An 1880 portrait of William Allingham by his wife Helen (Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware
Library)
William Allingham (March 19, 1824 or 1828 - November 18, 1889) was an
Irish man of letters and poet.
He was born at Ballyshannon, Donegal, and was
the son of the manager of a local bank who was of English descent. He obtained a post in the custom-house of his native town and held several similar posts in Ireland and England until 1870, when he
had retired from the service, and became sub-editor of Fraser's Magazine, which
he edited from 1874 to 1879, in succession to James Froude. He had published a
volume of Poems in 1850, followed by Day and Night Songs, a volume containing many charming lyrics, in 1855.
Allingham was on terms of close friendship with DG Rossetti, who contributed to
the illustration of the Songs. His Letters to Allingham (1854-1870) were edited by Dr Birkbeck Hill in 1897. Lawrence Bloomfield in Ireland, his most ambitious, though
not his most successful work, a narrative poem illustrative of Irish social questions, appeared in 1864. He also edited The
Ballad Book for the Golden Treasury series in 1864.
In 1874 Allingham married Helen Paterson, known under
her married name as a water-colour painter. He died at Hampstead in 1889, and his ashes are
interred at St. Anne's in his native Ballyshannon.
Though working on an unostentatious scale, Allingham produced much excellent lyrical and descriptive poetry, and the best of
his pieces are thoroughly national in spirit and local colouring. His verse is clear, fresh, and graceful.
Other works are Fifty Modern Poems (1865), Songs, Poems, and Ballads
(1877), Evil May Day (1883), Blackberries
(1884), Irish Songs and Poems (1887), and Varieties in
Prose (1893), and, arguably his wost famouse work, "The Faeries" .
William Allingham: a Diary (1907), edited by Mrs Allingham and D Radford, contains many interesting reminiscences of
Tennyson, Carlyle and other
famous contemporaries.
The Ulster poet John Harold Hewitt felt Allingham's influence keenly, and his
attempts to revive his reputation included editing and writing an introduction to The Poems of William Allingham (Oxford
University Press/ Dolmen Press, 1967).
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