Peter George Patmore (1786?-1855)
is remembered for being John Scott’s incompetent second at the duel at Chalk
Farm, for being the addressee of William Hazlitt’s letters in Liber
amoris, and for being the father of the poet Coventry Patmore. Not much was
recorded of his life. The son of a jeweler, he was a man about town who contributed
to Blackwood’s and the New Monthly Magazine, and for many years
was a reader and editor for the publisher Henry Colburn. Patmore edited the
Court Journal (1829?-1835) and the New Monthly Magazine
(1841-53). His one enduring publication is My Friends and Acquaintance: being
Memorials, Mind-portraits, and Personal Recollections of Deceased Celebrities
of the Nineteenth Century; with Selections from their Unpublished Letters,
3 vols (1854) with its memoirs of Lamb, Campbell, Blessington, R. Plumer Ward,
Hazlitt, the Smith brothers, and Laman Blanchard. While this contains much useful
information, Patmore usually suppresses the names of the persons and periodicals
for whom he wrote.
The work is a sad, catch-penny
production. At one time Patmore contemplated a more ambitious collection of essays
and to that end published memoirs of notable persons he had known—Lamb,
Blessington, Hazlitt—and began work on others. To this recycled matter, which
accounts for half the book, he adds letters, diary excerpts, material from
notebooks, and excerpts from Sheridan manuscripts in his possession. The interest
of these documents was such, he says in the preface, “that would certainly
have caused their contents, sooner or later, to see the light in some form or
other; and the conviction that, on the one hand, they ought not to do so without my
own deliberate preparation and supervision, or, on the other hand, without that
personal responsibility which should attend a work of this nature.” The
“preparation” seems to have consisted chiefly of censoring the material
he chose to publish preparatory to destroying his papers.
While reviewers made the usual
complaints about making private matters public Patmore was in fact unusually
reticent: of persons whose private lives were not already on the public record, or
who were still living, he has nothing to say or blanks out their names. He can be
remarkably tactful: while he alludes to Lamb’s drinking problem,
Blessington’s financial difficulties, and Blanchard’s suicide, he does
so in such an oblique way that those unaware of the facts could easily miss the
significance of what they are told. Hazlitt and Lamb were friends; the others were
acquaintances Patmore worked with in his capacity as editor; the novelist Plumer
Ward was both. Most of the letters are business correspondence, and while Patmore
is circumspect, My Friends and Acquaintance does afford occasional glimpses
into the inner workings of Henry Colburn’s “shop.”
Patmore was useful to Colburn as
someone who could mix in polite society while conducting the often nefarious
business of mediating between writers, publishers, and reviewers in the age of the
silver fork novel. He was the less-successful rival of William Jerdan of the
Literary Gazette, whose Autobiography (1852-1853) may have
prompted Patmore to publish his own literary correspondence. If so, the comparison
is not very flattering since Patmore’s range of social acquaintances and
literary abilities were more limited than Jerdan’s. In the matter of
celebrity-management Patmore’s memoir of Thomas Campbell, his predecessor as
editor of Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, is obliquely instructive
since the catalogue of Campbell’s faults (over-sensitivity, dilatoriness,
lack of tact and business acumen) points to what Patmore regarded as his own
particular skills. That Patmore was more the journalist than the gentleman is
apparent from My Friends and Acquaintance: one is taken aback by the
solecisms, mangled quotations, occasional vulgarity, and insistent hucksterism.
Yet there is more to the work than
this suggests. While Patmore does not explain what he means by “mind
portrait” it seems to involve looking at his subjects from their own points
of view. He takes a keen interest in how writers think of themselves and strives to
emulate or project this through his own writing. Patmore’s most successful
publication had been a collection of comic imitations entitled Rejected
Articles (1826) that went through multiple editions. In My Friends and
Acquaintance the portraits sometimes verge on parody: the Lamb piece tends
to silliness and the Plumer Ward to loquacity; the Thomas Campbell essay is
persnickety and the Lady Blessington essay is fulsome. In the valuable William
Hazlitt article the emulation is plainly intentional. A Hazlitt-like treatment of
Hazlitt is unlikely to be flattering, and Patmore is arguably more damnatory than
Hazlitt’s political foes had been.
The charge is made, more than
once, that Hazlitt gave scant attention to the books and plays he reviewed:
Other men become acquainted with things progressively, and with more or less
quickness and precision, according to their capacity and to the attention they
bestow. But Hazlitt felt them at once. They did not gradually engrave
themselves upon his perceptive faculties, but struck into them at once as by a
single blow. This peculiarity was of universal application in respect to Hazlitt,
and it was the secret of his unequalled critical faculties; for if his criticisms
themselves were often (perhaps always) more or less defective, on account of the
comparatively little of steady attention that he gave to the subject of them, his
critical faculties have perhaps never been surpassed. (3:46)
Patmore’s praises resemble
nothing so much as those Witwoud bestows on his friend Petulant in The Way of
the World: “No, no, hang him, the rogue has no manners at all, that I
must own—no more breeding than a bum-bailey, that I grant you.—’Tis pity; the
fellow has fire and life.” The long and detailed essay on Hazlitt is a
compelling portrait of a brilliant but deeply flawed character pursued relentlessly
by a fascinated and jealous Boswell.
My Friends and Acquaintance was puffed by periodicals Patmore was associated
with but treated harshly in the Literary Gazette, the Athenaeum, and
especially the Eclectic Review: “Shakespeare talks of ‘damning
with faint praise,’ but Mr. Patmore throughout these pages has shown us the
still heavier doom that may be inflicted by a blind and ignorant determination to
praise at all hazards, especially when the eulogy of one who is claimed as an
intimate friend reflects a sort of mock glorification upon himself” (December
1854, p. 702).
Much ink was spilt in rebutting
Patmore’s charge that Campbell did not write The Life and Correspondence
of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1831) and Life of Mrs. Siddons (1834). In
making the accusation Patmore unwittingly (and uncharacteristically) revealed the
suppressed identity of his informant. The Lawrence book—never claimed by
Campbell—bears the name “D. E. Williams” on its title page and from
what Patmore says one can deduce that this hitherto unidentified biographer was one
David Edward Williams (d. 1846), another of Henry Colburn’s writers-for-hire.
Patmore discusses (1:305-06) an
untitled manuscript drama by Charles Lamb in his possession that modern scholars do
not regard as Lamb’s work; however, the Sheridan dramatic fragments he uses
to pad out the third volume are indeed by the Sheridans, father and son; the
manuscripts are now in the British Library. The facsimiles mentioned are not
reproduced in the several online-versions of My Friends and Acquaintance I
have seen. Peter George Patmore died at the age of sixty-nine the year after his
book was published.
David Hill Radcliffe
