BIOGRAPHIES OF SOME OBSCURE CONTRIBUTORS
Prepared by Eileen Curran, Emerita, Colby College,
for the Victoria Research Web
Introduction
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals names “some 12,000 authors” of articles in a mere forty-three monthlies and quarterlies (5:vii) and leaves many more unidentified. While some of the same writers reappear in the thousands of monthlies and quarterlies not indexed in Wellesley and of weeklies and annuals, those journals would provide thousands of additional authors. The majority of these contributors remain as unknown once we learn their names as they were as anonymous writers. One of the justifications for anonymous publication was that each article spoke with the authority of the journal, no matter how young and still unknown, or simply unknown, the writer might be. Accepting that argument would mean that we need only a “biography” of the journal--the publishing histories that in Wellesley precede tables of contents. Nevertheless our natural instinct is to ask who these obscure journalists were; we want to know what knowledge or experience lay behind the articles we read. Moreover, learning something about contributors means learning something about 19th-century journalism and literary life, in fact about life and literature then, separately as well as together.
The biographies that follow set a few of these obscure contributors before us in what limited detail can be discovered. They represent a mere drop in the bucket--or a small drop glancing off the bucket, a restricted view of the subject, since I began many of them when working on the Foreign Quarterly Review. Even those added since then often take us beyond the British Isles, for 19th-century Britain was never as insular as we fancy. Intellectual curiosity took people abroad, or commercial interests, or a lower cost of living, or need for material for the next book, or a search for health or for new gambling spots (German spas provided both), among many impetuses to travel.
Some of these now unknown men and women aspired to be among the stars; one finds disappointed, frustrated men who never achieved the glory, or even the simple success, they sought--who didn’t get the jobs they wanted, whose articles weren’t accepted by their periodicals of choice. Inadequate education, limited ability, lack of connections, lack of the time and freedom that money can provide--or lack, whatever the advantages, of sustained effort--all this one finds in these biographies. Others, again for a wide variety of reasons, recognized the minor role they played and were content with it--not for lack of ambition but with a clear-sighted pride in what they had done. Nor should we neglect the con men, the paranoid or otherwise delusional, those unfortunately addicted to alcohol or drugs. If a century and a half later few of these names are remembered, here are people who spoke to, sometimes for, their contemporaries. Some were prolific contributors to the periodical press; others claimed only a few minutes in the pulpit the press provided.
None of these people appear in the Dictionary of National Biography or in other national biographical dictionaries (Dictionary of American Biography, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie or the not yet completed Neue Deutsche Biographie, etc.); a small number do receive brief entries in Boase’s invaluable Modern English Biography. If a source is used in a single biography, bibliographical information appears there. Some sources (e.g., Carlyle’s printed correspondence, various manuscript collections) yield information on more than one person dealt with here. For those I give identifying information on the first appearance, then use a brief tag; there will be a full bibliography at the end. There may be some inadvertent difficulties. For example, I give names of German libraries as they were when I corresponded with them in the 1960s; names, even locations of manuscript collections, may have changed. Some letters that I used in British manuscript collections have since been published; I try to cite publishing data but probably have missed a few.
Along the way I have received immense assistance from decades of reference and interlibrary loan staff at the Colby College Library and from librarians and archivists in several countries who have patiently checked their records and on occasion brought out boxes of yet uncatalogued material for me to examine. Microfilm, the computer and the internet have made it much easier to search from my desk in Maine but don’t excite the same feeling as unavoidably breaking Leonard Horner’s seal on the paper bands holding together applications for the first professorships at the new London University. (Once I finished with them, the letters, flecked with green and yellow and brown molds, were taken off to be fumigated. You can use them now in the University College Library, cleaned, deodorized, and numbered.)
-- E. C., Summer 2002
Update 2004: Fleming, Kater, Mackenzie, Moscati, de Sanctis, Wilberforce My apologies for the slow pace at
which this installment has followed the first; I will try to make better speed
with coming installments. The next lot
will include a corrected and much expanded sketch of Thomas C. Banfield, to
replace the sketch withdrawn from the first lot. As in the introduction to the
earlier installment, I would call attention to the geographical sweep of these
stories and to the struggles of these men--financial, spiritual,
psychological. Two very different men
are Italian emigrés; another is second generation English from German stock,
while a fourth lived in Germany for several years. Yet another, after filling diplomatic positions in the Caribbean
area, came to a bad end in New York.
Some went through sharp life (not limited to mid-life) crises,
struggling to find a calling or at least an income, at times beginning
brilliantly or with great promise before disappearing. Some of the sketches are shorter
than they should be, some longer. Just
trying to untangle the wild tales of the soi-disant
Marquis di Moscati from the possible facts of his life, asking if he was more
con man or more victim of British snobbery, has produced an unconscionably long
sketch. At the other end, I regret the
relative brevity of the sketch of Edward Wilberforce, who remains overshadowed
by others in his well-known extended family--and whose long professional life
as a barrister is scarcely touched upon here. Generally I have identified
periodicals but not individual articles if these can be found in readily
available sources like The Wellesley
Index to Victorian Periodicals and the on-line list of markings in the Athenaeum.
As much as possible I have given the titles of articles in periodicals
that have not been similarly indexed; occasionally I cite published
bibliographies.
-- E. C., Winter 2004
Albizzi || Austin ||
Barker ||
Beckwith(-Lohmeyer ||
Belinaye ||
Bell ||
Fleming ||
Kater ||
Mackenzie ||
Moscati ||
de Sanctis ||
Wilberforce
The count was born in 1804 in Florence, Italy, son of Giuseppe Pietro Albizzi (1745-1827) and nephew of the Marquis Albizzi. A cavalry officer in the army of Charles X of France, he was wounded in Paris fighting against the insurgents of July 1830. Possibly he then returned, with a brother, to Florence; sources are unclear on his movements in the early 1830s. By January 1835 he was in London, where he sought an audience with Sir Robert Peel. He claimed acquaintance with several aristocratic and political figures, mainly correspondents of Antonio Panizzi, on the basis of having “been recommended to” some of them and “presented to” others. He may have been in England longer, or he was a quick wooer; in April 1835, at St.Mary-le-Strand church in London, he married Mary Sophia Haywood, daughter of Martin Haywood of London and Southey Hall (Francis Haywood was a close friend of Panizzi). They had 3 sons and 2 daughters, born between 1836 and 1846. The Albizzis were living in Hay Park in 1836 but moved to Shrewsbury, where Albizzi taught French from 1838 (or perhaps earlier) through 1841. As far as we know, life was calm for a few years, disturbed by nothing more than a new baby every other year. Then the following story reached London (Times, 13 December 1841, p 5, col. c):
Presumably the publicity given this incident made it difficult for Albizzi to recruit new students in Shrewsbury. After returning to London, he tried to earn money as a writer, with limited success. The Rev. Joseph Edwards, a master at King’s College School, London, recommended him to George Long, editor of the Biographical Dictionary projected by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK). Albizzi wrote to Long (7 Feb. 1842) that he had “already furnished some articles to the foreign quarterly Review, the frazer Magazine &c &c.” Some brief notices in the Foreign Quarterly at this time may be his, but a change of publishers late in 1841 already had that journal in turmoil. Nothing of his has been identified in Fraser’s, and I have been unable to trace the book on the French Revolution of 1830 that he claimed Saunders and Otley published. In April Albizzi did some research in the British Museum Reading Room (signed in by Panizzi, who was ever willing to assist Italian expatriates), and early in May he submitted several contributions for the Biographical Dictionary’s first volume. Long rejected all of them, re-assigning the subjects to other writers.
By now he was probably desperate. A month or two later he entered into a conspiracy with Elzélina van Aylde Jonge, who called herself Mme. Ida Saint-Elme (“la Contemporaine”), proposing to sell the British government, through Lord Aberdeen (Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs), a collection of letters purportedly from and/or implicating Louis Philippe (who had supplanted Albizzi’s old patron, Charles X of France) in plots against Great Britain. The asking price was £8,000 to £9,000, but Aberdeen did not bite, instead consulting Louis-Philippe, who unsurprisingly branded the letters forgeries. Whether they were or not, Albizzi had misplayed his hand and had no future in London. By 1846 he had returned to Florence, where he died on 6 July 1851. His two oldest sons died young, within the decade of his death. The other three children survived and married into Florentine professional and aristocratic circles.
He was a member of the Alfred Club on Albemarle Street: an inexpensive club which John Timbs called “the asylum of doting tories and driveling quidnuncs” (Curiosities of London, 1867). An Ottavio degli
Albizzi, perhaps this man, published Elementi
di geologia e di mineralogia … [of Tuscany] in Florence in 1851. Sources:
Count Pompeo
Litta, Famiglie celebri Italiane 11
(Turin, 1876), disp. 178-180. Gentleman'’s
Magazine, June 1835, p. 654. (Litta calls him Rinaldo Ottavio, but
Albizzi did not use Rinaldo in England.
Rinaldo Ottavio and Ottavio may be safely identified as the same man by
their marrying the same woman at the same time.) BL Add.Mss. 40412/244 (Albizzi to Peel); 43051/264-292 (Albizzi
and others to and from Ld. Aberdeen).
SDUK (Albizzi to Geo. Long, 7 Feb. 1842). BMRR Born sometime
after 1805, youngest son of Jonathan Austin of Creeting Mill, Suffolk. Brother of John and Charles Austin (see DNB) and brother-in-law of Sarah Taylor
Austin. A linguist and Saxon scholar,
he lived chiefly in Freiburg, Germany.
“Said to be excessively shy,” he had at least as serious a writer’s
block as his brother John. In 1828 he
proposed writing for the SDUK but their minutes do not indicate any
submissions. He contributed to the Foreign Quarterly Review at least twice
in the 1830s. In Sept. 1837
Gladstone “wrote to Mr G-- Austine,” but there seems no further mention of
him. He may have died before 1846; his
father’s will made in that year does not mention him. Sources: Gladstone
Diaries, 2:314. Hamburgers, 54,
235. Janet Ross, Three generations of Englishwomen (London, 1893), 89. UCL SDUK.
BMRR. Banfield, Thomas C.
There was only one Thomas C. Banfield, whose middle
name was Collins; there was no Thomas Charles Banfield. Dates were 1802 - 1855. A lengthy biography will be posted at this site in the near future.
Charles Barker,
who is not to be confused with Charles Edward Barker, was born in May 1797 in
York, son of the Rev. Thomas Barker.
One brother, Thomas, took a degree from Queens’ College Cambridge and
was a life-long vicar of Thirkleby, Yorks.
Charles, however, declared that he did “not belong to the Church” and
had “no view whatever to the Clerical profession.” He was educated
at York Grammar School, then privately under the Rev. William Noddins, a Fellow
of Magdalene College Cambridge living in York.
In 1816 he entered Trinity College Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1821
and M.A. in 1824. In 1822 he won a £10
prize for the best essay on William III.
“His habits were for the most part those of a recluse Student, and he
indulged them to a degree which nothing but a robust and healthy constitution
could have enabled him to bear” (Testimonials,
6). After his B.A. he continued to
live at Trinity, taking private pupils. Sometime before 1824 he observed the
monitorial system at Charterhouse, in what capacity is not clear. In Feb. 1824 he applied for the Classical
Mastership at the new Edinburgh Academy; in March he changed this to an
application for an English mastership.
He was hired but dismissed after a year’s trial. Urged by Leonard Horner to apply for the
English Professorship at University College London in 1828, he instead applied
for the History Professorship, then withdrew the application. Later periods would have called him
manic-depressive or bi-polar; his letters describe alternating between intense
exciteability “which sometimes elevates me to a pitch that I believe myself
capable of everything …, and at another, depresses me so low that I fancy
myself worth nothing, and, what is worse, that there is nothing in the world
worth anything.” His family was
said to be literary and artistic. A
brother contributed to Punch. A sister,
Anne Elizabeth (Nancy; born 1790), in 1811, against the wishes of both
families, married T. Perronet Thompson, who later edited the Westminster Review. With another brother-in-law, Henry Southern,
Barker shared the Westminster’s
literary reviewing from 1824 to 1832; John Bowring claimed that Barker “was the
critic of a large portion of the light literature noticed in the Westminster,” though Wellesley identifies only one
collaboration and one possible review, both in 1826. Barker also contributed to the London Magazine in 1825-26, when Southern edited it, and helped
Southern edit the last series of the Retrospective
Review (1827-28), for which he also wrote.
He contributed to the Spectator
from its start in 1828 at least through 1830 (including “The Three Days at
Paris. By an Eye Witness,” 3:7 Aug.
1830: 585-7); to the Foreign Quarterly
Review in 1829; possibly to SDUK publications. Little of his apparently voluminous work has been identified. He lived in
Paris in 1830 and 1833, the last we hear of him. In 1853 two of his Retrospective
articles were republished posthumously as Characters and Anecdotes of Charles the Second; the anonymous
editor wrote that he was printing them “for readers of another
generation.” John Bowring said that
Barker died young, choking on an ear of barley. Sources:
Testimonials
in favour of Charles Barker, as a Candidate for the Situation of English Master
in Edinburgh Academy; Additional Testimonials …. Both Edinburgh, 1824. “Editor’s
Preface,” Barker’s Character and
Anecdotes of Charles the Second.
London, 1853. John
Bowring. Autobiographical Recollections. London, 1877. 72-3. L[eonard]
G[eorge] Johnson. General T. Perronet Thompson 1783-1869: His military, literary and political campaigns. London, 1957. 163-4, 188. George
L. Nesbitt. Benthamite Reviewing: The first
twelve years of the Westminster Review, 1824-1836. NY, 1934.
26. Frank
P. Riga and Claude A. Prance. Index to The London Magazine. NY:
Garland, 1978. 128, 130. Venn,
Pt. II, 1:150. Ms.
letters to R. Maugham, 23 Apr. 1829; Leonard Horner, 31 Jan., 15 June, and 14
Oct., all 1828. SDUK, Brougham Papers,
and College Corresp., all UCL. Wellesley. Beckwith was
born in London in 1810; the son of Charles William Lohmeyer (born in England
1769/1770; died in Copenhagen 1855).
His brother, John Henry (Beckwith-) Lohmeyer, was an employee in London
of the publisher Richard Bentley.
Charles worked in Copenhagen as a civil engineer and teacher of English.
In Denmark he published schoolbooks and translations from English; in England
Bentley published his translations from Danish, mainly of Hans Christian
Andersen. Confusion piles
upon confusion. Both Charles and John Henry are referred to at times as
Beckwith, at times as Lohmeyer, and at times as Beckwith-Lohmeyer, with no
consistency even in a close associae’s usage.
Sometimes it seems that when they weren’t Beckwith-Lohmeyer, Charles was
Beckwith and John Henry was Lohmeyer, but then Mr. Beckwith turns out to be
John Henry and Mr. Lohmeyer Charles. A
safer rule, at least for the 1840s and 1850s:
if he is in England, whatever he is called, he’s John Henry; if in Denmark, Charles. Bentley’s factotum who met Hans Christian
Andersen on the latter’s first visit to England in 1847 and before long annoyed
Andersen (“He digs in and is so piteous”--Diaries
175), though referred to as Mr. Beckwith, is John Henry, not Charles as Wullschlager
calls him (309); the same man signed as John Henry Lohmeyer when he received payment for Charles
Beckwith’s translations from Andersen, who referred to his translator as Mr.
Lohmeyer. Bibliographies
and library catalogues further confuse matters. The mistaken identification of Charles Beckwith and Charles Boner
is dealt with below. The Library of
Congress catalogue conflates Charles Beckwith Lohmeyer and John Charles
Beckwith (born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1789; in Denmark as an army officer
between 1805 and 1808; served in the Peninsula, lost a leg at Waterloo; lived
chiefly in the Vaudois valley in Piedmont 1827 to his death in 1862). Assisting
that confusion, John Charles apparently did not use “John”; the DNB
calls him Charles Beckwith after its initial use of the full name; and he would
be the “Lieut. Col. Chas. Beckwith”
admitted to the British Museum Reading Room in July 1830. Interestingly, the mother of John Charles
was a sister of William Otis Haliburton, therefore an aunt of Thomas Chandler
Haliburton, the creator of Sam Slick and a contributor to Bentley’s Miscellany. With
both Beckwith-Lohmeyers also employed by Bentley, there may be a family
connection. But to return to
Charles Beckwith. He married Amalie
Stahl, daughter of J. V. C. Stahl (connected with the Royal Theater) and Aue
Catherine Sadoline née Middleton. With
his wife, Beckwith kept a girls’ school
at Nørregade, Copenhagen. When in 1846 Andersen began to plan a visit to
England, he turned to Beckwith for English lessons, which began at the end of
1846 and continued into 1847. Beckwith
always presented himself as a close friend of Andersen, and indeed Andersen
allowed Beckwith to publish some of his translations in England before the
original Danish was published at home.
Nevertheless the relationship was often strained, and Andersen could not
ignore the criticism he heard of Beckwith’s ability as a translator. Beckwith died [in Denmark?] in 1874. Contributed to Bentley’s
Miscellany, Literary Gazette, Athenaeum. Translated:
1. Claude og Pauline, eller Kjærlighed og Stolthed. The Lady of Lyons, or Love and Pride,
Skuespil af E. L. Bulwer.
Copenhagen, 1843. 2. Hans Christian Andersen. A
poet’s bazaar. 3 vols. London: Bentley, 1846. “Biography of Hans Christian Andersen,”
1:1-27, is by Beckwith. 3. H. C. Andersen. A Christmas greeting to my
English friends. London: Bentley,
1847. This translation appeared before
the work’s Danish publication. [Bredsdorff’s Danish lit in Eng. trans. and Erslew both assign the translation to
Charles Boner; in fact, Erslew Suppl.,
1:22-23, considers “Charles Boner” a pseudonym used by C. Beckwith-Lohmeyer; he
also attributes to Beckwith translations actually by Boner. The British Library and Wullschlager assign Christmas greeting to Beckwith; Bentley
Receipts 51/281 shows that Lohmeyer collected payment for Beckwith’s articles
in Bentley’s Miscellany and for “‘The
Shadow’ & ‘The Old Street Lamp’ used in ‘Christmas Greeting.’”] 4. H. C. Andersen. The two baronesses. A romance
in three parts. 2 vols. London: Bentley, 1848. Publ. before the work’s Danish publication. 5. H. C. Andersen. Rambles in the romantic
regions of the Hartz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, &c. London: Bentley, 1848. “With the author’s sanction.” Several footnotes signed “Translator.” Rambles takes up pp. 1-105, 117-251. Pp. 255-294, “Albert Thorvaldsen; A
biographical sketch,” reprint work by Andersen transl. by Beckwith and
previously publ. in Bentley’s Miscellany.. Pp. 106-116, “Saint Christopher, A Catholic
legend,” are not by Andersen but author not identified. Rambles
the first translation into English of Andersen’s travel books (Bredsdorff, Danish lit. in Eng., 177). 6. H. C. Andersen. Pictures of Sweden. London: Bentley, 1851. Notes by the translator. Published: Verbal
distinctions. Et Tillæg til engelske
Læsebøger, Copenhagen, 1861. For
other English-Danish textbooks, published in Copenhagen between 1844 and 1851,
see Erslew Suppl., 2:238. Sources: The
diaries of Hans Christian Andersen, selected and transl. by Patricia L.
Conroy and Sven H. Rossel.
Univ.Washington P, 1990. Elias
Bredsdorff. H. C. Andersen og England.
Copenhagen, 1954. -----. Danish
literature in English translation, with a special Hans Christian Andersen
supplement. A bibliography. Copenhagen, 1950. Thomas
Hansen Erslew. Almindeligt Forfatter-Lexicon for Kongeriget Danmark med tilhørende
Bilande, fra 1814 til 1840.
Copenhagen, 1847. -----.
Supplement til ‘Almindeligt
Forfatter-Lexicon for Kongeriget Danmark med tilhørende Bilande’, indtil
Udgangen af Aaret 1853. 2 vols.
Copenhagen, 1858, 1860. Jackie
Wullschlager. Hans Christian
Andersen. The life of a storyteller. N.Y.:
Knopf, 2001. Ignores John Henry
and mistakenly considers all references to Beckwith or Lohmeyer to mean
Charles. BLPC. Bentley Archives, BL. Athenaeum
index. Wellesley.
Born 19 Nov.
1799, in London, the younger son and third of four children of the Marquis
Armand Marie de la Belinaye (d. 1836) by his wife Marie Louise Julia
(1771-1859), Breton aristocrats who emigrated at the time of French
Revolution. Parents were married in a
Roman Catholic chapel in London and later re-married in a civil service in Paris,
15 Aug. 1821. His older sister, Mary,
married Charles Philippe Auguste, Marquis de Grimaldi. He and his older
brother Armand were educated in part at the French Academy, Penn, near
Beaconsfield, Bucks. He qualified as a
surgeon, had a Harley Street practice from 1823 to 1842, and served as
physician to the French, Austrian, and Russian Embassies, as Physician
Extraordinaire to the Duchess of Kent, and as surgeon to an Italian troupe of
opera singers which included Giulia Grisi.
During this time he dropped his title, resuming it after 1842 when he
closed his medical practice. (In Oct.
1836 he received a ticket of admission to the British Museum Reading Room as
“Henry Belinaye, Esq.”) He lived at 17
George Street, Hanover Square; later in Fulham; married before 1840; was
widowed before May 1847, when he married Miss Sarah Maunch. By the first marriage he had at least one
daughter, Evelina Anne, who in 1858 married Thomas Lance. At some point Belinaye moved to Florence,
Italy, where he died on 10 Jan. 1873. Contributed to the Foreign Quarterly Review and probably to medical journals.
Published: medical texts: On the
removal of stones from the bladder (London 1825); The sources of health and
disease in communities (London, 1832); Compendium of lithotripsy (London
1837). Sources:
BL Add.Ms. 47,494; Royal College of Surgeons registers; SDUK; BMRR.
[Julia C. Byrne]. Gossip of the
century. London: Ward & Downey, 1892. 2:115.
A banker and
journalist, Bell was born in 1806, in Nassau, Bahamas, the eldest son of Robert
Bell of Nassau. He was educated chiefly
in Scotland, then studied law for 4 years.
In 1831 he married Agnes Tod of Stornoway, who died in 1838; in 1850 he
married Mary Anne Reaston, daughter of John Reaston of Duffield, Yorks. In 1840 he was said to have 14 years’
experience in joint-stock banking in Scotland and England. If true, banking must have been his day job
while he aspired to a different role.
In the 1830s he published literary and philosophical books: The Literary Album (Glasgow, 1829); Universal Mechanism; as consistent with the creation of all things
(Glasgow, 1830); The Scottish Martyr …
the Rev. Richard Cameron (Edinburgh, 1833; repr. 1842); Life of Donald Cargill (Glasgow,
1836). In the early 1840s he made his
living as a writer and journalist while trying to find other, non-literary
employment. In quick succession he
published books on banking questions: Philosophy
of Joint-Stock Banking (London, 1840; repr. 1855), some chapters previously
published in the “metropolitan press”; Country
Banks and the Currency (London, 1842); Banker's
and Merchant's Pocket Guide (Glasgow, 1843; rev. ed. London 1856). He edited the Great Northern Advertiser of Newcastle upon Tyne, perhaps for most
of its run, 24 Dec. 1840 - 23 Nov. 1843 (but not for its continuation as the Newcastle Advertiser) and edited or
co-edited the new Railway Herald (17
Apr. 1843-10 Apr. 1847; the length of Bell’s tenure is unknown); contributed to
the short-lived Cerberus (17 June -
18 Nov. 1843) and from July 1843 through Jan. 1846 to the Foreign and Colonial / New Quarterly Review. He may have been introduced to the
last-named periodical by William Ewart Gladstone, then at the Board of Trade,
who was closely connected with the Foreign
and Colonial from its start and to
whom Bell, writing from Newcastle upon
Tyne in May and June 1843, had offered his services. Not required at the Board, Gladstone replied, and Bell remained a
journalist. In mid-February 1844 Bell
wrote again to Gladstone in search of a job, again unsuccessfully. He continued writing for periodicals to
which he had already contributed and began to contribute to the new Banker's Magazine (first published in
1844). In 1846 he published A Guide to the Investment of Capital; or,
How to lay out money with safety and profit.
Being a popular exposition of the various descriptions of securities,
with hints for the guidance of capitalists (London: C. Mitchell). He wrote the
weekly leading article in the Banking department of the Atlas for "upwards of three years" and contributed to the
Westminster Review (no articles
identified) and to unnamed metropolitan and provincial newspapers. Gradually he also returned to early
interests, contributing to the Journal of
Sacred Literature, which John Kitto started in 1848, as well as to Kitto’s Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature. He also listed among the periodicals for
which he wrote Hunt's New York Magazine. In the
1850s he
served as secretary of the London Chartered Bank of Australia. No date of death has been found; the last
record dates from 1856. Sources:
"Dictionary … of Living Authors …,"
The Critic 12 (l July 1853), 358
[these biographies were written by their subjects]. Gladstone letter registers, BL Add. Mss. 44,554 - 44,555. Prefaces to his published books. The little we know about Samuel
Fleming comes from his applications for assistance from the Royal Literary Fund
(RLF) and a single begging letter to Lord Brougham. Even his contemporaries were not sure how much to believe; on the
back of one application the secretary of the RLF noted “Not
authenticated.” To complicate matters,
Fleming varied between giving great detail and being vague and general. Though many of his claims may be
legitimate, he probably wanted them to be taken in a grander sense than they
merited. Fleming was born about 1768. From 1791 to 1797 he taught Greek and
Latin--as “resident teacher” at various schools in the London area and as
private tutor to sons of the nobility.
Though described by one former employer, Charles Parr Burney, as “more
than qualified,” he apparently was not a success, never staying long in a
position, at Burney’s making “an abrupt and most unhandsome retreat,” to
everyone’s “great inconvenience.”
After that he fantasized of starting his own day school but was never
employed again in someone else’s school.
From 1797 into the early 1830s he claimed that he supported himself by
contributing to a number of London periodicals and by tutoring; among his
pupils he named William Henry West Betty (“The Young Roscius,” 1791-1874). It is doubtful that he earned much as a
writer. He claimed to have edited the Universal Magazine in 1804 (the first
volume of a new series, with a new publisher) and in 1806 something called the Commercial Telescope, though he could
not decide whether the latter was a periodical which he “edited, & in a
great measure, composed” or a book. In
1827 - 1828, he said, he contributed to two of James Silk Buckingham’s
periodicals, the short-lived Sphynx (8
July 1827 - 25 Apr. 1829) and the more successful Athenæum (first issue 2 Jan. 1828; unfortunately there are no
markings of the early issues); also to the Monthly
Review, the London Magazine (in
its faltering final years), the Foreign
Review (begun in 1828), and the New
Monthly Magazine. Nothing has been
identified as his in any of these. He
did identify his contributions to the London
Spy(which lasted for only 3 issues n 1831-1832). All along he published pamphlets, usually at his own expense;
they included An Impartial Statement of
the Merits and Services of Opposition (1797); Cobbett and the Learned Languages.
A speech on the utility of the learned languages (1807); Why are we poor? addressd to the industrious classes (1820/21); Defence of Queen Caroline; and Parallel
between the Jews and the Scotch (the printers attested to his authorship of
some of these). He translated, he said,
Mme de Staël’s Delphine (usually he
spelled her name “Stahle”) and, again from the French, Count Dal Pozzo’s work
on Catholic Emancipation (1829). He
edited Sir Edward Sherburne’s poems, with a life of the poet and a preface. He had been, he claimed,
co-director of the British Forum in New Bond Street. Several times he added “A.M.” after his name, but I have found no
evidence that he had any degree from Oxbridge, Trinity College Dublin, or the
Scottish universities. He never
mentioned parents, origins, or family, and early on declared himself “destitute
of Friends.” He seems always to have
lived quietly alone in lodgings, staying at an address for years. The few unequivocal recommendations came
from landlords and landladies who let him stay even when he was seriously in
arrears on his rent. In 1827 Burney noticed that Fleming
was “gradually subsiding into the character of a rather regular Beggar.” In 1828, 1832, and 1833 the RLF gave him
small grants (£5 each time). About
1834, when he was earning less than £2 a month, he was guilty of an unspecified
forgery when seeking aid from the Society of Schoolmasters, who informed the
RLF and probably others, bringing a halt to even small handouts. By October 1838 he was in the St.Pancras
Workhouse, New Road; he was still there when he was last heard from on 2 Nov.
1839. Contributions: Fleming gave
titles only of his contributions to the London
Spy: Character of
Julius Caesar suggested by an article in Blackwood’s Magazine. Character of
Cataline under a new point of view. A Grecian party in
imitation of the Symbosia of the ancients.
The tailor’s
abroad a parody on the ‘Schoolmaster abroad’
Remarks on the
general prevalence of music. Reminiscences of
an old pedagogue [not found in BL copy].
Remarks on modern
London. Essay on
plausibility. Comparative
anatomy of nations: or new traits of character in the English, Scotch,
& Irish, pp. 484-85. Signed "Crito." Remarks on the
ignorance of the London editors of newspapers.
A poetical elegy
on the death of Miss Fanny [paper torn].
A poetical address
for the pupils of the [paper torn] academy at Newport, Isle of Wight. Essay on the
decline of dramatic compostion. Cataline and his associates, pp. 500-501. Signed "Fabius." Sources: RLF case 61. Ms. letter
to Lord Brougham, 1 June 1839 (Brougham Papers UCL) One by one in the 1750s and 1760s
three Kater brothers emigrated from the tiny German duchy of Lippe-Detmold to
Bristol, joining a maternal uncle who had settled there in the sugar refining
business. The middle brother, Henry
(1748-1795), married an Englishwoman, Anne Collins; their only child, Capt.
Henry Kater (1777-1835; see DNB),
left Bristol and sugar, joined the army, was engaged under Col. Lambton in the
trigonometric survey of India, and pubished extensively in scientific
journals. In 1810 Capt. Kater married
Mary Frances Reeve; they had three children:
Mary Agnes (1811-1827); Henry Herman (1813-1881); and Edward
(1816-1866), the subject of this sketch. Edward inherited wealth and
position, perhaps also a tendency to depression or melancholia. On his father’s
side there were the sugar-refining fortunes, the Captain having been heir to
both his father and a bachelor uncle.
Edward’s mother had brought to the marriage the Yorkshire manors of
Mexborough and Wickersley and buildings and lands in Richmond and Swinton, all
in the Reeve family at least since the beginnng of the 18th century; her own
mother was known for holding court as the lady of Mexborough Manor. Capt. Kater was consulted by the “Admiralty,
the War Office, the makers of scientific equipment, manufacturers and mathematical
scholars,” who knew of his inventions and discoveries, many of them standardizing
measurements or aiding navigation.
However, after the death in 1827 of his daughter, a mathematical
prodigy, the Captain became reclusive, still working on his experiments but
narrowing his circle to a few scientific friends (Macmillan 18-19). In February 1833, when Edward was
in his teens. his mother died; two years later he lost his father. For a few years the sons remained in the
family’s London home, York House, Regent’s Park, though Henry Herman was away
from home during some of this time, attending the Royal Military College at
Sandhurst before entering Magdalene College Cambridge for the Michaelmas 1836
term. H.H., we are told, “pursu[ed] his
Cambridge studies, and liv[ed] an active social life” (Macmillan 24). Perhaps the social life prevailed, since he
seems to have kept only 4 terms at Magdalene, leaving in December 1837. Back in
London, Henry Herman continued to move in the best social circles. At Queen Victoria’s coronation (28 June
1838), he was “One of the Earl Marshal’s gold stick Officers” (Venn),
“responsible for ushering the duchesses to their appointed seats, and for
assisting in the distribution of the medals specially struck for the
occasion.” Not long after this joyous
day, he was thrown from his horse in Regent’s Park, near his house, and
sustained a fractured skull (Macmillan
25-26). The accident seemed to change
him. After his recovery he began to
dispose of London property and to assemble what he needed for a new life;
in August 1839 he left for Australia,
taking with him goods, servants, and livestock (including “the famous sires of
some of Australia’s best racehorses”). Soon after H.H. left Cambridge,
Edward took his place there, at Downing College rather than Magdalene,
matriculating as a fellow-commoner in Lent term 1838. Edward’s stay was only slightly longer than his brother’s. Downing’s records do not reveal when Edward
left Cambridge, whether after the summer of 1838 or Michaelmas term 1839. Early in February 1840, he received a ticket
of admission to the British Museum Reading Room; no longer having a family
home, he was staying with the Rev. Dr. James William Worthington, the first
vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Gray’s Inn Road.
By March he had become a member of the Parthenon Club, 20 St.James
Square, and was receiving his mail there.
(In April Worthngton became editor of the Foreign Quarterly Review, where he published Edward’s
articles. Worthington also had a role
in the Church of England Quarterly Review
and started and edited the Foreign and Colonial
Quarterly Review, later called the New
Quarterly Review.) Soon Edward Kater was busy making
or re-establishing connections and joining scientific societies. Though Macmillan’s history of the Kater
family claims that neither Edward nor Henry Herman “showed any interest in the
matters that preoccupied their father” (19),
Edward’s activities tell a different story. On 17 March 1840 he sent a paper to J. F. W. Herschel, an old
friend of his father, asking Herschel to communicate it to the Royal Society;
it was titled “Description of an Escapement for an Astronomical Clock, invented
by the late Captain Henry Kater, F.R.S. &c., drawn up from his own
memorandums by his son Edward Kater, Esq.”
Herschel presented it to the Society on 19 March and also asked if
Edward would like to be a fellow. Yes,
please, Edward replied on 28 March. He
was proposed for membership, “from personal knowledge,” by several eminent
scientists and explorers, all Fellows of the Society: Herschel, H. Harvey, Basil Hall, F. Beaufort, W. H. Smyth, John
George Children, and E. B. Beaumont.
The paper was published in Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 130 (1840), 335-340. On 6 July 1840, by which time he
was writing from 13 Nottingham Terrace, Edward indicated his intention to
become a member of a new or projected Historical Society of Science. By 19 November 1840, when he was elected a
fellow of the Royal Society, he was already a member of the Royal Institution
and a fellow of the Statistical Society.
At some point he became a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He contributed to the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1840-41 and probably contributed to
other periodicals in which Worthington had a hand. He was also establishing his place
socially. He acquired a townhouse at 46
Sussex Gardens--as the family history notes, “at Bayswater, then a fashionable
suburb” (Macmillan 22). He moved in
literary and theatrical circles. On 9
May 1841 he was an evening guest after a dinner William Macready gave for the
French actress Mlle Rachel (Elisabeth Félix)--no slight to be on the evening
list, which included people like Charles Babbage, Anna Jameson, Sir Edward
Fitzgerald, John Forster, Miss Helena Faucit, Samuel Lover, and Richard Lalor
Sheil. A year later, on 22 May 1842,
Kater was again Macready’s evening guest, as were most of the 1841 group as
well as Robert Browning, Daniel Maclise, Thomas Carlyle, and others almost
equally eminent. There is one
change: guests are the “E.
Katers.” The new Mrs. Kater was the
former Georgianna Mary Seton. There
were no children of the marriage. He died at 4 Camden Place,
Cambridge, on 7 July 1866, of “Apoplexy 12 Hours Certified,” aged 50. Present at the death was one Theodore Henry
Skinner of the same address. Under
“Occupation,” the death certificate notes “Fundholder.” Boase, which gives him one of its shortest
entries, does not even identify his parentage and education. At Edward’s death, many of Capt. Henry
Kater’s possessions passed to Henry Herman Kater in Australia; in 1873 the
latter gave some of these to the Sydney Observatory and the University of
Sydney, where they remain. Sources: David S. Macmillan, The
Kater Family 1750-1965 (Sydney, 1966).
Essential but not always trustworthy (or coherent); based on family
records and family tradition. Venn; Boase; BMRR; Kater to J. O.
Halliwell, Edin.U.L. mss. LOA 100/36; Macready Diaries, ed. Toynbee 2:135, 171.
Death certificate. I am particularly
grateful for the help received from William Bell, Archivist, Sheffield
Libraries Archives; Mrs. Gill Jackson, Information Officer, Royal Society;
Elizabeth Stratton, Archivist, Downing College, Cambridge; Mrs. Aude
Fitzsimons, Assistant Librarian, Magdalene College, Cambridge. Charles Mackenzie was born in 1788,
probably in Scotland, the eldest son of
Kenneth Francis Mackenzie (1748-1831) and his wife Anne Townsend. The Mackenzies were an ancient Scottish
famiy, “allied to the best blood of Scotland”; Charles was born into a junior
branch, the Mackenzies of Redcastle.
His was a large family, with eleven surviving children--four younger
sons and six daughters. Charles was
considerably older than his brothers.
The youngest, J. F. Townsend Mackenzie, born about 1813, entered the
army and somewhat unromantically caught cold in Fife, developed pneumonia, and
died in 1833. The next youngest son,
Colin, was almost twenty years younger than Charles but close in age to James and Kenneth. Colin (1806-1881) joined the East India Company as a cadet in 1825
and spent most of his life in military service in the East--in the first Afghan
War, in the 1856-57 India mutiny; a prisoner at times, a witness to the murder
of his friend Sir William Hay Macnaghten.
James was a civilian doing business in China and India. Of Kenneth we know least, and the name of
only one daughter appears--Mary, the next oldest child to Colin. Colin’s first wife, Adeline Pattle, was the
older sister of the photographer Julia Margaret (Pattle) Cameron and of Maria
Pattle Jackson, Virginia Woolf’s grandmother. Charles must have had a lonely,
difficult childhood. In the late 1780s
or early 1790s his father, a Scottish barrister, purchased Lusignan, a “very
large” plantation in Demerara which generally “gave a very good income,”
supporting the family for almost fifty years.
Kenneth Francis Mackenzie’s ties to the Caribbean area were strengthened
when about 1793 he was appointed attorney general in Grenada, serving also as
President of the Council. At the start
of Julien Fédon’s rebellion of 1795-96, when Ninian Home, the governor, and
over forty of his associates were taken hostage (and later murdered), Kenneth
Mackenzie became de facto governor,
“the chief authority left in George Town,” dealing with a rebellion fueled by
racial, national, and religious animosities.
He led British troops in their efforts to control the rebellion, with
its continuing massacres of English planters and their families; later he was
accused variously of acting too slowly or too quickly. After a few months English help began to
trickle in; large reinforcements arrived early in 1796 at the same time as a
new governor arrived, and President Mackenzie, by now ill, returned to
Britain. He had, he said, exhausted
his private fortune in providing for his troops and seeing to public needs, but
he was never reimbursed the £20,000 he claimed. (See [Helen Douglas Mackenzie], Storms and sunshine of a soldier’s life. Lt.-General Colin Mackenzie C.B. [Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884], 1:3-6, 11, which
repeats the family account as told much later by Charles’s younger brother
Colin--who was not born until ten years after the Grenada rebellion. Also see Raymund P. Devas, The Island of Grenada (1650-1950) [St.
George’s, Grenada: U. of the West
Indies, 1964], 103-155, for a detailed
history of the rebellion; pp. 122-135, 140, 147, and 151 discuss Kenneth Mackenzie’s role, quoting both his defenders
and detractors.) Was Charles in Grenada during this
dreadful time, or had he been sent to school or left with relatives in
Britain? If the history of his younger
brothers gives any clue, Charles’s early years were difficult wherever he
was. Their father was rigid,
stern. Decades later Helen Mackenzie
wrote that Colin’s “was not a happy childhood.
Every offence was visited with severity; flogging ad libitum was the rule, so that when the boys caught sight of
their father they preferred escaping to meeting him.” Anne Mackenzie brought no softening touch: the discipline “was not mollified by any
interference on the part of their mother, though she was most tender to her
children as long as they were babies” (Storms and sunshine 1:7). For Charles’s younger brothers, boarding
school did not improve matters: “Colin
often regretted the desultory manner in which he had been educated, and the
inferior schools to which he had been sent.
When about twelve he was placed wth his elder brothers, James and
Kenneth, at a school in Cumberland, of which he used to speak with horror, from
the ‘brutal severity of the punishment’” (1:9). There is a gap in our knowledge of
the family after the parents’ return to Britain in 1796. Kenneth senior continued his fruitless efforts
to have the government acknowledge his services in Grenada and recompense him for
his out-of-pocket expenses. For more
than a decade his claims kept them in London, where Colin was born in
1806. By then Charles, whatever his
preparatory education, had begun medical studies at the University of
Edinburgh. In 1808 he was chosen
president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh, a society of medical
students and post-graduates; he received a medical degree in 1809, with a
dissertation on asphyxia. Among his fellow medical students, the future
ethnologist James Cowles Prichard (1786 -1848) became a life-long friend. Mackenzie, who seems never to have practiced
as a doctor, also extended his studies beyond medicine; soon after taking his
degree he published essays on Scottish
mineralogy that led to an 1812 book, Outlines of the Mineralogy of the Ochil
Hills. (Several sources also credit
him with a degree of doctor of law; it was not an Edinburgh degree, and I have
found no record of his receiving a degree anywhere else.) Mackenzie then returned to London,
in the same year becoming a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. He may soon have discontinued his medical
studies: he is said to have joined the
Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular army not long after taking his medical
degree--as either an “amateur” or an aide de camp and secretary to the
Duke. Several relatives were officers,
particularly in India, and when the Allied forces commanded by Sir Arthur
Wellesley (not yet Wellington) defeated the French on 27-28 July 1809 at
Talavera, in western Spain, the 3rd Division was led by a Lieutenant General
Mackenzie. Perhaps Charles was a
hanger-on in a relative's camp rather than an insider at Wellington's elbow. According to a New York newspaper
quoted by Redding (Yesterday and to-day,
2:175), Mackenzie remained with Wellington’s army “until the battle of
Toulouse,” 10 April 1814. However, he
was in England for a year or more during that time, seeing to the publication
of his book and further securing his position in the scientific world. In January 1812 he was elected a fellow of
the Linnean Society and admitted in November of that year; in December he
indicated that he was “desirous of admission into the Geological Society,” to
which he was elected in January 1813.
To the Linnean Society he first gave his address as “Portugal”; other
addresses at this time were all in London.
If he then returned to the Peninsula, perhaps it was about the time that
General J. Mackenzie commanded a division during the botched siege of
Tarrazona, 3 - 11 June 1813.
After leaving the Peninsular Army,
Mackenzie travelled on the Continent for several months. Once back in England, he continued to
cultivate London scientific, political, and literary / journalistic
circles. On 6 Jan. 1815 he was elected
a fellow of the Royal Society; his sponsors were mainly members of the Linnean
and Geographical Societies. He
contributed to newspapers and magazines; an obituary notice in the Edinburgh Evening Courant, which others
copied, said that these included the Edinburgh
and Quarterly, but nothing has been
identified as his in either. He
received, and renewed, a ticket of admission to the British Museum Reading
Room. He acquired the support of George
Canning, who was appointed to the Foreign Office in September 1822. With that backing, Mackenzie moved towards a
diplomatic career. He accompanied a
British commission to Mexico in 1823; on 10 October he was named consul at Vera
Cruz. Before that, however, he seems to
have returned to Scotland, or at least to have had interests there; we hear
that “he turned himself to mercantile affairs, and a cleverer young man wasna
in-a’ Embro’” (Blackwood’s 27 (Apr.
1830), 679). His fortunes were
rising as those of his family fell. In
the early 1820s the senior Mackenzies were in financial straits because of a
drop in the Demerara plantation’s productivity. They moved to Fife, then a few years later to Wales, where the
two youngest boys became day scholars with a Rev. Dr. Donne in Oswestry. Though brother Colin would have liked a
university education, the best their father could manage for him was an
appointment to an East India Company cadetship in 1825. Charles came to his aid, payting an
estimated £500 for Colin’s outfit and passage.
At the end of 1825 Charles was appointed consul-general to Haiti, “with
particular instructions [from Canning] to obtain and to transmit to him
accurate accounts regarding the population, the industry, and the produce of
Hayti,” a task he “fulfilled … in a very clear and satisfactory manner.” The patronage that had brought him this far,
however, became a mixed blessing.
Canning died in early August 1827, less than a year after becoming prime
minister. A few months later Mackenzie
returned to England (bringing “a few Specimens of plants that I collected in
Haiti” for Dr. W. J. Hooker, an old friend who was now Regius professor of
botany at Glasgow University) and was left dangling, technically with a
position but with nothing to do, the report he had written for Canning kept
under wraps by the government. (This
charge, like the description of Mackenzie’s Haiti mission, is made in “The
British Colonies. Letter Third. To his Grace the Duke of Wellington, &c.
&c. From James M’Queen, Esq.,” Blackwood’s Magazine 27 [Feb. 1830],
24. James Macqueen [1778-1870] had
managed a sugar plantation in Grenada in the 1790s, when Mackenzie’s father was
attorney general / Council President; later Macqueen was a journalist and
entrepreneur in Glasgow and London. In 1824 he published The West India Colonies: the
calumnies and misrepresentations circulated against them examined and refuted.) Mackenzie’s consulship was
officially terminated on 10 October 1828; he had simultaneously held the title
of Hanoverian consul-general to Haiti and retained that title until February
1830. While seeking new government
employment, at the end of 1828 he turned to his pen for support, writing
articles that appeared in the January and April 1829 issues of the Foreign Quarterly Review and
successfully applying to another old friend, Macvey Napier, for work on the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Though he was unhappy cooling his heels in
London, he explained to Dr. Hooker that “I can’t stir from town, until I know
my future destination” and to Macvey Napier that he stayed only because his claims in Downing Street had not
yet been settled. Whatever those claims
were, they, like his father’s earlier
claims on the government, did not seem likely ever to be settled. He had as little hope of present government
employment, “for I find that valuable as Mr Canning’s approbation is, that it is not at the present day
a passport to Ministerial patronage.” The growing split in the party
between Wellington and the Canningites worked against Mackenzie. His Haiti report, like his career, remained
stalled until 1830, when finally “the results of his labours have been, after
much delay, and to the dismay of the British anti-colonists, drawn forth from
the archives of the Foreign-office, by order of the House of Commons, and
printed for the information of the members of that House and of the
public.” This would be Notes on Haiti , two volumes published
in London early in 1830. They did not
include the totality of Mackenzie’s reports:
“Much, however, as had been disclosed by the papers …, darker and more
conclusive information still remains behind, in the Report which Mr MacKenzie
was commanded and commissioned to make, and which he did make, but which has
been suppressed somewhere and even a review of the whole transmitted for the
Quarterly Review, withheld by, it is believed, the official influence which
controls that publication” (Macqueen, op.cit.). Finally Mackenzie received new
employment. On 20 Feb. 1830 he was
named Commissioner of Arbitration to the Mixed British and Spanish Commission
at Havana, Cuba. A few months later
George IV died, Parliament was dissolved, and by year’s end the Whigs were in power. If Mackenzie had already gone out to Cuba,
he was soon back in London, where we find him from late 1830 into 1832. In November 1830 he became for a short while
the first editor of The Albion, a
conservative evening daily, writing its
leaders. He contributed to the first
number of The Metropolitan, published
1 May 1831, and continued to contribute through 1832, on Polish affairs and
other subjects; his friends Thomas Campbell and Cyrus Redding were respectively
nominal editor and actual sub-editor (Redding, Campbell, 2:284). In 1832
he was a member of the Council of the newly formed Literary Association of the
Friends of Poland, of which Campbell was president (Redding, Campbell, 2:290-291; his sister-in-law
claimed that “One of [Colin Mackenzie’s] brothers became Secretary of the
Polish Association” and even persuaded Colin to join the Polish army; see Storms and sunshine 1:26-27). More personal matters also kept
Mackenzie in London into 1832. His
father, who was again living there, died in the course of the year; Colin was
home from India on sick leave. The five
brothers tried unsuccessfully to agree on “the best way of disposing” of the
Demerara estate, which Colin referred to as “our paltry inheritance” and which
created problems for years. Finally,
his appointment re-affirmed, Charles returned to Cuba in 1832, but in 1834
Palmerston, at the Foreign Office, dismissed him from Government service. It proved to be a permanent dismissal. All in all, the 1830s were not kind
to the family. The youngest brother,
Townsend, died on 29 January 1833. The remaining brothers still could not agree
about the Demerara estate. By August
1835 Colin was declaring himself entirely out of patience; then in 1836 he lost
his young wife, only 24 and already the mother of three daughters. In 1838, again back in England on sick
leave, Colin was involved in a “disagreeable lawsuit.” Charles’s life seems similarly unsettled, as
reflected less dramaticaly in his history with the Royal Society. He lost membership early in the decade, was
re-admitted in June 1832 only to have his membership cancelled in 1835, “from
the non-payment of his annual contribution”; the next year he was “re-admitted
by ballot into the Society.” From this point on, Mackenzie’s
activities are particularly difficult to trace. The Edinburgh Evening
Courant obituary notice described
him as “a ripe scholar and an excellent linguist, with great versatile literary
attainments.” According to Redding,
after 1834 Mackenzie “turned his attention not only to literature [i.e., journalism] and the politics of
the day, but to divers commercial operations” (Yesterday and today, 2:175).
The nature of these remains obscure.
About 1846 business took him to the United States for a few years; in
1850-1851 he was back in London. There
he fell in with Robert Pearse Gillies, whom he would have known as the first
editor of the Foreign Quarterly Review. Gillies enlisted Mackenzie’s help in a plan
to bring out the first number of a “New Foreign Quarterly Review,” but
Mackenzie “was called away to America” before anything could appear (Gillies to
Brougham, 18 March 1852; ms. UCL).
Thereafter Mackenzie lived in the U.S., “chiefly in Boston and New York,
in both of which cities he counted numerous friends, not the least known of
whom was Prescott the historian” (Redding 2:175). During this time he sent reports on American events to at least
one English newspaper. Some accounts of
his death suggest that he was in straitened circumstances in his last years. Charles Mackenzie died 6 August
1862, aged 75, of “accidental burning” in an extensive fire that started at the
Rainbow Hotel, “a sort of English chop and lodging house” in New York
City. The Rainbow Hotel occupied the
first three floors of a six-story building at 31-33 Beekman Street, in a block
that was mainly commercial and manufacturing; Mackenzie shared a third-floor
room with a William Simmons, who also died, and whose age was given variously
as 35 and 26. (Boase mistakenly dates
the death as 6 July. Joseph Irving, The Book of Scotsmen … [Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1881], 306, gives age at death as 74; while
the first newspaper accounts of the fire were vague or confused about his age,
the death certificate and Redding give it as 75.) His body was returned to
Liverpool, England. I have found no
evidence that he ever married. Contributions: Foreign Quarterly Review: “Humboldt’s Political and Statistical Account of Cuba,”
3 (Jan. 1829), 400-433. “Mexico,” 4 (Apr.
1829), 165-204.
Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History
Society, Edinburgh: “Analysis of
compact Feldspar from Pentland Hills,” 1 (1808-10), 616-28. “Outlines of the
mineralogy of the Ochil Hills,” 2 (1811-16), 1-23.
“Outlines of the
mineralogy of the Ochil Hills,” Thompson, Ann.
Phil. 3 (1814), 116-126. Sources [in addition to those cited above]:
Death certificate,
Municipal Archives and Records Center, N.Y.C.
Letters from
Mackenzie to Macvey Napier, 1815-1829:
BL Add.Mss. 34611/175, 208, 279, 355; 34613/456; 34614/37-38. To Dr. William J. Hooker, 24 July 1828: Kew Gdns. mss., Hooker corr. xliii 170.
Information from
Lynn Crothall, Linnean Society Library; Irene A. Ferguson, Special Collections,
Univerity of Edinburgh Library; Mrs. Gill Jackson, Royal Society Library;
Andrew Mussell, Geological Society Archives.
Cyrus Redding, Literary reminiscences and memoirs of Thomas
Campbell (London: Charles J. Skeet,
1860), 2: 284, 290-291; Yesterday and to-day (London: Newby, 1863), 2:173-177.
Obituary notices
in New York Times, Thurs., 7 Aug.
1862, p.3 (as “William McKenzie”); N. Y.
Times, 9 Aug. 1862, p.5 (name
corrected to “Charles Mackenzie”). New York Herald, 7 Aug. 1862, p. 9; N. Y. Herald, 9 Aug. 1862, p. 5. New
York Daily Tribune, 7 Aug. 1862, p. 2.
Edinburgh Evening Courant, 23
Aug. 1862, p. 7, and “Death of a Scottish Litterateur in New York,” 28 Aug.
1862, p. 2. Gent.Mag., Oct. 1862, 504. Foreign Office List, July 1864,
166.
Edinburgh
University List of Graduates in Medicine. Moscati, Francesco Maria
[Francis M.] di [or de]
The ‘Marquis di Moscati’ is a difficult subject. His fantasy view of his life presents a figure larger than life, an imposter according to many. Still, just when one decides that his claims are all lies, evidence turns up to give credit to some, and one must once again re-evaluate everything.
Moscati was born in Italy about 1774. In France and at first in England he usually did not call himself Marquis, describing himself simply as a Neapolitan gentleman. Some English suggested that his origins fell far below that. At a young age, his story went, he left his homeland for political reasons, serving as an officer under Bonaparte himself throughout the Napoleonic wars--or only in Egypt (1798-1799) and on the retreat from Moscow (1812), or under Murat. Or he was Napoleon’s aide-de-camp at Austerlitz (2 Dec. 1805). Whatever the role, he entertained well-to-do Londoners with tales of battlefield adventures. How true were they? He told this bizarre anecdote: ‘In 1810, one of my lieutenants was killed at the battle of Lintz; he was a Pole of a very violent temper, a bloody duellist, and much addicted to sensuality. I forwarded his skull to Dr. Gall [the phrenologist] …’ [paper read on 5 Nov. 1832 to London Phrenological Society, printed in Lancet]. There were two clashes at Linz, on 5 and 17 May 1809, not 1810; in the first, Austrian forces were defeated by Württemberg forces, in the second by Württemberg and Saxon forces. Where do Moscati and a violent womanizing Pole fit in, to say nothing of decapitating one’s own dead officer, wrapping up the head and shipping it off? May the Linz of this story be the Austerlitz of another tale? The latter reference appears only in the 1898 reminiscences of an elderly woman who as a child in the late 1830s or early 1840s had heard Moscati’s tales.
During the period of the Napoleonic wars Moscati probably was contributing to Roman and other Italian periodicals, wherever he may have been physically. A generally reliable list of his writings that Moscati drew up in 1833 for the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) includes yearly ‘improvisations’ in the Annali Arcadici from 1807 through 1814. In the 1832 paper he also claimed, during those pre-Waterloo years, a ‘criticosatirical article’ in the Efemeridi Letterarie di Venezia attacking Gall’s first work on craniology and attacks on Gall and phrenology in unnamed German and French periodicals. Though Gall, he said, tried to overcome his scepticism, and though he himself ‘made use of the skulls of the killed in battle,’ he still resisted until Pius VII issued a bull excommunicating Gall and condemning his system; then Moscati, while still entertaining reservations, supported Gall in the Revue Encyclopédique in 1817. This account requires careful scrutiny. The RLF list has him contributing to the Révue Encyclopédique only from 1821 to 1830, in his Paris period; moreover, this periodical began publication in 1819. Pius VII apparently issued no such bull; he did issue a condemnation of the Carbonari in 1821, threatening excommunication to those who remained members, and some Moscatis were connected with the Carbonari--but were they relatives of this Moscati? Earlier the Austrian Emperor, Francis I, not the Pope, had suppressed Gall’s work. The RLF list does include ‘a bitter Satyr against the Roman Church published in 1818’ without identifying place of publication or a specific subject for satire.
In 1817 Moscati was living in Rome. There, he said, he discussed phrenology, art, and politics with people like Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (later Ludwig I), the sculptors Canova and Thorvaldsen, and August von Kotzebue, the popular German dramatist. Ludwig and the others were indeed in Rome in 1817-1818; the evidence goes no further. Moscati was at least engaged in respectable, though probably low-paying literary work (scholarly or hack, depending on one’s view), providing notes and explanatory essays for mainly antiquarian and architectural studies and contributing Latin improvisations to the Diorio. He was also giving Italian lessons to English visitors to Rome.
Then for unknown reasons he was again obliged to leave Italy, according to family tradition (which however gives no clear date) crossing France and Belgium to reach England, along the way leaving a sister in a French convent. He never mentioned this trip, always claiming that he first arrived in England on 6 October 1831. For once incontrovertible evidence gives him the lie. First, an advertisement appeared in The Times at least five times, first on 1 August 1818 and then repeated daily, over a year later, from 18 through 21 October 1819: F. Moscati, a gentleman from Naples but latterly of Rome, where he had taught Italian to ‘English visiters’ there, now offered Italian language lessons in London, at half a guinea per hour. In 1818 his address was 15 Skinner Street, Snowhill, later 284 Strand. He could also be contacted at Mr Bell's, bookseller, of Oxford Street.
Second, parish records show that on 22 April 1821, at St.Pancras Old Church, London, Francesco M. Moscati married, by special license, Emma Handford; the handwriting in the parish records is identical to that of later documents signed by the ‘Marquis de Moscati.’ Both bride and groom were described as single, of age, and ‘of this parish.’ The special license allowed the ceremony to be performed anywhere and without the usual 15 days’ residency in a parish; the ‘of this parish’ of the marriage certificate might be pro forma, or Moscati had moved again. Soon after the wedding the couple settled in Paris, where Moscati contributed regularly to the periodical press and dreamt of being a literary figure. Between 1821 and 1830 he contributed not only to the Révue Encyclopédique but also to the Journal asiatique and Bulletin scientifique, using the signature F.M. He also contributed pieces signed only M. to the daily Constitutionnel ; testimony under oath in 1836 in a London court identified these as translations rather than original work. In addition to his periodical work, he said, the Paris publisher Ladvocat brought out his pseudononymous ‘romance,’ Le Monstre Politique . He also claimed an article on Chateaubriand in the Foreign Review . Though in 1827 William Fraser, the Foreign’s editor, did recruit Continental contributors, the review of Chateaubriand (1 [April 1828 ], 468-489) at most includes small bits by Moscati.
We know little more about these years in Paris. In 1824 Moscati attended Gall’s lectures. Probably he was involved again with liberal causes. Whatever was happening, Emma may have felt either neglected or bored. When Moscati returned to England, arriving by ship in London on 6 October 1831, he claimed that the political situation had forced him out of France and that he was trying to find his wife, who had been seduced by and had run off with an unnamed Irishman. He either did not find Emma or failed to persuade her to return to him. He had not intended to stay in Britain, he said; had long wished to settle in North America, but the search for Emma had exhausted his funds. At this point, he contacted ‘a friend in the country, whom I had intimately known in Paris’; this unnamed friend, who introducted him to others, was, I believe, Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer Lytton), who had lived in France, mainly in Paris, for considerable periods in 1825-1826 when he was working on Pelham. In January 1832 Bulwer, who was now living in London, sponsored Moscati for his first reader’s ticket to the British Museum Reading Room (which Moscati regularly renewed). In the same year, as editor of the New Monthly Magazine Bulwer printed at least one article by Moscati. Later Moscati claimed that he was the author of Pelham (published anonymously), or at least had assisted in its writing, and had assisted Gabriele Rossetti (Dante Gabriel’s father) with his edition of Dante—claims Bulwer and Rossetti denied in court. Rossetti pointed out that he first published his edition in London in 1826, five years before Moscati’s return.
Moscati also left his card with some London booksellers. A series of introductions led him to Professor Michael Faraday, who in turn introduced him to the Royal Institution, where in March and April 1832 Moscati delivered a series of literary lectures, for which he was paid 30 gns. After the Royal Institution discontinued literary lectures in favor of scientific, he lectured in November at the Literary and Scientific Institution, which also paid him. The lectures led to more introductions, pupils, invitations to London dinner parties. In April, before the fourth Royal Institution lecture, he became acquainted with Dr. John Elliotson (1791-1868; see ODNB), an eminent but controversial physician who became professor of clinical medicine at London University in the same year. Elliotson quickly took possession of Moscati, even claiming that he had been Moscati’s first and only real patron in England, that he had clothed Moscati and given him money, though one wonders if Moscati could really have been as shabby during his earlier months of town and country house visiting and London lecturing as Elliotson claimed. Elliotson, who had recently founded the London Phrenological Society, co-opted Moscati into its ranks, in spite of Moscati’s continuing ambivalence towards phrenology. There is no way of knowing whether, without Elliotson, Moscati might have settled into a life of respectable literary hackwork and tall tales that amused many without hurting anyone, as in France. There is also no way of knowing the extent to which Elliotson was responsible for spreading, perhaps sometimes even creating, Moscati’s English tall tales. Witnesses at later trials often swore that though they had heard certain stories, they had not heard the stories from Moscati; some even identified Elliotson as the source. Elliotson was a master at inflicting psychological damage, and his two-year control was disastrous for Moscati. He made much of Moscati’s linguistic skills: arriving in England in 1831 without knowing a word of the language, he said, Moscati had mastered invariably idiomatic English in just four months, adding it to the 35 languages he already knew. (Of course, we know of Moscati’s earlier years in London.) Then Elliotson turned around and privately and publicly, even in court, ridiculed Moscati’s use of particular words: for example, ‘ruminate’ in the sense of ‘meditate,’ a use the OED shows to have been acceptable at least since the 16th century. He treated Moscati as a child unable to take care of himself. In mid-March 1833 he asked the Royal Literary Fund to assist his protegé, who had not himself applied for aid, making the exaggerated claim that Moscati ‘had no source of income--not of a farthing.’ Elliotson collected the £20 granted and wrote the required letter of thanks, even telling Moscati not to thank the Committee. That at least is what Moscati understood him to say. Fortunately William Jerdan, always sympathetic to Moscati, urged him to write his own letter; he promptly did so, explaining why he had not written earlier. As if to show good intentions, Elliotson then sent some brief articles by Moscati to the Penny Cyclopaedia ; he later contended that his efforts to place Moscati’s articles and to find students for him were always unsuccessfull. At times Elliotson’s interest seems almost prurient, as when he nagged Moscati into revealing details of his debts: £11 for taxes, £6-odd to butcher, baker, etc.; £20 to redeem pawned property; nearly a year’s unpaid rent (as of March 1833); and £5 borrowed from ‘a very young man who could ill lend him money.’ No wonder that Moscati came more and more to resent Elliotson’s patronizing; the two men were set on a collision course. (Elliotson’s next, more dramatic performers, a few years after his rupture with Moscati, were the teen-age Okey sisters, whose amazing responsiveness to mesmerism and magnetism Elliotson exhibited to fashionable audiences until the girls were denounced as frauds. Later he became personal physician to such men as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Forster, William Macready, and Wilkie Collins.)
In addition to the lectures already mentioned, four papers by Moscati were read to the London Phrenological Society, starting with ‘History and conversion of an anti-phrenologist’ on 5 November 1832, followed by papers on 19 November 1832 and in January and February 1833 (on ‘The character and phrenological organization of Dr. Spurzheim’ and ‘Wonderful events of 1832’); all were then published in the Lancet and reprinted in Boston, Massachusetts, in the new Annals of Phrenology. Elliotson assured the audience that Moscati, who was in the audience, wrote every word himself. (He evidently spoke with a strong accent; in the 1835 trial Moscati began by saying: ‘Little acquainted with the elegances and pronunciation of your language, I shall speak slowly and softly, and endeavour, as far as I can, to be understood by you.’ The Times’ s court reporter was not sure that he always caught the words: ‘the plaintiff proceeded to address the Court, as far as the indistinctness of his foreign utterance was intelligible to us, as follows.’)
From 1832 into early 1834 Moscati took private language students, going to their homes for the lessons, and also gave lectures in private homes. Sworn testimony identifies some of his clients and patrons; they were a distinguished group.
During this period Moscati was also successful in placing articles. His RLF list starts its English section with ‘Calaspo, the republican,’ in the June 1832 Blackwood’s. Usually this article is credited to George Croly, who according to publisher’s records submitted the article—probably for Moscati, a service Croly is known to have performed for other unknown writers. Since Croly was Registrar of the Royal Literary Fund at this time, a false claim to the article would not have gone uncontradicted. Croly, the editor of the Monthly, also did not contradict Moscati’s claim to articles there (‘Talleyrand,’ ‘Perrier,’ ‘The French Press,’ ‘The Inquisition 1818,’ ‘The French-jurisprudence,’ ‘The French-emigrant’). Moscati said he contributed to Belle Assemblée (‘The Improvvisatori’) and to the New Monthly, though he could not identify his articles in the latter. ‘Dare not,’ Joseph Snow, the RLF’s clerk, wrote between lines; his implication is unclear. Under oath Bulwer Lytton testified that Moscati ‘once wrote three or four pages when I was the editor of the New Monthly Magazine [Nov. 1831 - Aug. 1833], for which he received remuneration’ [Times, 4 July 1836]. In addition, Moscati said he had contributed leading articles to the True Sun. He contributed at least two short reviews to the Athenaeum, in the 17 Aug. 1833 and 1 Feb. 1834 issues; Charles Wentworth Dilke, the editor, testified that Moscati’s reviews added up to ‘about a page.’ There are no marked files for the 1832 issues, which may have included more by Moscati.
Though Moscati seemed to be doing well, early in 1833 relations with Elliotson were becoming strained, and in August their differences came to a head. There was another source of stress which neither Moscati nor anyone else ever mentioned. About this time he began a relationship with a woman whom we know only as Mary; she appears on his death certificate as his wife. Born in London about 1806, she was 32 years younger than Moscati. They had two children: Frances Harriett, born in 1834, and Francis, born on 27 March 1836. Perhaps under a sense of his new responsibilities, or urged on by Mary, Moscati attempted to break loose from Elliotson, becoming his own worst enemy in the effort. It began insignificantly enough. He addressed ‘some letters’ to Paganini through The Times, which printed them on its Letters page in May 1833. Then he spread reckless stories in Paris and London, claiming that he wrote leaders or foreign articles for The Times, had his own office there. The stories filtered back to Printing House Square, which ignored the annoyance until his Paris tailor wrote to him under cover to The Times, asking them to forward the letter. Finally, on 6 March 1834, The Times, which was known to be an implacable enemy once stirred, took notice, with a sneer and a threat: Moscati had no connection with the paper, and they would be ‘greatly obliged for any information which may enable us to expose, in some exemplary way, the conduct of this pretender.’ Moscati unwisely replied immediately, to The Times and to the Standard, scenting a conspiracy between Elliotson and The Times. Someone then told The Times of Moscati’s saying that as a dinner guest at the home of the editor (Thomas Barnes), he had seen evidence of bribes from foreign governments--a receipt for £5,000 from Louis Philippe as well as gold bowls, fine china, and finer cashmere shawls presented by that ruler, by the Shah of Persia, and by other foreign monarchs. (What bribe-giver or bribe-taker is so naive as to expect written evidence of the bribe or to leave such evidence lying in plain sight? It all sounds like wide-eyed downstairs gossip.) The Times could not let such charges go unchallenged. They asked Moscati to deny saying such things; he did deny it, at the same time effectively reversing his denials by explaining that he had heard these stories from others in Paris and London. The exchange of letters went back and forth; The Times published everything while expressing its contempt for Moscati: ‘a person named Moscati … this pretender … this imposter’; ‘this person’; ‘Moscati’s impudence and imposture’; ‘shuffling and disgraceful answers … his folly and malignity … this fellow.’ They even printed a letter between third parties that referred to the ‘numerous lies of the Prince of Imposters.’
The Times’ s letters quickly damaged Moscati’s fortunes. On 9 Apr. 1834 Elliotson apologized to the Royal Literary Fund for his earlier support, sending them money to replace their grant to Moscati the previous year. People who had employed Moscati and invited him into their homes now would have nothing to do with him. He later recalled that in 1834 and 1835 he was driven to submitting articles under pseudonyms in order to get them published. Tradesmen to whom he owed money worried when they read their morning newspapers; in April or May 1834 he was imprisoned for a debt of £12. 10/. 11d. On 4 June 1834 he was discharged as an insolvent when it was shown that his creditors had no chance of collecting any of the debt owed them.
Within two weeks of his release Moscati responded to his opponents with a 40-page pamphlet, Mr. Moscati and John Elliotson, or, The revengeful attack of the Times explained and refuted, ‘printed for the author, and sold by him.’ Then he brought a libel action against The Times, citing loss of income resulting from their articles; it came to trial on 11 February 1835. He acted as his own lawyer, unmindful of the old adage, and easily proved loss of income. Sir John Campbell, for The Times, acknowledged that it had published the articles but pled justification and dragged out more of Moscati’s tall tales in order to ridicule them, and him. He was not, Sir John maintained, a marquis; he had not fought in any part of the Napoleonic wars, let alone through all Bonaparte’s battles, nor had he been to the Great Wall of China or to New York. Certainly he had not fought 93 duels, in each hitting his opponent in the left eye. The courtroom was at times convulsed in laughter. Eventually the judge persuaded Moscati to withdraw a juror, ending the trial.
A month later Moscati was in White Cross Street Debtors Prison. From there, more paranoid than ever, he wrote to William Jerdan, asking for RLF assistance to secure his liberty. ‘My persecutors,’ he wrote, ‘are very powerful, and very revengeful, and their conspiracy crescit eundo, but I shall do all in my power to unmask them. From this prison I have petitioned to obtain the permission of bringing another action against the Times Pro forma Pauperis, and I am assured that Sir Frederick Pollock will hold my Brief.’ Jerdan, arguing that Moscati was ‘insane to a high point’ but not guilty or evil, hoped that the RLF could help him; of course they didn’t. After Moscati again received his discharge, he did bring another libel action—not against The Times but against Longman and Company, the publisher of the London Medical Gazette. He did bring the action as a pauper, and Sir Frederick Pollock did represent him. Though Pollack, who had an extensive bankruptcy practice, seemed to thrive on unpopular cases, one must wonder what drew him to Moscati. Representing Longman was the Attorney General, Moscati’s old adversary, Sir John Campbell. The case was heard on 2 July 1836; a full report appeared in The Times of 4 July. In an unsigned article on Moscati’s 1834 pamphlet, the LMG had resurrected the tall tales ridiculed in the 1835 trial, added additional tales (like Moscati’s claims to have ‘ravished 18 nuns in one night’ and to have written Pelham), and called Moscati a liar and insane. Moscati replied, through counsel, that he had not told any of the stories he was accused of telling. The Attorney General excoriated Moscati as ‘utterly lost to all sense of honour, veracity and decency, …a pest of society,’ and called witness after witness who swore they had heard the stories from Moscati himself; he also called Italian and French witnesses to counter Moscati’s claim to a marquisate. Elliotson, one of those testifying against Moscati, acknowledged that he wrote the offending LMG article (Longman had refused to identify the author). Finally Lord Denman, the judge hearing the case, stopped the proceedings, berating Pollock for allowing the action to come forward.
Now comes a mystery. Some time in the six months following this second libel suit, the Times report was copied by a Philadelphia newspaper, the National Gazette , with the added information that Moscati had left England in disgust and was now in the U.S. Late in March 1837 that paper happened to be in the hands of a passenger on a steamboat leaving Louisville, Kentucky, for New Orleans, who told another passenger that Moscati was on board their ship. The second passenger, a Southern lawyer and politician named Henry Stuart Foote (1804-1880), struck up a conversation with ‘Moscati,’ who was going to New Orleans (Foote disembarked at Vicksburg). Was he really Moscati? On 11 April 1837 Moscati was in London, once again renewing his reader's ticket for the British Museum Reading Room. To suggest an American imposter posing as another imposter would smack too much of easy fiction. Moscati could have left England before the middle of July 1836, visited various places in the U.S., and at the end of March 1837 boarded a fast steamer in New Orleans to return to London. That scenario is beset by another difficulty. In a testimonial dated 5 November 1839 and sent to the RLF, Peter Perring Thoms, the proprietor of the Monthly Magazine in 1836 and 1837, affirmed that ‘my acquaintance with him [Moscati] commenced in Septr. 1836, … has been continued uninterrupted to the present time, and that … he wrote for me the following Popular Articles,’ the first of which were
‘Oct. 1836, leading article: The Present Crisis of Spain.
Yes, Moscati could have made a quick trip to the States, leaving London sometime in January 1837 after submitting copy for the February article and returning at the end of March with two new articles in hand ready for the printers. However, if he did, why did he never write about American affairs? His articles in the Monthly after his ‘return’ followed the pattern of his earlier articles there:
May 1837, pp. 514ff.; Asmodeus and the Incognito No. 2.
With Thoms no longer proprietor of the Monthly after 1837, Moscati had to find new employment. In 1838 the publisher W. S. Orr, of 2 Amen Corner, St.Paul’s Churchyard, London, employed him ‘for several months in compiling materials for a work,’ paying him £2 a week. That year Moscati put together on his own a ‘Historical Moral & Weather Almanack’; one of Orr’s assistants took it over in 1839, paying Moscati £10 for his work. Orr declared himself completely satisfied with Moscati’s ‘integrity and industry’; this in fact is the type of work that Moscati seems to have done well in France. Unfortunately it was not highly paid work; Moscati was barely managing to get by. In 1839, facing renewal of his lease, he again sought assistance from the Royal Literary Fund, and again was denied.
Moscati’s death certificate identifies him as professor of languages; family tradition said at The Gower Street Institute, but no such Institute has been traced. At this time private tutors, particularly of languages, often styled themselves ‘professor.’ He probably found pupils in the general area of the British Museum and the new London University where he lived, an area being rapidly developed in the 1830s. He gave lessons in his students’ homes, sometimes under the watchful eye of a governess. To reach the last pupils whom we can identify, however, he walked across London to Belgravia, to instruct a very young Sarah Isabella Thompson and her slightly older brothers, the children of John Vincent Thompson, Serjeant at Law (and brother of T. Perronet Thompson, who from January 1829 through January 1836 was co-editor and co-proprietor of the Westminster Review). Much work came as a form of charity: John Vincent Thompson ‘was always ready to help needy foreigners whether they were deserving or not.’ Years later Sarah Isabella, now Mrs. William Sidgwick, described her old Italian teacher in ‘A grandmother’s tales,’ published in Macmillan’s Magazine in October 1898. The anecdotes that precede and follow her discussion of Moscati can be dated between 1838 and 1840, inclusive. Mrs. Sidgwick’s memory occasionally failed at that distance in time; one story about him, for example, involves an event that occurred after his death. Nevertheless she does bring him vividly before us, as the child saw him, in what may be the truest portrait we have. He was, she says, a somewhat shabby, snuffy old gentleman, ‘sadly marked with small-pox,’ who told tall tales about his past and exaggerated an ordinary sight in a walk across Hyde Park into something remarkable; a teacher never quite in control of his pupils but fondly remembered. (She uses ‘snuffy’ three times in a single paragraph; the OED gives not only the obvious ‘bearing marks of … snuff-taking’ but also ‘ready to take offense.’)
Moscati had moved every year or two until 1839, when he settled at 7 Little Charles Street, Regent’s Park; he was still living there on 7 July 1846, when he appealed to Sir Robert Peel for help. Still blaming Elliotson (referred to only as “a wealthy and revengeful Physician”) for most of his troubles, he wrote that ‘this year I have been very unfortunate both in obtaining pupils, and in having papers inserted in periodicals.’ Now 72, he had probably been unemployed longer than a year. During this time he received small alms from people besides Thompson. To Peel he named one we heard of earlier and others who were respectable but less well-known than that earlier group: ‘Dr Moore, of Savile Street, Dr [Henry Shuchburgh] Roots, of Russell Square, Mr L. H. Petit, of New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, and Captain [John Richard] Groves [governor of Milbank penitentiary 1842-1854] … have occasionally helped me in my distress.’ Dr. Moore, who had first met Moscati at the November 1832 meeting of the Phrenological Society, testified against him at the 1836 trial and was aware that Moscati had even threatened to kill him (and Elliotson), yet could not give up on him.
This period produces another mystery. Living at the Little Charles Street address at the time of the 1841 census were Mary Maccaty, aged 30, of independent means, with two children, Frances Harriett, aged 8, and Francis, aged 5; there was no adult male in the household. Maccaty was one of several variant spellings for Moscati; the names and ages of the children are correct, though Mary has subtracted some four years from her own age. ‘Independent means’? And where was Moscati? Given the presence of the governor of Milbank penitentiary on his list of benefactors, one must wonder if he was once more imprisoned; insolvents who had committed fraud or forgery were sometimes sent to Milbank. Since this predated the Married Woman’s Property Act, Mary’s ‘independent means’ may have been safe only because she was not in fact Mrs. Moscati.
After some eight years at the Little Charles Street address, Moscati moved one last time. A year after the letter to Peel, on 30 June 1847, Moscati died at 79 Chalton Street, Somerstown, of cancer of the tongue. Mary was with him at the end, and the Thompsons were still looking out for him. Mrs. Sidgwick reported that ‘He died in great suffering which he bore with much patient dignity.’
In the 1851 census Mary appears as a laundress living on Caroline Street, off Commercial Road in East London, with her children; Frances Harriett was a kitchen maid. In 1860 Frances married Robert Mann, a clerk, later a railway accountant. Francis jr. was successively a printer’s clerk, a printer and billposter, and an advertising agent; he died on his birthday in 1910. Mary had died on 13 February 1886.
Sources:
I am grateful to Mrs. Shane (Moscati) Abdelnour, Francesco Moscati’s greatgreatgranddaughter, for family information. Information on the Italian and British branches of the family is on her website: http://www.geocities.com/shoanour; she has generously passed on to me the results of more recent research.
Other sources for the preceding sketch are RLF file #756 and the following issues of The Times: 17 May 1833; 7 March 1834; 12 March 1834, p. 5; 13 March 1834, pp. 2-3; 14 March 1834, p.5; 20 March 1834, p. 3; 5 Feb. 1835, p. 3; 10 Feb. 1835, p. 3; 11 Feb. 1835, p. 6; 12 Feb. 1835, pp.3-4; 4 July 1836. Also The Weekly Dispatch, Feb 15 1835, and The Sunday Times, July 1836.
Also Henry S. Foote, Casket of Reminiscences, 1874, repr. N.Y.: Negro Universities Press, 1968, pp. 71-73. [Sarah Isabella Sidgwick], ‘A grandmother’s tales,’ Macmillan’s Magazine 78 (Oct. 1898), 427-428; the ms. draft is among the Sidgwick Family Papers in the Pitts Theological Library, Archives and Manuscripts Dept., Emory University, and can be found on-line at www.pitts.emory.edu.
Also BL Add.Ms. 40,595, f.258 (Moscati to Peel, 7 July 1846); mss. letters, John Elliotson to SDUK (at UCL); Athenaeum marked files at City University of London and on-line; British Museum archives, Registers of readers; Roger Cooter, Phrenology in the British Isles: An annotated, historical biobibliography and index (Metuchen NJ & London: Scarecrow Press, 1989), pp. 64, 209, 241-242.
A native of Rome, Bartolomeo de Sanctis in 1802 earned an M.D. degree from the University of Rome, where subsequently he was professor of Mathematics. He lost the professorship when the French occupied the city in 1813. With the help of Baron von Humboldt, the German scientist and his “best Friend and Protector,” de Sanctis became military physician to the Dutch forces. He was said to be a fellow of several learned societies and colleges of medicine. After the peace of 1815, with recommendations from the Dutch government and from Sir Charles Stewart, then British Minister to Holland, de Sanctis went to England, hoping, he said, to join a scientific expedition. On 30 September 1816 he was admitted a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in London; his name last appears in the “College Catalogue of … Licentiates” in 1836.
In 1825 Thomas Joseph Pettigrew recommended de Sanctis for Royal Literary Fund assistance, declaring that “His writings in our own as well as Foreign Journals are very numerous”; de Sanctis was given a grant of £15. (Dr. Pettigrew continued to aid Italian emigrés; see Moscati, Francesco, above.. As surgeon to the Duke and Duchess of Kent, in 1819 he vaccinated Victoria; later he was surgeon to the Duke of Sussex.)
In a letter to Dr. Pettigrew dated 3 May 1829 (ms. RCP), Sir George Leman Tuthill discussed de Sanctis’s insanity and urged the undesirability of the Duke of Sussex seeing him in that state. One of several indications of insanity was his attempted suicide; admission to Bethlem Hospital was mentioned as a possibility. Although de Sanctis continued to appear in the Catalogue of Licentiates for seven more years, no address was given after 1829. Moreover, though he had been a regular user of the British Museum library ever since his arrival in England, he last renewed his reader’s ticket in March 1829.
Dr. de Sanctis considered himself a true Renaissance man. He identified a wide range of scientific interests (galvanism, electricity, magnetism, heat, light, sound, philosophical laws of harmony) but was, he said, as much a literary man as a scientist. He wrote poetry in Italian, translated Anacreon into Italian, carried on a “literary duel” in English on “the impossibility of the tonic accent or emphasis falling on a short syllable,” and wrote Latin pieces in the style of Horace and Catullus. He even earned a little money writing Latin inscriptions for medals and monuments.
Only two brief notices in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1828 have been identified as by de Sanctis; in spite of his claims to proficiency in English, the editor had to translate these. He edited The Italian Bee in London (L’Ape Italiano a Londra), indicating ties with the Italian community there. In 1817 the London publishers Schulze and Dean published his Lusus naturae Londini observatus descriptus, tabula et notis insuper illustratus. Sources: I am grateful to Julie Beckwith, Deputy Manager, Library & Information Service & Collections Librarian, Royal College of Physicians, who combed their collection for information.
See also Royal Literary Fund archives #547; British Museum Register of Reading Room tickets.
Edward was the grandson of the
great opponent of slavery, William Wilberforce (1759-1833; see DNB); the second son of Robert Isaac
Wilberforce (1802-1857; see DNB) and
Agnes Wrangham Wilberforce; and the nephew of Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873;
see DNB), Bishop of Oxford and then
of Winchester. He was born on 9
November 1834, in East Farleigh, Kent, where his father was vicar. His mother died a week after his birth, and
he was raised at first by his mother’s aunt and cousin, both named Jane
Legard. In April 1837 the younger Jane
became his step-mother. Later he was
sent to Eton, but at a young age, probably at 13, he left to follow his cousin,
Samuel Wilberforce’s oldest son, Herbert William Wilberforce (1833-1856), who
at 12 had left Eton to go to sea. For
a time they served on the same ship, probably the Daedalus, but Herbert was sent home for insubordination in April
1852. Edward left shortly thereafter,
after four years’ service. He returned to an uneasy
house. Perhaps his place in the family
would always have been painful; even after this point, his father would
continue to mourn the wife he lost with Edward’s birth (see Newsome 371). To make matters worse, the extended family
was caught up in theological turmoil.
Several members had joined the Roman Catholic church in 1850. Robert Isaac was torn, doubting the validity
of the Anglican position, put off by some Roman practices, and keeping his
uncertainties secret from Jane, his second wife and a loyal Anglican, who had
been ill for some time. A year after
her death in January 1853 Robert finally made the move, to the dismay of some
friends and of Samuel, the brother to whom he had previously been close. Edward’s family encouraged him to
join his older brother, William Francis Wilberforce, at Oxford. (Foster’s Alumni Oxoniensis mistakenly has Edward matriculating at Balliol in
June 1854. At some point he did attend
Trinity College, Oxford.) However, he
was still restless. He talked of
becoming a “great writer,” an ambition unacceptable to his father. A poem, “Lines on Brazil. By a middy,” appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany (32 [Dec. 1852],
624), but other manuscripts submitted to publishers had to be revised before
appearing elsewhere a few years later. He
retreated to Northumberland; in 1853 he dated from Bywell St. Peter’s,
Newcastle on Tyne, and spoke of reviewing books in the Newcastle Chronicle, a weekly with an anti-slavery history and
radical associations. He travelled on the Continent “for
some months” before alighting temporarily in London, where in January 1856 he
started a seriocomic monthly, The
Idler: magazine of fiction, belles
lettres, news, and comedy, editing
it and drawing a number of well-known contributors during its 6-month run. In the same year he published Brazil viewed through a naval glass, with notes on slavery and the
slave trade . After The Idler closed, he settled in
Munich. He and his father had
reconciled, and in the autumn of 1856 they and his brother travelled together
through Germany. (The two sons, like
their uncle Samuel, remained Anglicans, though Edward was less committed to the
church than the other two.) Not long
after his return to Munich, Edward was called to Italy, his father having died
in Albano in February 1857. Later in
1857 Edward and Edmund Forster Blanchard, son of Laman Blanchard, published a
volume titled simply Poems; Edward’s
often reflect bitterly on the theological disputes which entangled his extended
family. In 1860 Edward Wilberforce married
Fannie, daughter of Alexander Flash of New Orleans, Louisiana (died 1865 in
Mobile, Alabama), a slave-owner and probably a merchant with holdings in
Europe. They had three sons and a
daughter; the first child was born in Munich in 1861. Through most of the 1860s he supported the family as a
journalist. His German experiences
provided material for many articles, later reprinted as a book, and he wrote on
a great variety of other subjects.
After he was called to the Bar in 1866, his contributions to periodicals
continued while he established himself as a barrister but came to a halt after
1872; his efforts at fiction had ended a few years earlier. Now he wrote on the philosophy or theory of
the law. He was named a revising
barrister (North-Eastern Circuit) in 1885 and a Master of the Supreme Court
from 1899. However, he never gave up
his literary studies, in his 60s and 70s becoming a Dante scholar and translating
the Divine Comedy. He was a member of the Athenæum
Club and lived in Brentwood, Essex, where he died on 7 January 1914. He contributed to the Athenæum in 1856 and from 1862 through
1871 (439 arrticles are identified as his in the marked file; see
http://web.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html).
The Wellesley Index to Victorian
Periodicals identifies his prose contributions to Temple Bar (1861-1863, 1865-1867, 1869, 1872); Cornhill Magazine (1863-1864, 1866); North British Review (1865); Edinburgh
Review (1866-1867); and Dark Blue
(1872). He also contributed essays to The Reader, 1863-1867 (John Francis
Byrne, “The Reader: A Review of Literature, Science and the
Arts, 1863-1867,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss.,
Northwestern University, 1964, © 1965, p. 337) In addition to titles already
mentioned, he published: Social life in Munich (1863; reprints periodical contributions);One with another (fiction), 2 vols.,
1865; The Duke’s honour (fiction), 3
vols., 1870; Statute law; The principles
which govern the construction and operation of statutes, 1881; The better waters of purgatory (Dante
Society Lectures vol. 2, 1906). He
translated Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn’s Franz
Schubert: a musical biography,
1866; Dante’s Inferno, and other
translations, 1903; Dante’s Inferno
[with Purgatorio and Paradiso], 3 vols., 1909. Gerhart Wiesend has translated, abridged, and annotatedSocial life in
Munich, publishing it as Ein Snob in München. Die erstaunlichen
Beobachtungen des Mr. Edward Wilberforce in München
Sources (in addition to those identified
above): Who Was Who, vol. 1. David Newsome, The Wilberforces and Henry Manning.
The parting of friends (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP:
1966), 160, 248-49, 397,
408-09. Standish Meacham, Lord Bishop. The life of Samuel Wilberforce (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1970), for general
background. Times (London) 12 Jan. 1914. VPR 32 (1999), 148, 157. BLPC.
Ms. letters, Bentley Archives. Alvin Sullivan, ed., British
Literary Magazines 3:505. On-line sites
used: Miquel de Avendano’s Family Tree
of Oswald Wrangham … pt. II; also Mobile Co., AL, Wills, bk. 3, pt. 2, on the USGenWeb Project.
My thanks to Alan
Tadiello, Assistant Librarian, Balliol College, Oxford, for checking Balliol
and Oxford University recoAlbizzi, Count (Rinaldo) Ottavio
degli
“LUDICROUS FRACAS. The Ten Towns Messenger reports proceedings before the Mayor of Shrewsbury, wherein Dr. Mackenzie, the editor of the Salopian Journal, and Count Albizzi, a French teacher, were the parties accused of a desperate fracas. The Salopian Journal had given offence to the Count by a severe critique on the performances of a young lady at the Shrewsbury musical festival. A violent paper war was carried on between them for some time, in which the most abusive epithets were exchanged. At length the Count waited on the editor to exchange blows. Dr. Mackenzie was knocked down, and the Count, placing his foot on his fallen enemy, commenced belabouring him with a stick. The editor then drew forth a pistol and threatened to shoot his assailant if he did not liberate him. The pistol was fortunately wrenched from his hand by a police officer before any mischief was done. The magistrates bound over both parties to keep the peace.”
Austin, George
Barker, Charles
Beckwith(-Lohmeyer), Charles
Belinaye, Count Henry George de la
Bell, Gavin Mason
'pp. 248ff.: Louis Philippe, The cause of the present state of France
‘pp. 376ff.: Armand Carrel and M. Thiers.
‘Nov. 1836, leading article: Russia as it really is.
‘Jan. 1837, The Acquavitaro of Longaro. Rome 1518
‘Feb. 1837, leading article: Italy. Its ancient grandeur & present state.
‘Apr. 1837, pp. 392ff.: The ministry. Molé. Guizot.
‘pp. 398ff.: Asmodeus and the Incognito No. 1.’
‘July 1837, pp. 17ff.: The literary & political Life of M. Guizot
‘Aug. 1837, pp. 129ff.: Memoir of Abd-el-Kader, the present Emir of Mascara.
“Notes of the Month (also in Sept., Oct., Nov., and Dec.).’
Sept. 1837, Asmodeus and the Incognito No. 3.
‘Dec. 1837, pp. 585ff.: Private and Public Life of Prince Talleyrand.’