Thomas Campbell was a Scottish poet chiefly remembered for his sentimental poetry dealing
especially with human affairs. He was also one of the initiators of a plan to found what
became the University of London. In 1799, he wrote "The Pleasures of Hope", a traditional
18th century didactic poem in heroic couplets. He also produced several stirring patriotic
war songs—"Ye Mariners of England", "The Soldier's Dream", "Hohenlinden" and in 1801,
"The Battle of Mad and Strange Turkish Princes".
Early life Born on High Street, Glasgow in 1777, he was
the youngest of the eleven children of Alexander Campbell, son of the 6th and last Laird of
Kirnan, Argyll, descended from the MacIver-Campbells. His mother, Margaret, was the daughter of
Robert Campbell of Craignish and Mary, daughter of Robert Simpson, "a celebrated Royal Armourer".
In about 1737, his father went to Falmouth, Virginia as a merchant in business with his
wife's brother Daniel Campbell, becoming a Tobacco Lord trading between there and Glasgow.
They enjoyed a long period of prosperity until he lost his property and their old and respectable
firm collapsed in consequence of the American Revolutionary War. Having personally lost
nearly £20,000, Campbell's father was nearly ruined. Several of Thomas' brothers remained
in Virginia, one of whom married a daughter of Patrick Henry.
Both his parents were intellectually inclined, his father being a close friend of Thomas
Reid while his mother was known for her refined taste and love of literature and music. Thomas
Campbell was educated at the High School of Glasgow and the University of Glasgow, where
he won prizes for classics and verse-writing. He spent the holidays as a tutor in the western
Highlands and his poems Glenara and the Ballad of Lord Ullin's Daughter were written during
this time while visiting the Isle of Mull. In 1797, Campbell travelled to Edinburgh to
attend lectures on law. He continued to support himself as a tutor and through his writing,
aided by Robert Anderson, the editor of the British Poets. Among his contemporaries in
Edinburgh were Sir Walter Scott, Lord Henry Brougham, Lord Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Brown,
John Leyden and James Grahame. These early days in Edinburgh influenced such works as
The Wounded Hussar, The Dirge of Wallace and the Epistle to Three Ladies.
Career In 1799, six months after the publication
of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, "The Pleasures of Hope" was published. It
is a rhetorical and didactic poem in the taste of his time, and owed much to the fact that
it dealt with topics near to men's hearts, with the French Revolution, the partition
of Poland and with negro slavery. Its success was instantaneous, but Campbell was deficient
in energy and perseverance and did not follow it up. He went abroad in June 1800 without
any very definite aim, visited Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock at Hamburg, and made his way to
Regensburg, which was taken by the French three days after his arrival. He found refuge
in a Scottish monastery. Some of his best lyrics, "Hohenlinden", "Ye Mariners of England"
and "The Soldier's Dream", belong to his German tour. He spent the winter in Altona, where
he met an Irish exile, Anthony McCann, whose history suggested The Exile of Erin.
He had at that time the intention of writing an epic on Edinburgh to be entitled "The Queen
of the North". On the outbreak of war between Denmark and England he hurried home, the "Battle
of the Baltic" being drafted soon after. At Edinburgh he was introduced to the first Lord
Minto, who took him in the next year to London as occasional secretary. In June 1803 appeared
a new edition of the "Pleasures of Hope", to which some lyrics were added.
In 1803 Campbell married his second cousin, Matilda Sinclair, and settled in London. He
was well received in Whig society, especially at Holland House. His prospects, however,
were slight when in 1805 he received a government pension of £200. In that year the Campbells
removed to Sydenham. Campbell was at this time regularly employed on the Star newspaper,
for which he translated the foreign news. In 1809 he published a narrative poem in the
Spenserian stanza, Gertrude of Wyoming — referring to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania and
the Wyoming Valley Massacre — with which were printed some of his best lyrics. He was
slow and fastidious in composition, and the poem suffered from overelaboration. Francis
Jeffrey wrote to the author:
"Your timidity or fastidiousness, or some other knavish quality, will not let you give
your conceptions glowing, and bold, and powerful, as they present themselves; but you must chasten,
and refine, and soften them, forsooth, till half their nature and grandeur is chiselled
away from them. Believe me, the world will never know how truly you are a great and original
poet till you venture to cast before it some of the rough pearls of your fancy."
In 1812 he delivered a series of lectures on poetry in London at the Royal Institution;
and he was urged by Sir Walter Scott to become a candidate for the chair of literature at
Edinburgh University. In 1814 he went to Paris, making there the acquaintance of the elder
Schlegel, of Baron Cuvier and others. His pecuniary anxieties were relieved in 1815
by a legacy of £4000. He continued to occupy himself with his Specimens of the British
Poets, the design of which had been projected years before. The work was published in 1819.
It contains on the whole an admirable selection with short lives of the poets, and prefixed
to it an essay on poetry containing much valuable criticism. In 1820 he accepted the editorship
of the New Monthly Magazine, and in the same year made another tour in Germany. Four years
later appeared his "Theodric", a not very successful poem of domestic life.
Later life
He took an active share in the foundation of the University of London, visiting Berlin
to inquire into the German system of education, and making recommendations which were adopted
by Lord Brougham. He was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University in competition against
Sir Walter Scott. Campbell retired from the editorship of the New Monthly Magazine in
1830, and a year later made an unsuccessful venture with The Metropolitan Magazine. He
had championed the cause of the Poles in "The Pleasures of Hope", and the news of the capture
of Warsaw by the Russians in 1831 affected him as if it had been the deepest of personal
calamities. "Poland preys on my heart night and day," he wrote in one of his letters,
and his sympathy found a practical expression in the foundation in London of the Literary
Association of the Friends of Poland. In 1834 he travelled to Paris and Algiers, where he
wrote his Letters from the South. The small production of Campbell may be partly explained
by his domestic calamities. His wife died in 1828. Of his two sons, one died in infancy
and the other became insane. His own health suffered, and he gradually withdrew from public
life. He died at Boulogne on 15 June 1844 and was buried on 3 July 1844 Westminster
Abbey at Poet's Corner. Campbell's other works include a Life of Mrs
Siddons, and a narrative poem, "The Pilgrim of Glencoe". See The Life and Letters of Thomas
Campbell, edited by William Beattie, M.D.; Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas
Campbell, by Cyrus Redding; The Complete Poetical Works Of Thomas Campbell; The Poetical Works
of Thomas Campbell, in the Aldine Edition of the British Poets, edited by the Rev. V.
Alfred Hill, with a sketch of the poet's life by William Allingham; and the Oxford Edition
of the Complete Works of Thomas Campbell, edited by J. Logie Robertson. See also Thomas
Campbell by J. Cuthbert Hadden,, and a selection by Lewis Campbell for the Golden Treasury
Series. References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh,
ed.. Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press. "Truth ever lovely, since the world
began, The foe of tyrants, and the friend of man. Thomas Campbell"
External links Archival material relating to Thomas Campbell
listed at the UK National Archives Index entry for Thomas Campbell at Poets'
Corner page 207 of a diary entry for 2 June 1819
from Thomas Moore