Henry Crabb Robinson

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Engraving by William Holl the Younger (1869) after a photograph by Henry Crabb Robinson

Henry Crabb Robinson (born March 13, 1775 in Bury St Edmunds , Suffolk , † February 5, 1867 in London ) was a British lawyer , journalist and writer . During his stay in Germany from 1800 to 1805 he met personalities such as Goethe and Schiller , was the Times correspondent from 1808 to 1809 on the Napoleonic Wars on the Iberian Peninsula and worked as a lawyer from 1813 to 1828. His diaries reporting on literary trends of his time and personal encounters with important writers are valuable.

Life

Henry Crabb Robinson was the youngest son of a tanner, who died in 1781. After attending small private schools, he received lessons from the lawyer Mr. Francis in Colchester from 1790 . He heard Erskine representing a case in court and was so impressed with his demeanor and eloquence that he remembered it well 54 years later. In Colchester he also heard one of John Wesley's last sermons . In 1796 he moved to London, where he initially worked for a law firm on Chancery Lane. But when he received an annual income of 100 pounds from the estate of a deceased uncle from 1798 onwards, he was able to become independent and decided in 1800 to travel abroad for a longer period of time.

As a result, Robinson went to Frankfurt, which was then occupied by the French . After he had acquired some knowledge of German, he walked mostly through Germany and Bohemia and came to Weimar in 1801 , where he was introduced to Goethe and Schiller . Then he settled in Jena down and enrolled on 20 October 1802 the local university . The fees for this were less than half a guineas and the apartment rent was less than seven pounds a year. He got to know Madame de Staël and made her familiar with German philosophy. In the autumn of 1805 he left Jena and returned to his homeland via Hamburg . During his stay in Germany, he met other famous people such as Herder and Wieland .

Robinson now had a thorough knowledge of German and initially wanted to supplement his small income by translating German leaflets. He tried in vain to get a post in the diplomatic service. He then offered his services to the then Secretary of State Fox , met John Walter , the editor of the Times , and in 1807 accepted his offer to work as a correspondent for the Times in Altona . His letters From the banks of the Elbe (March to August 1807) were the most detailed source of events on the continent for the English public at the time. He had to return to Great Britain after Napoleon Bonaparte had made Denmark a French satellite state and became editor of the foreign section of the Times . Through his personal experience, he was able to publish facts in this magazine that helped the British government to justify its policy towards Denmark; namely, she had ordered Copenhagen to be bombed and the Danish fleet seized.

When the Spanish revolted against the French in 1808, Robinson was appointed war correspondent for the Times in the Iberian Peninsula , becoming the first British journalist to perform such a role. He landed in Coruña and wrote from there from August 1808 to January 1809 a series of letters entitled Shores of the Bay of Biscay and Coruña . During his stay there, Lord Holland and his wife arrived, accompanied by 16-year-old Lord John Russell . Robinson was in the rear of General John Moore's army in Coruña. He heard the gunfire, saw the wounded and French prisoners brought to Coruña, and waited until the enemy had been driven back, after which he embarked for England in early 1809 and landed at Falmouth . He returned to the Times office by September 29, 1809 .

Then Robinson left the journalistic career, studied from November 1809 in the Middle Temple and was admitted to the bar on May 8, 1813. Later in his legal career, he rose to head of the Norfolk District Court . His first case was the successful defense of a prisoner on trial in Norwich in August 1813 on a murder charge. He made the resolution he kept to quit his legal practice as soon as his annual net income exceeded £ 500. In 1828 he finally left his profession. The following year he became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London .

In his earlier years Robinson had made friends with not only Germany, but also France and his native England. His close friends included Charles Lamb , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , William Wordsworth and Robert Southey . He accompanied Wordsworth on tours through Scotland, Wales and Switzerland and from March to August 1837 through Italy. Wordsworth dedicated his memorials from the latter trip, which appeared in 1842, to him. Robinson was among the founders of the Athenaeum Club and University College London . He remained unmarried and healthy into old age. He died on February 5, 1867 at the age of 91 in his home at 30 Russell Square in London and was buried in Highgate Cemetery .

plant

Robinson was a skilled conversationalist; his breakfast receptions could rival those of the poet Samuel Rogers . Above all, he was an important mediator of German literature and philosophy in Great Britain and also contributed to the reception of English romantic poetry in Germany. From 1811 he kept an extensive, only posthumously edited diary in which he gave information about his conversations with Goethe, Herder, Wordsworth and Coleridge; it is also an important testimony to the literary and cultural currents of the first half of the 19th century. It provides the most detailed account of the last years of William Blake's friend, Robinson .

In the original, Robinson's Dr. William's Library (Gordon Square, London) left diary 35 volumes; and his travel journals contained 30 volumes, his letters 32 volumes, his memories 4 volumes and his anecdotes one volume. A small selection was first published by Thomas Sadler ( Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of H. Crabb Robinson , 3 vols., London 1869; 3rd edition, 2 vols., 1872). Edith J. Morley edited Robinson's Correspondence with Wordsworth (2 vols., 1927), also Crabb Robinson in Germany 1800-05 (1929) and On Books and Writers (3 vols., 1938).

literature

personal data
SURNAME Robinson, Henry Crabb
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British lawyer, journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 13, 1775
PLACE OF BIRTH Bury St Edmunds , Suffolk
DATE OF DEATH February 5, 1867
Place of death London