Tupper was once famous enough to be included, along with Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others, in the standard Victorian series "Moxon's Popular Poets"; yet even in his lifetime his reputation fell into eclipse, and by the 1860s smart young reviewers were finding "Tupperish" a handy term of critical abuse. His most famous work, Proverbial Philosophy (1838), sold much more heavily than the works of any of his more important contemporaries, including Tennyson, at least in the middle decades of the century; but no one since has had a good word to say for it, and its significance now is almost wholly as an index of the intellectual and literary tendencies of Tupper's class and time. That granted, it is worth closer examination than it has usually received.

Martin Farquhar Tupper was born in London in 1810, the eldest son of Dr. Martin Tupper, a successful physician, and Ellin Devis Tupper...