"The Farthing Poet", a Victorian individualist

Charles Dickens is known for the many remarkable characters in his novels, but among his large circle of acquaintances there was one person that he might have hesitated to create as fictional, best known as 'Orion Horne'.

Widely travelled, a poet, playwright, journalist and social reformer, unsuccessfully married, self- invented and enterprising, young Richard Henry Horne had left Sandhurst in 1820, aged just 18. Inspired by Shelley to become a poet in 1823, just two years later he sailed with the Mexican Navy and fought at Vera Cruz. Chambers' Dictionary describes this early career somewhat breathlessly:

"having survived yellow fever, sharks, broken ribs, shipwreck, mutiny and fire, he returned to England and took up writing."

Horne was known for his Spanish guitar playing, his cape and his theatrical whiskers and moustache, among his interconnecting circles of friends and colleagues in London.

Richard Henry Horne, c. 1840    Margaret Gillies*   © National Portrait Gallery London 

These poets, editors and publishers included Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and the Quaker writers William and Mary Howitt, William Macready the Drury Lane impresario, Charles Dickens (whom he met in Macready's dressing room) and Dickens' biographer John Forster.   

William and Mary Howitt,  miniature by Margaret Gillies 
© Nottingham City Museums and Galleries

Horne wrote for their new topical journals on many subjects and styles, often using exotic pseudonyms, through the 1830s, but his real ambition lay in his Jacobean-style verse dramas, (e.g. The Death of Marlowe, 1837).    He campaigned for a Society for English Literature and Art, to support "men of superior ability" against "the False Medium and Barriers excluding Men of Genius from the Public" and felt that "all departments of human genius and knowledge" should combine for the good of man.

In 1839 he began writing to Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) who contributed to his edition of Chaucer's Poems, Modernised.  This was published in 1841, when Horne was working in Wolverhampton as a government Assistant Commissioner reporting on child labour in mines and factories.  His detailed report  inspired Elizabeth Barrett to write The Cry of the Children in 1843.  He compares a rich child practising the piano, with a poor factory child striking a wrong key on a machine and losing its fingers, and reveals that when these neglected children pray "Our Father", they think that is the whole prayer.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Italy, 1858   Michele Giordiani

1843 also saw the publication of his major epic poem Orion, to general praise, and for which he is best known, as 'Orion Horne', partly through his own publicity.  It was to be sold for one farthing exactly, and only to those who pronounced its title correctly; this was his riposte to the public neglect of poetry.
He was also successful with his critical biographies (helped by Elizabeth Barrett), A New Spirit of the Age in 1844 and his popular children's book Memoirs of a London Doll in 1846.  Unwisely marrying  Kate Foggo in 1847, he began working on Dickens' new monthly journal Household Words in 1850. 

By 1852, abandoning his marriage, his old wanderlust and unsatisfied ambition sent him sailing to the Australian goldfields with fellow writer William Howitt, where he commanded Melbourne's Private Gold Escort in the outback.

One of many books written by Howitt, based on his and Horne's early years in the outback.

During a chequered career as writer and administrator,  he was ousted from his position as area magistrate in a controversy over illegal liquor sales, and in the 1860s produced a lyrical drama Prometheus, and other epic poems which he felt were unappreciated. Disillusioned, he sailed for England in 1869,  still writing poems, articles, plays and romances for periodicals, now under the name of Richard Hengist Horne, possibly (or not) appropriating the name from someone he met in the  outback. He survived on a government pension,  as "a literary doyen, producing many new works all artistically worthless"** until his death in 1884.

A chameleon figure in the Victorian literary world, he pioneered new styles and new ideas in his writing:  Dickens' symbolic dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend were partly inspired by one of Horne's articles.  But perhaps his greatest legacy was his detailed report for the Child Labour Commission in 1841, contributing to the 1847 Ten Hour Act and Lord Shaftesbury's successful campaigning.

The Cry of the Children 
" Do you hear the children weeping,…
For, all day, we drag our burden tiring
Through the coal-dark, underground --
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round,…"

E. Barrett Browning, 1843

*Margaret Gillies made a successful career for herself as a rare independent woman artist, known for her portraits of many public figures.  She was also one of Horne's friends, illustrating his children's  books.

 ** according to Ann Blainey, Horne's biographer: "The Farthing Poet," 1968