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Charles Macfarlane:
Reminiscences of a Literary Life
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contents:
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
CONTENTS
CHAP. I
CHAP. II
CHAP. III
CHAP. IV
CHAP. V
CHAP. VI
CHAP. VII
CHAP. VIII
CHAP. IX
CHAP. X
CHAP. XI
CHAP. XII
CHAP. XIII
CHAP. XIV
CHAP. XV
CHAP. XVI
CHAP. XVII
CHAP. XVIII
CHAP. XIX
CHAP. XX
CHAP. XXI
CHAP. XXII
CHAP. XXIII
CHAP. XXIV
CHAP. XXV
CHAP. XXVI
CHAP. XXVII
CHAP. XXVIII
APPENDIX
INDEX
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In 1916 two manuscript volumes of memoirs by Charles Macfarlane were discovered by a Derby bookseller and purchased, edited, and published by the writer John Fountain Tattersall (1857-1929). Macfarlane (1799-1858) had been a prolific writer whose novels continued to be reprinted into the twentieth century. But by 1916 his reputation as a historian and man of letters, never very great, had long since passed. Tattersall was attracted to the memoirs by the more familiar names chronicled among Macfarlane's anecdotes of persons famous and not-so-famous in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Little is known about Macfarlane apart from what is recorded in Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1917). A Highlander by origin, he may have been born in London. He tells us that he was walking in Westminster on the day when Spencer Perceval was murdered in 1809, and that he traveled to Portugal in 1815 while still a boy. From 1816 to 1827 he lived in Naples where he made the acquaintance of Percy Bysshe Shelley, met John Keats, and mixed with the local aristocracy. He published a volume of poetry in 1820 and contributed to the London Magazine. In 1828 he traveled to the Levant where he knew Byron's memoirist Julius Millingen at Constantinople. He returned to London in 1829 to publish his first book of travels, and for the next several years was a regular attendee at John Murray's, from whence some of his anecdotes derive.
Macfarlane spent the winter of 1829 living at Brighton to recover his health; there he became a fast friend of William Stewart Rose. In the 1830s he married and befriended the historian George Lillie Craik with whom he associated with Charles Knight, Macfarlane's regular publisher. The three were much involved with the Society for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge, for which Macfarlane produced, in collaboration with Craik, The Pictorial History of England during the reign of George the Third (1841-44). When Knight gave up his publishing business not long afterwards, Macfarlane found himself in financial difficulties at a time when he had two sons and three daughters to set up in the world.
In 1848 Macfarlane made a second tour of the Levant with his elder son Charles (1832-72), an experience from which he was able to extract two books. Upon his return he settled his family in Canterbury. In 1850 Henry Brougham (with whom Macfarlane had worked in the SDUK) organized a subscription to cover the expense of sending Charles out to India (where he would distinguish himself as an officer at the siege of Lucknow). In 1854 Macfarlane's wife, Charlotte-Emily, died. He himself was in poor health, describing himself in the preface to Reminiscences, dated 1855, as “lame and purblind”—most of the manuscript is in the hand of an amanuensis. In June 1857 on the nomination of the Archbishop of Canterbury he was admitted a “Poor Brother of the Charterhouse” where he died eighteen months later.
Charles Macfarlane is difficult to place socially since we know only the names of his parents and nothing about his education. In the Reminiscences he seems to make a point of not informing the reader of what he was about in Naples. Perhaps he was attached to a mercantile concern. In the years before his marriage, which took place about 1831, he seems to have lived as a gentleman of independent means in London and Brighton. After his marriage he turned increasingly to publication to supplement his income, some of his books being of a patently commercial character. But the statement in the DNB that he “earned a living by literary hack work” probably overstates the case: he was circulating in polite society and enjoying country house visits down to the time that his health broke. But it is true that for all his impressive list of acquaintances very little notice was taken of Macfarlane by his contemporaries.
He was a Scottish cosmopolite who maintained life-long friendships with persons connected with Naples, Constantinople, Brighton, and the London publishing world. As a member of the Royal Asiatic Society Macfarlane mixed with other travelers like himself. The Reminiscences is a particularly good source of information for Britons living in Italy and Italian exiles living in London—Count Pecchio was a particular friend and Macfarlane followed Italian politics closely. He also made acquaintances through the Scottish Tory social network associated with John Murray and William Jerdan (his son Charles was born in Edinburgh).
The one recorded comment about his character comes from Charles Knight, who described Macfarlane as “a most agreeable companion and an affectionate though not a safe friend” (Passages of a Working Life, 1864-65, 2:261). Knight and Macfarlane had quarreled over politics (Macfarlane could not abide Harriet Martineau whom Knight had hired to write the sequel to the Pictorial History of England). By “not safe” Knight probably meant “not discreet,” which the Reminiscences bears out. He gives a frank account of the alcoholism that ruined Thomas Campbell's life, and of Thomas De Quincey's indulgence at the dinner-table he reports John Wilson's remark, “‘Hang you, De Quincey!’ he would say. ‘Can’t you take your whisky toddy like a Christian man, and leave your d——d opium slops to infidel Turks, Persians, and Chinamen?’” (p. 80).
Reminiscences of a Literary Life was not written for publication (another indication that Macfarlane was not entirely indigent) though he imagines that “they—or at least some of them—may be published hereafter” (p. xiv). “I shall attempt no order, no chronological or other systematic arrangement,” he says, “but shall dictate my anecdotes as they occur to my memory” (p. xv). Some of the essays consist of little more than an anecdote and others are mere jottings, but some are elaborate and highly-finished productions. The best of is unquestionably the study of Derwent Coleridge, though also memorable is the portrait of the elderly and irascible expatriate Thomas James Mathias, (exiled to Italy on account, it was whispered, of libels in his never-acknowledged Pursuits of Literature).

David Hill Radcliffe