During his childhood, his parents moved twice within the town, where the boy enjoyed the country sights and gardens, learned to paint and listened to his mother's piano-playing.

Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, his most ambitious, though not his most successful work, a narrative poem illustrative of Irish social questions, appeared in 1864.

[citation needed] In April 1870 Allingham retired from the customs service, moved to London and became sub-editor of Fraser's Magazine, eventually becoming editor in succession to James Froude in June 1874, a post he would hold till 1879.

In 1881, after the death of Carlyle, the Allinghams moved to Sandhills near Witley in Surrey, where their third child, Henry William, was born in 1882.

Overnight, 244 men, women and children were evicted from their homes and left to wander the roads seeking shelter.

Working on an un-ostentatious scale, Allingham produced much lyrical and descriptive poetry, and the best of his pieces are thoroughly national in spirit and local colouring.

Allingham's wide-ranging anthology of poetry, Nightingale Valley (1862) was the inspiration for the 1923 collection Come Hither by Walter de la Mare.

[13] We daren't go a-hunting / For fear of little men […] was quoted by the character of The Tinker near the beginning of the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, as well as in Mike Mignola's comic book short story Hellboy: The Corpse, plus the 1973 horror film Don't Look in the Basement.

The lines Up the airy mountain / Down the rushy glen […] form part of the character Magrat's internal monologue in the Discworld novel Lords and Ladies.