ENGLISH POETRY, 1750-1855

Part 1: Recollections, Conversations and Commonplace Books of the
Reverend John Mitford (1781-1859) from the British Library, London

John Mitford (1781-1859) was one of that remarkable breed of English clergymen that people the novels of Oliphant and Trollope. An Oxford graduate with a steady stream of income from livings in Suffolk, he indulged his passion for English poetry in a variety of extraclerical activities.

He built up a famous library of English poetry which he drew upon in his subsequent writing.

He edited the first accurate edition of The Poems of Thomas Gray (1814) and later edited Gray's Works (1816).

He was employed by Pickering to edit a number of the Aldine editions of English poets including Cowper (1830), Goldsmith (1831), Milton (1832), Dryden (1833), Swift (1834), Prior (1835) and Spenser (1839).

He edited the correspondence of Horace Walpole and William Mason (1851) and became an advocate of landscape gardening.

Most famously of all, he served as Editor of the Gentleman's Magazine from 1834 to 1850 and wrote a famous series of articles on English Poetry.

To help him keep up with the latest news in literature and to pursue his love of art and painting, he kept a house in Sloane Street, London, where Samuel Rogers was a frequent guest. Mitford's hospitality and table-talk were much admired and Mrs Houston commented on his 'brilliant conversation, totally unmoved by any desire to shine.'

Mitford's commonplace books are a model of their kind and are a mine of information on all of the topics that interested him. They capture original poems, extracts from works and letters now lost, transcribed table-talk and recollections of discussions. All seventeen volumes, now held at the British Library, are reproduced in their entirety.

Literary figures covered range from Dryden and Pope, through Walpole and Gray, to Ruskin and John Forster. There is extensive coverage of his conversations with Samuel Rogers and Crabb Robinson and there are lengthy extracts from the correspondence of Horace Walpole, Thomas Gray, Jonathan Toup and William Mason.

Some of the topics covered are the poetry of Samuel Daniel, Pitt's popularity, Linnaen botanical theory, the Junius controversy, books in Mr Penn's library, Shakespeare's plays, Xenophon, Burke, radical politics, Reynold's theories of colour in painting, the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence, drama in the age of Sheridan and Kemble, and life in the courts of Europe. There are original manuscripts in the hands of Gray and Walpole.

The commonplace books are important sources for anecdotes and information concerning:

- Horace Walpole (1717-1797)
- Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
- William Mason (1725-1797)
- Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
- Hannah More (1745-1833)
- Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806)
- Samuel Rogers (1763-1855)
- William Beckford (1760-1844)
- Robert Southey (1774-1843)

Stray entries from these books have found their way into print (such as 'Conversations with the Duke of Wellington' in Temple Bar in 1888) but this is the first time that the whole of the commonplace books have been made available. They will be welcomed by scholars working on individual literary and artistic figures or on general topics such as eighteenth century taste, the classical revival, the sublime, the picturesque and late eighteenth and early nineteenth century culture and society.