The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
General
The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of the "Ingoldsby Legends"
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Ingoldsby, Thomas, 1788-1845. Ingoldsby legends; Kent (England) -- Description and travel
Ingoldsby was only in his seventh year when a very serious thing
befell, for his father, the alderman, died in 1795. Those who love
their Ingoldsby and everything that was his, as the present writer
does, will be interested to know that he was buried at Upper Hardres
("Hards," in the Kentish speech), a small and lonely village, four
miles from Canterbury, on the old Stone Street, as you go towards
Lympne and Hythe. There, in the village church, high up on the south
wall of the nave, the tablet to his memory may be found. What became
of Elizabeth Fox is beyond our ken. We are told, in the _Life and
Letters of Richard Harris Barham_, by his son the Reverend Richard
Dalton Barham, that she was at the time a confirmed invalid.
[Illustration: WESTWELL.]
[Illustration: THE HALL, 61, BURGATE STREET, CANTERBURY, WHERE THE
AUTHOR OF THE "INGOLDSBY LEGENDS" WAS BORN.]
To three guardians had been given the administration of the
comfortable patrimony of the boy, and by them he was sent to St.
Paul's School, then in the City of London. Thence he went to
Brasenose, Oxford, leaving the university with a modest B.A., degree
in 1811. Meanwhile the villain of the piece had been at work, in
the person of a dishonest attorney, one of his guardians, by whose
practices his fortune was very seriously reduced. Returning to
Canterbury, he seems to have contemplated studying for the law, but
quickly relinquished the idea, and prepared himself for the Church.
He was admitted to holy orders, and in 1813, in his twenty-fifth year
obtained a curacy at Ashford. This was exchanged in the following year
for the curacy of the neighbouring village of Westwell. Thus he was
fairly launched on his professional career, becoming successively
Rector of Snargate and Curate of Warehorne, Minor Canon of St. Paul's
and Rector of the united parishes of St. Mary Magdalene with St.
Gregory-by-St.-Paul's, and finally, by exchange in 1842, Rector of
St. Faith-by-St.-Paul's--a fine mid-nineteenth century specimen of
the "squarson." A competent genealogist, an accomplished antiquary,
a man of letters, he, by force of his sprightly wit, welded the
fragmentary legends of the country--but largely those of his native
county of Kent--into those astonishing amalgams of fact and fiction
which, published first, from time to time, in _Bentley's Miscellany_,
were collected and issued as the _Ingoldsby Legends_. It is not the
least among the charms of those verses that fact and fiction are so
inextricably mixed in them that it needs the learning of the skilled
antiquary to sift the one from the other; and so plausible are many of
his ostensible citations from old Latin documents, and his fictitious
genealogies so interwoven with the names, the marriages and descents
of persons, real and imaginary, that an innocent who wrote some years
ago to _Notes and Queries_, desiring further particulars of what
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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