Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood was the best-loved comic poet of his day — an incorrigible punster who could also break a reader's heart. "I Remember, I Remember" looks back at a childhood home with such gentle ache that it has been anthologized for nearly two centuries.

His most consequential poem appeared anonymously in Punch's 1843 Christmas issue: "The Song of the Shirt," the relentless lament of a seamstress sewing herself to death in poverty. It tripled the magazine's circulation, was sung in the streets, and helped force Victorian England to look at the people who made its clothes.