Thomas Miller (poet)

Thomas Miller (31 August 1807 – 24 October 1874) was a poet and novelist who explored rural subjects.

Miller was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, the son of George Miller, an unsuccessful wharfinger and ship-owner who deserted his wife and two sons in 1810. Thomas grew up in Sailors Alley, and one of his childhood friends was the future poet and journalist Thomas Cooper. He attended the White Hart Charity School. Although he left school at nine, he became a voracious reader. His love of the countryside was reinforced by summers spent on his grandfather's farm.

Miller found work as a ploughboy, then as a shoemaker’s apprentice, but was released from his indentures when he threw "an iron instrument" at his vicious and tyrannical master. He was then apprenticed as a basket-maker to his stepfather, and when he had done his time, moved to Nottingham in 1831 to set up his own basket-making business. There he published his own first writings Songs of the Sea Nymphs (1832), which he dedicated to Lady Blessington.

After moving to London he was befriended by Lady Blessington and by Samuel Rogers, and for a time engaged in business as a bookseller, but was unsuccessful and then devoted himself exclusively to literature, producing over 45 volumes, including novels, in which he successfully delineated rural characters and scenes. Among them were Royston Gower (1838), Gideon Giles the Roper, Rural Sketches and Pictures of Country Life, illustrated by Samuel Williams. He contributed a series to the run of penny dreadfuls entitled Mysteries of London, which depicted urban crime.

Although Miller attracted some patronage and some sums from the Royal Literary Fund, but he was often in financial need, and appealed directly to Charles Dickens for assistance in 1851. Dickens declined and wrote to his friend Bulwer Lytton of Miller; I fear he has mistaken his vocation.

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