ABSTRACT
Life and works Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (b. 1823) was the son of Peter George Patmore, a minor man of letters and friend of Hazlitt and Lamb. His father was a Freethinker, but Patmore inclined to Anglican orthodoxy. In 1844 his first volume of poetry was published, containing The River, The Woodman's Daughter, Lilian and Sir Hubert. In 1845 Patmore senior lost a good deal of money in railway speculation, and Coventry was forced to earn a living as a man of letters and an assistant in the British Museum. In 1847 he married Emily Augusta Andrews, the daughter of a Congregational minister and the inspiration for The Angel in the House. Patmore was on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (contributing to The Germ), and was responsible for bringing Ruskin's attention to the merits of the group's paintings. In 1853 Tamerton Church Tower was published, and in 1854 (anonymously) The Betrothal - the first part of The Angel in the House. Part II (The Espousals) followed in 1856. In 1862 The Victories of Love appeared, the same year as the death of his first wife. In 1864 he married Marianne Caroline Byles, who was a Catholic, and he himself became a Catholic. He retired from the British Museum, living first at Heron's Ghyll in Sussex, then at The Mansion, Hastings. In 1868 he printed (for private circulation) nine odes: these were added to and printed in 1877 as The Unknown Eros and Other Odes. He wrote a prose piece on the Virgin entitled Sponsa Dei, but destroyed it. Like Hopkins (with whom he corresponded) Patmore's relationships with the Catholic priesthood were not always harmonious. In 1880 his second wife died; and in 1881 he married Miss Harriet Robson. His 1886 Collected Works were preceded by an appendix on metrical principles, and before his death in 1895 he had produced a sizeable body of critical and religious writing, and some remarkable prose/poetry.
