SOURCE: Reiman, Donald H. Introduction to The Poet's Fate, by George Dyer. In Odes and The Poet's Fate, pp. v-xii. New York: Garland, 1979.

[In the following introduction, Reiman summarizes Dyer's life and discusses his poetry, concluding that the poet was one of the bright lights of the era, if not its best poet.]

George Dyer (1755-1841), friend of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth and beloved by Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, was one of the great “originals” of his age—a man who, had Thomas Love Peacock known him, would certainly have graced one of his novels of talk as a lovable eccentric. Anecdotes about Dyer fill the letters and essays of Lamb, the writings of Hazlitt, the letters of Southey, and the journals of Henry Crabb Robinson. Dyer wrote a memoir of his friend the Reverend Robert Robinson (1796) that Wordsworth regarded as one of the finest biographies in the language. He was a meticulous scholar, who contributed “whatever was original” to a large series of classical texts published by Valpy, and an assiduous antiquarian, who wrote a History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge, including Notices Relating to the Founders and Eminent Men (2 vols., 1814).

Dyer was born in London's Wapping district, the East End shipping slum, where his father was a watchman (the DNB [Dictionary of National Biography] account, mainly taken from Crabb Robinson, can be expanded greatly by consulting the letters, journals, and publications of Dyer's friends). Sent first to school by charitable women in a dissenting congregation, Dyer was nominated at the age of seven to Christ's Hospital (the endowed charity school that was later the alma mater of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hunt, among others of note). There he was befriended by Anthony Askew (DNB) and rose to the head of his class.

As a “Grecian” at Christ's Hospital, he was aided to enter Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1774. There Dyer won the favor of Richard Farmer, Master of Emmanuel and Vice-Chancellor of the University. Taking his B.A. in 1778, Dyer first served in 1779 as “usher” (assistant teacher) in a grammar school at Dedham, Essex. He then returned to Cambridge to tutor the children of the Rev. Robert Robinson (1735-1790), a leading Baptist and Unitarian clergyman and political liberal who had a profound influence on scores of Cambridge students. Dyer also won the respect of others in liberal Dissenting circles, including William Frend, Joseph Priestley, Gilbert Wakefield, and Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld (the latter two of whom assisted him financially from time to time).

E. V. Lucas' interesting chapter on Dyer in his Life of Charles Lamb ([1905], I, 144-167) quotes a full account by Dyer (from the Mirror of Literature, XXXVIII) of his service as usher in two schools during his early days. In 1791, after Robert Robinson's death (1790), Dyer was employed as an usher at Dr. Ryland's school at Northampton, where he edited unfinished works by Robinson and where he and John Clarke (later Keats's schoolmaster and father of Charles Cowden Clarke) were friends and rivals for the hand of Ryland's stepdaughter, who married Clarke. Charles Cowden Clarke tells how, after his father's death, Dyer

asked for a private conference with me, told me of his youthful attachment for my mother, and inquired whether her circumstances were comfortable, because in case, as a widow, she had not been left well off he meant to offer her his hand. Hearing that in point of money she had no cause for concern, he begged me to keep secret what he had confided to me, and he himself never made farther allusion to the subject.

(Lucas, Life of Charles Lamb, I, 149)

Dyer's chance for a career in the church having been closed by his unorthodox beliefs, he addressed the philosophical basis of the problem in a pamphlet, Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles (1789; enlarged ed., 1792). With the rising concern for social issues stimulated by the French Revolution, Dyer issued prose works entitled The Complaints of the Poor People of England (1793), Account of New South Wales and the State of the Convicts (1794), and A Dissertation on the Theory and Practice of Benevolence (1795; reprinted 1813), and in 1796 his masterpiece, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Robert Robinson. In 1797 he published The Poet's Fate, which proved to be his most interesting poetic work.

Dyer, as The Poet's Fate illustrates, was far more a scholar and antiquarian than a poet. He took more interest in gathering the information about poets that fills his notes than in composing his original poem. To Dyer (Lamb once told Coleridge) “All Poems are good Poems. … All men are fine Geniuses” (Lamb, Letters, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr., I [1975], 240). Such an attitude had definite limitations, as Lamb wrote to Wordsworth on April 26, 1819, while thanking him for Peter Bell and saying that he had delivered the gift copy Wordsworth intended for Dyer:

To G. D. a poem is a poem … for I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than another. The Gods by denying him the very faculty itself of discrimination have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom. But with envy, they excided Curiosity also, and if you wish the copy again … I think I shall be able to find it again for you—on his third shelf, where he stuffs his presentation copies, uncut [i.e., unopened], in shape and manner resembling a lump of dry dust. … I confess I never had any scruple in taking my own again wherever I found it, … and by this means one Copy of “my Works” served for G. D. and with a little dusting was made over to my good friend Dr. Stoddart.

(Lamb, Letters, ed. E. V. Lucas, [1935], II, 242)

In one of his notes to The Poet's Fate, Dyer not only praised the aborted experiment in Pantisocracy, but also praised Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, and Lloyd as up-and-coming writers, thus providing the first united notice of five writers who would eventually be grouped by a variety of commentators, from the satirists of The Anti-Jacobin (1797-1798) to modern literary historians.

Dyer lived in cheap lodgings at Clifford's Inn, Fleet Street, from 1792 until his death. He supported himself chiefly by writing for liberal periodicals, including Joseph Johnson's Analytical Review, the Critical Review, Leigh Hunt's Reflector, Southey's and Joseph Cottle's Annual Anthology, and Richard Phillips' Monthly Magazine. He also contributed biographical sketches of contemporaries to the volumes that Phillips published annually under the title Public Characters.

Dyer was so deeply involved in biographical, as well as bibliographical, research in preparing his History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge … (2 vols., 1814) that I suspect he also contributed to the excellent, anonymous volume entitled A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Henry Colburn, 1816), the best authors' “who's who” of the period. Though it was dedicated to the Prince Regent, not only was the volume printed by A. J. Valpy, for whom Dyer edited 141 volumes of classical texts between 1809 and 1831, but the biographical sketch of Dyer himself shows no sign of having been written by an objective or unfriendly hand, and it contains detailed information not available in any other biographical sketch:

Dyer, George, A.B. of Clifford's Inn. This gentleman, a popular writer of considerable genius, and a pleasing poet, was educated at Christ's Hospital, and at Emanuel College, Cambridge. Mr. D. was intended for the church, but having for conscientious motives relinquished all hopes of ecclesiastical preferment, he connected himself with the Baptists and for some years appeared as a preacher in the meeting-houses of various classes of dissenters. He then repaired to the metropolis, where he was at first, for a short time, engaged as a reporter of the Debates of the H. of Commons, and has since employed himself in the business of private instruction, and in writing for Reviews and other periodical works.

(p. 104)

In listing Dyer's publications, the account also adds one not recorded by DNB, NCBEL [New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature], or any other bibliography of his works: “An English Prologue and Epilogue to the Latin comedy of Ignoramus, written by Geo. F. Ruggle, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, during the reign of K. James I. with notes relating to modern times, 8vo. 1797.” …

As a man of letters, Dyer's desire for perfection would not allow him to publish anything that he had second thoughts about. This penchant caused him, sometime ca. 1799-1800, to cancel and have entirely reset (at his expense) an eighty-to-ninety-page preface to his Poems that had already been printed. This folly of a poor man led Southey, who dearly loved Dyer (“George the First,” as he was called to distinguish him from George Burnett, another character in their circle), to dub him “Cancellarius Magnus” or Lord Chancellor (Southey, New Letters, ed. Kenneth Curry [1965], I, 242). In October 1799 Southey wrote to Coleridge that Gilbert Wakefield had devised

a plan for making George Dyer comfortable—that is his friends were to hold themselves ready to supply him to the amount of a hundred a year, but George was not to know it, for if he did he would always anticipate his resources—and where he publishes one book publish three, for it seems it is his everlasting corrections of the press that perpetually keep him in debt.

(Southey, New Letters, I, 202)

As Lamb found late in 1801, however, Dyer required more than an ample annuity to keep him comfortable, for—absentminded intellectual and antiquarian that he was—the “poor heathen” became sick and nearly died because, as Lamb was informed by Dyer's “little dirty Neice,” unless Dyer “dines out he subsists on teas & gruels.” Lamb thereupon forced Dyer back from malnutrition to health by persuading Dyer to dine with him each day and, because Lamb was also poor, to pay him a shilling per meal (Lamb, Letters, ed. Marrs, II [1976], 28-38).

Besides being feckless about his sustenance, Dyer was also oblivious of the niceties of personal and domestic cleanliness. Writing to Rickman in November 1801, Lamb tells that “G. Dyer … has emigrated to Enfield, where some rich man, that has got two country Houses, allows him the use of a very large one, with a Library … by use, in a sentence back, I mean dirting & littering” (Letters, ed. Marrs, II, 33). Lamb, thinking that Dyer needed a wife to take care of him, tried to stir up a romance between Dyer and Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger (1778-1827; her poem against the slave trade is included in this series in a volume of James Montgomery's works). He apparently succeeded in stimulating Dyer's imagination (“He talks of marrying …” Lamb, Letters, ed. Marrs, II, 38) but not in arousing the lady's interest (“G. Dyer is in love with an Ideot, who loves a Doctor, who is incapable of loving any thing but himself” [ibid., II, 61]). That Lamb's instincts were right was demonstrated in 1825 when Dyer attracted the notice of a Mrs. Mather, widow of a solicitor who lived in Clifford's Inn, who married him and greatly improved his health, happiness, and cleanliness. Crabb Robinson says that Dyer's wife had earlier been his laundress and that she was illiterate; Thomas Sadler, the nineteenth-century editor of Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, doubts Robinson's account because Mrs. Dyer (who died in May 1861 in her hundredth year) had married three times before, including the solicitor Mather. But inasmuch as she chose to marry Dyer in order to take care of him, there is no reason to doubt Robinson's firsthand testimony; illiterate or not, she may have earlier married the solicitor to take care of him, and while an indigent widow she could have served as Dyer's laundress before deciding that he was a man she wished to live with. In his last few years Dyer went blind, and—writes Crabb Robinson—“I used occasionally to go on a Sunday morning to read to him. A poor man used to render him that service for sixpence an hour” (Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, ed. Sadler, 3rd. ed. [1872], I, 35; Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley [1938], I, 5). And Matilda Betham (q.v.) was reading to Dyer at the time of his death, March 2, 1841 (E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, I, 167). These friends might have performed this loving service, but Dyer would hardly have had to hire someone to read to him had Mrs. Dyer been literate.

In any case, the marriage was a happy one; Lamb wrote to Southey on August 9, 1825: “G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold. Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimus, and longer” (Lamb, Letters, ed. Lucas, III, 23). Crabb Robinson also attests to Dyer's happiness, reporting that Dyer told him, “Mrs. Dyer is a woman of excellent natural sense, but she is not literate.”

Lamb's Elia essays contain two detailed portraits of Dyer—one at the end of “Oxford in the Vacation,” which depicts him as an antiquarian researcher (“With long poring, he is grown almost into a book.”) and the other in “Amicus Redivivus,” which tells the tragicomical story of how Dyer, nearsighted and (though Lamb could not know it) on his way to becoming blind, left Lamb's cottage on the New River at Islington, walked into the river, and almost drowned. Lamb—though he also quoted approvingly lines from one of Dyer's poems at the end of his “Recollections of Christ's Hospital” (1813) and gloried in his friendship with “the gall-less and single-minded Dyer” in his “Letter of Elia to Robert Southey” (1823)—apparently hurt Dyer's feelings, for on February 22, 1831, he had to write to Dyer to explain that “I never writ of you but con amore. That if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was not for the purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with scholar-like habits … (Lamb, Letters, ed. Lucas, III, 303-304). Hazlitt, with less humor and awareness of the ridiculous than Lamb possessed, always took Dyer seriously and honored him without condescension. Perhaps William Hazlitt, then, should be given the last word in a portrait of Dyer, whose kindness of heart, dedication to truth, and uncompromised integrity he so honored:

A man may have the manners of a gentleman without having the look, and he may have the character of a gentleman, in a more abstracted point of view, without the manners. The feelings of a gentleman, in this higher sense, only denote a more refined humanity—a spirit delicate in itself, and unwilling to offend, either in the greatest or the smallest things. This may be coupled with absence of mind, ignorance of forms, and frequent blunders. But the will is good. The spring of gentle offices and true regards is untainted. A person of this stamp blushes at an impropriety he was guilty of twenty years before, though he is, perhaps, liable to repeat it tomorrow. He never forgives himself for even a slip of the tongue, that implies an assumption of superiority over any one. In proportion to the concessions made to him, he lowers his demands. He gives the wall to the beggar: but does not always bow to great men. This class of character has been called “God Almighty's gentlemen.”

(“On the Look of a Gentleman,” The Plain Speaker, in Hazlitt, Works, ed. P. P. Howe, XII [1931], 219)

Dyer as a man, if not as a poet, remains one of the bright lights in the Romantic Context.