Charles Harpur

Charles Harpur (23 January 1813 – 10 June 1868) was an Australian poet and playwright. He is regarded as "Australia's most important nineteenth-century poet." Life Early life on the Hawkesbury Harpur was born on 23 January 1813 at Windsor, New South Wales. His parents were convicts. His father, Joseph Harpur, was originally from Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland. He had been sentenced to transportation for highway robbery in March 1800; at the time of Harpur's birth, he was parish clerk and master of the Windsor district school. His mother, Sarah Chidley, was originally from Somerset, and had been sentenced to transportation in 1805. Harpur presumably went to school in Windsor, but little information about his education is available. Later in life, he claimed that he taught himself the principles of English verse by obsessively reading William Shakespeare. Sydney and first publications In the early 1830s, Harpur seems to have moved between Sydney and the Hunter Valley, but by 1833 he had settled with his parents in Sydney. At this time he began to publish his writings in newspapers. His earliest known publications were the poems 'An Australian Song' and 'At the Grave of Clements', which appeared in The Currency Lad on the 4th and 11 May 1833. In February 1835 he published parts of his first play, The Tragedy of Donohoe, in The Sydney Monitor, a radical newspaper edited by Edward Smith Hall. Harpur would continue to publish in newspapers throughout his life, eventually publishing hundreds of works in this manner.