Jean Ingelow

Jean Ingelow (17 March 1820 – 20 July 1897) was an English poet and novelist, who gained sudden fame in 1863. She also wrote several stories for children.

Early life Born in Boston, Lincolnshire on 17 March 1820, Jean Ingelow was the daughter of William Ingelow, a banker. The family moved to Ipswich when she was 14. Her father was manager of the Ipswich and Suffolk Banking Company, and the family lived in accommodation above the bank at 2 Elm Street. After the bank failed, her family moved out and an arch was built leading to Arcade Street. A blue plaque commemorating her has been installed and nearby Ingelow Street is named after her. Mopsa the Fairy, about a boy who discovers a nest of fairies and discovers a fairyland while riding on the back of an albatross, was one of her most popular works (reprinted in 1927 with illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop). Her third series of Poems was published in 1885.

Jean Ingelow's last years were spent in Kensington. By then she had outlived her popularity as a poet. She died in 1897 and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.

Criticism

Ingelow's poems, collected in one volume in 1898, had frequently been popular successes. "Sailing beyond Seas" and "When Sparrows build in Supper at the Mill" were among the most popular songs of the day. Her best-known poems include "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571" and "Divided".

Many of her contemporaries defended her work. Gerald Massey described The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire as "a poem full of power and tenderness". Susan Coolidge remarked in a preface to an anthology of Ingelow's poems, "She stood amid the morning dew/And sang her earliest measure sweet/Sang as the lark sings, speeding fair/to touch and taste the purer air." "Sailing beyond Seas" (or "The Dove on the Mast") was a favourite poem of Agatha Christie, who quoted it in two novels, The Moving Finger and Ordeal by Innocence. American composer Emily Bruce Roelofson used Ingelow’s text for her song “I Leaned Out of Windows”.

Yet the wider literary world largely dismissed her. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, for example, wrote: "If we had nothing of Jean Ingelow’s but the most remarkable poem entitled Divided, it would be permissible to suppose the loss [of her], in fact or in might-have-been, of a poetess of almost the highest rank.... Jean Ingelow wrote some other good things, but nothing at all equalling this; while she also wrote too much and too long." Some of this criticism has overtones of dismissing her as a female writer: "Unless a man is an extraordinary coxcomb, a person of private means, or both, he seldom has the time and opportunity of committing, or the wish to commit, bad or indifferent verse for a long series of years; but it is otherwise with woman." and Ingelow, Manitoba, is named for her. There is an Ingelow Road in Battersea, London.