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Philip James Bailey was born on April 22, 1816, in Nottingham, England, to Thomas Bailey and his first wife, Mary (nee Taylor).
The elder Bailey, a successful businessman and unsuccessful candidate for Parliament, bought the Nottingham Mercury in 1945, for which he served as editor and to which he contributed numerous articles espousing his liberal political convictions.
The younger Bailey enjoyed great encouragement for his poetical pursuits from his parents, particularly from his father. An incident that is frequently cited as formative to Philip’s subsequent literary development was the pilgrimage he made with his father to view Byron’s lying-in-state, which prompted Bailey’s friend Sir Edmund Gosse to say that Bailey was educated to the vocation of a poet.
Philip's father's position as publisher, along with his own poetic endeavors, made him more than supportive of his son’s literary leanings, and he saw too it that he received appropriate training, both by personally involving himself in Philip’s education and by securing the services of private tutors.
Philip received a local education until his sixteenth year, when he matriculated at Glasgow University.
He was awarded an honorary LL.D. degree, conferred by his alma mater, Glasgow University, in 1901.
Although destined for a literary career, after completing his undergraduate work at Glasgow University, Philip went on to London to read law and in 1940, he became a solicitor. However, he would never make much of a career in the law, for in the years prior to completing his legal training he had already composed the work that earned him his place in literature: Festus: A Poem, his verse epic that was published in London in 1939. It achieved immediate critical acclaim.
Philip Bailey was never to repeat the success of his first professional poetic effort, however. He completed five further volumes: The Angel World, and Other Poems (1850); The Mystic, and Other Poems (1855); The Age: A Colloquial Satire (1858); Universal Hymn (1867); and Nottingham Castle (1878), but none of these efforts were particularly successful, and some were outright failures, most notably The Age and Nottingham Castle.
He moved from his boyhood home of Nottingham to establish a home on the island of Jersey and traveled to Europe frequently. He never completely severed his ties with the town of his birth, however, and when he retired he returned to Nottingham to live out his remaining years.
Although his poetry never achieved the success of his first work, Bailey was still respected in the literary community of Great Britain, and when the nation’s poet laureate at the time, Tennyson, died in 1892, there were rumors that Bailey might be named successor, though the rumors ultimately proved false.
He died on September, 6, 1902, of influenza in Nottingham.
Philip James Bailey is known by his one voluminous poem Festus, which has undergone many changes and incorporations, but still remains a singular example of a piece of work virtually completed in youth, and never supplanted or reinforced by later achievements of its author.
The highly successful work Firmilian; or, The Student of Badajoz: A Spasmodic Tragedy, published by William Edmondstoune Aytoun, dubbed him the father of the “Spasmodic poets.” Today his work is considered important almost exclusively as a single episode in the historical evolution of verse form.
Quotes from others about the person
“Few works of literary art can have attracted so much favourable notice as Philip James Bailey’s Festus, and then have sunk so low. What can account for so odd a history?” - John Lucas
For the first time, Phillip had married, probably in the 1850s, to Anne Reed, and had fathered two children, but this marriage was not to last.
In the early 1860s, Bailey began a relationship with Anne Sophia Carey, whom he married in 1863, after divorcing his first wife. This second marriage was far more successful, lasting thirty-three years until Anne’s death.
July 31, 1785 - October 23, 1856
September 23, 1784 - 1818
1822 - October 27, 1896
1842 - February 1904
November 1849 - November 1910
