Abraham Hayward - Works

Works

He printed privately a translation of Goethe's Faust into English prose (pronounced by Carlyle to be the best version extant in his time). A second and revised edition was published after another visit to Germany in January 1834, in the course of which Hayward met Tieck, Chamisso, De La Motte Fouqué, Varnhagen von Ense and Madame Goethe. In 1878 he contributed the volume on Goethe to Blackwood's Foreign Classics.

His first successes as reviewer were in 1835-1836 by articles on "Walker's Original" and on "Gastronomy." The essays were reprinted to form The Art of Dining, in 1852. Hayward got up every important subject of discussion immediately it came into prominence, and concentrated his information in such a way that he habitually had the last word to say on a topic. When Rogers died, when Vanity Fair was published, when the Greville Memoirs was issued or a revolution occurred on the continent, Hayward, whose memory was as retentive as his power of accumulating documentary evidence was exhaustive, wrote an elaborate essay on the subject for the Quarterly or the Edinburgh. He followed up his paper by giving his acquaintances no rest until they either assimilated or undertook to combat his views.

In February 1848 he became one of the chief leader-writers for the Peelite organ, the Morning Chronicle. The morbid activity of his memory, however, continued to make him many enemies. He alienated Disraeli by tracing a purple patch in his official eulogy of the Duke of Wellington to a newspaper translation from Thiers's funeral panegyric on General St Cyr. His sharp tongue had already made him an enemy of Roebuck, and he disgusted the friends of Mill by the stories he raked up for an obituary notice of the great economist (The Times, May 10, 1873). He broke with Henry Reeve in 1874 by a venomous review of the Greville Memoirs, in which Reeve was compared to the beggarly Scot deputed to let off the blunderbuss which Bolingbroke (Greville) had charged.

After his break with Reeve, Hayward devoted himself more exclusively to the Quarterly. His essays on Chesterfield and Selwyn were reprinted in 1854. Collective editions of his articles appeared in volume form in 1858, 1873 and 1874, and Selected Essays in two volumes, 1878. In his useful but far from flawless edition of the Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs (Thrale) Piozzi (1861), he again appears as a supplementer and continuator of J. W. Croker. His Eminent Statesmen and Writers (1880) commemorates to a large extent personal friendships with such men as Dumas, Cavour and Thiers, whom he knew intimately.

Two volumes of Hayward's Correspondence (edited by HE Carlisle) were published in 1886. In Vanity Fair (November 27, 1875) he may be seen as he appeared in later life.