What do these subjects have in common? Frankenstein. Cherokee Indians. Tunisia. Operatic arias.

Tomorrow is the birthday of John Howard Payne (b. June 9, 1791). He was an interesting guy. He was born in New York City and became an actor when he was sixteen years old. He was popular and good-looking and invited to perform in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in various roles. He went to London, failed in the theatrical business, and was imprisoned for debt. He wrote several plays, and the only one that had any success was an opera called Clari, the Maid of Milan that was produced at Covent Garden in 1823. For the opera, Payne wrote a song called Home Sweet Home. The song became quite popular, but Payne received little or no money for it. While he was living in England, Mr. Payne developed quite a crush on Mary Shelley whose husband Percy died in 1822 in a boating accident. Mary wasn’t interested in John Howard, preferring to cling to the memory of her erratic and unfaithful, but talented and romantic, late husband. John Howard Payne returned to the United States after nearly twenty years in Europe and went to live with the Cherokee Indians. He lived with Cherokee Chief John Ross and collected myths and traditions of the Cherokees and wrote magazine articles. In 1842, he somehow got himself appointed by President John Tyler as U.S. Consul to Tunis, Tunisia. (?) He died in Tunis ten years later in 1852.

Home Sweet Home

Mid pleasures and palaces
Though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble,
There’s no place like home.
A charm from the skies
Seems to hallow us there,
Which seek thro’ the world,
Is ne’er met with elsewhere.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home.

I gaze on the moon
As I tread the drear wild,
And feel that my mother
Now thinks of her child;
As she looks on that moon
From our own cottage door,
Thro’ the woodbine whose fragrance
Shall cheer me no more.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home.

An exile from home,
Splendor dazzles in vain,
Oh, give me my lowly
Thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gaily,
That came at my call:
Give me them and that
Peace of mind, dearer than all.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home.

Payne wrote in a letter to C.E. Clark (approximately 1850): “Surely there is something strange in the fact that it should have been my lot to cause so many people in the world to boast of the delights of home, when I never had a home of my own, and never expect to have one now—especially since those here at Washington who possess the power seem so reluctant to allow me the means of earning one!”

Poetry Friday round-up is at HipWriterMama today.