Volume 3, Number 11 · January 14, 1965
Regency Memoirs
By Ellen Moers
The Journal of Thomas Moore 1818-1841
edited with an Introduction by Peter Quennell
Macmillan, 256 pp., $1.95 (paper)
The Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow
edited with an Introduction by John Raymond
Viking, 384 pp., $7.95
Perhaps suspecting that eight volumes made too large a monument to Tom Moore, Lord John Russell prefaced his 1853 edition of Moore's Journal with a prophetic reference to the academic critical industry in America. Among those unborn English-speaking millions across the sea there would arise, as Russell put it in a stunning metaphor, 'communities holding aloft the literature of England through the ocean of time.' For them the most minute, the most lengthy autobiographical record of a poet of Moore's stature would surely be 'the subject of inquiry, of curiosity, and of affectionate concern.' A busy man (Prime Minister during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s), Lord John was not one to waste his time on nonentities: Moore he considered 'of English lyrical poets…surely the first.'
Review, 2605 words
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