Author: Hake, Thomas Gordon
Biography:
HAKE, Thomas Gordon (1809-95: ODNB)
He had a significant career as a Victorian poet closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites but his first collection dates from 1828 when he was studying to be a doctor at Lewes, Sussex. He was born in Leeds on 10 Mar. 1809 but grew up in Devon, the son of Thomas Bedford Hake and his wife Augusta Maria Gordon, who had married in Exeter on 26 Aug. 1805. His father died when he was three. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and studied first with a doctor at Lewes, then at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities; he earned his medical degree at Glasgow in 1831. His Stuttgart collection dates from a period of European travel but from 1833 to 1838 he practised at the dispensary in Brighton, where he married Lucy Bush (1813-55) on 3 Oct. 1837. They had seven children. After a further year's study in Paris 1838-9, he settled at Bury St. Edmunds and began publishing medical papers and mystical literary works (Piromides, a tragedy, 1839; Vates, a "philosophical" romance later reissued as Valdarno, 1840). In 1853 he and his wife travelled to the US, where she died. On his return he moved to Roehampton and later to London, reduced his medical work, and began to spend more time writing poetry and prose fiction. The first of a series of verse collections, The World's Epitaph, appeared in 1866, and the last, The New Day, in 1890. His autobiography, Memoirs of Eighty Years, was published in 1892. In 1869 he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and became not only his medical adviser but also a close friend: it was in Hake's house in Roehampton that Rossetti took an almost fatal overdose in 1872. Rossetti reviewed two of Hake's collections, Madeline (1871) and Parables and Tales (1872), and made a fine crayon portrait of him in 1872. Alice Meynell edited a selection of his work in 1894. He died on 11 Jan. 1895 at his brother's house in London and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. (ODNB 21 Dec. 2021; rossettiarchive.org 21 Dec. 2021; findmypast.com 21 Dec. 2021)
Other Names:
- T. Gordon Hake