Meanwhile, Telford does not appear to have helped him much by introducing him to ‘all sorts of novelty.’ In fact, if we may believe himself, Campbell did not take at all kindly to London and its ways. Life there is ‘absolutely a burning fever’; he hates its unnatural and crowded society; it robs him of both health and composure. He cannot settle himself to anything; he has one eternal round of invitations, and has got into a style of living which suits neither his purse nor his inclination. Sleep has become a stranger to him; every morning finds him with a headache. Study and composition are out of the question. He sits ‘under the ear-crashing influence of ten thousand chariot wheels’; when night comes on he has no solace but his pipe, and he drops into bed like an old sinner dropping into the grave.
Campbell was very likely homesick, but his correspondence and the evidence of his intimates put it beyond doubt that he was not cut out for society. Indeed he expressly admits it himself. Fashionable folks, he exclaims in one of his letters, have a slang of talk among themselves as unintelligible to ordinary mortals as the lingo of the gipsies, and perhaps not so amusing if one did understand it. A man of his lowly breeding feels in their company something of what Burke calls proud humility, or rather humble contempt. As for conversation with these minions of le beau monde, he says it is not worth courting since their minds are not so much filled as dilated. This was another of Campbell’s many foolish utterances of the kind. It must have been made in a fit of spleen, for Campbell, like Burns, could dinner very comfortably with a lord when the meeting was likely to favour his own interests.
Johnson declared of Charing Cross that the full tide of human existence was there, but Campbell had nothing of Johnson’s affection for the streets. He objected to the noise because it made conversation impossible, or at least difficult. Hence it was that, ‘the roaring vortex’ having proved unendurable to him, he now changed his quarters to a dingy den of his own at 61 South Molton Street. Here he went on preparing the ‘Annals’ and the new edition of his poems, toiling with the stolid regularity of the mill-horse for ten hours a day. The new edition of the poems was published in the beginning of June, when his spirits had sunk to ‘the very ground-floor of despondency.’ It was a handsome quarto, and the printing, in the author’s opinion, was so well done that, except one splendid book from Paris, dedicated to ‘that villain Buonaparte,’ there was nothing finer in Europe. It was really the seventh edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ but it contained several engravings and some altogether new pieces, among which, in addition to ‘Lochiel’ and ‘Hohenlinden,’ were the once bepraised ‘Lines on Visiting a Scene in Argyllshire’ (the old family estate of Kirnan), and ‘The Beech Tree’s Petition.’
In the course of some pleasantry at the house of Rogers, Campbell once remarked that marriage in nine cases out of ten looks like madness. His own case was clearly not the tenth, at any rate from a prudential point of view. The sale of his new volume had given a temporary fillip to his exchequer, and with the proverbial rashness of his class, he began to think of taking a wife. His reasons were certainly more substantial than his finances. He says that without a home of his own he found it impossible to keep to his work. When he lived alone in lodgings he became so melancholy that for whole days together he did nothing, and could not even stir out of doors. In the company of a certain lady he had found for the first time in his life a ‘perpetual serenity of mind,’ and now he was determined to hazard everything for such a prize. It was a big hazard, and he foresaw the objections. His infatuation, he remarks to Currie, will inevitably set many an empty head a-shaking. But happiness and prosperity do not, in his view, depend upon frigid maxims; and the strong motive he will now have to exertion he regards as ‘worth uncounted thousands’ for encountering the ills of existence.
The lady for whom Campbell thus braved the uncertain future was a daughter of his maternal cousin, Mr Robert Sinclair, who had been a wealthy Greenock merchant and magistrate, and was now, after having suffered some financial reverses, living retired in London. She bore ‘the romantic name of Matilda,’ and is described by Campbell as a beautiful, lively, and lady-like woman, who could make the best cup of Mocha in the world. Beattie remarks upon the Spanish cast of her features: her complexion was dark, her figure spare, graceful, and below the middle height, and when she smiled her eyes gave an expression of tender melancholy to her face. Like Campbell, she had been abroad, and it is said that at the Paris Opera she attracted great attention in her favourite head-dress of turban and feathers. The Turkish Ambassador, who was in a neighbouring box, declared that he had seen nothing so beautiful in Europe. We have learned that Campbell himself was handsome, but Mr Sinclair naturally did not regard good looks as a guarantee of an assured income, and he stoutly opposed the match. The prospective husband was not, however, to be put off by talk about the precarious profits of literature. When was he likely to be in a better position to marry? He had few or no debts; the subscriptions to his quarto were still coming in; the ‘Annals’ was to bring him £300; and at that very moment he had a fifty pound note in his desk.
Mr Sinclair remained unmoved by this recital of wealth, but finding that his daughter’s health was suffering, he waived his objections, and arrangements were made for the marriage to take place at once. Campbell now adopted every means in his power to make money. He wrote to his friend Richardson, requesting him to take prompt measures for levying contributions among the Edinburgh booksellers, the stockholders of the new edition. ‘In the name of Providence,’ he demands in desperation, ‘how much can you scrape out of my books in Edinburgh? If you can dispose of a hundred volumes at fifteen shillings each, it will raise me £75. I shall require £25 to bring me down to Scotland … and under £50 I cannot furnish a house, which, at all events, I am determined to do.’ This request was made only nine days before the marriage, which was celebrated at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on the 10th of October 1803—not September, as Beattie and Campbell himself have it. After a short honeymoon trip, the pair returned to town and settled down in Pimlico, where the father-in-law had considerately furnished a suite of rooms for them.
Campbell’s idea had been to make his home in some ‘cottage retreat’ near Edinburgh. He did not want society or callers; he wanted to be sober and industrious; therefore he would live in the country if he should have to go ten miles in search of a box. He dwells lovingly on this prospect in letters to his friends; but although he did not abandon the notion for some time, it never came to anything. As a matter of fact, his new responsibilities led to engagements which practically chained him to London; to say nothing of the circumstance that he had joined the Volunteers, in view of the threatened invasion of which he sung. Moreover, he had got into some trouble with his Edinburgh publisher, and probably he felt that his presence in or near the capital would only add to his personal annoyance. How different his after life might have been had he carried out his original intention, it is useless to speculate.
As it was, he had not been long married when financial difficulties began to bear heavily upon him. He started badly by borrowing money from one of his sisters; later on he borrowed £55 from Currie; and finally he had to ask a loan of £50 from Scott. A man of really independent spirit, such as Campbell professed to be, would have felt all this very galling, but there is nothing to indicate that Campbell experienced more than a momentary sense of shame at the position in which he had placed himself. By and by we find him confessing to Currie that he doubted whether he had ever been a poet at all, so grovelling and so parsimonious had he become: ‘I have grown a great scrub, you would hardly believe how avaricious.’ To explain the necessity for these unpoetic borrowings would be somewhat difficult. It certainly did not arise from idleness or want of work. Campbell was constantly being offered literary employment, and he had by this time formed a profitable engagement with The Star. In November he describes himself as an exceedingly busy man, habitually contented, and working twelve hours a day for those depending on him. ‘I am scribble, scribble, scribbling for that monosyllable which cannot be wanted—bread, not fame.’ But the scribbling, it may be presumed, did not furnish him with much ready cash, and the current household expenses had to be provided for. By this time there were debts, too. Bensley, the printer, pressed him for a bill of £100; he owed one bookseller £30, and he had an account of £25 for his Volunteer uniform and accoutrements, which were to have cost originally only £10.
Campbell seldom writes a letter without referring to these sordid concerns; but, on the other hand, he just as often speaks of his newly-found felicity by his own fireside. Never, he says, did a more contented couple sit in their Lilliputian parlour. Matilda sews beside him all day, and except to receive such visitors as cannot be denied, they remain without interruption at their respective tasks. In course of time the Lilliputian parlour was brightened by a new arrival. The poet’s first child, Thomas Telford—so called in compliment to the engineer, who afterwards paid for it in a handsome legacy—was born on July 1st, 1804. In notifying Currie of the event he grows quite eloquent over the ‘little inestimable accession’ to his happiness, and asserts his belief that ‘lovelier babe was never smiled upon by the light of heaven.’ In view of what occurred later, the following reads somewhat pathetically: ‘Oh that I were sure he would live to the days when I could take him on my knee and feel the strong plumpness of childhood waxing into vigorous youth! My poor boy! shall I have the ecstacy of teaching him thoughts, and knowledge, and reciprocity of love to me? It is bold to venture into futurity so far. At present his lovely little face is a comfort to me.’ Well was it for Thomas Campbell that the future of his boy lay only in his imagination!
In the meantime, having begun to give hostages to fortune, he felt that he must make still greater efforts towards securing a settled income. This year he had been offered a lucrative professorship in the University of Wilna, but although he declared his readiness to take any situation that offered certain support, he hesitated about the offer because of the decided way in which he had spoken against Russia in ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ He had no fancy for being sent to Siberia, and so, after carefully considering the matter, he declined to go to Wilna. It was at this time that, under the feeling of his responsibility as a parent, he conceived the idea of his ‘Specimens of the British Poets.’ He desired to haul in from the bookselling tribe as many engagements as possible, of such a kind as would cost little labour and bring in a big profit. The ‘Specimens,’ he thought, would answer to that description; and he suggests to Currie that some Liverpool bookseller might embark £500 in the undertaking and make £1000. Find the man, he says, in effect, to Currie. Although Currie should ruin him by the undertaking, it would only be ruining a bookseller, and doing a benefit to a friend! That was one way in which Campbell proposed to meet his increased responsibilities. Another way was by removing his residence to the suburbs. At Pimlico, visitors, as he expresses it, haunted him like fiends and ate up his time like moths. To escape them, as well as to be out of the reach of ‘family interference’ (this was rather ungracious after the father-in-law’s furnishing!), he took a house at Sydenham, and in the November of 1804 he was ‘safe at last in his dulce domum.’