In addition to the poetry Allingham left behind an incomplete autobiography and a much more complete diary.

He was born March 19, 1824 in the town of Ballyshannon in County Donegal. Donegal is in the Northwest part of Ireland and Ballyshannon sits on the Erne River just southwest of Donegal Town.

Allingham's formal education began in 1836 when he attended Wray's School on Church Lane in Ballyshannon. In the Spring of 1837 he left his hometown to attend Killeshandra, a boarding school in County Cavan. His formal education ended the next year when he took a job at the local bank back in Ballyshannon where his father was a manager. For the next seven years he worked at various branches of the bank.

The bank job was tedious and depressing. He said it made him "heartsick." In 1846, through family connections, Allingham secured a government job as a Customs Officer. He was sent to Belfast for two months of training.

Just exactly how Allingham came by this disposition is not entirely clear but it seems certain that by the age of 22 he was more interested in literature and art than in book-keeping. However, the Customs job must have been well-suited to him because he more or less kept working for Her Majesty's Customs Office until 1870 when he gave it up to devote himself exclusively to art and literature.

One gets the impression that the seeds of Allingham's great love of art had something to do with the nature of that particular environment found in the northwest of Ireland. The ocean, the river, the flora and fauna all coalesced to produce a very aesthetically oriented man.

On the other hand, he felt quite isolated in this environment. To remedy the isolation and lack of cultural intercourse he began taking frequent trips to England. His first journey there occurred in the summer of 1843 when he was still employed by the bank.

Many of the details of Allingham's life come from his Diary which he began in June, 1847 and kept rather continuously until his death in 1889. The diary was first published in 1907 and it furnishes not only autobiographical information but many anecdotes and tales of the various writers and painters he met and got to know.

The Diary begins with an entry describing his visit to London in the summer 1847. He saw Jenny Lind perform the title role in Bellini's opera Norma. And despite the fact that he thought Lind was ill-suited for the part of the Druid priestess, he wrote, "Jenny Lind is the only actress I ever saw that I could imagine myself in love with." It was during this visit that he met the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt who would become his patron and the man to whom he would dedicate his first published book of poems.

During Allingham's 1849 summer visit to London he met the writer Coventry Patmore. (Patmore, a founder of the Cyclographic Society is the author of the line: "Poets love earlier than other men.")

The tension between his professional work as a Customs official and his literary aspirations was a source of some considerable conflict for Allingham. He perhaps wanted to be more than just a weekend poet.

It is interesting to note that in the diary entries for 1874 there is no mention of Ms. Patterson before the marriage. The only mention of his wife that year occurred on Thursday October 8 when he wrote, "Helen and I about 9:30 to 5 Cheyne Row." This refers to the home of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish essayist and historian. Carlyle, in fact, is the subject of most of Allingham's diary entries during 1874.

There is this peculiar 1876 recollection of what the putatively small-brained poet Robert Browning said when he looked at a photograph of himself on Allingham's chimney-piece: "There I am-- and I don't recollect when or where it was done, or anything about it. I find gaps in my memory..."

In June 1881 the Allinghams moved from London to Sandhills, Wyley, in Surrey. Here Allingham embarked on his work in quiet and tranquil conditions. Alfred Tennyson, named England's poet laureate in 1850 and his family lived nearby. And it seems that once Carlyle had died, Allingham replaced him with the poet laureate as the object of his intense attention.

A final comment with regard to Allingham's personal diary:

Allingham had three children. But it is curious how rarely they are mentioned in the diary. There are no direct references to any of their births. Ten days after the birth of his first child, Gerald Carlyle (November 8, 1875) Allingham mentions that Carlyle had inquired about "Madame and the Homunculus." Allingham goes on to quote Carlyle: "A Baby is the most wonderful of all phenomena in this variegated world..." A second child, Eva Margaret was born on February 21, 1875 but Allingham's only reference to this event in his diary occurs on April 11 when he mentions that Carlyle was "very sympathetic about H.'s serious illness" which was a result of her second childbirth. The third child, Henry William ,was born on May 11, 1882 but Allingham makes no mention of this event in the diary.

In 1888 Allingham's health began to falter and he wrote his last poem, "Sunrise at Eastbourne: A Photograph" on August 10, 1889. His last diary entry occurs on October 25 and at 2 o'clock in the afternoon of November 18, Allingham died. His body was cremated and the ashes returned to the churchyard in his hometown of Ballyshannon.