Peter George Patmore - Works

Works

He was best known at the New Monthly Magazine, of which he was editor from Theodore Hook's death in 1841 until the periodical was acquired by William Harrison Ainsworth in 1853. Patmore was also a contributor to other periodicals: the Liberal Review, the Westminster Review, the Retrospective Review, and to Blackwood's Magazine, the London Magazine and the Monthly Magazine. Several of Lamb's most characteristic letters were addressed to him, as were also the epistles subsequently collected by Hazlitt under the title of the Liber Amoris. Appearing in that book as "C. P.", Patmore was associated with Hazlitt's adultery with Sarah Walker, to the detriment of his reputation.

Patmore's best-known works included:

• Imitations of Celebrated Authors, or Imaginary Rejected Articles, London, 1826; a fourth edition appeared in 1844, with the title slightly modified and humorous preface omitted. The authors imitated were: Elia, Cobbett, Byron, White, Horace and James Smith, William Hazlitt, Jeffrey, and Leigh Hunt.
• My Friends and Acquaintance: Being Memorials, Mind-portraits, and Personal Recollections of Deceased Celebrities of the Nineteenth Century, with Selections from Their Unpublished Letters, London, 3 vols. 1854.

These gossipy volumes were filled with personal information on Lamb, Thomas Campbell, Lady Blessington, Robert Plumer Ward, H. and J. Smith, Hazlitt, Laman Blanchard, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Thomas Sheridan, son of the playwright. The critics, especially in the Athenæum Magazine and North British Review, rebuked the author for their triviality and inconsequence. The fact that the praise so freely given to Robert Plumer Ward was withheld from Campbell raised a storm of comment in a correspondence which ran in the Athenæum.

Patmore's others works (several of which were issued anonymously) included:

• Sir Thomas Laurence's Cabinet of Gems, with Biographical and Descriptive Memorials, 1837;
• Chatsworth, or the Romance of a Week, 1844;
• Marriage in Mayfair, a comedy, 1854.

He also wrote The Mirror of the Months, 1826, and Finden's Gallery of Beauty, or the Court of Queen Victoria, 1844'.

Between the years of 1820 and 1825, he was known mainly for a series of articles in the New Monthly Magazine entitled "Picture Galleries of England", acting as a critical guide to the main aristocratic collections of Old Master paintings at the time. These articles were a response to, and in some ways a dialogue with, a similar series begun by Hazlitt at around the same time, and published in the London Magazine. Patmore's works were serialised and then published in a single volume in 1824. He was forced into publication by the announcement of several other works of the same name attempting to capitalise on his (or possibly Hazlitt's) success.