Thomas Medwin (20 March 1788 – 2 August 1869) was an early 19th-century English writer, poet and translator. He is primarily known for his controversial biography of his cousin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and for published recollections of his friend, Lord Byron.
Early life Thomas Medwin was born in the market town of Horsham, West Sussex on 20 March 1788, the third son of five children of Thomas Charles Medwin, a solicitor and steward, and Mary Medwin (née Pilfold). His two older brothers John and Henry died in early adulthood. He was a second cousin on both his parents' sides to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), who lived two miles away at Field Place, Warnham, and with whom Medwin formed a friendship from childhood onwards meeting in their respective holidays for pursuits such as fishing and fox-hunting.
Medwin was from a prosperous rather than a wealthy family that expected their sons to work for a living. He attended Syon House Academy in Brentford in 1798–1804, as did Shelley in 1802–1804. Medwin related that Shelley and he remained close friends at Syon House, forming a bond so close that Shelley apparently sleepwalked his way to Medwin's dormitory.Thomas Medwin (1847), The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2 vols), T. C. Newby, London After a further year in a public school, Medwin matriculated at University College, Oxford in the winter of 1805, but left without taking his degree. He was initially articled as a clerk in his father's law firm in Horsham but had no wish to be a provincial lawyer preferring to spend time on more aristocratic pursuits often with his cousin Shelley. Their romantic attachments included their cousin Harriet Grove, with whom Shelley was deeply committed by the spring of 1810. Their relationship was brief and ended by Grove's parents A year later Shelley eloped and married sixteen year old Harriet Westbrook using money he had borrowed under false pretences from Medwin senior.
Medwin was a polyglot fluent in: Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese and interested in pursuing a literary life. He began writing poems, including a contribution to The Wandering Jew, a poem attributed to the youthful Shelley. He also ran up considerable gambling debts at his club in Brighton that caused a rift with his father, the result of which was the omission of Thomas from his father's will, executed in 1829. Considerable debts appear to have been paid by his family. He had also spent substantial sums on collecting art. Shelley later recalled Medwin as painting well and ”remarkable, if I do not mistake, for a particular taste in, and knowledge of the belli arti – Italy is the place for you, the very place – the Paradise of Exiles.... If you will be glad to see an old friend, who will be glad to see you... come to Italy.”Percy Bysshe Shelly. Private letter to Medwin; The Works X, 141. Medwin's financial situation was such that initially he could not accept his cousin's invitation, and by 1812 he had accepted a military commission in the 24th Light Dragoons, a regiment where he could pursue his social pretensions.
India Medwin was gazetted as a cornet in June 1812, progressing to the rank of lieutenant in the 24th Dragoon guards in 1813. His regiment was stationed at Cawnpore in Uttar Pradesh in northern India, one of the largest military stations in India, with an organised social life and stores stocked with European goods. The heat was stultifying and few duties were required of an officer. Judging from Medwin's description,The Angler in Wales, or Days and Nights of Sportsmen, 2 vols, 1834. he spent many enthusiastic hours hunting wildlife. He saw action at the siege of Hathras in 1817 and was involved in advances against the Pindaris on the banks of the river Sindh in December 1817. Medwin spent five years in India that included an intense affair with a Hindu woman that ended badly but through whom he was introduced to the doctrines of Raja Ram Mohan Roy.Nigel Leask: British Romantic Writers and The East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. 68–70. He also witnessed an incident of sati, the ritual burning of a widow, on the Narmuda river in 1818. and enthusiastically toured the classical Hindu temples of Gaur, Palibothra, Jagannath and Karla and the Elephanta and Ellora Caves. Medwin's regiment was disbanded at the end of 1818 and Medwin went on half-pay, attached to a regiment of the Life Guards until 1831, when he sold his commission. He was by this time known as Captain Medwin, although there is no evidence that he was ever promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant.
In October 1818 whilst waiting in Bombay for a berth back to England, he browsed a bookstall finding a copy of The Revolt of Islam by his cousin Shelley.Sandy, Mark. "The Revolt of Islam". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 August 2004. Accessed 22 July 2026. Recalling the incident under his persona Julian in The Angler in Wales in 1834, he was “astonished at the greatness of (Shelley's) genius” and declared, “that the amiable philosophy and self-sacrifice inculcated by that divine poem, worked a strange reformation in my mind.” Medwin's sobriquet Julian is likely to have been a reference to Shelley's Julian and Maddalo, a poem in which Julian has characteristics of Shelley."Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation". The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. West Sussex County Library Service. 24 December 2009 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t113.e4098>; H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) vol. 50, p. 207. Shelley was to provide the central experience and focal point of his future literary life.
Reunion with Shelley
In September 1820 he arrived in Geneva to stay with Jane and Edward Ellerker Williams, the latter of whom was to drown with Shelley. There he finished his first published poem, Oswald and Edwin, An Oriental Sketch, dedicated to Williams. This ran to 40 pages with 12 pages of notes. It was revised in 1821 as the Lion Hunt for Sketches From Hindoostan. Following his return from India, Medwin revived his friendship with Shelley inspiring his cousin with his recollections of India as they engaged in a creative exchange of ideas and criticism. In the autumn of 1820, Medwin joined his cousin Shelley in Pisa, moving in with him and his wife Mary Shelley, with whom he was to develop an uneasy relationship. Mary could not stand Medwin's nagging presence, and found him extremely boring,”The burden of Tom grows very heavy!” Medwin was periodically ill with a recurring hepatic ailment, during his months in Pisa but worked with Shelley on a number of poems and on the publication of his journal Sketches From Hindoostan. Shelley and Medwin started to study Arabic together; they also read Schiller, Cervantes, Milton and Petrarch, and throughout early 1821 pursued a vigorous intellectual life. Shelley was working on Prometheus and would read drafts each evening to Medwin, who was continuing with a second volume of Oswald and Edwin, An Oriental Sketch. In January they were joined by Jane and Edward Ellerker Williams. Medwin left Shelley in March 1821 to visit Florence, Rome and then Venice, where he continued to write and socialise.
Meeting with Byron
In November 1821 Medwin returned to Pisa, where Shelley introduced him to Lord Byron on 20 November 1821.Journals of the Conversations, of Lord Byron, noted at a residence with His Lordship at Pisa in the years 1821 and 1822, Thomas Medwin, Henry Colburn, London (1824). Byron and Medwin were to form a friendship. They enjoyed the company of various women, as can be seen by their correspondence with each other, and formed a male bond that was missing from Medwin's relationship with Shelley. He joined Byron for episodes of pistol shooting and riding and dined within Byron's inner circle with other friends that included: Shelley, Edward E Williams, Leigh Hunt and the recently arrived Edward John Trelawny. The last would feature as friend and rival throughout Medwin's life, as both sought to be arbiters of Byron's reputation. Medwin provided a translation of part of Petrarch's Africa for Byron,Byron's letters and Journals VI, 7: Thomas Medwin "Conversations" whilst Byron finished Cantos 6–12 of Don Juan. When Medwin decided to continue his tour of Italy in April 1822, Byron insisted on holding a splendid leaving party for him.
Death of Shelley Medwin travelled first to Rome, where he was introduced to the sculptor Antonio Canova,Leaves from the Autobiography of an Amateur, Thomas Medwin, Frasers's Magazine Sept 1839 and then to Naples, before sailing to Genoa. It was at Genoa that he heard a rumour of an English schooner being lost with two Englishman aboard, but only on his arrival in Geneva did he learn that it was Shelley and Edward Williams, who had drowned on 8 July 1822."The Sinking of the Don Juan" by Donald Prell, Keats–Shelley Journal, Vol. LVI, 2007, pp. 136–54. Medwin was devastated and returned to Italy, where he learned at Spezia that his friends' bodies had been thrown up out of the sea. He arrived in Pisa on 18 August, a few hours after the bodies had been cremated. Throughout the rest of his life, he was bitter about being late, even claiming at one time that he had been present. He met the widows and his friends Byron, Trelawny and Leigh Hunt, who were present at Shelley's cremation, and he put the sadness of those days into Ahasuerus, The Wanderer, a poetic tale of an individual condemned to immortality and earthly solitude. The preface begins with a poetic tribute, dedicated to Byron and laid at the feet of the dead Shelley. A melancholic Medwin left Pisa shortly after to visit Genoa, Geneva, Paris, where his spirits appear to have improved by an introduction to Thomas Moore and Thomas Colley Grattan and finally London.
Controversy over Byron The restless Medwin moved to Paris in 1824, where he met Washington Irving, an American author who shared his enthusiasm for Byron and the Spanish poets, particularly Calderón. A lasting correspondence was formed. Shortly afterwards Medwin learned of the death of Lord Byron on 19 April 1824. The news was published in London on 15 May, and by 10 July Medwin had compiled a volume, his Conversations of Lord Byron The manuscript received short shrift from Mary Shelley and from the majority of critics. John GaltBlackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Vol. 16 No. 94 (November 1824), pp. 530–540. and William Harness published negative appraisals in the November Blackwood's Magazine, and John Cam Hobhouse, a close friend of Byron wrote a withering assault on Medwin for the Westminster Review of January 1825, questioning the truth of much of the book's contents. Lady Caroline Lamb, one of Byron's mistresses, was deeply upset by Medwin's comments and wrote him letters putting her view of their affair to him. John Murray (1778–1843), the Scottish publisher whose family house owned the copyright to Byron's works, was also outraged at the revelations and threatened to sue. (Murray had destroyed Byron's memoirs as being unfit for publication).Thomas Medwin: Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron https://lordbyron.org/contents.php?doc=ThMedwi.1824.Contents>