The Ingoldsby Legends or Mirth and Marvels - Illustrated by Arthur Rackham

by Thomas Ingoldsby

This book forms part of our 'Pook Press' imprint, celebrating the golden age of illustration in children's literature. 'The Ingoldsby Legends' are a true classic of Children's literature. They were penned by Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845), better known by his nom de plume, Thomas Ingoldsby. The stories were inspired by real legends and old mythology, mostly deliberately humorous parodies and pastiches of medieval folklore and poetry. This collection also includes several poems by the author, including 'The Poplar', 'Marie Mignot' and 'The Truants.' The text is accompanied by a series of dazzling colour illustrations by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). One of the most celebrated painters of the British Golden Age of Illustration, which encompassed the years from 1900 until the start of the first world war, Rackham's artistry still delights both young and old over a century later. Presented alongside the text, his illustrations further refine Ingoldsby's masterful storytelling.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, Collections, Horror, Victorian

586 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1840

About the author

Thomas Ingoldsby was the pen-name of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham. Barham was an English cleric of the Church of England, novelist, and humorous poet. His Life and Letters and a miscellany of his poems, The Ingoldsby Lyrics, were posthumously edited by his son Richard Harris Dalton Barham.

Reviews

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this author after wanting to read The Spectre of Tappington from listening to an Old Time Radio version of this story. Thomas Ingoldsby is the pen name for English Clergyman, Richard Harris Barham, who had plenty of time on his hands to write. The Ingoldsby Legends are a collection of myths, legends and ghost stories. I will post the stories under the title and come back to this book to read. There are illustrations that are quite good and despite a couple typos that I reported, it read well.

[Marc Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM (1788-1845) l
By Arthur Symons
The Rev. Richard Harris Barham was a great creator of nonsense, and he had a prodigious faculty for versifying. He wrote entirely for his own amusement; or, as a friend said of him: 'The same relaxation which some men seek in music, pictures, cards, or newspapers, he sought in verse.' Most of his rhymes were written down at odd moments, often after midnight, and with a facility, his son tells us,' which not only surprised himself, but which he actually viewed with distrust ; and he would not unfrequently lay down his pen, from an apprehension that what was so fluent must of necessity be feeble.' In all this helter-skelter of ' mirth and marvels,' begun for Bentley's 'Miscellany' in 1837, when he was nearly fifty years of age, there is nothing feeble in all the fluency. No verse that has been written in English goes so fast or turns so many somersaults on the way. He said once, of a poem which he did not care for,' that the only chance to make it effective was to strike out something newish in the stanza, to make people stare.' If that was ever his aim, he attained it, and not in his rhymes only. The rhymes are marvellous, and if they are not the strictest, have the most spontaneous sound of any in English. The clatter of ' atmosphere' and ' that must fear,'
the gabble of —'And so like a dragon he Looked in his agony,' with even the more elaborately manufactured twisting domestic and foreign necks all over Christendom,'
have so easy a jingle as they go galloping over the page, that we are hardly conscious how artificial they really are. With the rhymes go rhythms, so bold, swift, and irreverent, and with pauses so alarming that one is never able, if one has read them as a child, to get out of one's head the solemn thrill of —'Open lock To the Deadman's knock!' or the ghastly gaiety in the sound of
' Hairy-faced Dick at once lets fly, And knocks off the head of young Hamilton Tighe.'
Under all the extravagance, like a light through a lantern, there is meaning, let wildly loose, but with something macabre, grim, ghastly, above all haunted, in it. Barham's material came to him partly out of old books, which he read to catch from them a harsh Protestant laughter against Catholics; but for the better part from legends which he found in his own neighbourhood. A scholar revels throughout these unclerical rhymes, .drawing wicked and harmless imps out of book and bottle as he pores, past midnight, over his black-letter folios and his port. And so we find, in these poems made up of fear, fun, and suspense, a kind of burlesque which is not quite like any other, so jolly is it as it fumbles with death, murder, tortures, and terrors of the mind. Here is burlesque of that excessive kind which foreigners see in the tragic laughing white clown in the arena, with his touch of mortal colour in the cheeks. And it is full of queer ornament, as in this interior of Bluebeard's castle, furnistad as if by Beardsley: —'It boasts not stool, table, or chair,Bloudie Jacke !But one Cabinet, costly and grand, Which has little gold figures Of little gold niggers, With fishing-rods stuck in each hand; It's japanned, And it's placed on a splendid buhl stand.' Was there ever a gayer and ghastlier farce than in this very poem, ' Bloudie Jacke of Shrewsberrie,' which goes to the jingling of bells, in a metre invented as if to fit into an interval between Poe and Browning? To be so successfully vulgar in ' Misadventures at Margate' is to challenge the lesser feats of Hood, and the prose of a narrative like' The Leech of Folkestone ' (part of what the writer called ' prose material to serve as sewing-silk and buckram') is, for all its oddity, almost as chilling to the blood as Sheridan Lefanu's in his book of vampires, 'In a Glass Darkly.' But where Barham is most himself, and wonderful in his way, is in the cascading of cadences rhymed after this fashion: —'There's Setebos, storming because Mephistopheles
Gave Mm the lie, Said he'd " blacken his eye," And dashed in his face a whole cup of hot coffee-lees.' Not Butler nor Byron nor Browning, the three best makers of comic rhyme, has ever shown so supreme an inventiveness in the art.

[Paul Cowdell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this through interests both in the legends of Richard Harris Barham's part of the world (Kent) and in the adaptive use of traditional folklore for literary ends. There's actually not so much of the latter as I'd hoped, but the creation of the Ingoldsby family narrator/s as a vehicle for Barham (an extremely witty and learned churchman) is itself an interesting approach, and he owes much more to the 18th century antiquarian traditions than to the emerging folklore investigations of his own day.

Barham's great facility was in impeccable if convoluted rhyming, and his writing is explicitly conceived of as diversionary entertainment. I don't really recommend trying to read this through cover to cover, because it's not that sort of writing, but if you're in the right mood it's a cheerfully distracting collection to dip into. I suspect one reason he's invoked only vaguely as having something to do with Kent legends & folklore is that readers these days probably don't get very far into the book before realising it's not what they'd hoped it might be in that regard.

That said, Barham definitely did shape the first two series of the Legends as coherent collections. (The third series, assembled posthumously from his remaining writings, is far less successful). The first series particularly fair romps along (including some brilliantly funny footnotes), and probably can be read through in its entirety before the sensation begins to pall a bit.

The further into the Legends you get, though, the greater the likelihood that the unrelenting flash of Barham's performance will begin to wear you down: some of the stories outstay their welcome thanks to that relentlessness, and begin to feel more strained in their efforts to amuse you. That may also be compounded by his high church moralising, which makes the continued anti-Semitism (escalating noticeably in the second series) even less palatable than it would have been ordinarily. That's not the only throwaway racism for the entertainment of upper class dinner guests on offer here, and it's tiresome to say the least. But at their best (especially in series one) Barham's outrageous rhyming (I particularly liked 'indigenous/pigeon-house') is genuinely successful in its smart but good-humoured glee.

[Estott · Rating 3 out of 5]

My reading edition was published in 1866, and is well read. I can see the appeal of this back in the 19th C. - back in the days when there were comparatively few books that a young person might get their hands on which were not dull and educational or dull and moralizing this must have been a delight. A bit of the supernatural, some jests, and a touch of satire- this must have made many a dull afternoon pass a bit faster. Many British readers recalled this fondly well into the mid 20th C. It is still entertaining, the main obstacle being the language (early 19th C. prose with an archaic touch) and the slightly drawn out nature of the stories - and the poems> let's not forget the poems, our ancestors were a great deal more tolerant of it than we are, and they didn't mind length- if you were enjoying something you wanted more of it. If given a careful bit of editing this could still get a laugh- especially the poor man who wakes up each morning to find that yet another pair of his pants has unaccountably vanished...

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

These legends contain the fantastic boasts,
of ordinary folk, saints, demons, and ghosts,
and should be read with careful eye,
by those seeking a peculiar lullaby—
or anyone also who did wonder or muse,
what if Washington Irving wrote like Dr. Seuss?

[Octavia Cade · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand from Wikipedia that the stories and various narratives collected here are based off Kentish legends, and they do have the feel of old stories retold, a lot of them. Most of the retellings are done in poetry form, but there are quite a few short stories interspersed. What the author, taking on the mantle of a member of the Ingoldsby family (which supposedly supplies bit players for most of the legends) does is retell these stories fairly tongue-in-cheek. His morals, especially (he likes to end his poems with morals) are particularly snarky, and were often the most entertaining part. Still, it took me ages to wade through. There's a lot of characters in here who get a (literal) boot up the arse, and did I ever want to give one to Ingoldsby, along with a hearty "Get on with it!" There's just so much waffle - he goes off on tangents, and they're lengthy and often repetitive, and because all his poetry is rhyming it often has to be massaged very heavily to fit, which can be awkward. Honestly, I'm interested in the legends (well, some of them) but I think I'd rather read a straight prose retelling. He's not funny enough to be this long-winded.

[Sheila]

This is my copy of The Ingoldsby Legends, picked up at a local garage sale for 50 cents. At some point I'll have to snag a copy to read, but this is an 1890 edition of the book and the pages are delicate, to say the least, so I won't be reading this one. It's a beautiful little book, though. I'm quite proud of it.

[Lisa of Troy]

Unannotated Book in F. Scott Fitzgerald's College of One

[Greg S · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a slow read.


“It was Miss Simpkinson, who, deeply engaged in sipping her tea and turning over her album, seemed, like a female Chrononotonthologos, 'immersed in cogibundity of cogitation.”

Several of the metaphors are specific to the culture at the time. Several mentions of details pertaining to London.

[Nathan Dehoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

My wife came across a reference to this work in something she was reading, and said it sounded up my alley. Ingoldsby is actually a pseudonym, the real author being the English priest Richard Harris Barham. It's a collection of poetry largely based on medieval legends, many involving ghosts and saints. I quite liked Barham's style, which brought a lot of wordplay and meta-humor into the poetic scheme, including multilingual rhymes that were admitted to not quite rhyme.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book only because H. Rider Haggard's hero, Allan Quatermain (King Solomon's Mines, etc.) always mentions this book. I really enjoyed this book. A combination of poems and short stories, most of which are humorous.

[Signor Mambrino]

Boring garbage

[Bee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read:

Jerry Jarvis's Wig - 3/5

[Michael Vawser]

USD8.96 on Biblio.com
Published by Thomas Nelson and sons after 1860 when name changed

[Sheri-lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some charming moments of comedy mixed in with the grotesque here. The timing of my reading of these poems is rather opportune -- being so close to Halloween. Ghosts, conjurings, etc.

A wee too much metre and rhyming all at once. A fair amount of moralizing too.

It was also interesting to see how he often used "Jew" for a rhyme and almost always in a derogatory way. By 'interesting', I mean bizarre that it was completely normal to use it in this way. I'll never quite understand how people can do that.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collections of tales told through rhymes and rhythms that shouldn't work but for some reason do. Barham's tales are vivid and descriptive while his words flow across the page with relative ease. Although I'm not one for poetry this was quite an interesting and enjoyable collection that focused more on telling the tale vividly than worrying about the formation of the stanza or the accuracy of the rhyme.

[Voracious · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've really only tasted a smattering of the stories and verses in this collection, but they are fun. As they were written in the 1840s, the style is circuitous indeed, but there are good tales here. Would be an excellent volume to keep in the car for those stretches of waiting so frequently involved in chauffeuring kids to activities.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicholas Murchie and Lucy Robinson read from a collection of myths, legends, ghost stories and poetry supposedly written by Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Manor, but actually penned by the Rev Richard Barham, first published in book form in 1840.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

An undeservedly forgotten book; Barham was a master at the comic ghost story. http://gothictexts.wordpress.com/ <--- Has an excellent copy available, along with a few other texts I'd strongly recommend.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the worst Victorian poetry I've ever seen.