Samuel Parr (1747-1825) was a
celebrity in Regency England. Born in humble circumstances, he rose to prominence
as a schoolmaster, first at Harrow, then at Stanmore, Colchester, and Norwich. From
1785 to 1800 he took private pupils at Hatton in Warwickshire where he resided as a
country parson to the end of his life. A year after his death the literary
magazines were still running memoirs of Parr; in 1828 appeared the William Field
biography reproduced here, John Johnstone’s substantial biography in
Parr’s collected works, and the first installment of the two-volume
Parriana collected by E. H. Barker. This material amounted to something
like 3,500 pages of memoirs: short of Scott and Byron it would be difficult to find
another writer who received so much posthumous attention.
Parr’s reputation has not
worn well. His prose, modeled on Samuel Johnson’s, was not calculated to
please later readers, nor his pedantry, belligerency, and tendency to ramble. For
all his considerable learning, Parr never published a scholarly work, nor did his
sermons, pamphlets, reviews, and biography of Fox long survive the occasions that
gave rise to them. He was known as a conversationalist, though nothing he said, any
more than anything he wrote, made its way into anthologies of quotations. While
Parr was regarded as something of an oracle, there was nothing particularly novel
or startling about his opinions. His Latin epitaphs, however, were reprinted and
admired throughout the nineteenth century.
The striking thing about Parr was
his personality—it would seem that no one who met him could ever forget him, and
that no one who had not met him could share the enthusiasm (or disgust) of those
who did. He was a small man, an ill-dressed, unprepossessing personage who spoke
with a lisp. He insisted on smoking on all occasions and in all companies, a habit
that coincided with what his general rudeness; he loved an argument, courted
controversy, and strove for attention. Parr had known Samuel Johnson in his youth
and may have modeled his manners as well as his prose on that formidable model. But
Parr was the Whig Samuel Johnson—a man whose sharp-tongued remarks warmed
the hearts, or at least heated the passions, of partisans of all stripes.
The fascination with Parr derived
in part from his long memory—he was fifteen years older even than Samuel Rogers.
Parr became engaged with politics in the heady times of Wilkes and Liberty—he had
opposed not just the French wars, but the American war. He had been personally
acquainted with Fox and Burke, indeed with three generations of Whig politicians.
He had a tenacious memory and a fund of useful knowledge he was more than willing
to share with any who would listen. Despite his pomposity and contentiousness he
was welcome in polite society. A life-long defender of radicalism, Parr himself was
no radical: he was a vigorous defender of what to Foxite Whigs seemed like prudent
common sense.
While he had a reputation as a
flogger, Parr took a deep interest in the careers of his students, many of whom
became lifelong friends. Parr could also be a domestic tyrant, and having married a
woman a strong-willed as himself, did not enjoy much domestic peace. He did
love his family, as his letters and epitaphs attest. Parr seems to have got on well
with his parishioners, and with persons from across the political and theological
spectrum willing to put up with his character. He could be generous with money and
was quick to side with the oppressed. For all his vanity there were things he
obviously cared about more than himself—classical scholarship, political liberty,
and Christian morality. Contemporaries were fascinated by his odd mixture of
truculence and benevolence.
Byron was among the admirers of
Parr, not least for the Harrow connection. Parr was born in Harrow, studied at
Harrow, taught at Harrow, and following his failure to obtain the post of
headmaster, opened Stanmore in rivalry to Harrow. At their first meeting (in 1813?)
Byron held aloof: “I listened to him with admiring ignorance, and respectful
silence,” he recalled to Moore, 19 September 1818. Parr at first interpreted
this behavior as haughtiness, though he was soon writing to Hannah Edwards in an
undated letter, “Yesterday I was in company with Lord Byron: his manners are
amiable, and his genius is exquisite” (Field, 2:158). No great admirer of
contemporary poetry, Parr later professed that Byron “excites my feelings
more strongly than any poet I ever read; except ... the chorusses of Æschylus, and
they make me mad” (2:156).
Samuel Parr took a keen interest
in biography and gathered materials and arranged for his own life to be written.
When the designated biographer failed to undertake the work the task fell to two
rivals. Parr’s literary executor, the physician John Johnstone (1768-1836),
had access to Parr’s documents but no skill as a biographer, while the
schoolmaster William Field (1768-1851), the more competent biographer, lacked
access to Parr’s papers. Both Johnstone and Field produced hagiographies,
leaving the more colorful matter for Edmund Henry Barker (1788–1839), whose
Parriana was biographical but not a biography.
Field’s Memoir is an
unconventional life and letters. A friend and neighbor of Parr for thirty-five
years, Field solicited letters and recollections, and brought to the project an
intimate familiarity with Parr’s published writings. But Field makes scant
use even of such letters as he had, preferring Parr’s public voice as
recorded in his printed works. Since these were often scarce of access and
difficult to read, Field no doubt believed that he was performing a service by
organizing and preserving Parr’s scattered but invaluable opinions on men and
books.
As reviewers noted, Field was no
Boswell. He was a Unitarian minister with little interest in gossip or humor. But
he was very like Boswell in writing the life of a mentor he held in awe. Field
strives to write the biography as Parr would have written it—which is to say, laden
with information and argument as opposed to narrative and scene-painting. Field,
however, does what Parr did not do, which was to arrange his copious antiquarian
matter into something like a meaningful order. His intention was to produce an
intellectual biography by setting the events of Parr’s life in the context of
his reading and book-collecting. To Field, Parr’s opinions about church
fathers and dissenting divines, about pedagogy and Latin style, were of greater
interest than his domestic broils or literary quarrels.
The other notable thing about
Field’s biography, which again derives from Parr himself, is its desire to
record the lives and characters of all the persons with whom the schoolmaster came
into contact over the course of his long life: teachers and students, patrons and
parishioners, even physicians and apothecaries. Cambridge University intellectual
traditions and social networks figure very prominently in the Memoir. Field
concludes what amounts to a collective biography with an appendix consisting of
lives of Parr’s students—most of whom he outlived—and a collection of
epitaphs.
Field’s great theme is
liberty of conscience, a ticklish subject given Parr’s tendency to
partisanship and dogmatism. One of many catalogues in the Memoir enumerates
the portraits hanging in the breakfast-room at Hatton: “Thomas Twining,
Thomas and Joseph Warton, Fox, Sheridan, General Washington, General Green, Paine,
Buonaparte, Gibbon, Paley, Gilbert Wakefield, George Walker, the celebrated Porson,
the highly-distinguished Sir Samuel Romilly, and the deeply-lamented Francis
Horner” (1:186). The apostate Burke had once belonged to this august company
but his image, after hanging inverted for a period, was eventually entirely
removed. William Paley, after suffering a similar indignity, had been restored to
the upright position.
In this connection it is worth
recalling a passage from Thomas De Quincey about Parr and his portraits: “one
anecdote, illustrating his intemperance, we can add ourselves. On one occasion,
rising up from table, in the middle of a fierce discussion with Mrs Parr, he took a
carving knife, and applying it to a portrait of that lady hanging upon the wall, he
drew it sharply across the jugular, and cut the throat of the picture from ear to
ear, thus murdering her in effigy” Blackwood’s (January 1831)
76. This was the kind of anecdote readers expected but which William Field, in
deliberate censorship, refused to supply.
The first volume of Field’s
biography appeared in January 1828, the second in August. While there was a
sympathetic notice in the politically friendly New Monthly Magazine, the
Literary Gazette was palpably disappointed by the lack of extractable
anecdotage. Religious journals debated whether Parr inclined more towards orthodoxy
or Unitarianism, and there was a savage response by a Tory reviewer in the
Gentleman’s Magazine. The Monthly Review expresses the
consensus view: “It contains little more than a plain detail of facts, few of
which are new to the public, illustrated by plentiful quotations from the
Doctor’s printed works, and by a few occasional reflections, generally of a
very slight and common-place tissue, from the biographer himself, who appears to be
a well-meaning, and tolerably well-informed man, but not very strikingly gifted
with any higher powers. The book, as a literary production, indeed, has little or
no merit, and derives all its interest merely from its subject” (February
1828) 207.
