Adelaide Anne Procter (30 October 1825 – 2 February 1864) was an English poet and philanthropist.
Her literary career began when she was a teenager, her poems appearing in
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and Social criticism, social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by ...
's periodicals ''
Household Words
''Household Words'' was an English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens in the 1850s. It took its name from the line in Shakespeare's '' Henry V'': "Familiar in his mouth as household words."
History
During the planning stages, titles orig ...
'' and ''
All the Year Round
''All the Year Round'' was a British weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom. Edited by Dickens, it was the direct successor to his previous publication '' Ho ...
'', and later in feminist journals. Her charity work and her conversion to Roman Catholicism influenced her poetry, which deals with such subjects as homelessness, poverty, and
fallen women
"Fallen woman" is an archaic term which was used to describe a woman who has "lost her innocence", and fallen from the grace of God. In 19th-century Britain especially, the meaning came to be closely associated with the loss or surrender of a ...
, among whom she performed philanthropic work. Procter was the favourite poet of Queen Victoria.
Coventry Patmore
Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (23 July 1823 – 26 November 1896) was an English poet and critic, literary critic. He is best known for his book of poetry ''The Angel in the House'', a narrative poem about the Victorian era, Victorian ideal of ...
called her the most popular poet of the day, after
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (; 6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of ...
. Few 20th-century critics have discussed her work because of Procter's religious beliefs, but her poetry is beginning to be re-evaluated as showing technical skill.
Procter never married. Her health suffered, possibly due to overwork, and she died of tuberculosis at the age of 38.
Life
Adelaide Anne Procter was born at 25
Bedford Square
Bedford Square is a garden square in the Bloomsbury district of the London Borough of Camden, Borough of Camden in London, England.
History
Built between 1775 and 1783 as an upper middle class residential area, the square has had many disti ...
in the
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury is a district in the West End of London, part of the London Borough of Camden in England. It is considered a fashionable residential area, and is the location of numerous cultural institution, cultural, intellectual, and educational ...
district of London, on 30 October 1825 to the poet
Bryan Waller Procter and his wife Anne (''née'' Skepper).
[Gregory (2004).] The family had strong literary ties: novelist
Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (''née'' Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer detailed studies of Victorian era, Victoria ...
enjoyed her visits to the Procter household,
[Gregory (1998), 5.] and Procter's father was friends with poet
Leigh Hunt
James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 178428 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet.
Hunt co-founded '' The Examiner'', a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was the centre ...
, essayist
Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb (10 February 1775 – 27 December 1834) was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his '' Essays of Elia'' and for the children's book '' Tales from Shakespeare'', co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764� ...
, and novelist
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and Social criticism, social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by ...
,
[O'Gorman (2004), 314.] as well as being acquainted with poet
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poetry, Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romanticism, Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Balla ...
and critic
William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt (10 April 177818 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary criticism, literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history ...
.
[Hickok and Woodall (1998), 519.] Family friend
Bessie Rayner Belloc wrote in 1895 that "everybody of any literary pretension whatever seemed to flow in and out of the house. The Kembles, the Macreadys, the Rossettis, the Dickens , the Thackerays, never seemed to be exactly visitors, but to belong to the place." Author and actress
Fanny Kemble
Frances Anne Kemble (later Butler; 27 November 180915 January 1893) was a British actress from a Kemble family, theatre family in the early and mid-nineteenth century. She was a well-known and popular writer and abolitionist whose published wor ...
wrote that young Procter "looks like a poet's child, and a poet ...
ith
The Ith () is a ridge in Germany's Central Uplands which is up to 439 m high. It lies about 40 km southwest of Hanover and, at 22 kilometers, is the longest line of crags in North Germany.
Geography
Location
The Ith is i ...
a preter-naturally thoughtful, mournful expression for such a little child".
Dickens spoke highly of Procter's quick intelligence. By his account, the young Procter mastered without difficulty the subjects to which she turned her attention:
When she was quite a young child, she learnt with facility several of the problems of Euclid
Euclid (; ; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the '' Elements'' treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely domina ...
. As she grew older, she acquired the French, Italian, and German languages ... piano-forte ... nddrawing. But, as soon as she had completely vanquished the difficulties of any one branch of study, it was her way to lose interest in it, and pass to another.[Dickens (1866), 3.]
A voracious reader,
Procter was largely self-taught, though she studied at
Queen's College in Harley Street in 1850.
The college had been founded in 1848 by
Frederick Maurice, a
Christian Socialist; the faculty included novelist
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was a broad church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian, novelist and poet. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the workin ...
, composer
John Hullah, and writer
Henry Morley.
Procter showed a love of poetry from an early age, carrying with her while still a young child a "tiny album ... into which her favourite passages were copied for her by her mother's hand before she herself could write ... as another little girl might have carried a doll".
Procter published her first poem while still a teenager; the poem, "Ministering Angels", appeared in ''Heath's Book of Beauty'' in 1843.
In 1853 she submitted work to Dickens's ''
Household Words
''Household Words'' was an English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens in the 1850s. It took its name from the line in Shakespeare's '' Henry V'': "Familiar in his mouth as household words."
History
During the planning stages, titles orig ...
'' under the name "Mary Berwick", wishing that her work be judged on its own merits rather than in relation to Dickens's friendship with her father; Dickens did not learn "Berwick's" identity till the following year. The poem's publication began Procter's long association with Dickens's periodicals; in all, Procter published 73 poems in ''Household Words'' and 7 poems in ''
All the Year Round
''All the Year Round'' was a British weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom. Edited by Dickens, it was the direct successor to his previous publication '' Ho ...
'',
most of which were collected into her first two volumes of poetry, both entitled ''Legends and Lyrics''. She was also published in ''Good Words'' and ''Cornhill.''
As well as writing poetry, Procter was the editor of the journal ''Victoria Regia'', which became the showpiece of the
Victoria Press, "an explicitly feminist publishing venture".
In 1851, Procter converted to
Roman Catholicism
The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...
.
Following her conversion, Procter became extremely active in several charitable and feminist causes. She became a member of the
Langham Place Group, which set out to improve conditions for women, and was friends with
feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
s
Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Bessie Rayner Belloc) and
Barbara Leigh Smith, later Barbara Bodichon.
Procter helped found the ''
English Woman's Journal'' in 1858 and, in 1859, the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women,
both of which focused on expanding women's economic and employment opportunities. Though on paper Procter was merely one member among many, fellow-member
Jessie Boucherett considered her to be the "animating spirit" of the Society. Her third volume of poetry, ''A Chaplet of Verses'' (1861), was published for the benefit of a Catholic Night Refuge for Women and Children that had been founded in 1860 at Providence Row in
East London
East London is the part of London, England, east of the ancient City of London and north of the River Thames as it begins to widen. East London developed as London Docklands, London's docklands and the primary industrial centre. The expansion of ...
.
Procter became engaged in 1858, according to a letter that her friend
William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray ( ; 18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was an English novelist and illustrator. He is known for his Satire, satirical works, particularly his 1847–1848 novel ''Vanity Fair (novel), Vanity Fair'', a panoramic portra ...
wrote to his daughters that year. The identity of Procter's fiancé remains unknown, and the proposed marriage never took place. According to her German biographer Ferdinand Janku, the engagement seems to have lasted several years before being broken off by Procter's fiancé. Critic Gill Gregory suggests that Procter may have been a lesbian and in love with
Matilda Hays, a fellow member of the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women;
[Gregory (1998), 25.] other critics have called Procter's relationship with Hays "emotionally intense."
[Hoeckley (2007), 123.] Procter's first volume of poetry, ''Legends and Lyrics'' (1858) was dedicated to Hays and that same year Procter wrote a poem titled "To M.M.H." in which Procter "expresses love for Hays ...
ays was anovelist and translator of
George Sand
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (; 1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pen name George Sand (), was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. Being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balz ...
and a controversial figure ...
hodressed in men's clothes and had lived with the sculptor
Harriet Hosmer in Rome earlier in the 1850s."
While several men showed interest in her, Procter never married.
Procter fell ill in 1862; Dickens and others have suggested that her illness was due to her extensive charity work, which "appears to have unduly taxed her strength". An attempt to improve her health by taking a
cure
A cure is a substance or procedure that resolves a medical condition. This may include a medication, a surgery, surgical operation, a lifestyle change, or even a philosophical shift that alleviates a person's suffering or achieves a state of heali ...
at
Malvern failed.
On 3 February 1864, Procter died of
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB), also known colloquially as the "white death", or historically as consumption, is a contagious disease usually caused by ''Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can al ...
, having been bed-ridden for almost a year.
[Gregory (1998), 1.] Her death was described in the press as a "national calamity". Procter was buried in
Kensal Green Cemetery
Kensal Green Cemetery is a cemetery in the Kensal Green area of North Kensington in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in London, England. Inspired by Père Lachaise Cemetery in P ...
.
Literary career
Procter's poetry was strongly influenced by her religious beliefs and charity work; homelessness, poverty, and
fallen women
"Fallen woman" is an archaic term which was used to describe a woman who has "lost her innocence", and fallen from the grace of God. In 19th-century Britain especially, the meaning came to be closely associated with the loss or surrender of a ...
are frequent themes. Procter's prefaces to her volumes of poetry stress the misery of the conditions under which the poor lived.
Procter's Catholicism also influenced her choice of images and symbols;
[Hoeckley (2007), 127.] Procter often uses references to the Virgin Mary, for example, to "introduce secular and Protestant readers to the possibility that a heavenly order critiques Victorian gender ideology's power structure."
Procter wrote several poems about war (the majority of poems published on this topic in ''Household Words'' were by Procter), although she rarely deals directly with the topic, preferring to leave war "in the background, something to be inferred rather than stated."
[Markovits (2005), 473.] Generally, these poems portray conflict as something "that might unite a nation that had been divided by class distinctions."
According to critic Gill Gregory, Procter "does not overtly ponder the vexed question of the poet, particularly the woman poet and her accession to fame", unlike many other women poets of the time, such as
Felicia Hemans
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (25 September 1793 – 16 May 1835) was an English poet (who identified as Welsh by adoption). Regarded as the leading female poet of her day, Hemans was immensely popular during her lifetime in both England and the Unit ...
and
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (14 August 1802 – 15 October 1838) was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L.
Landon's writings are emblematic of the transition from Romanticism to Victorian literature. Her first major b ...
. Nor is Procter particularly interested in questions of gender roles. Procter is instead primarily concerned with the working classes, particularly working-class women, and with "emotions of women antagonists which have not fully found expression". Procter's work often embodies a Victorian aesthetic of sentimentality, but, according to Francis O'Gorman, does so with "peculiar strength"; Procter employs emotional affect without simplification, holding "emotional energy
n tension... against complications and nuances."
Procter's language is simple; she expressed to a friend a "morbid terror of being misunderstood and misinterpreted", and her poetry is marked by "simplicity, directness, and clarity of expression".
While critics have long dismissed Procter because her poetry is "straightforward" and religious (and thus deemed full of "sentimental excesses"), her work shows technical skill in its playing with ambiguities of stress and "temporal dislocation." Critics have also for the most part ignored most of Procter's poems, "preferring to discuss the few poems of social critique ... over, for example, the many paeans to Mary." Karen Dieleman, however, argues that taking into account both Procter's religious beliefs and contemporary Roman Catholic liturgical practices shows that Procter's poetry is "attuned to the power of both affect and reserve, spontaneity and control, lay devotion and moral authority."
Reputation
Procter was "fabulously popular"
[Gray (1999), 682.] in the mid-19th century; she was
Queen Victoria
Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria, her death in January 1901. Her reign of 63 year ...
's favourite poet
and
Coventry Patmore
Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (23 July 1823 – 26 November 1896) was an English poet and critic, literary critic. He is best known for his book of poetry ''The Angel in the House'', a narrative poem about the Victorian era, Victorian ideal of ...
stated that the demand for her work was greater than that for any other poet, excepting
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (; 6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of ...
.
One volume alone of her poetry went through as many as nineteen editions between 1858 and 1881. Readers valued Procter's poems for their plainness of expression, although they were considered "not so very original in thought;
heir merit is thatthey are indeed the utterances 'of a believing heart', pouring out its fulness." Procter herself expressed little ambition about her work: her friend Bessie Raynor Belloc thought that Procter was pained that her reputation as a poet had outstripped her father's, and quoted Procter as saying that "Papa is a poet. I only write verses."
Procter's popularity continued after her death; the first volume of ''Legends and Lyrics'' went through 19 editions by 1881, and the second through 14 editions by the same year.
Many of her poems were made into hymns
[Lennox (1911).] or otherwise set to music. Among these was "
The Lost Chord
"The Lost Chord" is a song composed by Arthur Sullivan in 1877 at the bedside of his brother Fred Sullivan, Fred during Fred's last illness. The manuscript is dated 13 January 1877; Fred Sullivan died five days later. The lyric was written as a ...
", which
Arthur Sullivan
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (13 May 1842 – 22 November 1900) was an English composer. He is best known for 14 comic opera, operatic Gilbert and Sullivan, collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including ''H.M.S. Pinaf ...
set to music in 1877; this song was the most commercially successful of the 1870s and 1880s in both Britain and the United States.
[Scott (2004).] Composer
Hermine Küchenmeister-Rudersdorf set Procter’s text to music in her song “Shadow.” Her work was also published in the United States and translated into German.
By 1938, Procter's reputation had fallen so far that a textbook could mention her poems only to pronounce them "stupid, trivial and not worthy of the subject". Critics such as Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Kathleen Hickok, and Natalie Joy Woodall argue that the demise of Procter's reputation is due at least in part to the way Charles Dickens characterized her as a "model middle-class domestic angel"
[Hoeckley (2007), 125.] and a "fragile and modest saint"
[Hickok and Woodall (1998), 520.] rather than as an "active feminist and strong poet."
Emma Mason argues that although Dickens's portrayal of Procter "extinguished modern interest" in her, it also "has helped rescue Procter from the kind of endless conjecture about her private life that has confused studies of women like
Letitia Landon."
[Mason (2006), 81.]
Modern critics have given Procter's work little attention. The few critics who have examined Procter's poetry generally find it important for the way that she overtly expresses conventional sentiments while covertly undermining them. According to
Isobel Armstrong, Procter's poetry, like that of many 19th-century women poets, employs conventional ideas and modes of expression without necessarily espousing them in entirety. Francis O'Gorman cites "A Legend of Provence" as an example of a poem with this kind of "double relationship with the structures of gender politics it seems to affirm." Other critics since Armstrong agree that Procter's poetry, while ladylike on the surface, shows signs of repressed emotions and desires.
Kirstie Blair states that the suppression of emotion in Procter's work makes the narrative poems all the more powerful, and Gill Gregory argues that Procter's poetry often explores female sexuality in an unconventional way, while as often voicing anxiety about sexual desires.
[Gregory (1996), 89.] Elizabeth Gray criticizes the fact that the few discussions of Procter's poetry that do exist focus primarily on gender, arguing that the "range and formal inventiveness of this illuminatingly representative Victorian poet have remained largely unexplored."
List of works
* "Three Evenings in the House", a short story written for ''
A House to Let'' (1858), one of the collaborative Christmas numbers of the journal ''Household Words'' that Charles Dickens published.
* ''Legends and Lyrics'', first series, 1858
* ''Legends and Lyrics'', second series, 1861
* ''A Chaplet of Verses'', 1862
Notes
References
* Armstrong, Isobel. "A Music of Thine Own: Women's Poetry — An Expressive Tradition". In ''Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader.'' Ed.
Angela Leighton. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. .
* Belloc, Bessie Rayner. ''In a Walled Garden''. New York: Macmillan and Company, 1895. No ISBN.
*
Blair, Kirstie. ''John Keble in Context''. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2004. .
* Chapman, Alison. ''Victorian Women Poets''. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: D. S. Brewer, 2003. .
* Dickens, Charles. Introduction. ''Legends and Lyrics Together with a Chaplet of Verses''. Reprint, 1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1866. No ISBN.
* Dieleman, Karen. ''Religious Imaginaries : The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter.'' Ohio University Press, 2012.
* Gray, F. Elizabeth. "Review of ''The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers''." ''Victorian Studies'' 42 (1999): 682–684. Accessed through Project Muse on 7 May 2009.
* Gregory, Gill. "Adelaide Procter's 'A Legend of Provence': The Struggle for a Place". In ''Victorian Women Poets: A Critical Reader.'' Ed. Angela Leighton. New Jersey: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. .
* Gregory, Gill. ''The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers''. Aldershot, Hants., England: Ashgate, 1998. .
* Gregory, Gill. "Procter, Adelaide Anne (1825–1864)". ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (subscription only). September 2004. Retrieved 7 May 2009.
* Harrington, Emily. "The Expiration of Commitments in Adelaide Procter's 'Homeward Bound.'" ''Victorian Literature and Culture'' 48 (2020): 435-444. Accessed through Cambridge Core on 28 June 2024.
* Hickok, Kathleen, and Natalie Joy Woodall. "Adelaide Anne Procter." In ''An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers.'' Revised edition. Edited by Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
* Hoeckley, Cheri Larsen. "'Must Her Own Words Do All?': Domesticity, Catholicism, and Activism in Adelaide Anne Procter's Poems." In ''The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers: Critical Essays.'' Edited by Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
* Accessed 7 May 2009.
* Markovits, Stefanie. "''North and South'', East and West: Elizabeth Gaskell, the Crimean War, and the Condition of England." ''Nineteenth-Century Literature'' 59 (March 2005): 463–493. Accessed through
JSTOR
JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...
(subscription only) on 24 September 2009.
* Mason, Emma. ''Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century.'' Devon: Northhcote House Publishers, 2006.
* Moine, Fabienne. "A Woman's Answer": Adelaide Procter et la poésie face au genre. ''Cahiers victoriens & édouardiens'' 75 (2012), 93-106. Accessed through
ProQuest
ProQuest LLC is an Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan-based global information-content and technology company, founded in 1938 as University Microfilms by Eugene Power.
ProQuest is known for its applications and information services for l ...
(subscription only) on 28 June 2024.
* O'Gorman, Francis. ''Victorian Poetry: An annotated anthology''. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. .
* Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. "'The Lady of Shalott' and the Critical Fortunes of Victorian Poetry". In ''The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry''. Edited by Joseph Bristow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. .
* Scott, Derek B.
The Musical Soirée: Rational Amusement in the Home. ''The Victorian Web''. 2004. Retrieved 27 August 2009.
* Taylor, Emily. ''Memories of some contemporary poets, with selections from their writings''. London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1868. No ISBN.
External links
*
*
*
*
(poems, reviews, and biography)
brainyquote.com. Accessed 4 April 2024.
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Procter, Adelaide Anne
1825 births
1864 deaths
People from Bloomsbury
People associated with Gilbert and Sullivan
19th-century English writers
English women poets
English Catholic poets
English Roman Catholic writers
Proponents of Christian feminism
Converts to Roman Catholicism
19th-century English women writers
19th-century English poets
19th-century Roman Catholics
LGBTQ feminists
British LGBTQ writers
19th-century English philanthropists
Catholic feminists
19th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Tuberculosis deaths in England