Martin Farquhar Tupper

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Martin Farquhar Tupper (July 17, 1810 in London - November 1889 in Albury, Surrey) was an English writer, and poet, and the author of Proverbial Philosophy.

He was the son of Martin Tupper, a doctor, who came of an old Huguenot family. He was educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a prize for a theological essay, Gladstone being second to him. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, but never practised.

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a critical essay from 1850 about Farquhar's "Proverbial Philosophy."

He began a long career of authorship in 1832 with Sacra Poesis; in 1838 he published Geraldine, and other poems, and for fifty years was fertile in producing both verse and prose; but his name is indissolubly connected with his long series of didactic moralisings in blank verse, the Proverbial Philosophy (1838-1867), which for about twenty-five years enjoyed an extraordinary popularity that has ever since been the cause of persistent satire.

The first part was, however, a comparative failure, and N. P. Willis, the American author, took it to be a forgotten work of the 17th century. The commonplace character of Tupper's reflections is indubitable, and his blank verse is only prose cut up into suitable lengths; but the Proverbial Philosophy was full of a perfectly genuine moral and religious feeling, and contained many apt and striking expressions. By these qualities it appealed to a large and uncritical section of the public. A genial, warm-hearted man, Tupper's humane instincts prompted him to espouse many reforming movements; he was an early supporter of the Volunteer movement, and did much to promote good relations with America. He was also a mechanical inventor in a small way. In 1886 he published My Life as an Author.

At the end of his life he vanished in obscurity, nowadays his work is forgotten. Despite the words on his death stone: "Although he is dead, he will speak."