Born at Stirling, a minister’s son, studied medicine and practised in Glasgow, travelled with the young Duke of Hamilton 1772–78, and then settled in London. His “View of Society in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy” (1779–81) was well received; but the novel “Zeluco” (1789), which suggested Byron’s “Childe Harold,” is to-day the least forgotten of his works. These include two other novels, “Medical Sketches,” and books on the French Revolution. Moore died at Richmond.

Personal

  Moore was sagacious as a physician, and throughout life had intense enjoyment in general observation, and in every kind of good literature and good society. He was universally liked, and most of all in his own house. He had a well-built frame and regular features.

Zeluco, 1789

  This character is well contrived to purge the selfish and malignant passions, by exhibiting the hideous effect of their unrestrained indulgence.

  I now leave “Childe Harold” to live his day, such as he is; it had been more agreeable, and certainly more easy, to have drawn an amiable character. It had been easy to varnish over his faults, to make him do more and express less; but he never was intended as an example, further than to show, that early perversion of mind and morals leads to satiety of past pleasures and disappointment in new ones, and that even the beauties of nature, and the stimulus of travel (except ambition, the most powerful of all excitements) are lost on a soul so constituted, or rather misdirected. Had I proceeded with the poem, this character would have deepened as he drew to the close; for the outline which I once meant to fill up for him was, with some exceptions, the sketch of a modern Timon, perhaps a poetical Zeluco.

  Dr. Moore, the father of the hero of Corunna, with good narrative power, some sly humour, and much observation of character, would have been, in our day, a writer of the Peacock family. Nevertheless, to one who is accustomed to our style of things, it is comic to read the dialogue of a jealous husband, a suspected wife, a faithless maid-servant, a tool of a nurse, a wrong-headed pomposity of a priest, and a sensible physician, all talking Dr. Moore through their masks. Certainly an Irish soldier does say by Jasus, and a cockney footman this here and that there; and this and the like is all the painting of characters which is effected out of the mouths of the bearers by a narrator of great power. I suspect that some novelists repressed their power under a rule that a narrative should narrate, and that the dramatic should be confined to the drama.

  His novel “Zeluco” (published in 1789) produced a powerful impression at the time, and indirectly, through the poetry of Byron, has left an abiding mark on literature. The novel would in these days be called a psychological novel; it is a close analysis of the motives of a headstrong, passionate, thoroughly selfish and unprincipled profligate. It is full of incident, and the analysis is never prolonged into tedious reflections, nor suffered to intercept the progress of the story, while the main plot is diversified with many interesting episodes. The character took a great hold of Byron’s imagination, and probably influenced his life in some of its many moods, as well as his poetry. It is not too much to say that the common opinion that Byron intended “Childe Harold” as a reflection of himself cannot be cleared of its large mixture of falsehood with a study of Moore’s “Zeluco.” Byron said that he intended the Childe to be “a poetical Zeluco,” and the most striking features of the portrait were undoubtedly taken from that character. At the same time it is obvious to everybody acquainted with Moore’s novel and Byron’s life that the moody and impressionable poet often adopted the character of Zeluco, fancied himself and felt himself to be a Zeluco, although he was at heart a very different man.

  Owing to the praise bestowed on it by Mrs. Barbauld, has been far too generally accepted as one of the most notable of eighteenth-century novels. Zeluco, the Byronic villain, and Laura, his amiable and suffering wife, are highly conventional types of evil and of good.

  The book, besides the unlucky drawback that almost all its interest lies in the latter part, has for hero a sort of lifeless monster of wickedness, who is quite as uninteresting as a faultless one and shows little veracity of character except in the minor personages and episodes. In these, and indeed throughout Moore’s work, there is a curious mixture of convention with extreme shrewdness, of somewhat commonplace expression with a remarkably pregnant and humorous conception. But he lacks concentration and finish, and is therefore never likely to be much read again as a whole.

General

  Every reader of extracts from the writings of Dr. Moore must feel a strong desire to become more intimately acquainted with an author so conversant with men and manners and so eminent for the benevolence of his heart and the purity of his morals, and thus be irresistibly induced to purchase all his works and place them in his library by the side of Johnson, Fielding, and Smollett.

  He is characterised by profound knowledge of the world, admirable good sense, intimate acquaintance with human nature, a lively imagination, a rich vein of original humour, and an incomparable power of representing life and manners with discrimination, force, and delicacy.

  As an author, Dr. Moore was more distinguished by the range of his information than by its accuracy or extent upon any particular subject, and his writings did not owe their celebrity to any great depth or even originality of thought. As a novelist he showed no extraordinary felicity in the department of invention, no great power of diversifying his characters, or ease in conducting his narrative. The main quality of his works is that particular species of sardonic wit, with which they are indeed perhaps profusely tinctured, but which frequently confers a grace and poignancy on the general strain of good sense and judicious observation that pervades the whole of them.

  The popularity of the work [“View of Society”] was mainly owing to its amusing sketches, to the many good stories which it contains, and to the lively and animated style in which the whole is written.