Francis Hodgson was one of Byron's
early friends, a fellow-satirist and admirer of William Gifford, a congenial soul
who took an early and keen interest in Byron's affairs. It was Hodgson who
deflected the challenge Thomas Moore sent to the author of English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers. After the unexpected deaths of his mother and several
close friends, Byron wrote a will making Hodgson one of his principle heirs.
Following Byron's departure in 1816, Hodgson cultivated a life-long correspondence
with Augusta Leigh in which Byron was the central topic of conversation. The
letters exchanged between Byron, Hodgson, and Mrs. Leigh are an important source of
biographical information about the poet.
The memoir compiled by the poet's
son James (1845-1880), an assistant master at Charterhouse, contains other matters
of interest. Francis Hodgson was a well-regarded if conventional poet, translator,
and critic. His correspondence sheds light on the operations of the reviews (he
contributed voluminously to the Critical and Monthly). At Cambridge
he was part of an informal social club whose members included the poets and
translators Robert Bland and John Herman Merivale, the Harrow schoolmaster Henry
Drury, and the barristers Thomas Denman, Launcelot Shadwell, and Joseph Green
Walford. Following the course of their professional careers through the
correspondence one gains a due sense of how important and enduring school
relationships were, not least for Byron.
Though it would come late in life,
Hodgson's most enduring legacy was to be his career as a reformer at Eton College
where he was provost from 1840 until his death in 1852. While he could not have
anticipated this outcome—his career had been that of a provincial
clergyman—in retrospect one can see how his life experience prepared him for
just that outcome. The Memoir contains a trove of information about public
school life at Eton and Harrow. Through its pages one can follow the intricacies of
the patronage networks developed in and around the public schools that were so
important for poets, clergymen, scholars, and schoolmasters. One can also follow
the intersections of school-relationships with family ties and aristocratic
patronage (in Hodgson's case, Lord Liverpool and the Earls of Rutland and
Devonshire).
This emphasis on social networking
was in part accidental: while Hodgson left behind a mass of correspondence his
editor had access to very few letters written by Hodgson himself. As James Hodgson
explains in his preface, “Acting on the principle that a man may more
accurately be known by his friendships than in any other way, I have endeavoured to
make the letters of friends, as far as possible, illustrative of the life and
character of their correspondent.” Of these Byron and Augusta Leigh are given
most fully so that the resulting life-and-letters tends to read like a collective
biography centered on the lives of Hodgson and Byron.
The editor also notes that he did
not have the advantage of working from personal recollections. By the time the
Memoir was published in 1877 a quarter of a century had passed since the
death of its subject and very few of Hodgson's correspondents were still alive.
James Hodgson could not have known his father very well since he died when the son
was but seven years old. His mother was still alive, but having been married so
late as 1838 she may not have been much help with annotating the earlier
correspondence. The memoir makes few pretensions to literature or character
analysis; after an opening chapter devoted to family history it presents the
letters with a bare minimum of connecting material.
As is so often the case with
nineteenth-century lives and letters one is left to draw one's own inferences about
what has been selected or suppressed and why. Elisions are sometimes apparent and
sometimes not. One learns very little about Hodgson's domestic life, either because
it was not part of the original material or because the editor regarded it as a
private matter. James Hodgson does not tell us that his father's first marriage
produced no children or that his second marriage produced five. He does not so much
as supply the Christian names of his wives. Such omissions obscure some of the more
important relationships in a career in which family and professional connections
were inseparable.
Both of Hodgson's marriages arose
out of his Cambridge friendships. His second wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of
Thomas Denman, at the time Lord Chief Justice of England. The first, Susan Matilda
Tayler, was a niece of Charles Henry Hall, dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Like
Hodgson's father he was patronized by Lord Liverpool, but there was a more
immediate connection since Susan Matilda's older sister Ann Caroline was the wife
of Henry Drury. We are not told that Drury's sister Louisa was married to John
Herman Merivale, or that Denman's wife Theodosia was the sister of another
(apparent) member of the Cambridge band of friends, Richard William Vevers. Nor are
we told that another Tayler sister, Eliza, was married to Robert Bland, Hodgson's
friend and Byron's former tutor at Harrow.
While the Memoir devotes an
entire chapter to Bland's biography nothing is said of his marriage until the
concluding mention of his death in 1825: “a fund was raised for the bereaved
family, by contributing to which (some of them far beyond their means) his friends
paid a touching tribute to his talents.” Hodgson, Drury, and Denman were
surely among these friends, and James Hodgson must have known from the
correspondence that the three friends had married three daughters of Archdale
Wilson Tayler (1759-1814). The loving tribute Francis Hodgson paid to his friend
and brother-in-law in the Literary Gazette (23 April 1825) mentions only her
name.
Whatever it was that the family
wished to suppress they seem to have suppressed effectively. We know from Byron's
correspondence that when Bland was overseas in 1809-10 Hodgson was asked to look
after his mistress, that Hodgson had violated his charge and offered himself in
marriage, and that having rejected him the lady subsequently took up with an
officer of dragoons whom Bland challenged upon his return. Byron, presumably at the
request of Drury or Hodgson, had intervened to avert a duel and subsequently mocked
the bellicose clergyman Bland and the guilt-ridden lover Hodgson. If the
“d——st bitch” Byron later identified as “Susan
C.” was the “Susan T.” Hodgson eventually married, the lacunae in
the narrative might be explained. But this seems a stretch.
If Bland and Hodgson could not
marry the same woman, they could yet marry sisters. Byron wrote to Hodgson,
“Bland’s nuptials delight me; if I had the least hand in bringing them about
it will be a subject of selfish satisfaction to me these three weeks” (1
October 1813). To this letter Hodgson appended a note acknowledging his “most
generous and well-timed aid” to his friends. The Memoir informs us
that “In October 1813, Byron, Drury, and Hodgson went together in a
postchaise to Oxford, where Byron had an interview with Mrs. Tayler, who was then
on a visit to her brother, the Dean of Christ Church. The result of this interview
was the removal of all objections to the intended marriage [of Hodgson]” A
year later Byron wrote to Drury of their “never to be forgotten journey to
Ox[for]d” (18 October 1814).
We do not know what Byron had done
to further Bland's marriage in September, but the October meeting surely involved
discussions of financial assistance: Bland had a situation; Hodgson, still a
college fellow, did not. Mrs. Frances Taylor, a recently-impoverished widow with a
family of eighteen children, was in no position to provide her daughter with a
dowry. Perhaps her brother the dean was asked to find a situation for Hodgson; he
does seems to have been involved in unfolding events, for a year later we find
Byron borrowing money from Hodgson in exchange for a promissory note that the dean
had given to Mrs. Tayler (Byron to Hodgson, 17 October 1814). Despite Byron's
assistance the wedding had to wait upon Hodgson's finding a position and did not
take place until August 1815.
In recalling the Oxford meeting to
Henry Drury Byron toyed with the idea of a joint wedding with Hodgson: “I saw
him and his idol at Hastings—I wish he would be married at the same
time—I should like to make a party—like people electrified in a row by
or rather—through the same chain—holding one another's hands,
& all feeling the shock at once.” The marital chain is a ludicrous image
but not an inapt metaphor for the social links that joined Byron with the three
sisters via the three friends. Before long Hodgson would be exchanging letters with
Augusta Leigh and Annabella Milbanke, drawing him into yet wider and more galvanic
circles. So far from being suppressed, those letters and that story are given pride
of place in the Memoir of Francis Hodgson.
