Thomas James Arnold and the Attribution of Articles in the Wellesley Index and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The 'Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals' names the radical Scottish journalist William Weir, 1802-1858, as the author of an unsigned series of seven articles, published in Henry Colburn's 'New Monthly Magazine', entitled 'Recollections of a Gottingen Student', 1829-1830. While the old 'Dictionary of National Biography', which is referenced in 'Wellesley', is silent on the dates of Weir's time in Gottingen and does not attribute any material from the 'New Monthly Magazine', the new 'Oxford Dictionary of National Biography' provides the dates 1824-1825 for his period of study, and suggests Weir also drew on his experiences in Gottingen for a series of unsigned articles, entitled 'Reminiscences of a German Student', in the 'Edinburgh Literary Journal', 1831. It is contended that if we make the well-founded assumption that the articles are factual, then they were written by two different people. The accurate dating of the events of these articles is significant in that it enables us to determine whether these accounts are of relevance to the life of the English poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who studied in Gottingen between 1825 and 1829 and who wrote in German and English.