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Thomas Medwin (20 March 1788 –2 August 1869) was an early 19th-century English writer, poet and translator. He is known chiefly for his biography of his cousin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and for published recollections of his friend, Lord Byron.
Medwin was from a prosperous rather than a wealthy family that expected their sons to work for a living. He attended Syon House Academy in Isleworth in 1788–1804, as did Shelley in 1802–1808. Medwin related that Shelley and he remained close friends at Syon House, forming a bond so close that Shelley apparently sleepwalked his way to Medwin's dormitory.Thomas Medwin (1847), The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2 vols), T. C. Newby, London After a further year in a public school, Medwin matriculated at University College, Oxford in the winter of 1805, but left without taking his degree. He was initially articled as a clerk in his father's law firm in Horsham.
Medwin showed aptitude in foreign languages and was to become fluent in Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. He began writing poems, including a contribution to The Wandering Jew, a poem attributed to Shelley. The young Shelley and Medwin met during their respective holidays for pursuits such as fishing and fox-hunting. Their romantic attachments included their cousin Harriet Grove, with whom Shelley was deeply committed by the spring of 1810, although he was to elope with Harriet Westbrook in 1811 using money he had borrowed under false pretences from Medwin senior.
Medwin rebelled against his father's wish for him to become a lawyer, running up gambling debts and causing a quarrel with his father, the result of which was the omission of Thomas from his father's will, executed in 1829. Considerable debts appear to have been paid by his family. His activities involved much carousing and gambling at his club in Brighton and spending money on collecting art. Shelley recalled Medwin as painting well and "remarkable, if I do not mistake, for a particular taste in, and knowledge of the belli arti – Italy is the place for you, the very place – the Paradise of Exiles.... If you will be glad to see an old friend, who will be glad to see you... come to Italy."Percy Bysshe Shelly. Private letter to Medwin; The Works X, 141. Medwin's financial situation could not continue as it was, and by 1812 he had accepted a military commission in the 24th Light Dragoons, a regiment where he could pursue his social pretensions.
The heat was stultifying and few duties were required of an officer. Judging from Medwin's description, The Angler in Wales, or Days and Nights of Sportsmen, 2 vols, 1834. he spent many enthusiastic hours hunting wildlife. He saw action rarely, but was present at the siege of Hathras in 1817 and involved in advances against the on the banks of the river Sindh in December 1817. He witnessed at least one incident of sati, the ritual burning of a widow, on the Narmuda river in 1818. He enthusiastically toured the classical Hindu temples of Gaur, Pataliputra, Jagannath and Karla Caves, and the Elephanta Caves and Ellora Caves. Medwin may have had an affair with a Hindu woman that ended badly, but through whom he was introduced to the doctrines of Rammohan Roy.Nigel Leask: British Romantic Writers and The East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. 68–70. Medwin's regiment was disbanded at the end of 1818 and Medwin went on half-pay, attached to a regiment of the Life Guards until 1831, when he sold his commission. He was by this time known as Captain Medwin, although there is no evidence that he was ever promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant.
Whilst waiting in Bombay for a berth back to England in October 1818, he rediscovered on a bookstall the poetry of his cousin Shelley, in a copy of The Revolt of Islam. Shelley was to provide the central experience and focal point of his literary life. Recalling the incident under his persona Julian in The Angler in Wales in 1834, he was "astonished at the greatness of (Shelley's) genius" and declared that "the amiable philosophy and self-sacrifice inculcated by that divine poem, worked a strange reformation in my mind." Medwin's sobriquet Julian is likely to have been a reference to Shelley's Julian and Maddalo, a poem in which Julian has characteristics of Shelley."Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation". The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. West Sussex County Library Service. 24 December 2009
In the autumn of 1820, Medwin joined his cousin Shelley in Pisa, moving in with him and his wife Mary Shelley, with whom he was to develop an uneasy relationship. Mary couldn't stand Medwin's nagging presence, and found him extremely boring: "The burden of Tom grows very heavy!". Medwin was periodically ill during his months in Pisa but worked with Shelley on a number of poems and on the publication of his journal Sketches From Hindoostan. Shelley and Medwin started to study Arabic together. They also read Schiller, Cervantes, Milton and Petrarch, and throughout early 1821 pursued a vigorous intellectual life. Shelley was working on Prometheus and would read drafts each evening to Medwin, who was continuing with a second volume of Oswald and Edwin, An Oriental Sketch. In January they were joined by Jane and Edward Ellerker Williams. Medwin left Shelley in March 1821 to visit Florence, Rome and then Venice, where he continued to write and socialise. In November 1821 he returned to Pisa.
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However supporters of Medwin's book included several eminent writers, including Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, who incorporated in his edition of Edward Phillips' Theatrum Petarum Anglicanorum a memoir of Shelley, written by Medwin. Leigh Hunt, as might be expected, took a more tolerant view of Medwin in Lord Byron and his Contemporaries (1828), and since the publication of Byron's letters in Thomas Moore's biography(1830/31)Letters & Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life (vol. 1, January 1830)/(vol. 2, January 1831), Thomas Moore and Lady Blessington's Conversations (1832–1833), (2025). 9781108033930, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108033930 Medwin's recollections of Byron have come to be seen as not always faithful in detail, but essentially an accurate portrayal. There were at least twelve impressions in the United States, and it was published in Germany, France and Italy. It remains in print to this day. Captain Medwin was by then famous (or infamous), well-off, and able to marry Anne Henrietta Hamilton, Countess of Starnford (a Swedish title), on 2 November 1824 in Lausanne.
Medwin moved to Genoa, where he worked assiduously on a play, Prometheus portatore del fuoco (Prometheus the Fire-Bearer). Though never published in English, it was translated into Italian and published in Genoa in 1830, where it was reviewed enthusiastically. Antologica magazine, July 1830. In typical fashion, Medwin dedicated the play to the memory of Shelley. Genoa, however, turned out to be only an interlude, as Medwin was expelled for writing a tragedy called The Conspiracy of the Fieschi, which alarmed the Genoese authorities, believing it to be anti-government propaganda. By January 1831 Medwin was back in London, still hoping to earn a living as a writer.Thomas Medwin, My Moustache, published in Ainsworth Magazine, I (1842), pp. 52–54.
Medwin had also embarked on well-received translations of Aeschylus' plays into English. Prometheus Unbound and Agamemnon appeared in companion volumes in May 1833, followed by The Seven Tribes Against Thebes, The Persians, The Eumenides and The Choephori. He did not translate The Suppliants, apparently because he disapproved of "its corruptions".Forman's edition of Shelley by Thomas Medwin, p. 243. The translations were warmly reviewed by major literary magazines, including The Gentleman's Magazine, and published in Fraser's Magazine. Some criticised him for straying from the original meaning, which he had intentionally done, where he felt the occasion demanded. Medwin's skill lay in bringing alive Aeschylus's characters through believable dialogue that uses traditional metres and measure.
Medwin's output in the middle years of the 1830s was extensive. He contributed a series of short stories to Bentley's Miscellany. He departed from his usual classical fare in The Angler in Wales or Days and Nights of Sportsmen, which is in the tradition of Isaac Walton's The Compleat Angler. It defends the sport angling and provides insight into Medwin's love of the countryside and its pursuits. The publisher Richard Bentley contributed seventeen illustrations but decided that the submitted manuscript was not long enough for two volumes. This caused some tension between Medwin and Bentley as Medwin's funds were sparse. As a consequence additional material was added in the form of an appendix, made up of quotations from such works as Jan Swammerdam's Ephemeri vita, a treatise on the mayflyKarl A. E. Enenkel & Mark S. Smith (2007). Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts. BRILL. The second volume was padded by a revised version of Medwin's Pidararees now called Julian and Giselle.
Medwin'
/ref> In 1837 Medwin announced that he was moving to Heidelberg, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, Germany.
In Heidelberg he formed a deep attachment to the poet Caroline Champion de Crespigny (1797–1861),Sources differ for the birth and death dates of de Crespigny. There is a baptismal record in the register of Durham Cathedral dated 24 October 1797, whilst Probate records of 28 February 1862 record her death in Heidelberg on 26 December 1861, letters of administration having been granted to her son Albert Henry.Caroline Bathurst was the daughter of Henry Bathurst, Bishop of Norwich and niece of Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl Bathurst. In 1820 she married Heaton Champion de Crespigny, an ultimately unsuccessful union that produced at least five children, but had ended by 1837 with her husband pursued by creditors. She settled in Heidelberg shortly thereafter.Letters of Julie Gmelin, 19 June 1849, published in Badische Post that describes her as a former mistress of Byron, 21 March 1924. Their relationship was essentially intellectual, as neither could afford a divorce settlement from their estranged spouses. The English colony in Heidelberg was intimate. Medwin's acquaintances there included Mary Howitt and William Howitt, who found him a man of "culture and refinement, aristocratic in his tastes",An Autobiography: Mary Howitt (London, 1891), p. 154. whilst Charles Godfrey Leland, an American folklorist who befriended Medwin in Heidelberg, describes Medwin as a kindly man "full of anecdotes, which I now wish that I had recorded".Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland, Heinemann Press, London, October 1893
In the early 1840s Lady Fanny Brawne, John Keats's former fiancée and literary muse, moved to Heidelberg with her husband, and through her Medwin was involved once again in a controversy concerning a dead, but highly influential English Romantic poet. Medwin and Lady Lindon collaborated to correct the allegation provided by Mary Shelley in her Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840) that Keats had become insane in his final days. Lady Lindon showed Medwin letters that suggested otherwise. Medwin used this new information in his Life of Shelley, where he published extracts from letters by Keats and his friend Joseph Severn.
Criticism was to be expected and Medwin's biography of Shelley duly received a withering attack in The Athenaeum, which opened its review: "We are not in any way satisfied with this book."Athenaeum, 18 September 1847 "The Spectator" wrote "Medwin's labours... are chiefly remarkable for the art of stuffing... nor does the author forget a scandal when he can pick any up." Medwin was even more strongly reviled by the surviving members of the Pisan circle. Mary Shelley's reaction was to be expected, given her antipathy towards him, but Trelawny was equally cutting, calling the work "superficial" as late as 1870.Letters of Edward John Trelawny, quoting a letter from Trelawny to W. M. Rossetti dated 1870. However, it was received better by some critics, including William Howitt and W. Harrison Ainsworth, who began their review in Howitt's Journal by saying the subject "could not possibly have fallen into more competent hands."Howitt's Journal II (1847) Medwin returned to Heidelberg from a visit to London and Horsham in time for the 1848 Revolution that swept through Germany. He and Caroline de Crespigny took flight to a more peaceable Weinsberg in Wurttemberg. He continued to work there, producing some poetry and translations for his host, Justinus Kerner, to whom in 1854 he published a poem. He returned to Heidelberg the same year and published a further poetry volume, The Nugae. This was international in content, with original poems and translations in Greek, Latin, English, and German. A further book of poetry published in 1862 in Heidelberg was entitled Odds and Ends, with translations from Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Scaliger, and additional poems by Caroline de Crespigny, who died shortly before its publication.
The few writers to highlight Medwin concentrate on his popular writings on Shelley and Byron, but his legacy includes numerous translations from Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Portuguese and Spanish. His translations of Aeschylus and his early travel writings are vivid and memorable. His poetry remains neglected, with little critical comment available since their publication. His importance in the mid-19th-century cultural cross-currents between Britain, the United States and Germany has only recently been assessed. Medwin introduced many German writers to the English-speaking world, notably the poets Karl Gutzkow, Ludwig Tieck and Ludwig Achim von Arnim. He "deserves to be reassessed in the light of the new evidence that is now available."
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