Short Fiction:
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, 1921
Clorinda Walks in Heaven, 1922
The Black Dog, 1923
Fishmonger’s Fiddle, 1925
The Field of Mustard, 1926
Count Stephan, 1928
Silver Circus, 1928
The Gollan, 1929
The Higgler, 1930
The Man from Kilsheelan, 1930
Easter Day, 1931
The Hundredth Story of A. E. Coppard, 1931
Nixey’s Harlequin, 1931
Crotty Shinkwin, and the Beauty Spot, 1932
Ring the Bells of Heaven, 1933
Dunky Fitlow, 1933
Emergency Exit, 1934
Polly Oliver, 1935
Ninepenny Flute, 1937
These Hopes of Heaven, 1937
Tapster’s Tapestry, 1938
You Never Know, Do You?, 1939
Ugly Anna, and Other Tales, 1944
Fearful Pleasures, 1946
Selected Tales from His Twelve Volumes Published Between the Wars, 1946
The Dark-Eyed Lady: Fourteen Tales, 1947
The Collected Tales of A. E. Coppard, 1948
Lucy in Her Pink Jacket, 1954
Simple Day, 1978
Poetry:
Hips and Haws, 1922
Pelagea, and Other Poems, 1926
Yokohama Garland, 1926
Collected Poems, 1928
Cherry Ripe, 1935
Nonfiction:
Rummy: That Noble Game Expounded, 1933
It’s Me, O Lord!, 1957
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Pink Furniture, 1930
In terms of struggle and development, the life of Alfred Edgar Coppard (KAHP-urd) was, particularly in his early years, an epic in itself. He began in abject poverty, and his rise was circuitous. Born on January 4, 1878, at Folkestone in Kent, England, he was the son of a housemaid, Emily Alma (née Southwell) and George Coppard, a tailor. After the family moved to Brighton, Coppard was educated at the Lewes Hill Boarding School until the age of nine. His father had died of tuberculosis the year before. Coppard later remembered him as a radical young man with a bushy beard who never owned nor could afford an overcoat. This fact was apparently significant, as Coppard himself did not own an overcoat until he was thirty. After the father’s death, the family (Coppard, three sisters, and their mother) was sunk in destitution and was forced to apply for parish relief.
At nine, Coppard was taken out of school to become a wage earner. A year later, he was sent to Whitechapel in London, where he lived with an uncle and served as a shop boy to a trousers maker. From there, he was transferred to a pool of messenger boys at Reuter’s Telegraph Agency. The pay was usual for the period, but it was not enough to take care of the rest of his family; he lived on strict rations. This was a period, however, of growth and novelty amid colorful relatives, both hostile and friendly, and the tumult of the city.
Two years later, Coppard returned to Brighton and hired out as an office boy. From thirteen on, he worked at a number of jobs, meanwhile becoming an avid reader of poetry and continuing what had already become a program of self-education. He appears to have been endowed with extraordinary energy; his enthusiasms were broad as well as precocious. He loved sports, hiking, music, painting, and amateur theatricals. By the time of his early teens, he had started to write poetry, inspired chiefly by John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and John Milton’s “L’Allegro.”
Coppard never returned to school but was employed at various places, including a factory that made soap. In his twenties, he was active in sports; at Chatham and London, he competed in many sprint races. In 1907, with his first wife, he went to live at Oxford. This was a move, Coppard said, that changed his life. He met students and members of the literary crowd, although technically he was an outsider. Nevertheless, in the town of Oxford he was able to participate in the cultural and literary life. He went to free public lectures, given by such notables as Bertrand Russell and William Butler Yeats, and he made the acquaintance of the young Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, Hugh Walpole, and others. Coppard also became interested in, and attended meetings of, the labor and social democratic movements of the day. When he was forty-one, he took the important and risky step of quitting his job and devoting all of his time to writing.
For three years, he lived alone in a cottage in a field near Oxford. It was the first leisure of his life, and some of his best stories were written there. In 1921, Harold Taylor, of the newly founded Golden Cockerel Press, offered to publish a volume of Coppard’s short stories. This was Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, a critical success which also afforded its author some economic comfort, though at no time was his situation ever one of affluence.
In 1927, Alfred Knopf became his American publisher. Coppard’s stories were winning respect. Later years found him the writer of an extraordinary number of books. He was considered one of the foremost short-story writers in England in the 1920’s and 1930’s. A summit had been reached as far as his artistic attainment went, however, and he lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity. Coppard married twice; his second wife was Winifred May de Kok, of the Orange Free State in Southern Africa. They had a son and a daughter. He could never afford to travel widely, but he took extensive hiking tours throughout England. Many years were spent at Dunmow, his home in Essex, and he died in London on January 13, 1957. Since then, Coppard’s work has experienced a resurgence of popularity as a result of the adaptation of several of his stories for television (they have been seen on Masterpiece Theater). For both his mastery of the short-story form and his sensitive portrayal of English rural life, Coppard is an important figure in the development of the short story as a serious literary form.
In appearance, Coppard was dark and gypsylike, with a rugged kind of outdoor handsomeness. He hated the pretentious, and though he could be a brilliant and arresting conversationalist, there was an undercurrent of reserve, with glints of witty sarcasm. When asked by Who’s Who what his favorite recreation was, the answer he gave was “resting.”