HOOD, THOMAS , British humorist and poet, the son of Thomas Hood, bookseller, was born in London on May On the death of her husband in 181I Mrs. Hood re moved to Islington, where Thomas Hood had a schoolmaster who appreciated his talents. The boy earned a few guineas—his first literary fee—by revising for the press a new edition of Paul and Virginia. After a short period in a counting-house, where the con finement threatened his health, he was transferred to the care of his father's relations at Dundee. On his return to London in 1818 he learned engraving, in which he acquired a skill that enabled him to illustrate his own works.
In 1821 he became sub-editor of the London Magazine, and thus came into contact with Charles Lamb, Cary, de Quincey, Allan Cunningham, Proctor, Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, the peas ant-poet Clare and other contributors to the magazine. He had married in 1825, and Odes and Addresses—his first work—was written in conjunction with his brother-in-law J. H. Reynolds, the friend of Keats. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827), a book of verse written under the strong influence of Keats, and a dramatic romance, Lamia, published later, belong to this time. But reputation came to him not from his serious verse, but from the series of the Comic Annual, dating from 1830, which Hood undertook and continued, almost unassisted, for several years. He treated current events in a fine spirit of caricature, entirely free from grossness and vulgarity, without a trait of personal malice, and with an undercurrent of true sympathy and honest purpose that gives these papers, like the sketches of Hogarth, a permanent value. Hood was an inveterate punster, and annoyed his more serious readers by his excesses in this direction. He de fended himself in the couplet: However critics may take offence, A double meaning has double sense.
In another annual called the Gem appeared the poem on the story of "Eugene Aram," which first showed his full poetical power. Hood started a magazine in his own name, and conducted this work from a sick-bed. To this period belong those poems, too few in number, but immortal in the English language, such as the "Song of the Shirt" (which appeared anonymously in the Christ mas number of Punch, 1843), the "Bridge of Sighs" and the "Song of the Labourer," which pictured in moving verse the appalling condition of the industrial worker of his day.
Hood was associated with the Athenaeum, started in 1828 by J. Silk Buckingham, and he was a regular contributor for the rest of his life. Prolonged illness brought on straitened circumstances; and Sir Robert Peel allotted to him a small pension from the civil list, which was continued to his wife and family after his death on May 3, 1845. When nine years later Lord Houghton un veiled a monument to the poet at Kensal Green, many working men and women came to do honour to the writer whose best ef forts had been dedicated to the cause and the sufferings of the workers of the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The list of Hood's separately published works is Bibliography.-The list of Hood's separately published works is as follows: Odes and Addresses to Great People (182 5) ; Whims and Oddities (two series, 1826 and 1827) ; The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur and other Poems (1827). his only collection of serious verse ; The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer (1831) ; Tylney Hall, a novel (3 vols., 1834) ; The Comic Annual (183o-42) ; Hood's Own; or, Laughter from Year to Year (1838, second series, 1861) ; Up the Rhine (1840) ; Hood's Magazine and Comic Miscellany (5844-48) ; National Tales (2 vols., 1837), a collection of short novelettes; Whimsicalities (1844) , with illustrations from Leech's designs; and many contributions to contemporary periodicals.
The chief sources of his biography are: Memorials of Thomas Hood, collected, arranged and edited by his daughter (186o) ; his "Literary Reminiscences" in Hood's Own; Alexander Elliot, Hood in Scotland (1885) . See also the memoir of Hood's friend C. W. Dilke, by his grandson Sir Charles Dilke, prefixed to Papers of a Critic; and M. H. Spielmann's History of Punch. There is an excellent edition of the Poems of Thomas Hood (2 vols., 1897), with a biographical intro duction of great interest by Alfred Ainger.