Thomas Hood - Marriage and Family Life

Marriage and Family Life

He was married in May 1824, and Odes and Addresses—his first work—was written in conjunction with his brother-in-law J.H. Reynolds, a friend of John Keats. S. T. Coleridge wrote to Charles Lamb averring that the book must be his work. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827) and a dramatic romance, Lamia, published later, belong to this time. The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies was a volume of serious verse. But he was known as a humorist, and the public rejected this little book almost entirely.

Hood was particularly fond of practical jokes which he was said to have enjoyed perpetrating on members of his family. In the Memorials of Thomas Hood, which was largely written by his daughter, there is a story of Hood playing one such joke on his wife. He instructs Mrs. Hood to purchase some fish for the evening meal from the woman who regularly comes to the door selling her husband’s catch. But he warns her to watch for any plaice that “has any appearance of red or orange spots, as they are a sure sign of an advanced stage of decomposition.” Of course when the fish-seller comes Mrs. Hood refuses to purchase her plaice she exclaims “My good woman… I could not think of buying any plaice with those very unpleasant red spots!” Hood was much amused by the fish-sellers expression of amazement at complete ignorance of the appearance of plaice.

The series of the Comic Annual, dating from 1830, was a kind of publication at that time popular, which Hood undertook and continued, almost unassisted, for several years. Under that somewhat frivolous title he treated all the leading events of the day in caricature, without personal malice, and with an under-current of sympathy. The attention of the reader was distracted, by the incessant use of puns, of which Hood had written in his own vindication:

"However critics may take offence,
A double meaning has double sense."

He was probably aware of this danger. As he gained experience as a writer, his diction became simpler.