| Admin History | Richard Doddridge Blackmore (1825-1900) was a novelist, poet and fruit farmer, born on 7 June 1825 at the vicarage in Longworth, Berkshire. Following the death of his mother, much of his early childhood was spent at the home of his maternal grandmother and uncles at Newton Nottage, Glamorgan, on the north shore of the Bristol Channel. His father moved back to King's Nympton in his native Devon in 1832. Blackmore also used to visit his paternal grandfather, the Revd John Blackmore (17641842), who lived at Combe Martin, in north-west Devon, but held another cure at Oare on the north edge of Exmoor. All these remote and beautiful places were later to feature largely in his fiction. Blackmore lived with epilepsy. In August 1837, he went to Blundell's School in Tiverton, Devon, where his father had been before him, and where he himself was to send John Ridd, the hero of his most famous novel. He became head boy of the school, and gained a school scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he went at the end of 1843. He graduated with a second-class degree in classics in 1847, and after a short time as a tutor decided to study law; he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in June 1852, and is said to have practised as a conveyancer for some years.
On 8 November 1853, at Holy Trinity Church, Gray's Inn Road in London, without the knowledge or approval of his family, Blackmore married Lucy Maguire or McGuire (1822?1888) of Guernsey, who was a Roman Catholic born in Dublin. The marriage proved happy and they had no children. Lucy Blackmore became a member of the Church of England, and friendly relations between the couple and the Revd John Blackmore had been established before the latter's death in 1858. Religious and social barriers between lovers were to be a frequent motif in Blackmore's fiction, notably in 'Lorna Doone'. By 1855, Black had left his career as a lawyer, and worked first as a teacher and then as a fruit farmer in Teddington, which remained his main occupation for the rest of his life. He became an accepted authority on fruit growing, contributing articles on the subject to several reference books, and from 1883 until 1892 he served on the fruit and vegetable committee of the Royal Horticultural Society.
Blackmore's earliest publications were all verse: two volumes under the pseudonym Melanter. None of them caught the public attention, and even when he did turn to publishing prose fiction, he had no success for some years. For his third novel, 'Lorna Doone', begun in February 1865, Blackmore drew on legends and tales circulating in Devon and Somerset associated with the area of north-east Exmoor which he knew from his childhood visits to his Blackmore grandfather, and set his novel in the late seventeenth century. The first edition of the book did not sell particularly well, but the one-volume low-cost edition of 1870 became a best-seller. None of Blackmore's other novels ever approached the aesthetic or commercial success of 'Lorna Doone', but his next novel, 'The Maid of Sker' (3 vols., 1872), was his own favourite. Blackmore's novel 'Alice Lorraine: a Tale of the South Downs' (3 vols., 1875) was so badly reviewed he briefly resolved to abandon novel writing, but a steady stream of novels continued to flow from his pen, and although they never made as much money for him or their publishers as 'Lorna Doone' had, he was able to place them as serials and obtain good prices.After the death of his wife Lucy in 1888, Blackmore seldom moved far from home. He died of abdominal cancer on 20 January 1900 and was buried at Teddington cemetery.
Source: Charlotte Mitchell (2005), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography |