The Ingoldsby Legends by Thomas Ingoldsby

First published: 1840, 1842; 1847

Type of work: Comic verse

Principal Characters:

• Thomas Ingoldsby, Gent., editor of the family legends
• Charles Seaforth, in “The Spectre of Tappington”
• Lord Tomnoddy, in “The Execution”
• SIr Ralph De Shurland, in “Grey Dolphin”
• Saint Dunstan
• Saint Gengulphus
• Saint Odille
• Saint Nicholas
• Saint Cuthbert
• Saint Aloys
• Saint Medard, in their respective “Lays”

Analysis

“Captain Swing,” the symbol of proletarian revolt in England in the 1830’s, makes several appearances in Richard Harris Barham’s comic verse, always in a contemptible light. The rick-burning associated with the “Captain” may have been abhorred by the poet and his middle-class public as a foreign import of violence, but it was also a sure sign of the depression which closed the decade and the one which followed. A very different sign of the temper of the times was THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS themselves; they increased the flow of comic verse initiated by Hood and continued by Lear, Carrol, and Gilbert among a host of minor talents who parodied everything they could lay their hands on and produced comic versions of every familiar object from fox hunting to the history of England. Although the fashion spread to America and the colonies, and lasted into the early decades of this century in PUNCH, it was so much confined to Victorian England as to become a characteristic of that time and place.

THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS first appeared in 1837, the year of Victoria’s accession, in Richard Bentley’s MISCELLANY. This was a new publishing venture, edited by Charles Dickens, which ceased shortly before Barham’s death in 1845. The volume now titled THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS was largely collected from the MISCELLANY pieces which had previously been published in two series in 1840 and 1842. Apart from a few occasional or sentimental pieces, the legends comprise about fifty long poems and six short stories. The best-known of the latter, “The Spectre of Tappington,” initiated the LEGENDS and explains in a final note that this is a story or legend of the Ingoldsby family of Tappington Everard in Kent, the family mansion of the Barhams. Later the legends continued to be published under the pseudonym of “Thomas Ingoldsby,” who was supposed to have found them in an old oak chest in the manor and who edited them for publication in the MISCELLANY.

Barham’s pseudonym was preserved for a time and maintained in his letters from “Thomas Ingoldsby” to Bentley prefacing the two series published in his lifetime; but the pretense must soon have been penetrated. Barham in 1837 was forty-nine and well-known in London ecclesiastical, theatrical, and journalistic circles. For sixteen years he had been a Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral and was now also Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene; he is supposed to have been a model parish parson but it is difficult to see how he combined those duties with editing the London Chronicle for a number of years and religiously attending the theater. A minister of the Church of England was obviously in the early nineteenth century a gentleman above all else, and as such he was expected to go out in society and to possess some accomplishments such as the ability to turn out light verse. Barham had already shown such ability in the comic verses and the novel he had published before he began the LEGENDS which are now his claim to fame.

Some of the LEGENDS are still anthologized, “The Jackdaw of Rheims” being the best-known; but the volume as a whole is likely to become wearisome to the modern reader when read right through. The early Victorians found the work amusing because the LEGENDS are long stories in comic verse ending in a mock moral: they were intended to occupy one’s time, to entertain, and to instruct. The peculiar mode evolved by Thomas Hood and developed by Barham, that of comic verse, accounted for the length of the stories (over one thousand lines in some poems) and for the sly humor of the moral conclusion.

A comparison of “The Jackdaw of Rheims” and “The Spectre of Tappington” will fix most of the qualities of the LEGENDS. Both deal with the apparently magical disappearance of objects, in the former the Cardinal’s turquoise ring, in the latter Charles Seaforth’s whole wardrobe of trousers. Many of the LEGENDS deal with the disappearance of treasure—“The Lay of the Old Woman Clothed in Grey,” for instance—and that the treasure in one case is trousers is typical not only of oddly coy references to a garment that Barham several times says he can only allude to but also of his general tendency to reduce the exotic and rare to homely proportions. In “The Jackdaw of Rheims” the gorgeous procession of “six little Singing-boys” ends as

One little boy moreA napkin bore,Of the best white diaper, fringed withpink,And a Cardinal’s Hat mark’d in perma-nent ink.

In both tales there is a rational explanation for the disappearance. Charles Seaforth, for example, in “The Spectre of Tappington” sleepwalks and buries his own trousers. But the Cardinal’s curse apparently causes the return of the ring. More than half the LEGENDS deal with medieval superstitions, generally ghosts and witches, some of them a retelling of popular stories, as in “The Lay of St. Dunstan,” which recapitulates the tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Most of the LEGENDS return to the past rather than dealing with contemporary events; the largest single group is the “Lays” of Saints Dunstan, Gengulphus, Odille, Nicholas, Cuthbert, Aloys, and Medard. The prose “Spectre” reads like one of the comic Irish tales of Charles Lever and restricts Barham’s fancy by necessitating dialogue and scenes; he prefers to embroider verbally so that the stanza gradually moves away from the object it is describing and sometimes even returns on itself, as in “The Auto-Da-Fe”:

And no one, I am sure, will deny itwho’s tried aVile compound they have that’s calledOlla Podrida.(This, by the by, ’s a mere rhyme tothe eye,For in Spanish the i is pronounced likean e,And they’ve not quite our mode of pro-nouncing the d.In Castile, for instance, it’s giventhrough the teeth,And what we call Madrid they soundmore like Marreeth.)

The most obvious feature of comic verse is the complexity of rhyme and meter, providing an elaborate surface to the poems that minimizes their content and is sometimes strained in effect, devices that Gilbert, for instance, gradually toned down in the BAB BALLADS and was able to use effectively in the dramatic context of his operas. The variety of stanza forms reflects the complexity of other devices, but is also used to change the style of a whole poem, as in the ballad quatrains of “St. Medard,” or the tone of a poem when some grave matter must unfortunately be introduced. The grave element in these poems often deals with the deaths of foolish women, such as the Maiden in the mock-ballad, “Bloudie Jack of Shrewsberrie,” or of wicked strong men, such as Sir Ralph de Shurland in the prose tale, “Grey Dolphin,” and is usually made ridiculous.

One of the shortest LEGENDS is “The Execution: A Sporting Anecdote,” sometimes anthologized under the name of its hero, Lord Tomnoddy, a young man about town who relieves his ennui by throwing a party for his fellow “sports” to watch a man hang; the party becomes so drunken that all the young men miss the execution, which is described in couplets or triplets without the internal rhyme of the rest of the poem.

In the “Auto-Da-Fe” the mass burning of Jews is described in comic verse:

While similar treatment is forcing outhollow moansFrom Aby Ben Lasco and Ikey BenSolomons,Whose beards—this a black, that in-clining to grizzle—Are smoking, and curling, and all in afizzle;The King, at the same time, his Dons,and his visitors,Sit, sporting smiles, like the Holy In-quisitors . . .

But the scene is preceded by a long apostrophe of righteous horror at the tradition of the Inquisition and the cruel auto-da-fe, addressed to Seville and couched in trochaic-iambic tetrameter:

Those shouts from human fiends thatswell,—That withering scream,—that franticyell,—All, Seville,—all too truly tellThou art a MARVEL—and a HELL!

The tripping meter is almost always anapaestic tetrameter; to prevent monotony and the effect of doggerel the succession of twelve-syllable lines is broken by dimeters in the same measure, generally two to a line to give an internal masculine rhyme which is also used by the line or lines that follow:

But whatever she said, It fill’d him withdread,And made all his hair stand on end onhis head. . . .

Barham’s verse is chiefly remarkable for its rhyme rather than its meter. He can extend the rhyme of a couplet to eight lines; the triple or feminine rhymes he evolves are his most distinctive feature; usually a polysyllable is made to echo a concluding run of monosyllables or part of another polysyllable which is broken in two. Byron’s well-known “intellectual . . . henpecked you all” in DON JUAN is outdone many times by Barham, as in the following examples, “temper or . . . Emperor,” “College, I . . . Acknowledge, I,” “in fine a . . . Agrippina,” “Rostopchin . . . drop chin,” “Apollo, cost . . . holocaust,” “condemn none . . . Agamemnon,” “dragon he . . . agony,” “dupe colour’d . . . pea-soup-colour’d.” It was this verbal dexterity which the Victorians loved, and Barham had a long reign in the parlor, schoolroom, and nursery.

Barham’s popularity declined because his verbal dexterity is simply verbal dexterity. When one tires of the juggling virtuosity only the tone and content remain, and both may be distasteful to modern audiences, not because of the constant laughing at church ritual (“Father Fothergill brewed an XXX puncheon of holy water”) but for the quality of social and racial snobbery expressed in many of the poems. But these faults are not apparent if the THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS are read as they should be, at intervals and in the context of Victorian verse. They belong in the anthologies.