William Ernest Henley

William Ernest Henley: Unbowed, and Largely Unread

On Robben Island, Nelson Mandela recited sixteen lines of Victorian verse to fellow prisoners, finding in them an expression of self-mastery. The lines were written around 1875 by a man in his mid-twenties lying in an Edinburgh hospital, one leg already gone below the knee, waiting to learn whether surgeons would take the other foot as well. "Invictus" is now among the most quoted poems in English. Its author is among the least read poets who wrote one.

Gloucester

He was born on 23 August 1849 in Gloucester, the eldest of six children of William Henley, a bookseller and stationer, and Mary Morgan, who was descended from the poet Joseph Warton. His father died in 1868.

From 1861 to 1867 he attended the Crypt School in Gloucester, which he found disappointing, redeemed entirely by its headmaster, the Manx poet Thomas Edward Brown. Henley's verdict on Brown is worth quoting because of how rarely he handed out such things: "a man of genius — the first I'd ever seen."

The Bone Disease

From the age of twelve he had tuberculosis of the bone. Around 1868–69 his left leg was amputated below the knee. Some years later the disease reached his right foot, and the surgeons proposed to take that too.

He refused. Instead, in August 1873, he took himself to Edinburgh's Royal Infirmary to be treated by Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery — a decision made on little more than conviction. He stayed in that hospital for three years. Lister saved the foot. Everything Henley subsequently did, he did on the strength of that gamble.

Three Years in a Ward

The hospital produced the work that actually matters. The *In Hospital* sequence, composed between 1873 and 1875, is a set of unrhymed, irregular poems observing the ward from inside it: the surgeon, the nurses, the other patients, the waiting, the smell of the place. Written in free verse decades before free verse was a movement, and taking as its material a subject Victorian poetry considered unfit, it anticipates modern poetry in both form and content. It is the most genuinely radical thing Henley ever did, and almost nobody reads it.

"Invictus" came out of the same bed, written around 1875. It waited more than a decade for print, appearing in his *A Book of Verses* — sources date the collection variously to 1888 and 1891. Later collections followed: *The Song of the Sword* (1892), retitled *London Voluntaries* (1893), and the valedictory *Hawthorn and Lavender* (1901). "Pro Rege Nostro" became a patriotic standard during the First World War, long after his death.

Long John Silver

Among the visitors to his ward were Leslie Stephen and a consumptive young Scot named Robert Louis Stevenson. The friendship that started there lasted fifteen years and produced four collaborative plays, among them *Deacon Brodie*, *Beau Austin* and *Admiral Guinea*. It also produced a character. Stevenson admitted the debt outright: Henley's "maimed strength and masterfulness" became Long John Silver, and "the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you."

Contemporaries describe him in terms usually reserved for weather. Stevenson's stepson Lloyd Osbourne remembered "a great, glowing, massive-shouldered fellow with a big red beard and a crutch; jovial, astoundingly clever." The journalist Sidney Low saw "the startling image of Pan come to Earth… with halting foot and flaming shaggy hair, and arms and shoulders huge and threatening."

The friendship broke in 1888, when Henley accused Stevenson's wife Fanny of plagiarising a story by her husband's cousin Katharine de Mattos. Mutual friends restored a thin correspondence; neither man recovered from the rupture.

The Editor

Henley's real power in late-Victorian letters was exercised from an editor's chair, and it was considerable — his influence has been compared to Samuel Johnson's a century before. He ran *The London Magazine* (1877–78), the *Magazine of Art* (1882–86), the *Scots Observer*, later the *National Observer* (1889–93), and the *Tudor Translations* series until his death.

What he did with those platforms was find people. Rudyard Kipling's *Barrack-Room Ballads* ran in his pages in 1890–92. He published and pushed W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells and J. M. Barrie. His circle, half-mockingly called the "Henley Regatta," championed realism and attacked Decadence — which in the 1890s meant setting himself against the prevailing avant-garde. He also wrote criticism (*Views and Reviews*, 1890) and co-edited *Slang and its Analogues* with John Stephen Farmer, later translating Villon's ballades into thieves' cant.

His journal, in the phrase of one account, "found utterance for the growing imperialism of its day." Not everyone was charmed. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt found him repellent both physically and ideologically, and condemned his "deification of brute strength and courage."

Wendy

He married Hannah Johnson Boyle — Anna — on 22 January 1878. Their only child, Margaret Emma, was born in 1888, a sickly girl who died in 1894 aged five. She had called J. M. Barrie, a family friend, her "fwendy-wendy," which is how Peter Pan's heroine got her name in 1904. Henley never recovered. Stevenson, from across the world and across their quarrel, wrote to him: "There is one thing I always envied you, and that I envy you still."

Why William Is Called a Genius

Two claims are usually smuggled under the word here. The weaker is for "Invictus," and it is mostly about circumstance rather than art. The poem is a plain, hard, four-stanza assertion of will, technically unremarkable, and its enormous life owes as much to who has recited it — Mandela on Robben Island above all — as to what is on the page. It is a great sentence-machine, not a great poem.

The stronger claim is for *In Hospital*, and it is serious. In the early 1870s, from a sickbed, with no movement to belong to, Henley wrote free verse using interior monologue about clinical medicine — anticipating modernist technique by roughly forty years. He simply looked at the ward and found that inherited Victorian forms could not hold it, and improvised the ones that could. That is invention of a real kind.

Add to it the editorial faculty, which is rarer than critics admit: Henley recognised Kipling, Yeats, Wells and Barrie early, and put them in front of readers.

The honest counter-case: his own poetry, "Invictus" excepted, sank almost without trace, and his biographer's verdict is devastating — he is "the most freely quoted and the most thoroughly neglected of Victorian lyrists." His imperial and muscular enthusiasms date badly, and Blunt's charge of worshipping brute strength has teeth. He was an enabler of other people's masterpieces more than the author of his own. But *In Hospital* is a genuine first, and a man who both invents a form and finds Kipling has earned more than a poster quotation.

Legacy

In 1902 he fell from a railway carriage, reactivating the tuberculosis that had shadowed him since childhood. He died at Woking, Surrey, on 11 July 1903, aged fifty-three, leaving a personal estate of £840. His ashes were placed in his daughter's grave at Cockayne Hatley in Bedfordshire; a bust of him stands in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral. Composers kept his lyrics alive — George Butterworth's song cycle *Love Blows as the Wind Blows* (1912), settings by Delius and Quilter. And in 2009 Clint Eastwood made a film called *Invictus*, in which Morgan Freeman's Mandela hands the poem to a rugby captain. Henley's crutch, his beard, his one-legged swagger survive as Long John Silver; his daughter's lisp survives as Wendy; his sixteen best-known lines survive as an anthem for people in cells. The poet himself has almost entirely disappeared behind them.