John Cabell Riely

Elected to the Fellowship on 1 March 1990

Obituary written by Beth Riely

John Cabell Riely, a scholar of 18th-century literature and art, died of a heart attack on Saturday, January 22nd at his home in Newton Centre. A former professor in the English Department of Boston University from 1981 to 2003, he was 65 years old.
Mr. Riely was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of James Evans Riely and Marianne Gateson Riely. After finishing Episcopal Academy in 1963, he went to Harvard College where he graduated cum laude in 1967. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. For the next nine years he was an editor of The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, vols. 40-42, published by the Yale University Press and Oxford University Press (1980). “Cagmag” was the affectionate nickname of his three volumes of Miscellaneous Correspondence.
While at Yale, where he gave lectures and seminars, Mr. Riely wrote the exhibition catalogue for Rowlandson Drawings from the Paul Mellon Collection (1977), displayed in New Haven and at the Royal Academy in London. The Age of Horace Walpole in Caricature (1973) was published by Yale University Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum published English Caricature, 1620 to the Present (1984, written with Richard Godfrey). With Hugh Belsey he wrote Gainsborough and Rowlandson: Drawings in Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery (1990). The recipient of many grants and fellowships, he also contributed numerous articles and papers on the literature and art of 18th-century England to journals, festschrifts, and conferences.
Mr. Riely was a devoted member of the Club of Odd Volumes and St. Botolph Club in Boston. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London (1990) and the Royal Society of Arts (1997). He also belonged to The Johnsonians (USA), The Johnson Club (England), and the Walpole Society (England) as well as many other 18th-century societies. Mr. Riely was also deeply attached to Squam Lake, where his family spent summers while he was growing up and which he continued to enjoy throughout his life with family and friends.
He leaves two sons, Christopher Cabell Riely, of Providence, Rhode Island, and Andrew Carrington Riely, of Washington, D.C.; his former wife, Elizabeth Gawthrop Riely, of Brookline, Massachusetts; a sister, Celia Carrington Riely Lewis, of Dussac in the French Dordogne; and his companion, Martha Vasconcellos, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. After a private service, a memorial service will be held for friends and colleagues. Instead of flowers, his sons request that donations be made in his memory to the Squam Lakes Conservation Society in Holderness, New Hampshire.