Minor poets who can shed important light on their more famous contemporaries are often overlooked by nineteenth-century scholars. Jean Ingelow is one such minor Victorian poet who has been all but forgotten by modern critics, yet her contemporary popular appeal rivaled Alfred, Lord Tennyson's. Her popularity, her acquaintance with the major writers and artists of both England and America (including Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and her prolific output make Ingelow a worthy subject of investigation.

Jean Ingelow was born on 17 March 1820 in the small seaport of Boston, Lincolnshire. Her father, William Ingelow, was at the time a successful banker, and her mother, Jean Kilgour, was descended from a Scottish Aberdeenshire family. Jean, the first-born of ten children (the youngest was born when Jean was twenty), grew into her teens at Boston. When she and her sisters and brothers were not being tutored at home, she...