LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES
Byron
Documents Biography Criticism
Cyrus Redding:
Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell
  Indexes


EDITORS’ PREFACE
PERSONS INDEX
LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS
TITLES INDEX
DOCUMENT INFORMATION

contents:
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
DOWNLOAD XML

Creative Commons License

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Produced by CATH
It is said that no man is a hero to his valet. Cyrus Redding (1785-1870) was a newspaper-man before enlisting as co-editor at the New Monthly Magazine in 1821. He was responsible for the historical department while Thomas Campbell managed the literary side and lent his considerable prestige to the enterprise. As the understrapper, Redding could not but chafe at bearing most of the labor while Campbell garnered most of the praise. While professing admiration for the poet's genius and character Redding's biography reads like a long bill of complaints: Campbell was lazy, fickle, and absent-minded; he was vain about his reputation, failing as a poet, and unable to work to a schedule; he could not ride a horse or compose a good letter; his handwriting was bad, he spoke poorly in public, and he wore a wig. Redding's love for Campbell is also apparent, if only intermittently.
The Reminiscences first appeared as a twenty-two-part series of articles that ran in the New Monthly Magazine from 1846 to 1848, material eked out with text recycled from Redding's autobiography (1858) and hastily made up into a book; very little research seems to have been involved. While some attention is given to Campbell's origins and earlier and later life, the Reminiscences is a chiefly a memoir of the literary partnership at the New Monthly (1821-30) and afterwards at the Metropolitan Magazine (1831-32). Cyrus Redding has a journalist's eye for fact and detail but little sense of literary form. He brings Campbell to life through dialogue and anecdote rather than narrative, and with 700 pages to fill and few letters at his disposal, Redding is anecdotal to a fault.
As a result the Reminiscences fails to shape its materials into a meaningful life such as Moore's Byron or Lockhart's Scott. Certainly Redding did nothing to enhance Campbell's reputation as a poet or man of letters. It is true that Campbell, who had achieved early and almost unprecedented success with his Pleasures of Imagination (1799), martial odes, and Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), was no more able than most romantics to sustain his poetical career. But he enjoyed a second decade of success as a lecturer and critic, and a third decade as a admired and sought-after literary editor. The New Monthly plainly owed more to Campbell than his biographer was prepared to allow, for the other journals Redding edited failed in short order.
But following the death of his wife in 1828 Campbell gradually unraveled, yielding to depression and alcohol abuse (he died of a liver complaint). The behavior Redding complains about often sounds like that of a closet drinker and it is revealed in passing that Mrs. Campbell carried the key to the wine cellar about with her (ii 109). By the end of his life Campbell was hallucinating, changing residences frequently, and unable to care for his invalid son Thomas, confined with John Clare in Matthew Allen's asylum for lunatics. No doubt Cyrus Redding had much to put up with, but he denies that alcohol was a problem, at least before the death of Matilda Campbell.
The biographer was not positioned to observe his subject's social life in the clubs, salons, and country houses where Campbell mixed with the Whig intellectual aristocracy. Redding was a vulgar Whig in the sense once applied to vulgar Marxists, and expresses annoyance at Campbell's personal loyalties to grand personages whose political creeds were less than “true blue”—sometimes even Tory—nor is it difficult to imagine why the abrasive journalist's social horizons would be more circumscribed than the amiable and affluent poet's. While this narrowness renders Redding less successful as a biographer, it keeps the focus squarely on his fraught personal relationship with Campbell, not a bad thing in a memoir.
Cyrus Redding had few personal friends but many professional acquaintances; the Reminiscences is replete with anecdotes about obscure persons who would not have found their way into a more conventional biography—to fill out his volumes he was compelled to include much trivial matter that with the passage of time has acquired its own sort of desultory interest. The dialogues, presumably worked up from the same journals used for Redding's autobiography, are lively, probable, and convey much information about the manners and opinions of the times. Whatever his limitations as poet, novelist, and biographer, Redding is a lively reporter.
At the time of his death in 1844 Thomas Campbell's poetry remained a valuable literary property. Redding, who had edited the first collected edition of Campbell's poems in 1828, may have expected to be named his literary executor and biographer. Instead that position went to William Beattie, a fellow Scot who had succeeded Redding as Campbell's understrapper. Beattie was a wealthy and well-connected physician, a literary amateur of the sort Redding despised, and while Redding pointedly never mentions him by name, one can imagine the hostility the then-unemployed journalist would have felt at being cut out. Beattie's anodyne Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, 3 vols (1849) was not a success; Redding might have done better had he had access to Campbell's correspondence and the financial motive to write a full-dress biography.
The Reminiscences was as shoddily printed as it was hastily put together and the lack of an index has rendered its useful information difficult to access. It was given a favorable review in the New Monthly, was mined for gossip in the Literary Gazette, and was ignored by the major reviews. It must have sold poorly since the book was remaindered within a few months of issue and never reprinted.

David Hill Radcliffe