Winthrop Mackworth Praed

Winthrop Praed (1802-1839), from The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, 1864. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (28 July 1802 - 15 July 1839) was an English poet and politician.

Life

Overview

Praed, son of a sergeant-at-law, was born in London, educated at Eton and Cambridge, and called to the bar in 1829. He sat in Parliament for various places, and was Sec. to the Board of Control 1834-1835. He appeared to have a brilliant career before him, when his health gave way, and he died of consumption in 1839. His poems, chiefly bright and witty skits and satirical pieces, were published in America 1844, and appeared in England with a memoir by Derwent Coleridge in 1864. His essays appeared in 1887.

Family. youth, education

Praed was the 3rd son of William Mackworth Praed, of Bitton House, Teignmouth, Devonshire, serjeant-at-law, and for many years chairman of the audit board. London. His father was the grandson of William Mackworth, 2nd son of Sir Humphry Mackworth, who took the additional name of Praed upon his marriage about 1730 to Martha, daughter and heir of John Praed of Trevethow in Cornwall. The maiden name of the poet's mother was Winthrop. The Winthrops of New England are a branch of the same family.

Praed, was born on 26 July 1802 at 35 John Street, Bedford Row. He was a delicate and precocious child. His mother died a year after his birth, and his earliest education was superintended by an elder sister, to whom he was tenderly attached; she died in 1830. He gave up pressing occupations in order to attend her in her last illness.

In 1810 he was placed at Langley Broom school, near Colnbrook, under a Mr. Atkins. He read Plutarch and Shakespeare, and became a good chess-player. He wrote dramas and sent poems home, which were carefully criticised by his father.

On 28 March 1814 he entered Eton in the house of F.J. Plumtre, afterwards a fellow of Eton College. An elder brother helped him in his studies; and Plumtre gave prizes for English verse, which were generally divided between Praed and George William Frederick Howard (afterwards 7th earl of Carlisle).

In 1820 Praed started a manuscript journal, the Apis Matina, of which he wrote about half. It was succeeded by the Etonian, the most famous of school journals. Walter Bloun was Praed's colleague as editor. Some of his contributors were already at college. Among the chief writers were H.N. Coleridge, Sidney Walker, C.H. Townshend, and John Moultrie, who describes Praed in his Dream of Life (Moultrie, Works, 1876, 421). Praed signed his articles as "Peregrine Courtenay," the imaginary president of the "King of Clubs," supposed to conduct the paper. Charles Knight (1791–1873) published the Etonian, which lasted for 10 months.

Praed was a member of the debating society during his last year at school, and helped to found the boys' library. He acted in private theatricals; was chosen by his senior schoolfellow, Edward Bouverie Pusey, as a worthy competitor in chess; and, though too delicate for rougher exercises, was the best fives-player in the school. He wrote, according to Charles Knight, a singularly beautiful hand.

In October 1821 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, with a high reputation, and read classics with Macaulay, who was 2 years his senior. He cared little for mathematics, and only just avoided the "wooden spoon." He failed, though he only just failed, to win the university scholarship; but he won the Sir William Browne medals for Greek ode in 1822 and 1823, and for epigrams in 1822 and 1824. He won the college declamation prize in 1823, and chancellor's medal for English poem in 1823 and 1824.

He was bracketed 3rd in the classical tripos for 1825. His classical verses, specimens of which are preserved in the ‘Musæ Etonenses’ (Series Nova, tom. ii. 1869), show, besides good scholarship, unusual facility and poetic feeling.

Praed was especially distinguished at the union, where his seniors, Macaulay and Charles Austin, were then conspicuous and his only superiors. He generally took the radical side in opposition to Macaulay. In the autumn of 1822 Knight started and edited his Quarterly Magazine, to which Praed was the chief contributor. Macaulay and some of the old contributors to the Etonian’ also wrote. Praed's contributions were in the earliest 3 or 4 numbers; and he took no part in a continuation afterwards attempted.

In 1823 he published, through Charles Knight, Lillian: A fairy tale, a jeu d'esprit written at Trinity in October 1822. In 1826 Knight started, with Praed's help, a weekly paper called The Brazen Head, which lasted only for 4 numbers.

After graduating with a B.A. in 1825, Praed became private tutor at Eton to Lord Ernest Bruce, younger son of the Marquis of Ailesbury. He read for a fellowship at Trinity College, to which he was elected in 1827. He finally left Eton at the end of 1827.

Career

On 29 May 1829 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, and joined the Norfolk circuit. His ambition, however, was for parliamentary life. He was no longer a liberal, though in 1829 he was on the committee of William Cavendish (afterwards 7th Duke of Devonshire) when the latter was the whig candidate for Cambridge University.

The statesman whom he most admired was his fellow Etonian, Canning. After Canning's death in 1827 he became alarmed at the democratic tendencies of the reformers; and his fastidious and scholarly temperament made contempt for demagogues more congenial than popular enthusiasm. At an earlier period he had been strongly in favour of Roman catholic emancipation; but when that question was settled, his political sympathies were completely conservative.

Overtures were made to him to accept a seat in the House of Commons with a view to opposing him to Macaulay, who had recently entered parliament. Praed said that he would not accept a post which involved "personal collision with any man;" but was otherwise ready to support the conservative government. The negotiation dropped; but in December 1830 he bought the seat of St. Germans for 2 years for £1,000.

He made a successful maiden speech on the cotton duties; and though his next speech, on the Reform Bill, brought some disappointment, he improved as a debater. He proposed an amendment in favour of "minority representation," according to which each constituent was to vote for 2 candidates only when 3 places were to be filled. Another amendment, providing that freeholds in a borough should give votes for the borough and not for the county, was proposed by him in a very successful speech, and led to friendly attentions from Sir Robert Peel.

St. Germans was disfranchised by the Reform Bill, and Praed stood, unsuccessfully, for St. Ives, Cornwall, near which a branch of the Praeds lived in the family seat of Trevethow. He published, at Penzance, anonymously, in 1833, Trash dedicated without respect to James Halse, esq., M.P., his successful rival. Praed remained out of parliament till 1834; and during this period wrote much prose and verse in the Morning Post, which became the leading conservative paper, a result attributed to his contributions (Preface to Political Poems, by Sir G. Young, 1888, xviii).

In 1833 the Duke of Wellington furnished him with materials for a series of articles in opposition to some changes in the ordnance department, and subsequently requested Praed to defend him in the Morning Post against an attack in The Times. The duke invited Praed to Walmer Castle, and treated him with great confidence.

At the general election at the end of 1834 Praed was returned for Great Yarmouth, and was appointed secretary to the board of control by Peel during his short administration. His father died in 1835, and in the same summer he married Helen, daughter of George Bogle.

His later parliamentary career was not conspicuous. He retired from Great Yarmouth in 1837, and was elected for Aylesbury. In 1838 he was much occupied with his friend Derwent Coleridge and others in agitating for an improvement of national education, which led to the introduction of the national system under the committee of council on education in 1839. He was deputy high steward to the University of Cambridge during his later years.

His health, which had never been strong, began to break in 1838, and he died of a rapid consumption, at Chester Square, on 15 July 1839. He was buried at Kensal Green. He left 2 daughters, Helen Adeline Mackworth and Elizabeth Lilian Mackworth. His widow died in 1863.

Writing

Praed's best poetry shows very remarkable grace and lightness of touch. His political squibs would perhaps have been more effective had they been more brutal; but Praed could not cease to be a gentleman even as a politician. The delicacy of feeling, with a dash of acid though never coarse satire, gives a pleasant flavour to his work; and in such work as the Red Fisherman he shows an imaginative power which tempts a regret for the diffidence which limited his aspirations. Probably, however, he judged rightly that his powers were best fitted for the lighter kinds of verse.

Praed had continued to write occasional poems in keepsakes and elsewhere. The earliest collection of his poems, edited by R.W. Griswold, appeared at New York in 1844; an enlarged edition of the same appeared in 1850. Another American edition, edited by W.A. Whitmore, appeared in 1859.

An authorized edition, edited by Derwent Coleridge, with the assistance of Praed's sister, Lady Young, and his nephew, Sir George Young, appeared in 1864; Selections, by Sir George Young, were published in 1866; and Political and Occasional Poems, edited with notes by the same, in 1888. Those in the 1st part appeared in the Morning Chronicle, the Brazen Head, the Sphynx (a paper edited by James Silk Buckingham), the Times, and elsewhere down to 1831. Those in the 2nd part appeared in the Albion, a morning paper, from 1830 to 1832, and the rest in the Morning Post 1832 to 1834. The 3rd part consists of 3 satires, written in 1838-1839, previously unpublished.

Praed's essays — that is to say, his contributions in prose to the Etonian, Knight's Quarterly, and the London Magazine — were collected in a volume of Henry Morley's ‘Universal Library’ in 1887; selections of his poems also appeared in Moxon's ‘Miniature Library’ (1885), and in the ‘Canterbury Poets,’ edited by Frederick Cooper (1886).

The Whitmore edition erroneously ascribed to Praed some poems by Edward Marlborough Fitzgerald, omitted in Derwent Coleridge's edition. Fitzgerald was a friend and imitator of Praed; and for some time they used the same signature ‘Φ.’ Praed corrected some of Fitzgerald's poems (cf. Sir George Young's Preface to Political Poems, xxiv–xxxi).

Critical introduction

by Henry Austin Dobson

"In a collection of short pieces," says Matthew Arnold in his preface to Wordsworth’s selected poems, "the impression made by one piece requires to be continued and sustained by the piece following." The verses of Praed are in some sort an illustration of the justice of this remark. Had he himself prepared his book for the press he would doubtless have cancelled a good many poems which his representatives, naturally enough, hesitated to omit. But even the over-affluent character of his legacy to posterity has not much impaired his popularity, or influenced the critical estimate of his work.

As a writer of "society-verse" in its exacter sense, Praed is justly acknowledged to be supreme. We say "exacter sense," because it has of late become the fashion to apply this vague term in the vaguest possible way, so as indeed to include almost all verse but the highest and the lowest. This is manifestly a mistake.

"Society-verse," as Praed understood it, and as we understand it in Praed, treats almost exclusively of the votum, timor, ira, voluptas (and especially the voluptas) of that charmed circle of uncertain limits known conventionally as "good society," — those latter-day Athenians, who, in town and country, spend their time in telling or hearing some new thing, and whose graver and deeper impulses are subordinated to a code of artificial manners. Of these Praed is the laureate-elect; and the narrow world in which they move is the "main haunt and region of his song." Now and again, it may be, he appears to quit it; but never in reality; and even when he seems to do so, like Lander’s shell remote from the sea, he still ‘remembers its august abodes.’

Praed’s chief characteristics are his sparkling wit, the clearness and finish of his style, and the flexibility and unflagging vivacity of his rhythm. He is a master of epigram and antithesis, especially of the kind exemplified by the following couplets:—

  ‘He lay beside a rivulet,
  And looked beside himself’;

— or —

  ‘And some grow rich by telling lies,
  And some by telling money.’

His defects are that he lacks sincerity and variety of theme,— that his brilliancy at times becomes mere glitter, and his manner mechanical. His biographer assures us that his nature had a deeper and graver side than would be suspected from his habitual tone of sportive irony: it is incontestable, however, that the indications of this in his works are faint compared with those which we find in Thackeray and Hood.

"My own Araminta" is an admirable example of his lightest style; the "Vicar" of his more pensive character-pieces; whilst in My little Cousins, which our space does not permit us to quote, there is a rarer vein of playful tenderness. In many of his charades he almost manages to raise those metrical pastimes to the dignity of poetry.

Recognition

Praed won the Chancellor's Medal for English poem in both 1823 (for "Australasia") and 1824 (for "Athens").

In 1830 he won the Seatonian Prize, for his long poem, "The Ascent of Elijah".

His poem "Fairy Song" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

A portrait, showing a very refined head, is prefixed to the Poems of 1864.

The Praed Society is the poetry society at Eton. It meets at a master's house and membership is by invitation.

Publications

Poetry

• The Ascent of Elijah: A poem, to which was adjudged one of the Seatonian prizes for the year 1830. Cambridge, UK: J. & J.J. Deighton, 1831.
• Australasia: A poem which obtained the Chancellor's Medal at the Cambridge commencement, July 1823. [London?]: 1823.
• Lillian: A fairy tale. London: Charles Knight, 1823.
• Athens: A poem which obtained the Chancellor's medal at the Cambridge commencement, July 1824. Cambridge, UK: R. Harwood, 1824.
• The Poetical Works of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold). New York: H.G. Langley, 1844.
• Lillian, and other poems: Now first collected (edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold). New York: Redfield, 1852.
• The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (edited by Derwent Coleridge). (2 volumes), London: Edward Moxon, 1864; New York: Thomas Crowell, 1864. Volume I, Volume II.
• A Selection from the Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (edited by Sir George Young). London: Edward Moxon, 1866.
• The Red Fisherman. New York: Kilbourn Tompkins, 1875.
• The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (edited by Sir George Young). London: Ward, Lock, & Bowden, 1888.
• Every-day Characters. London: Kegan Paul, 1896.
• Selected Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (edited by Alfred Denis Godley). London: Henry Frowde, 1909.
• Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed (edited by Ferris Greenslet). Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909.
• Selected Poems of W.M. Praed (edited by Kenneth Allott). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953.

Non-fiction

• Essays (edited by Sir George Young). London & New York: Routledge, 1887.

The Talented Man by Winthrop Mackworth Praed

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat..

See also

• List of British poets
• Seatonian Prize winners

References

•  Stephen (1896) "Praed, Winthrop Mackworth" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 46 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 281-283 . Wikisource, Web, Feb. 21, 2018.

External links

Poems

• "Fairy Song"
• Praed, Winthrop Mackworth (1802-1839) ("The Vicar") at Representative Poetry Online
• Praed in The English Poets: An anthology: "A Letter of Advice," "The Vicar"
• Praed in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: "The Vicar," "The Newly-Wedded"
• Winthrop Mackworth Praed at My Poetic Side (bio & 10 poems)
• Winthrop Mackworth Praed at PoemHunter (12 poems)
• Winthrop Mackworth Praed at Poetry Nook (57 poems)

Prose

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Winthrop Mackworth Praed

Books

• Winthrop Mackworth Praed at Amazon.com

About

• Winthrop Mackworth Praed in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Praed, Winthrop Mackworth in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Mackworth Praed, Winthrop at The History of Parliament Online, 1820-1832
• Memoir by Derwent Coleridge

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Praed, Winthrop Mackworth