, where he became close friends with the writer Thomas Adolphus Trollope and his first wife, Theodosia. In 1866 Austin began a 32-year association with The Standard, a tory organ, acting as leader writer from 1866 to 1896 and occasionally working as a special foreign correspondent—for example, at the ecumenical council in Rome from November 1869 to February 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War at Prussian headquarters in 1870, and at the congress of Berlin in 1878. He retired from all journalistic work for The Standard and other papers in 1898. He twice stood unsuccessfully for parliament as a Conservative; in 1865 for Taunton in Somerset and in 1880 for Dewsbury in Yorkshire. On 14 November 1865 he married Hester Jane Mulock (d. 1929), an Irish protestant, the daughter of Thomas Homan Mulock of Bellair, King's county. After an extended honeymoon in Italy, in 1867 they leased Swinford Old Manor, at Hothfield, near Ashford, Kent, about 60 miles from London, where they lived until Austin's death. From 1863 onwards Austin was a frequent contributor of poetry and critical essays to major periodicals such as the Quarterly Review, Macmillan's Magazine, the Eclectic Magazine, The Academy, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the Pall Mall Magazine, and in 1883 he and William John Courthope became joint editors of the newly founded Conservative journal the National Review; Austin continued as sole editor of the journal from 1887 to 1895. From 1864 until his death he published over forty volumes of verses, poetical dramas, prose idylls, novels, and books of criticism. According to Michael Sadleir, at least one other novel, Jessie's Expiation (1867), was written, under the pen-name Oswald Boyle (Sadleir, 1.12).

One of Austin's earliest and best-known critical works was The Poetry of the Period (1870), a collection of eight essays which he had previously published anonymously in the Temple Bar. Several of the essays attacked Browning, Swinburne, Arnold, Morris, and, especially, Tennyson, dismissing them as insignificant or indifferent poets 'with no marks of greatness'. In the case of Tennyson, Austin wrote:

Mr Tennyson is not a great poet, unquestionably not a poet of the first rank, all but unquestionably not a poet of the second rank, and probably—though no contemporary perhaps can settle that—not even at the head of poets of the third rank, among whom he must ultimately take his place.

Austin, Poetry of the Period, 4

Another essay sparingly praised the poetry of the Roman Catholic poets Cardinal Newman, Aubrey de Vere, Father Faber, and Adelaide Anne Procter, and a final essay, 'Supernatural Poetry', concentrated on the spiritualistic poet–prophet Thomas Lake Harris. Austin's prose idylls 'The Garden that I Love' (1894) and 'In Veronica's Garden' (1895) proved to be two of his most popular works, the former going through five editions in two years. Prince Lucifer (1887), a poetical drama, was dedicated to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her first jubilee. Flodden Field: a Tragedy (1903), the only one of his several poetical dramas ever to be staged, was performed without success at His Majesty's Theatre in London in June 1903.

On 1 January 1896, four years after Tennyson's death, Austin was appointed poet laureate in his place. This appointment probably was based more on his association with the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and with his journalistic service to the tory party in The Standard and the National Review, than on his poetic ability. Austin's first official poem as poet laureate, 'Jameson's Ride', appeared in The Times on 11 January 1896, just ten days after his appointment. A tribute to the South African statesman Leander Starr Jameson, who invaded Transvaal on 29 December 1895 on an unauthorized and ill-fated march which led to his defeat and capture by the Boers, the poem was widely lampooned, parodied, and criticized. Not only was it inferior poetry, but the poet laureate's praise for Jameson was embarrassing to the government which had condemned the military action. Its poetic quality recalled Austin's famous lines on the prince of Wales's illness in 1871:

Flash'd from his bed, the electric tidings came,He is not better; he is much the same.

P. Magnus, Edward VII, 1964, 114

Although in his critical pronouncements Austin usually ranked as great poetry only epics and dramatic poems which combined love, religion, and patriotism, his own dramatic poetry was very seldom critically approved. His literary fame rests, almost totally, on his nature lyrics with their simple charm, such as those in English Lyrics (1890), and on some of his prose idylls. Appreciatively called the 'laureate of the English Spring', he is at his best when expressing his intimate and genuine love of nature, and of the English countryside or its gardens. As Norton Crowell remarked, 'Few poets have been more thoroughly in rapport with their surroundings and more completely in love with nature' (Crowell, 258). Austin published his two-volume Autobiography in 1911. A distinguished looking gentleman with a full head of white hair and a large white handlebar moustache, Alfred Austin died, childless, at his home, Swinford Old Manor, on 2 June 1913.

Sources

The autobiography of Alfred Austin, 2 vols. (1911)