23 Facts About Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood was an English poet, author and humorist, best known for poems such as "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt".

Thomas Hood later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works.

Thomas Hood was the father of the playwright and humorist Tom Thomas Hood and the children's writer Frances Freeling Broderip.

Thomas Hood was born to Thomas Hood and Elizabeth Sands in Poultry, London, above his father's bookshop.

The elder Thomas Hood was a partner in the business of Vernor, Thomas Hood and Sharp, a member of the Associated Booksellers.

The labour of engraving was no better for his health than the counting house had been, and Thomas Hood was sent to his father's relations at Dundee, Scotland.

In Dundee, Thomas Hood made a number of close friends with whom he continued to correspond for many years.

Thomas Hood led a healthy outdoor life, but became a wide and indiscriminate reader.

In 1821, John Scott, editor of The London Magazine, was killed in a duel, and the periodical passed into the hands of some friends of Thomas Hood, who proposed to make him sub-editor.

Thomas Hood gradually developed his powers by becoming an associate of John Hamilton Reynolds, Charles Lamb, Henry Cary, Thomas de Quincey, Allan Cunningham, Bryan Procter, Serjeant Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, the peasant-poet John Clare, and other contributors.

The Plea was a book of serious verse, but Thomas Hood was known as a humorist and the book was ignored almost entirely.

Thomas Hood was fond of practical jokes, which he was said to have enjoyed inflicting on members of his family.

The series of the Comic Annual, dating from 1830, was a type of publication popular at the time, which Thomas Hood undertook and continued almost unassisted for several years.

Thomas Hood would cover all the leading events of the day in caricature, without personal malice, and with an undercurrent of sympathy.

Thomas Hood started a magazine in his own name, mainly sustained by his own activity.

Thomas Hood did the work from a sick-bed from which he never rose, and there composed well-known poems such as "The Song of the Shirt", which appeared anonymously in the Christmas number of Punch, 1843 and was immediately reprinted in The Times and other newspapers across Europe.

Thomas Hood was associated with the Athenaeum, started in 1828 by James Silk Buckingham, and was a regular contributor to it for the rest of his life.

The pension that Peel's government bestowed on Thomas Hood was continued to his wife and family after his death.

Jane Thomas Hood, who suffered from poor health, had put tremendous energy into tending her husband in his last year and died only 18 months later.

The house where Thomas Hood died, No 28 Finchley Road, St John's Wood, now has a blue plaque.

Thomas Hood's best known work in his lifetime was "The Song of the Shirt", a verse lament for a London seamstress compelled to sell shirts she had made, the proceeds of which lawfully belonged to her employer, in order to feed her malnourished and ailing child.

Thomas Hood's poem appeared in one of the first editions of Punch in 1843 and quickly became a public sensation, being turned into a popular song and inspiring social activists in defence of countless industrious labouring women living in abject poverty.

The list of Thomas Hood's separately published works is as follows:.