John Giles Eccardt, Thomas Gray, 1747–8. Oil on canvas, 40.3 x 32.7 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London. This portrait was commissioned by Horace Walpole who was Eccardt’s principal patron.
Gray's Elegy
Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, published in 1751, was an instant hit, and it has ever since remained one of the best-known and best-loved poems in the English language. Gray (1716–71) shunned the limelight, and the poem’s publication came about almost by accident. He had written a first version of the piece several years earlier, either in 1742, as a reaction to the untimely death of his very close friend, Richard West (1716–42), or perhaps in 1745. He then set the poem aside until 1749, when he seems to have picked it up again after the death of his mother’s sister, Mary (1683–1749), to whom he was also extremely close. The first eighteen stanzas of the two versions are substantially the same. The first version then concludes with four stanzas that were later abandoned and replaced with seventeen new ones. This was a momentous change because it turned a poem that was essentially a conventional eighteenth-century Christian meditation on death into something quite new and original. Gray began with a popular genre of reflective verse, known as graveyard poetry, and ended up writing a piece about mortality whose antecedents stretch all the way back to Virgil and beyond.
John Giles Eccardt, Horace Walpole, 1754. Oil on canvas, 39.4 x 31.8 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London. The house in the background is Strawberry Hill, Walpole's Gothic extravaganza, remodelled between 1749 and 1776.
In June 1750 Gray sent the finished ‘Elegy’ to his friend Horace Walpole (1717–97), the brilliant son of a Prime Minister. Walpole, who was a great admirer of Gray’s verse, circulated the manuscript among his circle of friends. The idea of copyright being almost non-existent, a copy of the poem ended up in the hands of the publishers of the Magazine of Magazines, who wrote to Gray in February 1751, informing him that ‘an ingenious Poem, called Reflections in a Country-Churchyard, has been communicated to them, which they are printing forthwith.’ Gray wrote to Walpole in a panic on 11 February, asking him to have the piece printed anonymously and without delay by the bookseller and publisher Robert Dodsley (1704–64). It appeared four days later on 15 February as a quarto pamplet, priced sixpence.
Gray and Walpole first became friends when they were at school together at Eton College, where they formed a ‘quadruple alliance’ with West (mentioned above), whose father was a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and Thomas Ashton (1715–75). Gray and Walpole both subsequently went to Cambridge, where Gray matriculated at Peterhouse (1734) and Walpole at King’s (1735). In 1738 Walpole invited Gray to accompany him on the Grand Tour. They set off in March 1739, spending several months in France, before crossing the Alps into Italy, where they spent the whole of 1740, mainly in Florence, Rome and Naples. In April 1741, en route to Venice, they quarrelled. The reasons are unknown but their radically different circumstances and temperaments, and the long period spent on the road together doubtless conspired to cause friction. Gray returned home, and the two men were not reconciled until 1745.
Two extracts from Gray’s letters give some insights into his character. The first, from a letter to Richard West, sent from Turin in November 1739, describes the journey through the Alps via the Carthusian monastery, the Grande Chartreuse:
In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining: Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noon-day; You have Death perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed, as to compose the mind without frighting it. I am well persuaded St. Bruno was a man of no common genius, to choose such a situation for his retirement; and perhaps should have been a disciple of his, had I been born in his time.
And now a letter to West, sent from Rome in May 1740, describing a ball. Among the guests was Il Serenissimo Pretendente – the exiled son of King James II, known as the Old Pretender:
Figure to yourself a Roman villa; all its little apartments thrown open, and lighted up to the best advantage. At the upper end of the gallery, a fine concert, in which La Diamantina, a famous virtuosa, played on the violin divinely, and sung angelically; Giovanni and Pasqualini (great names in musical story) also performed miraculously. On each side were ranged all the secular grand monde of Rome, the Ambassadors, Princesses, and all that. Among the rest Il Serenissimo Pretendente (as the Mantova gazette calls him) displayed his rueful length of person, with his two young ones, and all his ministry around him. ‘Poi nacque un grazioso ballo’, where the world danced, and I sat in a corner regaling myself with iced fruits, and other pleasant rinfrescatives.
To read ‘Gray’s “Elegy” and the Logic of Expression’, a detailed discussion of the two versions of Gray’s celebrated poem, click here.