Background
Thomas Dunn English was born in or near Philadelphia, of Quaker stock, descended from an ancestor who settled in New Jersey about 1683. His father was probably Robert English.
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Thomas Dunn English was born in or near Philadelphia, of Quaker stock, descended from an ancestor who settled in New Jersey about 1683. His father was probably Robert English.
He attended Wilson's Academy in Philadelphia, the Friends’ Academy, Burlington, New Jersey, and the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he presented a thesis on phrenology, defending the theories of Gall and Spurzheim, and was granted the degree of M. D. in 1839.
During the three years following he read law and in 1842 was admitted to the bar, but, as he wrote later, “I never was lawyer enough to hurt me. ” His energies were turned more to writing for magazines than to practising his professions. As early as 1839 he had begun to write for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, through which connection he met Edgar Allan Poe, one of the editors, of whom he became an intimate and then an adversary. In that year he edited a Tyler daily, the Aurora, which failed; and held a political appointment as weigher of the port of New York. About this time he published a poem, “The Gallows-Goers, ” coarse but vigorous, which was widely circulated in the campaign against capital punishment. In 1845 he tried his hand at editing the Aristidean, A Maga- sine of Reviews, Politics and Light Literature, to which both Poe and Whitman were contributors but which failed after six issues. The following year Poe held English up to ridicule in a sketch in his series, “The Literati, ” published in Godey’s Magazine in 1846. English retaliated with a card, reprinted in the Evening Mirror, charging Poe with forgery. Poe sued Hiram Fuller fq. v. f, editor of the Mirror, and won, but the stir created by this suit did much to becloud the poet’s fame for half a century. During the trial English changed his residence to Washington. In 1848, with George Dexter of New York and George Zieber of Philadelphia, publishers, the illustrator F. O. C. Darley, and G. G. Foster, he undertook to bring out a weekly humorous sheet at Philadelphia, the John Donkey. “John- Donkey was the best humorous periodical that had yet been attempted, labored though some of its wit appears. . .. Its satire was often scurrilous ; it attacked Greeley, Poe, and many others. It is said to have attained a circulation at one time of twelve thousand, but libel suits ruined it after it had brayed valiantly from January to July, 1848” (Mott, post, p. 426). From 1852 to 1856 English practised law and medicine at Lawnsville, Virginia (now Logan, W. Va. ), of which place he was the first mayor. Returning North he settled in Bergen County, New Jersey. A “Copperhead” in politics during the Civil War, he was elected to the New Jersey legislature from Bergen County and served 1863-64. In 1878 he removed to Newark where he lived until his death. For a time he was on the literary staff of the Newark Sunday Call. He was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1890 and served 1891—95, being defeated for a third term. In his last years he was nearly blind. English died at his home in Newark in 1902. During his career he published many books— most of which he did not care to acknowledge— began work on a metrical history of America which was never completed but which may have been drawn upon for American Ballads (1880), and the Boy’s Book of Battle Lyrics (1885), wrote more than twenty plays, and was constantly contributing prose and verse to periodicals.
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In 1844, he states in his autobiography, “I was President of a political club, and did a good deal of stumping. I dare say that I was unnecessarily offensive in my remarks at times, and provoked a deal of ill-will. ”
“I write poetry, ” he said toward the close of his life, “because publishers pay me well; publishers pay me well because the public seems to like my themes . .. and so long as I am paid, and no longer, I shall continue to write. ” As a poet English belonged to “the gnomes and elves of Parnassus” of whose literary by-products George Edward Woodberry remarked: “No quotation could do sufficient injustice to them—they must be read to be properly damned. ” As a playwright English was notoriously facile and verbose. For Burton he wrote a play in which journeymen printers figured as the main characters. It was written in forty-eight hours, and took eight hours to rehearse. For Oxley, English said, “I wrote a rhyming extravaganza, in which the actors were all to be gigantic frogs. ” Of his dramas, however, only one, The Mormons, or Life at Salt Lake, produced at Burton’s Theatre in 1858, was published. His only bid for lasting literary fame was made on September 2, 1843, when he published in the New Mirror, edited by G. P. Morris and N. P. Willis, the engaging poem “Ben Bolt, ” addressed to a real person of that name. Its charming simplicity attracted composers: the Library of Congress lists twenty-six different compositions to this song; English himself wrote one “entirely for the black keys. ” In 1848, Nelson Kneass in Pittsburgh adapted a German air and sang the song in the drama, The Battle of Buena Vista. In 1894 Du Maurier introduced it into his popular novel, Trilby. It was said that the attention paid to English in the House of Representatives was due as much to his authorship of “Ben Bolt” as to any other cause.
Quotations:
As he wrote, “I never was lawyer enough to hurt me. ”
n 1844, he states in his autobiography, “I was President of a political club, and did a good deal of stumping. I dare say that I was unnecessarily offensive in my remarks at times, and provoked a deal of ill-will. ”
“I write poetry, ” he said toward the close of his life, “because publishers pay me well; publishers pay me well because the public seems to like my themes . .. and so long as I am paid, and no longer, I shall continue to write. ”
English said, “I wrote a rhyming extravaganza, in which the actors were all to be gigantic frogs. ”
In 1842 was admitted to the bar
He was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1890 and served 1891—95, being defeated for a third term.
He had married in 1849 Annie Maxwell Meade of Philadelphia, who died June l7, 1899, survived by four children.