Martin Farquhar Tupper - Legacy

Legacy

Tupper survives if at all as a second-rate, puffed up poet whose success was only possible in a literary market where "philistines" might be able to approve of his platitudes. However, he also survives as a worthy target for a better poet: Sir William Schwenk Gilbert in his Bab Ballads. In the poem Ferdinando and Elvira, or, The Gentle Pieman, Gilbert is describing how two lovers are trying to find out who has been putting mottos into "paper crackers" (a sort of 19th Century "fortune cookie"). Gilbert builds up to the following lines, eventually coming up with a spoof of Tupper's own style from Proverbial Philosophy:

"Tell me, Henry Wadsworth, Alfred, Poet Close, or Mister Tupper,

Do you write the bonbon mottoes my Elvira pulls at supper?"

"But Henry Wadsworth smiled, and said he had not had that honour;

And Alfred, too disclaimed the words that told so much upon her."

"Mister Martin Tupper, Poet Close, I beg of you inform us";

But my question seemed to throw them both into a rage enormous."

"Mister Close expressed a wish that he could only get anight to me.

And Mr. Martin Tupper sent the following reply to me:--"

"A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit."

Which I think must have been clever, for I didn't understand it."

The three other references are also recognizable (the Bab Ballad was from 1869 or so). They are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lord Tennyson (both still read and remembered) and "Poet" John Close, a well-meaning scribbler of the mid-Victorian period who wrote hackwork to honor local events (some samples are in the classic volume of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl, as is a good sample of Tupper's own work).

He was also one of the worthies mentioned in the "Heavy Dragoon" song in Gilbert's libretto for the Savoy Opera "Patience"::"Tupper and Tennyson, Daniel Defoe"

In Anthony Trollope's "The Eustace Diamonds", Lucy Morris attempts to read "Tupper's great poem" out of boredom when she's first at Lady Linlithgow's house.

Karl Marx likens Tupper's style of poetry to the appeal of Utilitarianism. In Das Kapital, he writes, "Bentham is among the philosophers what Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England."

Edmund Clerihew Bentley wrote flippantly: "Martin Tupper / Sang for his supper. / Though the supper wasn't nice, / It was cheap at the price."

G.K. Chesterton also mentions him in The Man Who Was Thursday.

In the video game, Alice: The Madness Returns, Alice retrieves a memory of her mother stating, "Whoever said "There is no book so bad, but something good may be found in it" never read Martain Farquar Tupper's Proverbial Phiosophy."