George Dyer's reputation has largely derived from anecdotes about his eccentric character and behavior. Leigh Hunt told a story about Dyer's leaving a dinner wearing only one shoe and not discovering his loss until halfway home. Charles Lamb affectionately portrayed his friend Dyer in "Oxford in the Vacation" (1820) and "Amicus Redivivus" (1823). The former essay gently teases Dyer's pedantic scholarship; in the latter essay Elia whimsically comments. "I do not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than on seeing my old friend G. D. ... at noon day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst" of the New River at Islington. But Dyer also needs to be taken seriously, first as an active republican and dissenter in the revolutionary 1790s; second as a man of letters who over a long life maintained an astonishingly diverse output as poet, pamphleteer, biographer, historian, and editor.

Dyer was born in London...