Henry D. Inglis (1795–1835)
Travel writer and editor. Born in
Edinburgh,
Inglis formed part of the Scottish literary circle in
London,
a circle with which the Ruskin family enjoyed contact in the
1830s, when
John was first entering the publishing scene.
Inglis was related on both his fatherʼs and motherʼs sides to writers and artists, including a connection by marriage to the important
Scottish portrait painter,
Sir Henry Raeburn (
1756–1823)
(
Baigent, “Inglis, Henry David [1795–1835]”).
It is unlikely that
Inglis had much to do with the commissioning and revision of
Ruskinʼs poems.
For much of
1834, when this volume of
Friendshipʼs Offering was in preparation,
Inglis was abroad, preparing a travel book,
Ireland in 1834—a tour,
according to the bookʼs subtitle, that occupied the author during the “spring, summer, and autumn” of that year.
Inglis dated the bookʼs dedication from
London,
November 1834 (p. vi), which would have been about the time that
Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV
was released for public sale. It is more likely that the editing of
Ruskinʼs poems remained in the hands of
Thomas Pringle (1789–1834),
who was editor of the annual
from 1828 until his death in December 1834.
With the onset of
Pringleʼs tuberculosis in late
June 1834,
Inglis
did step into the breach at some point in the
second half of the year in order to help oversee the annual.
As
W. H. Harrison (ca. 1792–1878) explains in the preface to
Friendshipʼs Offering for
1836,
which he took over following
Inglisʼs own death in
March 1835,
Inglis “assisted”
Pringle “in the last year” of
Pringleʼs editorship
(
Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXVI, v).
It was apparently a longstanding friendship that enabled
Pringle in his last days to rely on
Inglis, who, according to
Randolph Vigne,
had formerly benefited from
Pringleʼs support when making his way in
London literary life.
Their acquaintance extended back to university days in
Edinburgh,
Vigne reports—though,
if so,
Inglis would have been a youth who was
Pringleʼs junior by six years
(
Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 16).
Much of
Inglisʼs assistance must have been directed at the volume for
1836,
since
Pringle sent the volume for
1835 to press in
August 1834
(see
Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 244).
Before being absolutely forced by declining health to give up work,
Pringle could not have afforded to resign his editorial post.
As he commented in a letter of
October 1834, in which he pleaded for financial help in order to move to a warmer climate,
he “was utterly . . . without income, except what depended on [his] pen”
(
Ritchie,“Memoirs of Thomas Pringle”, cxix;
and see
Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 246).
There is one possible connection between
Inglis and
Ruskinʼs composition of the poem,
“Saltzburg”. Whereas the Ruskin family first visited the Austrian city
during the
Tour of 1835, too late to have served as the occasion for
Ruskinʼs poem of
1834,
Inglis had traveled to
Salzburg and written about his experiences in
The Tyrol; with a Glance at Bavaria (
1833).
Inglis, however, did not consider there to be “much in
Salzburg to detain the traveller long”;
and nothing in his published account suggests a possible source for details in
Ruskinʼs poem
(
Inglis, The Tyrol, 270, and see 269–71).
If there was a contact between
Inglis and the Ruskins—or contact via
Pringle—he
might have communicated some ideas about
Salzburg personally,
including the dubious information that the patron saint of
Salzburg,
St. Rupert,
“was by birth a Scotchman”, as
Ruskin asserted in a note to his poem.
This notion was available in the
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum
by
Thomas Dempster (
1579–1625),
a treatise that had been republished in
Edinburgh in
1829,
as an expression of the enthusiasm for Scottish antiquarianism associated with
Walter Scott (1771–1832)
(
Du Toit, “Dempster, Thomas (1579–1625)”;
and see
“Saltzburg”).