This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of 19 July 2024 as part of a review article entitled "Burning Decks" (p.20). The author has formatted it for the Victorian Web, adding a few extra details, page numbers from the book under review, and links to related material.
Bringing neglected figures from the nineteenth century back to the public eye can be tricky. For Edward Chitham, who writes about the poet Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), perhaps the biggest problem is simply the immense change in literary taste. Hemans's best-known poem, "Casabianca" (1826), starts with the familiar words, "The boy stood on the burning deck, / Whence all but he had fled." This sounds hackneyed now, while Hemans's other poetry strikes us as sentimental. Although she remained popular throughout the Victorian period, William Michael Rossetti, prefacing the Moxon edition of her work, could not help commenting on its "cloying flow of 'right-minded' perceptions of moral and material beauty" (xxvii).
Hemans's early death from tuberculosis in 1835, pigeon-holes her as a Romantic. Shelley, evidently impressed by her fervour, dubbed her a "tigress" and tried to start a correspondence with her, and she was warmly received by Scott at Abbotsford and Wordsworth at Grasmere. While her work could not be compared with theirs, it had much to commend it to her contemporaries. Not usually as dramatic as "Casabianca," it tended to be earnest and pious, but still with what Chitham calls "flashes of significant poetry" (x). "Casabianca" itself, written in 1826 and inspired by an incident in the Battle of the Nile, was not at all hackneyed at the time: the victory on the Nile had yet to be celebrated in one of the bas-reliefs at the base of Nelson's Column. The poem shows her characteristically contrasting themes: obedience and self-sacrifice on the one hand, and the sufferings occasioned by the sea and war on the other. In this first modern biography, Chitham suggests the sources of these themes by exploring her background, sometimes, of necessity, supplementing certainties with informed speculation.
Thomas Secombe's frontispiece to the Rossetti ed.
The daughter of a well-connected merchant who had fallen on hard times, Hemans was born in straitened circumstances in Liverpool, but spent her later childhood in North Wales. She produced her first volume of poetry at fourteen, her mother having procured almost a thousand subscribers — including the Prince of Wales. It was a promising start to what turned out to be a difficult life, with a "bankrupt and soon absent" father (11), and then, six years after an early marriage, an equally distant husband. With five sons to bring up, Hemans depended even more urgently on poetry a means of subsistence. She might vary her forms and metres, but neither wished nor could afford to challenge her readers with unconventional views that might have appealed more to us today.
The story of Hemans's life, her moves between different parts of the country, and her struggles against poverty and ill-health, is a poignant one. Looking back during her last days, she herself feared that financial pressure had forced her to produce "mere desultory effusions ... My wish ever was to concentrate all my mental energy in the production of some more noble and complete work... which might take its place as the work of a British poetess.... Perhaps it might not even yet be too late to accomplish what I wish, though I sometimes feel my health so deeply prostrated, that I cannot imagine how I am ever to be raised up again" (223). Sadly, it was indeed too late.
Nevertheless, Chitham's well-chosen quotations convey a talent that still has the power to move. In a poem of 1833, "Prayer of the Lonely Student," for instance, Hemans imagines the wakeful speaker seeing "the stars returning, / Fire after fire in heaven's rich Temple burning", and welcoming them: "Fast shine they forth — my spirit friends, my guides." She apparently identifies with such a student — she had in fact, been fascinated by a lecture she attended at Trinity College, Dublin, given by the Irish Astronomer Royal, William Hamilton — and the poem ends on a religious note, with the speaker's "lowly, fearful, self-distrusting heart" paying homage to the "Mightiest! Whose bless'd will/ All the fair stars rejoicingly fulfil" (qtd. p. 213). This poem, published in Blackwood's, is not among those in Rossetti's edition, but can be found in her last collection, Scenes and Hymns of Life, with Other Religious Poems (1834), dedicated to Wordsworth.
Sadly, Hemans was as much of her time in her health as in her piety, poetic style and intellectual affiliations. She had been coughing up blood even before her marriage, but had soldiered on regardless. Still in her early forties, she died early in 1835 while staying in Dublin. Her elder brother George and his wife had come down from their home in Kilkenny to tend her.
This empathetic portrait of a woman whose precociousness, humility, faith, and conscientious parenting almost overrode her frailty, brings the best of her poetry into much sharper focus.
Bibliography
[Book under review] Chitham, Edward. Liverpool Tigress? The Life of Felicia Hemans. York: Chitham, 2024. 262 pp. Pbk £15.00. ISBN: 978 1526209955
Hemans, Felicia Dorothea. Scenes and Hymns of Life, with Other Religious Poems. Edinburgh: Blackwood's, 1834. Internet Archive, from a copy in Oxford University. Web. 3 December 2024.
_____. The Poetical Works of Felicia Hemans. Edited, with a critical memoir, by William Michael Rossetti. London: John Walker, [1882?]. Internet Archive, from a copy in Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Web. 3 December 2024.
_____. The Poetical Works of Felicia Hemans: with Memoir, Explanatory Notes, etc. . New York: J. Wurtele Lovell, 1881. Internet Archive, from a copy in Harvard University Library. Web. 3 December 2024.
Created 2 December 2024