Jean Ingelow (1820-97)



English poet and writer, born on 17 March 1820 in the small seaport of Boston, England. She is also a writer of stories for children and her best-known fairy tale is Mopsa the Fairy (1869).

Her family moved to Ipswich because of financial difficulties in 1834, and she began to compose poems. In the early 1840’s she became acquainted with Edward Harston, who stimulated her into poetical writing and later edited her book. In 1850 her family relocated to London, again for monetary reasons, and she published anonymously her first book, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings (1850), in the burgeoning Victorian literary circles.

Her most admired volume, Poems, was published in 1863. The literary ballad “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571” included in Poems shows her effective depiction of nature, especially the river and sea, to express her lifetime thematic concern, love. (M. I.)

1.The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571
2.Winstanley