Cyrus Redding is remembered as the
biographer of Thomas Campbell, his co-editor at the New Monthly Magazine in
the 1820s. He also edited the first collected editions of the poems of Shelley and
Keats, published in a Galignani edition of 1829. To his contemporaries he was
best-known for his writings on wine, particularly A History and Description of
Modern Wines (1833), the first important book on the subject in English.
(There was a sequel, Every Man his own Butler, 1839). Redding regarded
himself as a poet and political journalist but he was a literary
jack-of-all-trades.
He was born in Cornwall in 1785,
the son of a well-to-do Baptist minister, and attended the grammar school in Truro
before beginning as a journalist in London in 1806. He edited the Plymouth
Chronicle from 1808 to 1814 and, in France from 1815 to 1818, he edited
Galignani’s Messenger while writing as a correspondent for the
Hunts’ Examiner. From 1821 to 1830 he edited the New Monthly
Magazine with Campbell, and then, briefly, the Metropolitan
Magazine. From 1834 to 1840 he edited the Bath Guardian and the
Staffordshire Examiner, Liberal party organs, before returning to London
where he edited the English Journal and the London Journal, both of
which failed. Cast adrift by the politicians he served, Redding drifted into
obscurity, selling his library and moving to the country—where, he does not
say. In 1870 he died in London where for some time he had received a small
civil-list pension.
Cyrus Redding was a literary
figure of the second or third order, nor does his autobiography cast him in a
particularly attractive light as a writer or as a person. But he was an acute
observer with a very wide circle of acquaintance as befits a journalist, and when
he takes the trouble, as he seldom does in the Recollections, he could write
well enough. Though associated with the Examiner he was a party man rather
than a coterie poet; Campbell aside, he seems to have had few if any close
friendships. One suspects that he was close to his family, if only because he makes
absolutely no mention in the memoir of the wife to whom he was married for nearly
six decades. Redding never met Byron.
As memoirs go, Fifty
Years’ Recollections is a very ugly duckling, a crazy-quilt of
anecdote, reflection, character-sketch, and travel-journal. It seems to have been
written haphazardly, with material as likely to be interjected where it occurred in
the course of composition as in the sequence of the narrative. The first volume is
desultory but not unreasonable; in the second Redding begins recasting material
from previously-published memoirs, resulting in gaps and repetitions; when that is
exhausted early in the third volume (the point at which his career stalled) he
resorts to book-padding of the worst sort. But there are passages of interest
throughout, and while the strokes are rough, Redding’s pen-portraits of
Plymouth during the war and France afterwards are striking.
What gives the
Recollections particular value is the depth and extent of the persons
discussed and described, hundreds of them, in many walks of life. This is the
upside to Redding’s desultory mode of composition: in his very lack of
selection and tendency to wander he describes much that would otherwise have gone
unremarked. Campbell aside, Redding does not have much of interest to say about the
characters of major literary figures, but his gallery of literary understrappers,
country lawyers and city politicians, dissolute clergymen, naval officers, cast-off
courtiers, and political refugees is quite remarkable.
So too is the character of an
author who seems like a reincarnation of Swift’s Gulliver. A great traveler
and a seasoned cosmopolitan, Redding has few loyalties to persons or places;
perpetually busy about a shifting series of projects, he offers opinions about
Greek philology, fine art, constitutional law, Balkan politics, crop-management. He
excoriates the Tories for their bellicosity and proposes improvements to
gun-carriages. His great hero is Napoleon, but for all his strident whiggery he can
admire Wellington, Canning, and Peel. Like Gulliver, he is completely
unselfconscious about his inconsistencies, now extolling the popular voice and now
abusing the ignorant masses. He assails Southey for clinging to an indefensible
past while lashing the degeneracy of the times with all the gusto of a Tory
satirist; he mocks the Church for superstition and indulges in speculations about
ghosts and spirits. He is dazzled by William Beckford’s opulence without
troubling himself about its origins in West-Indian slavery.
Redding’s political
prejudices are another source of credulity: his readiness to believe that George
III was secretly married to Hannah Lightfoot renders him vulnerable to a hoaxing
letter, and he reprints fantastic libels against the Tory MP Peter Borthwick,
libels for which he had been tried and found guilty twenty years before. Other
prejudices seem less forgivable, such as his distaste for women writers and spite
for professional rivals. But as with Gulliver it is hard not to feel sympathy for a
man as much sinned against as sinning.
His literary prejudices are of
interest if only for their congruence with Byron’s. Campbell and Rogers, not
Scott and Byron, are the objects of his admiration and he heaps scorn on the
egotism of Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. Despite his personal connections with the
Hunt circle he mocks Charles Lamb for his insularity and opines that the London
Magazine, having been written by and for a coterie, was bound to fail. He
dislikes its editor John Scott and shares Campbell’s distaste for Hazlitt.
This is hard to account for apart from professional rivalry. One hardly expects him
to boast of John Wilson’s friendship or to laud Maga’s D. M.
Moir as a great poet, but so he does. John Keats, whose poems Redding had edited,
is not once mentioned, perhaps because the memoirist had fallen out with Leigh
Hunt.
Cyrus Redding’s contrarian
streak runs deep and may have hindered his professional advancement: “I never
coaxed, nor flattered, nor lied, nor persevered in pestering those who have in
their hands the good things of this life—my services were rendered too
sincerely and too independently” (3:379). While he refrains from lashing out
at the politicians who left him high and dry (for Redding party loyalty is the
essence of political principle) it is all too apparent that he was a bitter and
disappointed man; the rambling 150-page rant that concludes his memoir is painful
to read.
Despite it all, the
Recollections was well received by reviewers who valued Redding’s
rich store of anecdote and gossip about times past and a second edition was issued
only a few months after the first. While the prefaces to both editions are dated
from London, one wonders whether the author was really on hand to oversee their
production. The third volume of the first edition was obviously not corrected for
the press: it contains, in addition to the general carelessness with names and
sloppiness of composition, egregious compositor’s errors. In a few places
where the text is incomprehensible it is corrected in the present version from the
second edition. The first is preferred as containing material later cut, including
a letter from Pierce Egan that is one of the better things in the
Recollections. The second edition, like the first, lacks an index; while
the text was reset the book was published without a table of contents.
David Hill Radcliffe
