Martin Farquhar Tupper

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

He was the eldest son of Dr. Martin Tupper (1780–1844), a medical man highly esteemed in his day who came from an old Guernsey family, by his wife Ellin Devis Marris (d. 1847), only child of Robert Marris (1749–1827), a landscape painter (by his wife Frances, daughter of the artist Arthur Devis).

Martin Tupper received his early education at the Charterhouse. In due course of time he was transferred to Christ Church, Oxford where he took his degree of B.A. in 1832, of M.A. in 1835 and of DCL in 1847. At Christ Church, as a member of the Aristotle Class, he was a fellow student of many distinguished men, the Marquess of Dalhousie, the Earl of Elgin, William Ewart Gladstone and Francis Hastings Doyle.

Having taken his degree of M.A., Tupper became a student at Lincoln's Inn and was called to the Bar in the Michaelmas Term, 1835. He did not, however ever practice as a barrister. In the same year he married his first cousin once-removed Isabella Devis, daughter of Arthur William Devis, by whom he was to have four sons and four daughters. About the same period commenced Tupper's literary career. He contributed to the periodicals of the day, but his first important essay in literature was a small volume entitled Sacra Poesis.

In 1837 appeared the first series of Proverbial Philosophy, long series of didactic moralisings composed in a lawyer's chambers in Old Square, Lincoln's Inn, during part of the previous year. Tupper had been encouraged to publish them by Henry Stebbing. A typical example is: "Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech". His work met at first with moderate success in Britain, while in the United States it was almost a total failure. It slowly picked up steam, however, and within thirty years it had passed through forty large editions in Britain by 1867, while nearly a million copies were sold in the United States. His blank verse is just prose cut up into suitable lengths; but the Proverbial Philosophy contained apt and striking expressions and appealed to a large section of the public.

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