PRAED, Winthrop Mackworth (1802-1839), one of the most illustrious English writers of vers de société, was the third and youngest son of William Mackworth Praed, serjeant at law. The name of his father’s family had been originally Mackworth, and the circumstances under which the additional title of Praed was adopted are set out in the Parochial History of Cornwall (iii. 101). Winthrop, a cognomen famous across the Atlantic as borne by the governor of Massachusetts, was his mother’s maiden name, and the union of these three consonantal names in the person of Winthrop Mackworth Praed formed the combination over which Miss Mitford expressed righteous indignation. He was born at 35 John Street, Bedford Row, London, 26th July 1802, and almost as soon as he could read was taught by his father to “lisp in numbers.” His mother died in 1809, whereupon the child was sent to the preparatory school of Langley Broom near Coinbrook, where he remained until he was removed (28th March 1814) to Eton. Towards the close of his schoolboy days he started a manuscript periodical called Apis Matina. This was succeeded in October 1820 by the Etonian, a paper projected and edited by Praed and Walter Blunt, which appeared every month until July 1821, when the chief editor left the “glade” of Eton and the paper died. Henry Nelson Coleridge, William Sidney Walker, and John Moultrie were the three best known of his coadjutors in this periodical, which was published by Charles Knight, and of which many interesting particulars are set out in Knight’s A utobiography and in Maxwell Lyte’s Eton College. Before Praed left school he succeeded in establishing over a shop at Eton a “boy’s library” for the use of the higher Etonians, the books of which are now amalgamated in the ...official “boy’s library” in the new buildings. His career at Cambridge, where he matriculated at Trinity College, October 1821, was marked by exceptional brilliancy. Thrice he gained the Browne medal and twice the chancellor’s medal for English verse. He was bracketed third in the classical tripos in 1825, won a fellowship at his college in 1827, and three years later carried off the Seatonian prizes. At the Union his speeches attracted the admiration of his fellow-undergraduates; he struggled, and not unequally, with Macaulay and Austin. The character of Praed during his university life is described by Bulwer Lytton in the first volume of his Life (pp. 227-239, 244-246). At Cambridge, as at Eton, the poet was drawn by Charles Knight into the pleasures of magazine-writing. Knight’s Quarterly Magazine was started in 1822 with Praed as one of the principal contributors, and, after languishing for some time, it expired when three octavo volumes had been issued. For two years (1825-27) he resided at Eton as private tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce, a younger son of the marquis of Ailesbury. During part of this time he was occupied in preparing himself for the profession of the law’, and on 29 th May 1829 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. He travelled on the Norfolk circuit, where his prospects of advancement were bright, but the bias of his feelings inclined him towards politics, and after a year or two he devoted himself entirely to political life. Whilst at Cambridge he leaned to Whiggism, and even to the autumn of 1829 his feelings were bent towards the same side, but with the dawning of the Reform Bill he passed into the opposite ranks, and when he was returned to parliament for St Germans (17th December 1830) his election was due to the kindness of Mr Herries, a zealous member of the Tory party. He sat for that borough until December 1832, and on its extinction contested the borough of St Ives, within the limits of which the Cornish estates of the Praeds are situated. The squibs which he wrote on this occasion were collected in a volume printed at Penzance in 1833 and entitled Trash, dedicated without respect to James Haise, Esq. M.P., his successful competitor. Praed subsequently sat for Great Yarmouth from 1835 to 1837 and for Aylesbury from the latter year until his death. During the progress of the Reform Bill he advocated the creation of three-cornered constituencies, in which each voter should have the power of giving two votes only, and maintained that freeholds within boroughs should confer votes for the boroughs and not for the county. Neither of these suggestions was then adopted, but the former ultimately formed part of the Reform Bill of 1866. Praed was for a few months (December 1834 to April 1835) secretary to the Board of Control, and he was much gratified at receiving the appointment of deputy high steward of his beloved university of Cambridge. The last years of his life were racked by the pains of phthisis, though all that sympathy and devotion could effect to alleviate his sufferings was accomplished by his wife, Helen, daughter of Mr George Bogle, whom he had married in 1835. He died at Chester Square, London, on 15th July 1839, and was buried at Kensal Green on 23d July.
Praed’s lighter poetry was the perfection of ease. It abounded in allusions to the characters and follies of the day and passed with playful touch from puns to politics. In his humorous effusions he was the chief of a school which in these latter days has found numerous imitators. Many of his poems were marked by much pathetic feeling, for his talents were by no means limited to puns and jests. Several American issues of his works appeared before the comprehensive English edition of his Poems, “with a memoir by Rev. Derwent Coleridge,” was published in 1864. At a later date a selection from his poems by Sir George Young was given to the world.
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