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
