Henry Chorley

Henry Fothergill Chorley (15 December 1808 – 16 February 1872) was an English literary, art and music critic, writer and editor. He was also an author of novels, drama, poetry and lyrics.

Chorley was a prolific and important music and literary critic and music gossip columnist of the mid-nineteenth century and wrote extensively about music in London and in Europe. His opera libretti and works of fiction were far less successful. He is perhaps best remembered today for his lyrics to "The Long Day Closes", a part song set by Arthur Sullivan in 1868.

Chorley was born in Blackley Hurst, near Billinge, Lancashire, England. Chorley was the youngest of four children of Quaker parents, John Chorley (1771–1816), an iron worker and lock maker, and Jane Chorley, née Wilkinson (1779–1851). Chorley's father died, leaving his mother alone with young children. Jane Chorley moved her family to Liverpool to help take care of her half-brother, Dr Rutter, when he became ill. Chorley was educated by private tutors in Liverpool and then the school of the Royal Institution. His youth was shaped partly by spending time in the household of the wealthy and intellectual Mrs Benson Rathbone of Green Bank, and he became a close friend of her son Benson, who died in an accident in 1834.

He began working in merchants' offices, hoping to become a musician, but his uncle discouraged that as an impractical ambition. However, Chorley soon took to musical and literary criticism. He began to write for the Athenaeum in 1830 and remained its music and literature critic until 1868. While there, he reviewed approximately 2,500 books and wrote reviews and musical gossip columns discussing composers and performers in Britain and on the European continent. In this position, he had much influence. He had strongly conservative views and was a persistent opponent of innovation, but was a lively chronicler of London life. In 1850 and 1851, Chorley edited the Ladies' Companion, which covered fashion and domestic women's issues. In the Athenaeum and elsewhere, Chorley often criticised the music of Schumann and Wagner for what he called "decadence".

In addition to criticism for journals, Chorley wrote voluminously on literature and art. His non-fiction books were widely read and included Music and Manners in France and Germany (1841), which includes a detailed description of contemporary opera in Paris and Felix Mendelssohn's career in Leipzig, Germany. He expanded the German section of this book and published it 1854 as Modern German Music. His masterpiece was Thirty Years' Musical Recollections (1862), which covers, year-by-year, the opera seasons of European operas in London between 1830 and 1859. In the work, he blames the autocratic manager of Her Majesty's Theatre, Benjamin Lumley, for a decline in the quality of performances there. On the other hand, he praises the efforts of Giulia Grisi, Mario and Michael Costa, together with a group of journalists (including himself), for successfully creating the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden in 1847. He also wrote the well-received Memorials of Mrs. Hemans (1836), Handel Studies (1859), an annotated edition Mary Russell Mitford's letters (2 vols., 1872) and The National Music of the World (1882).

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