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
