A FORGOTTEN CENTENARY
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] &a—The article under the above title in your issue of Atigust 8th, revives my hope that the biography of my uncle, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, will be rewritten more fullyand "dramatically than has hitherto been done. Dr. Richard Garnett who wrote the E. G. Wakefield volume in Fisher Unwin's Builders of Great Britain series (1879), had, I know, felt the limitations imposed upon him by the necessity of conforming to the unavoidable conditions of a series publi- cation. In a conversation I had with him only a few months before his death, Dr. Garnett expressed his intention to write a fuller biography.
Some years afterwards I entered into correspondence with the late Sir Edward Cook who also contemplated a similar enterprise. The interplay of Wakefield's unscrupulosity with his genius and his finer qualities makes a life story of intense dramatic quality. It is characteristic that he should have used the enforced leisure of his imprisonment for a crime of a peculiarly sordid type, to evolve and actually commence his colonization schemes which have largely resulted in saving for the Empire, not only New Zealand, but South Australia and Canada as well. The disaffection in our Canadian colonies was at its height in 1838, and was successfully dealt with by Lord Durham's " Report," of which it was said " Wakefield thought it, Buller wrote it, Durham signed it." There seems little doubt that it was Wakefield's distinctly sharp practice in securing unauthorized publication in the Times of the essential portions of this Report which forced action upon a Cabinet predisposed to act against it.
His life sparkles with similar admixtures of the bandit law- breaker with intentions for the public good. There is much material both in England and New Zealand for a first-class life of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and there is one source of information, the letters of Robert Rintoul, which has, so far as I am aware, never been fully explored.—I am, Sir, &e., FRANCES TORLESSE.
19 Ashburnham Road, Hastings.
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