‘Unremembered Kindness’: George Dyer and English Romanticism

Abstract

‘The oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness itself.’ So Charles Lamb described his esteem for George Dyer in a letter to Coleridge, 26 August 1800 (Marrs, i. 235). Elsewhere, however, Dyer frequently turns up in a joke at his own expense. His short sight and chronic absent-mindedness contributed to a number of humorous stories, such as Leigh Hunt’s recollection that Dyer had once left a dinner wearing only one shoe, and had not discovered his loss until half way home. Best known of these tales about Dyer are Elia’s two essays ‘Oxford in the Vacation’ and ‘Amicus Redivivus’. The former essay indulges Dyer’s pedantic scholarship,

busy as a moth over some rotten archive, rummaged out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new-coat him in Russia, and assign him his place.

His kind heart most warmly sympathised at all times with the cause of civil and religious liberty, which he uniformly espoused by his writings …

The Gentleman’s Magazine, NS 15 (1841), 545

— feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,

As may have had no trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life;

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love.

Tintern Abbey, 31–6