Samuel Carter Hall
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Samuel Carter Hall (May 9, 1800 - March 11, 1889), Irish journalist, was born at Waterford, the son of an army officer.
In 1821 he went to London, and in 1823 became a parliamentary reporter. He studied law in 1824, though he never practised. From 1826 to 1837 he was editor of a great number and variety of public prints, and in 1839 he founded and edited The Art Union, shortly renamed The Art Journal. His exposure of the trade in bogus Old Masters earned for this publication a considerable reputation. His intention was to support modern British art by promoting young artists and attacking the market for unreliable old masters. The early issues of the Journal strongly supported the artists of The Clique and attacked the Pre-Raphaelites. Hall remained deeply unsympathetic to Pre-Raphaeliism, publishing several attacks upon the movement. Hall resigned the editorship in 1880, and was granted a Civil List pension for his long and valuable services to literature and art.
His wife, Anna Maria Fielding (1800-1881), became well known as Mrs S.C. Hall, for her numerous articles, novels, sketches of Irish life, and plays. Two of the last, The Groves of Blarney and The French Refugee, were produced in London with success. She also wrote a number of children's books, and was practically interested in various London charities, several of which she helped to found.
Hall's notoriously sanctimonious personality was often satirised, and he is regularly cited as the model for the character of Pecksniff in Charles Dickens's novel Martin Chuzzlewit.[1] As Julian Hawthorne wrote,
Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and voluble sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to appear before the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an ingenuous hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously were the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than acquired. Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the character; there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private contemplation as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed himself before others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the letter, and thus escaped his own recognition. His indecency and falsehood were in his soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he paraded them at the very moment that he was claiming for himself all that was their opposite.[2].
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- The Book of British Ballads (1842)
- The Gallery of Modern Sculpture (1849-54)
- Memoirs of Great Men and Women... from Personal Acquaintance (1871)
- The Trial of Sir Jasper: A Temperance Tale in Verse (1873)
- An Old Story: A Temperance Tale in Verse (1875)
- A Memoir of Thomas Moore (1879)
- Rhymes in Council; Aphorisms Versified (1881)
- Retrospect of a Long Life, from 1815 to 1883 (1883)
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.