It is astonishing to me that Richard Holmes, detailed biographer in two volumes of the poet, Coleridge, has contained himself to assemble in just 112 pages 36 miniature but scintillating portraits (which he calls ‘Insights’) of ‘The Romantic Poets and Their Circle’.

In a beautifully illustrated slim volume published by and for the National Portrait Gallery to accompany their stunning collection of portraits, Holmes has gathered and described in sometimes merely a page the extraordinary lives, achievements and impact of the glorious romantics (1770-1830) linking the well known – Keats, Shelly, Byron, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, with the lesser known – Robert Southey, Thomas de Quincey, Robert Haydon and Leigh Hunt. 

Nor is his selection only of writers.  Painters, Turner and Gilray, are included, and scientists, William Herschel and Humphry Davy.  Nor are they all male.  Holmes has gathered twelve women, again ranging from the famous – Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelly, and Jane Austin to the less famous Amelia Opie, Dorothy Jordan and Felicia Hemans who wrote (I didn’t know) those immortal lines every schoolboy variated upon: ‘The boy stood on the burning deck/Whence all but he had fled’.

This precious volume contains many such pieces of, to me, unknown biographical detail.  I was not aware, for example, that Hazlitt ‘ended his days in tragic isolation and poverty’, or that the actor, Edmund Kean, had a Jewish father who ‘flung himself off a roof’.

The above are what could be dismissed as items of gossip (nothing wrong with a bit of gossip, though), but in fact Holmes is cannier than that.  These miniature portraits are full of links between the writers, painters and scientists in terms of influence, friendship, and their times.  What I found particularly fascinating were the portraits within the portraits.  Something we never do in these days of photography is describe, in our letters to friends, our friends.  Thus Walter Scott described Burns eyes ‘as remarkably large, dark and glowing’; and Elizabeth Rennie wrote of Mary Shelly: ‘If not a beauty, she was a most lovable-looking woman with skin exquisitely fair, and expressive gray eyes.’  Reading such descriptions made me want immediately to describe someone to someone.

Holmes’ gem of a book makes an age come alive through its brilliant spirits.  How he disciplined himself to be brief and succinct when his natural scholarship must have tempted him time and again to enter into more detail I can only guess at.  Why has no one thought to capture such spirits and their age on film?  Holmes’ volume could be considered a kind of film treatment humming with dramatic lives and vibrant living.