14

Norwich

Soon after returning home, Polidori received a letter from William

Taylor. It began encouragingly by congratulating him on his separation
from Byron:
Whatever reasons you may have in a pecuniary point of view
to regret so early a separation from your patron, yet in a moral
point of view this very separation has its value, & has certainly
contributed to convince every one of your high & strict spirit of
independence & correctness.
Taylor went on to offer some practical encouragement: a doctor in
Norwich had recently come into a large inheritance and seemed likely to
retire. Thus there might be room for Polidori to set up a practice. Taylor
suggested that Polidori come and investigate the possibilities. But this
time he did not invite Polidori to stay with him; he gave excellent reasons
for not doing so, but they can only have made his failure to do so more
conspicuous and more discouraging:
You would soon form an extensive circle of independent ac-
quaintance if you had rooms of your own. In this house you
would be in some degree confined to our narrow set of
acquaintance, which does not include the fashionable world:
hence I do not recommend it to you.
He ended with some unkind - and unjustified - speculation about
Polidori's writing:
As you complain of ennui, I take for granted you are not draw-
ing up your travels for the press, which however you used to
talk of intending to do;
Brought butbyprobably
to you you have
| UCL - University been
College too idle to
London
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Norwich 143

take the necessary notes on the spot, & find that travels cannot
be written properly in the closet.1
Polidori may not have been up to Taylor's high standards of productiv-
ity, but he had not been entirely idle. Though he had abandoned the
account of his travels with Byron, he had kept up his medical journal in
Italy, and was now preparing it for publication.
Polidori did go to Norwich and tried to establish himself there as both
a doctor and a writer. W.M. Rossetti believes that he joined the staff of
the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, and he may have had some connec-
tion with it, though it has not preserved any record of him.2 He opened a
dispensary, which was apparently supported by a public subscription.
There presumably he treated the poor, as he remarks in the preface to
Ximenes. He joined the Norwich Philosophical Society and also the local
Masonic lodge.3
For a Catholic, the automatic consequence of the latter act was excom-
munication. There is no evidence, however, that Polidori took this
sanction seriously; many Catholics, even in the Catholic countries of
Europe, did not.4 On his expulsion from Milan, Polidori had hoped to
find a rising he could join; Freemasonry may have had for him, as it did
for many, connotations of international subversion. But Italian secret
societies such as the Carbonari were as much a reaction against Free-
masonry as a development from it; and throughout the revolution-
ary period, British Freemasonry remained respectable and generally
apolitical.5 Its secrecy may still have intrigued him; a quasi-Masonic
oath of secrecy is prominent in The Vampyre. A Masonic lodge was also
(as it still is) a good venue for making friends and professional contacts,
both of which Polidori badly needed.
When news of Polidori's new life reached Byron, it inspired a feeble
but prophetic epigram: T fear the Doctor's Skill at Norwich / Will hardly
salt the Doctor's porridge.'6 Later - after Polidori had committed suicide
- Byron explained to Medwin some of the difficulties he must have
faced: 'it is difficult for a young physician to get into practice at home,
however clever, particularly a foreigner, or one with a foreigner's name.'
His religion would have made him seem all the more foreign. Medwin
also suspected (as Gaetano had intimated) that Polidori's association
with Byron might have been a disadvantage, especially in a provincial
city.7 In October 1817, Polidori wrote to Murray with rather strained
optimism: T am [go]ing on very well with few patients & no fees but good
introductions into society which is as much as I could look for yet.'8
Polidori could not live on introductions. For the rest of his life, he
remained largely dependent on his father and on his godfather, John
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144 After Byron: 1816-1821

Deagostini. Both felt called on to provide him with good advice as well as
financial support. In a letter of January 1818, in which he offered to
guarantee a loan from Deagostini, Gaetano said:
It is, however, time for you to put your head to work, for if you
do not start using your judgement at the age you have now
reached, I despair of your ever making use of it. Independence
is what every sage and prudent man must aspire to, but it
cannot be obtained by one who does not know how to limit
his expenses to the means that he can readily obtain, in
recompense for his labours or his ideas, or from generous
friendships and confidences. A young man like you, who
cannot maintain himself with 8 or 10 guineas a month in a
provincial city, will not easily find any one to supply him with
more, for nothing else than useless expenses. I for my part
cannot discern any slavery greater, or more repulsive and
humiliating, than that of debts; and I grieve to see how much
you are inclined to contract them.
Polidori had apparently spent '£35 in little more than a month.' This time
Gaetano did not suspect that he might have gambled it away:
You will see in a little while what a fine figure you will make if
you are obliged to return home. Will you drag your library
around with you? How much your books will cost you if you
make them travel every six months! They will soon cost you
their weight in silver.
He went on to suggest:
Meanwhile you might perhaps gain something by your
profession, which is the only thing on which you can found
your hopes; for if you flatter yourself upon making money by
writing, you will soon find out your mistake. That is a beggarly
trade. 9
Unfortunately, Polidori was also finding his profession a beggarly trade.
In March 1818, sending him £25, Deagostini wrote: T wish you heart-
yly good success in your profession, and a wise economy in your
expences, untill you can provide for them by yourself.' In May, sending
him £15, Gaetano reminded him: 'You should, however, have answered
your mother, who does not know what to think of you.' In August, after
Polidori reported that he had been advised that it might be cheaper for
him to buy a house than to continue living in lodgings, Deagostini
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Norwich 145

replied: 'I must intrude upon yours and your friends judgement with a
few observations prompted to me by my humble conception founded
upon 45. years experience both of myself and of many others to
my knowledge' - he thought it was a terrible idea. In September, send-
ing him £10 and saying that henceforth he would regularly send £7 a
month, to which Deagostini would add £3, Gaetano informed him
that Deagostini 'was not pleased with your reply,' and gave him a
warning:
If you are not beginning to do something at Norwich after
being there for such a long time, I don't know when you will
begin. I fear some of your better friends have greatly changed
their favourable dispositions towards you, and you know the
reason for it well. This can greatly impede your progress in
your profession.
In December, offering to send him £50 (in two instalments) to help him
pay off his debts, Gaetano said, 'I do not want to preach to you here on
your conduct of your expenses,' and immediately proceeded to do so,
'because you yourself must see the injustice and the unpleasant conse-
quences to which you are reducing yourself.'10
It is only fair to add that Polidori must have been a difficult son (and
godson). And Gaetano's warning that Polidori was losing his better
friends is confirmed by Harriet Martineau; his behaviour in his later
years in Norwich, she says, 'disabused every body of all expectation of
good from him.'11 There is no excuse, however, for the proprietorial
attitude Gaetano consistently assumed towards Polidori. He never
stopped thinking of his son's affairs as more his own business than his
son's; never stopped reminding him that his own feelings were more
intense, more real, and in every way more important than his son's could
be; and never stopped blaming him for those feelings. He began his letter
of 27 January 1818 with a resounding if only marginally relevant quota-
tion from the Psalms (41.8):
Dear John,
Abyssus abyssum invocat [Deep calleth on deep]. You are
verifying this phrase by your conduct, and are thus destroying
your own and other people's peace of mind, but mine more
than any one's else. How much I have done for you you may
perhaps forget: how much I have suffered for you, and still
suffer, cannot be comprehended by your imagination, though it
is a poetical imagination.12
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146 After Byron: 1816-1821

In February, Gaetano warned that if Polidori could not moderate his

expenses, serious trouble would follow: 'you will engulf yourself in
disastrous debts that will form your destruction - and mine, if they are
made with my suretyship.' This was reasonable enough, but he went on:
'My lot is so connected with yours that you cannot suffer without my
suffering more than you, but you should do a little more to reciprocate
my love and my friendship.' On 3 May, he wrote: 'my circumstances do
not allow me to render your situation such as you desire, and I should
desire even more than you.' On 24 May, after Deagostini had refused
Polidori a loan, Gaetano assured him:
I am as mortified as you can be, perhaps even more, to see that
you have had recourse almost in vain to a friend who has
thrown away so many thousands of pounds in lending them
either to rascals who have never thought of returning a penny
to him, or to men who flatter him or have flattered him only
to take advantage of him, while you who are his godson and
have, so to speak, grown up in his arms - he makes you strug-
gle for trifles.
(Deagostini's obituary in The Times would describe him as 'exceedingly
liberal to his friends, and to the indigent who approached him.') 13 This
conflict between jealous father-figures is a curious inversion of sibling
rivalry; probably not coincidentally, it is reminiscent of Gaetano's quar-
rels with Luigi.
In September, Gaetano assured his son again:
My heart is sicker than yours can be, because there is always a
weight crushing it, but I suffer it without complaint, in the
hope that sooner or later it will be removed, but perhaps if such
a day comes, it will be the last one of my life, as it seems that
my days cannot be other than a tissue of afflictions and unrest.
In January, he had warned Polidori against accepting a loan from De-
agostini, on the grounds that his godfather would 'therefore want to buy
a repulsive authority over you.' 14 He might have done better to warn his
son against himself. Gaetano's domination - not to call it castration - of
his son also took the practical form of repeatedly urging him to come
back to London. He even offered to pay for shipping Polidori's books. 15
Polidori kept trying to buy back at least a partial independence,
though not all of his attempts could be called practical, and none of them
was successful. He suggested that his father could save money by
removing his younger brothers from Ampleforth and allowing him to
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Norwich 147

tutor them; Gaetano replied: 'As for Robert and Henry, I have to act in
accordance with the feelings of a father, and so... permit me to say that it
is useless to talk to me about it.' Polidori asked his father to pawn some
rings and the watch Byron had helped him buy; Gaetano assured him: 'I
will never have the heart to pawn your things, and so if ever you find
yourself in need of doing it, go about it some other way.'16 Polidori even
offered to sell his books; Gaetano told him not to think of it.17 By January
1819, Polidori was back in London.
Since he could not begin to practise in London until he was twenty-six,
moving there at twenty-three meant that he was in effect giving up
medicine. 'From that time,' Medwin quotes Byron as saying, 'instead of
making out prescriptions, he took to writing romances; a very unprofita-
ble and fatal exchange, as it turned out.'18 But he had already found
medicine itself unprofitable, and he had already taken to writing.
In July 1817, soon after he had moved to Norwich and eighteen
months before he moved back to London, Polidori sent Murray Ximenes,
under the title Count Orlando; or, The Modern Abraham, asking him to
'peruse [it] or get it perused so as to judge of its fitness' for publication.19
He did not think it fit for performance, because of its religious subject-
matter; as he would later explain in its preface, he did not think that
religion should be used for the entertainment of 'an audience formed of
peers and sailors, prostitutes and senators.'20 The mention of peers and
the bad company they keep looks like an allusion to Byron, a great
theatre-goer and at one time a member of the committee of Drury Lane
Theatre. Polidori was also worried that The Modern Abraham might be an
'objectionable' title, presumably for religious reasons; he offered to
change it if Murray wanted to publish the play.
Murray did not want to publish the play. He wrote to Byron:
By the way, Polidori has sent me his tragedy! Do me the
kindness to send by return of post a delicate declension of it,
which I engage faithfully to copy. I am truly sorry that he will
employ himself in a way so ill-suited to his genius; for he is not
without literary talents.21

Byron obliged him: 'You want a "civil and delicate declension" for the
medical tragedy?' he wrote on 21 August, 'Take it -' He began by playing
on the Aristotelian and Gregorian conceptions of catharsis (as an
anorexic, he knew the latter all too well):

Dear Doctor - I have read your play

Which is a good one in it's way
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148 After Byron: 1816-1821

Purges the eyes & moves the bowels

And drenches handkerchiefs like towels
With tears that in a flux of Grief
Afford hysterical relief
To shatter'd nerves & quickened pulses
Which your catastrophe convulses.
He went on to give an account of the play which confirms that he had
never read it:
I like your moral & machinery
Your plot too has such scope for Scenery!
Your dialogue is apt & smart
The play's concoction full of art -
Your hero raves - your heroine cries
All stab - & every body dies ...
Ximenes, though its moral is pointed enough, contains no supernatural
machinery (with the possible exception of the divine command faked by
Ximenes), and calls for no theatrical machinery or special effects. It is the
heroine, Euphemia, who raves at the end. Only one character, Gustavus,
does any stabbing; only two (out of eight) die. Byron may have been
thinking of the plot of Cajetan, Boadicea, or The Duke of Athens; he is more
likely to have been thinking simply of the cliches of romantic tragedy.
Most of the rest of the epistle, though it is one of Byron's wittiest, has
even less to do with Polidori or his play. The civil and delicate excuse for
declining it is put, like the opening, in medical terms:
It is not that I am not sensible
To merits in themselves ostensible
But - and I grieve to speak it - plays
Are drugs - mere drugs, Sir, nowadays - 22
Byron illustrated the point with a list of commercially unsuccessful
plays, in which he had the grace to include Manfred (Murray had civilly
and delicately informed him that it '[soared] above the Million').23
There is no evidence that Murray copied Byron's verses and sent them
on to Polidori; but even before Byron sent them from Italy, Polidori got
the point. He wrote to Murray on 19 August: T imagine from your having
delayed answering me the note I sent you with my play that you have
determined against publishing it if that is the case send me the mss by the
coach from Charing Cross directed, as soon as possible.' He appears to
have been nonchalant about the rejection, perhaps because the mockery
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Norwich 149

of the Diodati circle had hardened him to failure as a playwright, perhaps

because he was already absorbed in another literary project. 'Having had
some leisure lately,' he had revised his medical journal, and wondered if
it could be included in the quarterly Journal of Science and the Arts, which
was published by Murray and sponsored by the Royal Institution. It
printed travel accounts as well as scientific writing, so it was a doubly
appropriate place for Polidori to try to publish his Italian medical jour-
nal.24 The journal would fill about twenty-five pages of print; Polidori
wanted it published as soon as possible and hoped it would not have to
be serialized.25
In October 1817, however, Polidori still had not sent Murray the
medical journal. He had been prevented by illness: 'I had been attacked
in my head in consequence of exposure to the sun when suffering under
tooth ache.' And then he had had a driving accident: 'a violent concus-
sion was produced... which confined me for a month ... so that for a long
time back I have been incapable of doing any thing.' He was expecting to
visit London in a week or two, however, and promised to bring the
journal with him. In the meantime, he had an anxious question: 'What is
Lord Byron about & where is he I have neglected writing to him in
consequence of having heard that he has spoken harshly about me in his
letters I wish I knew the truth about that for I do not know how to act
with regard to corresponding with him - ' He also wanted to know when
the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage would come out (it would
not until April 1818), and asked Murray to send it to him if it had,
together with a complete set of Byron's works - including 'Fare Thee
Well' and 'A Sketch,' which apparently were not available in Norwich.26
He would pay Murray for them when he came to London. He ended with
another, pathetic request: 'I have not a single piece of his handwriting
could you give me a piece[?]'27
Polidori did go to London for a few days at the end of October,28 but
apparently he did not take the medical journal with him. In January 1818,
he wrote to Murray again: 'I am quite ashamed of my having delayed my
journal so long but I fear even now from what you said with regard to
Your journal being partially intended for the reading of Ladies that it will
not do - I will however send it you immediatly upon your answer ...'
There was some excuse for his delay: the journal had grown from 25 to
'about 150 pages of print.' In case Murray could not use it, Polidori asked
him to 'pass it for me to some Medical bookseller so that it might be
printed as I am told by every body that it would advantage me very much
to have published medically.' He repeated his order for Byron's works,
inquired after Byron less hesitantly - 'Where is he? for I want to write to
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150 After Byron: 1816-1821

him' - and asked for an autograph rather less touchingly: 'will you send
me some of his handwriting & if you could of any other Gifford & Rogers
of our Litterature or history,' As his health returned, so did the brasher
side of his personality.
In the same letter, Polidori also asked Murray for work: 'I see you are
announcing a new Monthly publication could you employ me in writing
for it? I should like to write upon Italy & Italian litterature but not upon
any political subject.'29 (This new publication was probably Blackwood's,
which had begun publication in 1817, and in which Murray would buy a
half share later in 1818.)30 Polidori may have had enough of politics for
the time being, or may simply have wanted to reassure the conservative
Murray. But though Byron, in his delicate declension, had imagined
Murray as sighing to Polidori, 'Ah Sir! if you / Had but the Genius to
review,' 31 and though Murray himself had expressed his appreciation of
Polidori's literary talents, he did not ask Polidori to write for him.
Instead, with the help of Robert Gooch, who had earlier tried to
persuade the College of Physicians to let him practise in London and
whom he had made executor of his will, Polidori began writing for the
Eclectic Review.32 This was, as he later explained to Frances, 'an Evan-
gelical review what do you think of that for a change however I do not
interfere with either Providence fate or freewill but leave [them] to settle
these minor points at their good will.' 33 It was also a supporter of such
radical causes as religious freedom and the abolition of the death
penalty. 34
Polidori's first article was a review of Hobhouse's Historical Illustra-
tions of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, on which Hobhouse had
already been working when Polidori saw him in Rome in 1817. Murray
had been reluctant to publish Hobhouse's annotations to Byron's
poem.35 But Byron, though he admitted that they were 'of the heroic
size,' insisted that they were 'very valuable & accurate,' that Hobhouse's
'researches have been indefatigable,' and that as a result he 'has more
real knowledge of Rome & its environs that any Englishman - who has
been there since Gibbon.'36
Hobhouse's indefatigable researches had 'occupied several months,'
as he put it in the advertisement to Historical Illustrations. He confessed
that 'it is very likely he ought to have protracted that time, and more
carefully revised his compilation,' but he claimed some clemency on the
grounds that no one could be expected to master 'the endless details of
erudition.'37 Polidori was not clement: he found that Hobhouse's 'state-
ments are for the most part erroneous, and his superficial erudition
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Norwich 151

perverted to purposes it cannot accomplish.'38 He also took exception to

what he considered the anti-Catholic bias of the book.
Apparently unknown to Polidori, di Breme also attacked Hobhouse's
book, on the grounds that its discussion of contemporary Italian liter-
ature (which was actually written not by Hobhouse but by Ugo Foscolo)
did not do justice to the opposition between the classic and romantic
movements in Italian writing, that it was too favourable to Foscolo, and
that it did not include di Breme among the six major living Italian
writers.39
The reviews Polidori wrote later are extremely generous - in striking
contrast to his first. Perhaps Polidori knew what Hobhouse had been
saying about him to Shelley and Byron, and so wrote with a particular
animus against him; perhaps the devastating reviews his own works
received later in 1818 and in 1819 taught him to be gentler.

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