R(ichard) D(oddridge) Blackmore Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on R(ichard) D(oddridge) Blackmore

Blackmore's one famous story gave a name to a brand of cookies, to several British pubs, and to hundreds of baby girls born throughout the English-speaking world near the turn of the century. Lorna Doone (1869) even caused a legendary place--the "Doone Valley"--to appear on the official maps of Exmoor in southwestern England. A window in Exeter Cathedral pictures the heroine, the rustic hero, and the outlaw-villain in miniature; tourists still come by the busload each year to visit the little church at Oare where Lorna was supposedly shot down at the altar. The story has appeared as a movie, a BBC television serial, and a classic comic. Yet the author of this "Romance of Exmoor" remains obscure, with most of his other books out of print and unread, even though they once gave him a claim to be considered with George Eliot and Thomas Hardy as an important novelist of the English countryside.

Blackmore was born in 1825 in the Berkshire village of Longworth, the second surviving son of a country curate, John Blackmore, whose father was a clergyman in North Devon. Richard's mother, Anne Bassett Knight, was the daughter of the Vicar of Tewkesbury. Christened Richard Doddridge in memory of his only notable literary ancestor, the hymn-writer Philip Doddridge, the boy lost his mother when he was three months old and was cared for by her sister, first at the Knights' family home at Newton Nottage on the south coast of Wales and later at Elsfield, outside of Oxford. He attended school at Bruton in Somerset and at South Molton in Devon before entering Blundell's School at Tiverton in Devon. There, under rough treatment from his schoolmates, he began to suffer from epilepsy; but he distinguished himself in classical studies and went on to Exeter College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in 1847 without first-class honors. Admitted to the Middle Temple in London in 1849, he studied law under John Warner of the Inner Temple and was called to the bar in 1852. Fear of epilepsy kept him from seeking employment as a solicitor in the courtroom; he tried instead to make a living as a conveyancer, preparing legal documents for the few clients who requested his services. Without a steady income, he nonetheless married an Irish Catholic, Lucy Maguire, in November 1853; and although she soon became an Anglican, he kept the marriage secret from his family for many months afterwards. During this time he tried to gain recognition and income as a poet, but his three thin volumes of 1854 and 1855 failed to win any encouraging reviews. So he began teaching classics at the Wellesley House Grammar School, Twickenham, in 1855 and continued teaching until 1857, when an uncle's legacy allowed him to purchase sixteen acres of land for a home, orchard, and gardens at Teddington, which was then a village apart from London. For the rest of his life he raised fruit for the London market, but he soon began writing fiction to cover his losses from gardening. Fruit-growing remained his first love: to his publisher he wrote, "Anyone looking at my vines would say 'this is your role my good fellow, stick to it; any ass can write novels....'"

Blackmore's novels (or "tales" or "romances" as he often called them) typically celebrate rural life in specific regions of southern England, although Mary Anerley (1880) is set in Yorkshire, Erema (1877) has scenes in California and Virginia, and part of Dariel (1897) takes place in the Caucasus. His pastoral themes are offset by melodramatic plotting, with moments of violence and romantic adventure that helped to make Lorna Doone one of the best-sellers of the century. After a slow start in 1869, the book went through edition after edition in England and America. The cheap edition of 1897 prompted an advance order of 100,000 copies, and a steady demand has persisted through at least the first half of this century. The story itself develops from the hero's passion for a beautiful girl and his effort to free her from a band of outlaws on seventeenth-century Exmoor. The action begins with adolescent trauma when the hero, John Ridd, comes home from Blundell's School to find that his father has been shot by the Doones. Crossing Exmoor in the mist, he glimpses the outlaws with the little girl whom they have abducted and will call "Lorna Doone." The next spring he finds her at the edge of the Doone Valley; at twenty-one he returns and falls in love with her, knowing that the chief outlaw, Carver Doone, wants to make her his bride. To deliver Lorna from this monster becomes the young farmer's heroic task. He succeeds in the dead of winter, only to lose her when she is called to London to join the court of James II. Before they can be reunited, John must endure more ordeals: arrest after the Battle of Sedgemoor during the collapse of Monmouth's rebellion; a second attack on the Doone Valley; and a climactic hand-to-hand battle with the villain, who has shot the heroine at the altar. The romance ends with life in place of death, love in place of threatened despair. Conventional as the surprise ending is, Lorna Doone achieves distinction through the rustic narrator's mingling of humor and lyricism, earthy detail and poetic description. His tone makes the book so unique that Blackmore could never give his readers another one like it.

Still, his later fiction can reward anyone interested in the rural past. The Maid of Sker (1872) treats life in southern Wales and northern Devon from the roguish point of view of a Welsh fisherman in the eighteenth century. Alice Lorraine (1875) anticipates Hardy's The Trumpet-Major (1880) with its scenes from the Napoleonic era; Blackmore returned to this period in Mary Anerley, one of his best books for characterization and humor, and again in Springhaven (1887), a full-scale historical novel which won inclusion in the Everyman's Library series. Three studies of village life reveal a talent comparable to Hardy's in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). These include Cripps, the Carrier (1876),set in the countryside around Oxford; Christowell (1881), set mainly upon Dartmoor; and Perlycross (1894), set in his father's parish of Culmstock in East Devon. Though flawed in plot, tone, and dialogue (for the genteel characters), these novels are rich in rustic character and tradition, in dialect and detailed observation of nature. As portrayals of village communities, they rank with Mary Anerley and Springhaven among the neglected achievements of "the author of Lorna Doone."