De Zirkoff on Gerald Massey

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 8 pages

Eight pages, de Zirkoff's bio-bibliography of Gerald Massey from the Collected Writings volume VIII, pages 465 to 467. *It is the most remarkable life in this batch by ordinary standards* — a poet and Egyptologist who began in real poverty — and the account keeps the wages and the hours in, which is what gives it its force.

Massey was born in a hut at Gamble Wharf, on the canal near Tring, on 29 May 1828, the son of William Massey, a canal boatman, and his wife Mary, who brought up a large family on a weekly wage of some ten shillings. He said of himself that he had no childhood. He received a scanty education at the national school at Tring and was put to work at eight in a silk mill in the same town, working from five in the morning to six at night for between ninepence and one shilling and threepence a week; later he tried straw plaiting, and the marshy district of Buckinghamshire gave him ague, so at fifteen he went to London as an errand boy. Reading was his absorbing passion from childhood, and poetical inclinations developed gradually; in his leisure he studied French and read Thomas Paine, Volney and Howitt. He published his first volume, Poems and Chansons, in 1848 with a bookseller at Tring, selling some 250 copies at a shilling each. The revolutionary spirit of the time caught him: he joined the Chartists and put his pen at their service, and in 1849, aged twenty-one, began editing at Uxbridge a paper written by working men called The Spirit of Freedom. His sympathies then veered to the religious side of reform and he associated himself with the Christian Socialists under Frederick Denison Maurice, acting as secretary of their board. The Ballad of Babe Christobel and Other Poems of 1854 established him as a poet of liberty, labour and the people, going through five editions in a year and being reprinted in New York, with Tennyson and Ruskin acknowledging his talent. The Egyptological work for which theosophists know him came later.

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