Henry Reeve

Henry Reeve (9 September 1813 – 21 October 1895) was an English man of letters and judicial official. Biography He was the younger son of Henry Reeve, a Whig physician and writer from Norwich, and was born at Norwich. He was educated at the Norwich School under Edward Valpy. During his holidays he saw a good deal of the young John Stuart Mill. In 1829 he studied at Geneva and mixed in Genevese society, then very brilliant, and including the Sismondis, François Huber, Charles Victor de Bonstetten, Alphonse de Candolle, Pellegrino Rossi, Sigismund Krasinski (his most intimate friend), and Adam Mickiewicz, whose Faris he translated. During a visit to London in 1831 he was introduced to Thackeray and Thomas Carlyle, while through the Austins he made the acquaintance of other literary figures. Next year, in Paris, he met Victor Hugo, Victor Cousin, and Sir Walter Scott. He travelled in Italy, sat under Schelling at Munich and under Ludwig Tieck at Dresden, became in 1835-36 a member of Madame de Circourt's salon, and numbered among his friends Alphonse de Lamartine, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, Alfred de Vigny, Adolphe Thiers, François Guizot, Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, and Alexis de Tocqueville, of whose books, Démocratie en Amérique and the Ancien Régime, he made standard translations into English. In 1837 he was made clerk of appeal and then registrar to the judicial committee of the Privy Council.. From 1840 to 1855 he wrote for The Times, his close touch with men like Guizot, Christian Bunsen, Lord Clarendon, and his own chief at the Privy Council Office, Charles Greville, enabling him to write with authority on foreign policy during the critical period from 1848 to the end of the Crimean War. Upon the promotion of Sir George Cornewall Lewis to the Cabinet early in 1855 Reeve was asked by Longman to edit the April number of the Edinburgh Review, to which his father had been one of the earliest contributors, and in the following July he became the editor.