Thomas Medwin

Thomas Medwin

Thomas Medwin (* 20th March 1788 in Horsham , West Sussex , † 2. August 1869 ,) was a British writer and translator of the 19th century, mainly as a biographer of his cousin Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Lord Byron is remembered .

Life

Thomas Medwin was the third son of five children of lawyer Thomas Charles Medwin and Mary Medwin (née Pilford). He was a second cousin, both on the father's and on the mother's side, of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who grew up in the immediate vicinity. Medwin, son of a wealthy family, attended A Syon House Academy in Isleworth 1788-1804 , which later (1802-1808) also attended Shelley. In 1805 he enrolled at University College (Oxford) , but did not obtain a degree.

Medwin's father would have liked to see him as a lawyer, but the young man led a rather casual lifestyle, drank and played and lived beyond his means. However, Thomas showed great talent for languages ​​and acquired a good knowledge of Greek, Latin, German, French and the other Romance languages. He started writing poetry. In 1812, however, his financial situation was so serious that he decided to live as a soldier in India without prior military training. Medwin got a rather quiet position as a cornet with the 24th Light Dragoons in Kanpur , which gave him plenty of time to hunt and fish. He visited the famous Hindu temples of Gaur , Pataliputra , Jaganath and Karla and witnessed a widow burning ( Sati ) on the Narmuda River. In Bombay in 1818 he discovered Shelley's book The Revolt of Islam and was deeply impressed by his cousin's poetic genius. In 1818 Medwin's regiment was disbanded and until 1831 he was assigned to a regiment of the Life Guards on half pay.

In September 1820 Medwin traveled to Geneva, where he lived with Jane and Edward Ellerker Williams and wrote his first published poem: Oswald and Edwin, An Oriental Sketch . The forty-page poem would later find its way into Mdwin's Sketches From Hindoostan . From 1820–1821 Medwin lived and worked with the Shelley couple in Pisa. The friends read Schiller, Cervantes, Milton and Petrarca together and began to learn Arabic together. Shelley also introduced Medwin to Lord Byron in November 1821. The two became friends.

At the end of a month-long trip to Italy, Medwin learned of the drowning death of his friends Shelley and Williams on July 8, 1822. He processed the traumatic experience in the poem: “Ahasuerus, The Wanderer”.

The restless Medwin moved to Paris in 1824 and met Washington Irving there , like Medwin an admirer of Lord Byron and Calderon. After Byron's death on May 5, 1824, Medwin published Conversations of Lord Byron in July 1824 . The work received many negative reviews, but became a scandalous success because of its revelations throughout Europe and the USA. Medwin was temporarily free of financial worries and was able to marry the Swede Anne Henrietta Hamilton, Countess Starnford, in Lausanne at the age of 36.

But Medwin lived beyond his means again, slipped into a financial catastrophe in 1829, left his wife and their two daughters and moved to Genoa and then to London in 1831. In 1832 the Athenaeum published six episodes of Medwin's Memoir of Shelley . Medin now also started his highly acclaimed translation of the ancient Greek dramas by Aeschylus .

Despite diligent and diverse publications in the 1830s, Medwin could not get rid of his creditors. In 1837 he therefore moved to Heidelberg, but continued to publish in the Athenaeum and other British magazines and thus became an important figure in the cultural exchange between Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world. As a cultural correspondent, he introduced the British to authors such as Karl Gutzkow , Ludwig Tieck , Achim von Arnim , Annette von Droste-Hülshoff , Rauch and Diefenbach. He was personally friends with Justinus Kerner . Baden-Baden provided the background for Medwin's only novel Lady Singleton , published in 1842 .

The relationship with Caroline Champion de Crespigny , a former lover of Lord Byron, also arose in Heidelberg , and it is here that Medwin wrote his great and controversial biography of Shelley from 1845–1847: the book is dismissed by contemporary critics as irrelevant and flawed yet an essential source, especially for the poet's childhood.

In 1862, at the age of 70, Medwin returned to England. The great traveler died on August 2, 1869 in his brother's house in his hometown.

Works (selection)

Conversation of Lord Byron , 1824

• Oswald and Edwin, to Oriental Sketch. (Geneva 1821)
• Sketches in Hindoostan with Other Poems. (London 1821)
• Ahasuerus, The Wanderer; Dramatic Legend in Six Parts. (London 1823)
• The Death of Mago. to Petrarch; in Ugo Foscolo, Essays on Petrarch (London 1823) pp. 215, 217
• Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron. Noted during a residence with his Lordship at Pisa, in the Years 1821 and 1822 (London, 1823)
• Prometheus Bound. (after Aeschylos), Siena 1927; London 1832; Fraser's Magazine XVI (August 1837), 209-233
• Agamemnon. (after Aeschylos), London 1832; Fraser's Magazine XVIII (November 1838), pp. 505-539
• The Choephori. (after Aeschylos), Fraser's Magazine VI, (London 1832), pp. 511-535
• The Shelley Papers. Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1833)
• The Persians. (after Aeschylos), Fraser's Magazine VII (January 1833) pp. 17-43
• The Seven Against Thebes. (after Aeschylos), Fraser's Magazine VII (April 1833) pp. 437-458
• The Eumenides. (after Aeschylos), Fraser's Magazine IX (May 1834) pp. 553-573.
• The Angler in Wales, or Days and Nights of Sportsmen. (London 1834)
• The apportionment of the world, from Schiller. Transl. by Thomas Medwin. Bentley's Miscellany IV p. 549 (December 1837).
• The Three Sisters. A Romance of Real Life. Bentley's Miscellany III (January 1838)
• The Two Sisters. Bentley's Miscellany III (March 1838)
• Canova: Leaves from the Autobiography of an Amateur. Frasers Magazine XX (September 1839)
• My Mustache. Ainsworth's Magazine, I, pp. 52-54 (1842)
• Lady Singleton, or, The world as it is. Cunningham & Mortimer, (London, 1843)
• The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. (London 1847)
• Oscar and Gianetta: From the German of a Sonnetten Kranz, by Louis von Ploennies. The New Monthly Magazine XCI (March 1851) pp. 360-361
• To Justinus Kerner: With a Painted Wreath of Bay-Leaves. The New Monthly Magazine XCI (November 1854) p. 196
• Nugae. (Heidelberg, 1856), Edited by Medwin and includes his own poems.
• Odds and Ends. (Heidelberg, 1862)
• The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. (London, 1913). A new edition, edited by H.Buxton Forman.

literature

• Ernest J. Lovell Jr .: Captain Medwin: Friend of Byron and Shelley. University of Texas, 1962
• Susan Cabell Djabri, Jeremy Knight: Horsham's Forgotten Son: Thomas Medwin, Friend of Shelley and Byron. Horsham District Council, Horsham Museum 1995