Edward Jerningham was a poet who moved in high society during the second half of the 18th century. Born at the family home of Costessey Park in 1737, he died in London on 17 November 1812. A writer of liberal views, he was savagely satirised later in life.
Edward Jerningham was the third son of Sir George Jerningham and belonged to a family which had lived in Norfolk since Tudor times. Since they were Roman Catholic, he was educated first at the English College at Douai in France, and afterwards in Paris. In September 1761 he came to England to be present at the coronation of George III and brought with him a fair knowledge of Greek and Latin and a thorough mastery of French and Italian. Having an interest in religion, he examined the points of difference between Anglicanism and the Catholic Church and eventually adopted the former during the 1790s. He corresponded with Anna Seward on religious subjects [1] and at the end of his life wrote some theological works. [2]
Belonging to the family of a baronet, he moved in high society, having among his chief friends Lords Chesterfield, Harcourt, Carlisle, and Horace Walpole - who often referred to him as ‘the charming man’. He was also a friend of the Prince Regent, at whose request he arranged the library then kept at the Brighton Pavilion. Their relations were close enough for Jerningham to act as go-between during the affair between Lady Jersey and the Prince. [3] His poetry went through several editions and his work also included four plays: Margaret of Anjou: an historical interlude (1777), [4] the tragedy The Siege of Berwick (1794), [5] and the comedies The Welch Heiress (1795) [6] and The Peckham Frolic: or Nell Gwyn (1799). [7] The first three were acted without much success and the last was never performed. In the theatre world he was a particular friend of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who nevertheless is said to have caricatured him as Sir Benjamin Backbite in The School for Scandal (1777). [8]
“Jerningham is a literary magpie whose poetry is overwrought with allusive echoes of other poets,” comments a modern critic, [9] only echoing the opinion of Jerningham's contemporaries. Fanny Burney, for example, mentioned to one of her correspondents in 1780 that “I have been reading his poems, if his they may be called”; [10] and even his friend Horace Walpole admitted “in truth he has no genius: there is no novelty, no plan and no suite in his poetry; though many of the lines are pretty”. [11] He was a good imitator, however, and even something of a literary barometer, straddling the transition from Augustan literature to early Romanticism, which explains his interest to students of his period today.
At the outset of his literary career, Jerningham mixed with the circle about Thomas Gray, although he never met the poet himself. [12] However, like many at the time, he began by writing a close imitation of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in "The Nunnery” (1762). [13] Jerningham then followed it up in successive years with other poems on similar themes in which the connection with Gray's work, though less close, was maintained in theme, form and emotional tone: “The Magdalens: an elegy” (1763); [14] “The Nun: an elegy” (1764); [15] and “An Elegy Written Among the Ruins of an Abbey” (1765), which is derivative of similar use of the ruin theme in elegiac works such as Edward Moore’s “An elegy, written among the ruins of a nobleman's seat in Cornwall”. [16] Monastic themes were an obvious choice for a Catholic raised in Europe, but they are singular for being penetrated by notes of erotic passion. What is left unfulfilled in “The Nunnery”, wasting its sweetness on the desert air, is any chance of married life or sexual dalliance. And where the latter had been irregularly fulfilled, then it found a retreat in the recently opened refuge for reformed prostitutes, the setting of “The Magdalens”. There the religious connotations are intensified by Jerningham's description of its inmates “kneeling at yon rail” in “Nun-clad Penance” in the church where men of fashion such as himself went to hear them sing. [17]
The penitent male equivalent is treated in “The Funeral of Arabert, Monk of La Trappe” (1771), [18] and in the heroic epistle of “Abelard to Eloisa” (1792), [19] which serves as a pendant to Pope's earlier “Eloisa to Abelard” and, like it, is written in couplets. Jerningham's use of this theme introduces another of the questions surrounding his originality. There had already been nine poetical replies in Abelard's name to Pope's original epistle, stretching from 1720 to 1785, but his is singular in stressing the historical background to Abelard's story. Although the material was available, as it was to Pope, in John Hughes’ Letters of Abelard and Heloise: with a particular account of their lives, amours, and misfortune, [20] no one before him had thought to include the quarrel with Bernard of Clairvaux and the indictment for heresy as among the pressures that Abelard was under. An analogous case is another of Jerningham’s heroic epistles, “Yarico to Inkle” (1766), of which there had also been several other examples under that title in the four decades before his appeared. [21] The original story concerned an “Indian maid” who had saved a shipwrecked mariner on the North American coast and was subsequently sold by him into slavery. Jerningham's contribution was to shift the story into the context of the growing movement against the slave trade by making Yarico an African negro who draws attention to the anomaly in Christian doctrine that allows such discrimination against those of another race. [22]
One example of the transitional nature of Jerningham's work is found in his “Enthusiasm”, [23] a quasi-philosophical poem in which the “Enthusiastic Maid, Daughter of Energy” is put on trial in a heaven for her bad effect on the progress of civilization. In the first half of the poem, a prosecuting seraph condemns her as the cause of the Muslim burning of the Alexandrian library and the Catholic massacres and persecution of Protestants in France. In the second part she is defended as inspiring the spirit of self-sacrifice, the signing of Magna Carta, and the defiance of received ideas as exemplified by Christopher Columbus and Martin Luther. At the end she clinches the argument with the example of America's self-liberation, an instance of libertarian thinking that would very shortly be regarded as treasonable in the wake of the reaction to the French Revolution.
The poem had its admirers, but one contemporary review found it too prosaic in developing its thesis. [24] Though it is argued there that the poetry is insufficient to encompass its subject, it is rather poetical convention that impedes the meaning. Most historical allusions in “Enthusiasm” are so clothed in obscurity that they have to be identified by footnotes, and the heavenly landscape is encumbered with such abstractions borrowed from the odes of Gray and William Collins as “Meek Toleration, heav’n-descending Maid” and Superstition who “Extends, in thunder cloath’d, her threat’ning arm”. But it is only the change in versification that divides Jerningham's championship of the significance of the American revolution from William Blake’s just four years later in America: A Prophecy (1793). Otherwise the veiled manner and personified abstractions remain much the same. [25]
It is Jerningham’s meditative description of “Tintern Abbey” (1796) [26] that indicates most vividly the interface between a past manner and what was to come immediately after in William Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798). Jerningham’s poem is a work of elegiac antiquarianism not very different from descriptions by other poets of the time [27] and with the same aesthetic appreciation of the melancholy scene as is found in J. M. W. Turner’s 1794 watercolour of the abbey ruins (see opposite). Wordsworth pays sly homage to this almost obligatory sensibility by interpreting the “wreaths of smoke” rising from the local ironworks as possible evidence “of some Hermit’s cave” upslope. [28] But otherwise he turns his back on both past and present and perceives the natural landscape as having an eternal moral force that resonates in the imagination. [29] The contrast could not be stronger.
An injudicious victim of his good nature, Jerningham twice responded to requests for poetical contributions from the leaders of literary cliques that were objects of ridicule. As a visitor to fashionable Bath, he was approached by Anna, Lady Miller and submitted “Dissipation” [30] to the fourth volume of the anthology of works from her Batheaston circle. Already the focus of satire, the death of its patroness in 1781 brought it to an end before Jerningham's reputation came to much harm. [31]
A decade later, he was recruited to help reverse the failing fortunes of the Della Cruscans, [32] the members of which, like the Batheaston set, made themselves ridiculous by the practice of mutual admiration. Writing under the name of ‘Benedict’, he published a number of sonnets imitative of the Robert Merry – Hannah Cowley exchanges in their earlier collection, The Poetry of the World (1788), and these were published in a new collection, The British Album (1790). [33]
Not only were the works of the Della Cruscans voluminous and uncritical, but they were also identified with the radical cause and so became the object of the reactionary William Gifford’s bitter satire. At the start of his attack on the group in The Baviad (1794), Gifford makes “Some sniv’lling Jerningham at fifty weep/ O’er love-lorn oxen and deserted sheep,” [34] and the reputation of weak sentimentality was to stick to him for the next two centuries. One of Jerningham's friends, at least, had no idea what Gifford was talking about. The attack "shows that he certainly was not acquainted with Mr Jerningham’s works", commented John Taylor; "he speaks of him as a pastoral poet, though Mr Jerningham has not one pastoral poem in all his numerous productions." [35] But though the poet retorted with a satire of his own, [36] his self-defence is forgotten now and Gifford's disinformation still remains largely unchallenged.
Thomas Gray was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751.
Alexander Pope was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translations of Homer.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1733.
Tintern Abbey was founded on 9 May 1131 by Walter de Clare, Lord of Chepstow. It is situated adjacent to the village of Tintern in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye, which at this location forms the border between Monmouthshire in Wales and Gloucestershire in England. It was the first Cistercian foundation in Wales, and only the second in Britain.
Christopher Anstey was an English poet who also wrote in Latin. After a period managing his family's estates, he moved permanently to Bath and died after a long public life there. His poem, The New Bath Guide, brought him to fame and began an easy satirical fashion that was influential throughout the second half of the 18th century. Later he wrote An Electoral Ball, another burlesque of Bath society that allowed him to develop and update certain themes in his earlier work. Among his Latin writing were translations and summaries based on both these poems; he was also joint author of one of the earliest Latin translations of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which went through several editions both in England and abroad.
William Gifford was an English critic, editor and poet, famous as a satirist and controversialist.
Eloisa to Abelard is a verse epistle by Alexander Pope that was published in 1717 and based on a well-known medieval story. Itself an imitation of a Latin poetic genre, its immediate fame resulted in a large number of English imitations throughout the rest of the century and other poems more loosely based on its themes thereafter. Translations of varying levels of faithfulness appeared across Europe, starting in the 1750s and reaching a peak towards the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th. These were in the vanguard of the shift away from Classicism and towards the primacy given emotion over reason that heralded Romanticism. Artistic depictions of the poem's themes were often reproduced as prints illustrating the poem; there were also paintings in France of the women readers of the amorous correspondence between the lovers.
The Spectator was a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England, lasting from 1711 to 1712. Each "paper", or "number", was approximately 2,500 words long, and the original run consisted of 555 numbers, beginning on 1 March 1711. These were collected into seven volumes. The paper was revived without the involvement of Steele in 1714, appearing thrice weekly for six months, and these papers when collected formed the eighth volume. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison's, and the poet John Hughes also contributed to the publication.
The Della Cruscans were a circle of European late-18th-century sentimental poets founded by Robert Merry (1755–98).
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. Originally titled Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard, the poem was completed when Gray was living near the Church of St Giles, Stoke Poges. It was sent to his friend Horace Walpole, who popularised the poem among London literary circles. Gray was eventually forced to publish the work on 15 February 1751 in order to preempt a magazine publisher from printing an unlicensed copy of the poem.
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey is a poem by William Wordsworth. The title, Lines Writtena Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798, is often abbreviated simply to Tintern Abbey, although that building does not appear within the poem. It was written by Wordsworth after a walking tour with his sister in this section of the Welsh Borders. The description of his encounters with the countryside on the banks of the River Wye grows into an outline of his general philosophy. There has been considerable debate about why evidence of the human presence in the landscape has been downplayed and in what way the poem fits within the 18th-century loco-descriptive genre.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The Task: A Poem, in Six Books is a poem in blank verse by William Cowper published in 1785, usually seen as his supreme achievement. Its six books are called "The Sofa", "The Timepiece", "The Garden", "The Winter Evening", "The Winter Morning Walk" and "The Winter Walk at Noon". Beginning with a mock-Miltonic passage on the origins of the sofa, it develops into a discursive meditation on the blessings of nature, the retired life and religious faith, with attacks on slavery, blood sports, fashionable frivolity, lukewarm clergy and French despotism among other things.
William Parsons was an English poet, one of the Della Cruscans.
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford, later the Duchess of Somerset, was a British courtier and the wife of Algernon Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who became the 7th Duke of Somerset in 1748. She was also known as a poet, literary patron and woman of letters. Her great-aunt by marriage, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, influenced her literary development. She was also influenced by the poet Elizabeth Singer, with whom she became acquainted in her youth at Longleat, where she grew up.
James Cawthorn was born in Sheffield on 4 November 1719 and died in Tonbridge on 15 April 1761. A school master in holy orders, he was a minor English poet and imitator of Alexander Pope.
James Woodhouse (1735–1820) was an English poet from the Black Country village of Rowley Regis. He was known as the "shoe-maker poet" from his trade that supported him during his early years. He made the acquaintance of the poet William Shenstone, who lived nearby, and was encouraged by him to write poetry. In 1764 a collection of his poems was published with the financial assistance of his friends and he acquired some fame as a writer of "humble" beginnings. He acquired literary patrons, the most of important being the "bluestocking" Elizabeth Montagu, who also became his employer. After a dispute with Montagu, he left her service and his final years were spent in London, where he set up a bookselling business. He died in 1820 and was buried at the cemetery of St George's Chapel, near Marble Arch in London.
Thomas Warwick was a poet and unbeneficed clergyman of Cornish origin, born about 1755, died after 1785. He took part in the revival of the sonnet form at the end of the 18th century and his other writing included odes and poems on mediaeval subjects. His behaviour was described as eccentric and he died early in a carriage accident.
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