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R. D. Blackmore

Richard Doddridge Blackmore (1825–1900) did not consider himself a writer. He lived for most of his life in the then rural London suburb of Teddington as a market gardener, famous throughout the south-east of England as an authority on certain varieties of fruit. Times were hard, however, particularly for someone who lavished an uneconomical amount of time on horticultural research: and although he had dabbled in a bit of poetry before, Blackmore turned to writing seriously to supplement the meagre income he made from selling fruit.

He was a tall man, with a large muscular frame; but for reasons which are now not known, he was advised in 1854 to pursue an active outdoor career (he had previously tried being a lawyer and a teacher) or else risk dying young. Perhaps it was this necessity which made him regard the sedentary life of a writer as secondary to his life as a horticulturalist; and perhaps he was just being modest. At any rate, when a Teddington bookshop advertised one of his books as by a ‘local author’, he politely asked them to take the notice down; and even few of his neighbours knew that he was a famous writer.

Although he wrote a number of novels, the one which has survived to become an undoubted classic is Lorna Doone. First published in 1869, it was hardly noticed at first. But by a freak historical accident, the Marquis of Lorne at that time became a son-in-law to Queen Victoria; the book came to people’s attention because of the entirely coincidental similarity of name. The thrilling adventure story, filled with romance and drama, and set in countryside which Blackmore knew well from his school days in Devon, has won countless admirers ever since.

A visitor to Blackmore in his old age remarked of his passion for his fruit and flowers, ‘God has given him no other children’. With the book’s popularity, however, the name Lorna, which he had invented, caught on and Blackmore kept in his drawing-room a collection of portraits of children named after his heroine.