Author: Campbell, Robert Calder
Biography:
CAMPBELL, Robert Calder (1799-1857: PBI)
He was born on 30 Mar. 1799 and baptised on 16 Apr. at Arderseir, Invernesshire, the son of the Rev. Pryce Campbell, the Presbyterian minister, and his wife Grace Gordon. He joined the 43rd Madras native infantry (Cadet, 1817; Lieutenant, 1818; Captain, 1826; Major, 1836), served in the Burma campaign 1825-6, and was invalided in 1831. In 1839 he left the army and returned to London where he became friends with the sculptor Alexander Munro and the poets Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. His Lays from the East (1831) is unremarkable except for a poem addressed to Maria Jane Jewsbury (q.v.). She reviewed the volume in the Athenaeum and thought he had mistaken “vehemence for vigor.” He published prolifically in London (over forty contributions to the Annuals) and various Calcutta magazines, most notably the Calcutta Magazine, Calcutta Literary Gazette, and Parbury’s Oriental Herald and Colonial Intelligencer. His second volume, The Palmer’s Last Lesson, and Other Poems (1838), adds little to his reputation but is of historic interest because of its dedication to Emma Roberts, quotation of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, sonnet on Keats (qq.v.), and another long poem addressed to Maria Jane Jewsbury. Besides a third volume of poetry (1851), he also published a novel, Winter Nights (1850), and some autobiographical travel writing that is still of interest, Rough Recollections (1847) and Episodes in the War-Life of a Soldier (1857). He died on 13 May 1857 at 27 University Street, Bloomsbury, of a long-standing heart condition, and was buried in Highgate. He never married.(PBI 1: 365-74; ODNB 22 Feb. 2021; Scotland's People 22 Feb. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 22 Feb. 2021; BL India Office Records (birth, enlistment and retirement, 1799, 1817-18, 1838-42); Boyle 48-49; Morning Advertiser 16 May 1857; Inverness Courier 21 May 1857; GM June 1857, 742) AA