William Shenstone

William Shenstone (18 November 1714 - 11 February 1763) was an English poet, and an early practitioner of landscape gardening through the development of his estate, The Leasowes.

William Shenstone (1714-1763). Portrait by Edward Alcock (died 1782), 1760. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Life

Overview

Shenstone was a son of Thomas Shenstone, owner of a small estate at Hales Owen, Shropshire. At this place, called the Leasowes, the poet was born. In 1732 he went to Oxford. On his father's death he retired to the Leasowes where he passed his time, and ran through his means in transforming it into a marvel of landscape gardening, visited by strangers from all parts of the kingdom. The works of Shenstone consist of poems and prose essays. Of the former, The Schoolmistress, a humorous imitation of Spenser, with many quaint and tender touches, and the "Pastoral Ballad" in 4 parts, perhaps the best of its kind in the language, survive. The essays also display good sense and a pointed and graceful style. The last years of Shenstone were clouded by financial embarrassments and perhaps also by disappointed affections. After his death his works were collected and published by Robert Dodsley.

Family

His father, Thomas, son of William Shenstone of Lappal, born in 1686, was churchwarden of Halesowen, Worcestershire, in 1723, and died in June 1724. His mother, who died in June 1732, aged 39, was Ann, eldest daughter and coheir of William Penn of Harborough Hall, Hagley. Shenstone had a brother, Thomas (1722–1751), who was brought up as an attorney, but never practised. The entries of the family in the Halesowen registers date back to the reign of Elizabeth (Grazebrook, Family of Shenstone the Poet, 1890).

Youth and education

Shenstone, born on 13 November 1714, was baptized on 6 December at Halesowen.

Shenstone's earliest teacher was an old dame, Sarah Lloyd, whom he afterwards celebrated in the Schoolmistress, and he soon acquired a great love for books. He was next sent to the Halesowen grammar school, and then to Mr. Crampton at Solihull.

In May 1732 he matriculated from Pembroke College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Dr. Johnson. About the same time, on the death of his mother, Thomas Dolman, rector of Broome, near Kidderminster, who had married Shenstone's aunt, Mary Penn, became his guardian. When 19 he wrote a mock-heroic poem, "The Diamond," and in 1737 he printed at Oxford, for private circulation, a small anonymous volume of Poems on Various Occasions; written for the entertainment of the author, and printed for the amusement of a few friends prejudiced in his favour. This volume, which Shenstone afterwards tried to suppress, contains the 1st draft of the Schoolmistress. At Oxford he studied poetry in the company of his friends, Richard Jago, Richard Graves, and Whistler. He took no degree, but kept his name on the college books until 1742 (Nash, Worcestershire, i. 528 seq.).

Adult life

In 1741 Shenstone published anonymously The Judgment of Hercules, written in the preceding year; and in 1742 he brought out, also anonymously, a revised version of the Schoolmistress, which was now described as "written at college, 1736." In this form the poem had 28 stanzas, 2 of which were afterwards omitted; the completed poem has 35 stanzas (D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, 355–356).

Shenstone lived for a time with a relative who was tenant of the Leasowes, a property bought by Shenstone's grandfather. In 1745, on the death of his guardian, he took that estate into his own hands, and began what was really his life's work, the beautifying of the grounds, which became, in Johnson's words, "a place to be visited by travellers, and copied by designers." Shenstone holds an important place in the history of English landscape-gardening.

The Leasowes, from Harrison's Seats, 1788. Art by Samuel Evans (1762-1835), engraved by Benjamin Thomas Pouncy. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

With his income of £300 a year, he spent far more than was wise in laying out his grounds, and was often troubled by depression and disappointments. In 1749 he wrote: "I lead the unhappy life of seeing nothing ind the creation so idle as myself.’ Horace Walpole wrote of him: "Poor man! he wanted to have all the world talk of him for the pretty place he had made, and which he seems to have made only that it might be talked of" (Letters, v. 169); and Gray said that his "whole philosophy consisted in living against his will in retirement, and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it" (Works, 1884, iii. 344; cf. Addit. MS. 28958). In 1755 he told Graves that he was "cloyed with leisure" (Addit. MS. 21508, f. 38).

He was a large, heavy, fat man, shy and reserved with strangers (Autobiography of Dr. A. Carlyle, 370). Dodsley says he was a man of great tenderness and generosity, but not easily appeased if offended; he was careless in his expenditure, and negligent in his dress, wearing his grey hair in a manner then unusual.

For many years he corresponded regularly with Lady Luxborough, Lord Bolingbroke's sister; his letters are in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 28958), and Lady Luxborough's letters to him were published in 1775; but the correspondence is, in Walpole's words, "insipidity itself" (Letters, vi. 285, vii. 24). Many others of Shenstone's letters are in the Select Letters collected by his friend, actor Thomas Hull (2 volumes 1778).

Among Shenstone's other friends were William Somerville, Joseph Spence (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. ii. 375), James Grainger, who addressed to him the 2nd book of the ‘Sugar Cane’ (Nichols, Lit. Illustr. vii. 232), and Dr. Thomas Percy. The correspondence with Percy, in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 28221), shows that Percy frequently consulted Shenstone while compiling the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

At the beginning of 1763 Shenstone was hoping to receive a pension, for which application had been made to Lord Bute by Lord Loughborough, and he paid a visit to Lord Stamford at Enville in connection with this matter; but on his return he caught a chill, which developed into putrid fever, "hastened by his anxieties," and he died, unmarried, on 11 February.

He was buried on 15 February by the side of his brother, in Halesowen churchyard.

By his will (P.C.C. 91, Cæsar), made a few days before his death, he left the Leasowes and other lands to his cousin, John Hodgetts of Birmingham, for life, and then to his cousin, Edward Cooke of Edinburgh, and his heirs for ever, with power to sell, preferably to his friends, especially Hon. John Grey, youngest son of Lord Stamford.

Writing

According to Thomas Percy, Shenstone had a choice collection of poems preparing for the press at the time of his death. His writings were collected by Robert Dodsley and published in 3 volumes in 1764–1769, the last volume consisting of letters which Shenstone, curiously enough, thought to be "some of my chefs-d'œuvre," and the 2nd of prose Essays on Men, Manners, and Things. Dodsley contributed a "Description of the Leasowes" and a character of the poet.

Horace Walpole called Shenstone "that water-gruel bard," and said he "was labouring all his life to write a perfect song, and, in my opinion at least, never once succeeded" (Letters, vii. 54, viii. 509).

Most of his verse is artificial and unreal, and has rightly been forgotten, but what remains is of permanent interest. He is best known by the Schoolmistress,’ a burlesque imitation of Spenser, which was highly praised by Johnson and by Goldsmith (Works, ed. Cunningham, iii. 436); but many will value equally, in its way, the neatly turned Pastoral Ballad, in four parts, written in 1743, which is supposed to refer to the author's disappointment in love; or the gently satirical Progress of Taste, showing "how great a misfortune it is for a man of small estate to have much taste."

Burns warmly eulogised Shenstone's elegies, which are also to some extent autobiographical, though it is difficult to say how far they are sincere.

Critical introduction

by George Saintsbury

Shenstone is our principal master of what may perhaps be called the artificial-natural style in poetry; and the somewhat lasting hold which some at least of his poems have taken on the popular ear is the best testimony that can be produced to his merit. It is very hard to shape any critical canons likely to pass muster nowadays, and yet capable of saving the bulk of his verse. But the 1st and 2nd of his Pastoral Ballads always fix themselves in the memory of those who, possessing that faculty, are set in childhood to the not very grateful task of learning them; and on re-reading them years after, they do not wholly lose their charm, though the reader may be tempted rather to smile than to sympathise. The Schoolmistress has something of the same grace, so has the Dying Kid; while the poem on St. Valentine’s Day would perhaps be the best of Shenstone’s works but for some inexcusable negligences of expression which 10 minutes study would have corrected.

It is difficult to believe that Shenstone ever gave much study to his work, or that he possessed any critical faculty. His elegies, though not always devoid of music, are but dreary stuff, and his more ambitious poems still drearier. His attempts at the style of Prior and Gay are for the most part valueless. Yet when all this is discarded, "My banks they are furnished with bees," and a few other such things, obstinately recur to the memory and assert that their author after all was a poet.

In the mixture of grace and pathos with a certain triviality, with much that is artificial, and with not a little that is downright foolish, Shenstone comes nearer to Goldsmith than to any other English author. His tenderness, his knowledge of human nature, and his literary power, are of course far inferior to Goldsmith’s, yet if inferior in degree he is nevertheless not wholly dissimilar in kind. The really affecting elegy on "Jessy" is an instance of the genuine feeling which, in an age when such feeling was not common, he possessed; nor are other instances of the same kind hard to be found in him.

As concerns the formal part of poetry, his management of the anapaestic trimeter is unquestionably his chief merit. In the Spenserian stanza he is commendable, and dates fortunately prevent the charge that if The Castle of Indolence had not been written neither would The Schoolmistress. His anapaests are much more original. The metre is so incurably associated with sing-song and doggerel, that poems written in it are exposed to a heavy disadvantage, yet in the 1st 2 pastoral ballads at any rate this disadvantage is not much felt. Shenstone taught the metre to a greater poet than himself, Cowper, and these 2 between them have written almost everything that is worth reading in it, if we put avowed parody and burlesque out of the question.

Perhaps the history of his gardening at the Leasowes has mixed itself up too thoroughly with Shenstone’s work, and has soiled his harmless pastorals with memories of the tumble-down huts, the broken benches, the mouldy statues, and all the rest of the draggled finery which in our climate is associated more or less with this style of decoration and of which almost everybody has seen examples. But it really seems that he had, as his well-meaning French panegyrist asserted, ‘a mind natural’ even though the ‘Arcadian greens rural’ which he ‘laid’ must have smacked far less of nature than of art. ‘The crook and the pipe and the kid,’ of which Johnson speaks so contemptuously, are somehow or other less distasteful in Shenstone than in any other poet. For in the 1st place one cannot help remembering that the man did, as few men have done, try to turn his life in accordance with his verse, and Worcestershire (nominally Shropshire) into the likeness of the counterfeit Arcadia. Secondly there is an inoffensiveness about him which conciliates and disarms. He was not a great poet, perhaps indeed he was a very small one; but he was a poet somehow, and he wore his rue with a sufficient difference from other poets to deserve that his name should live long in the history of English verse.

Recognition

After The Schoolmistress, Shenstone published no more poems, except in the Collection of Poems issued by Robert Dodsley. In the 1st and 3rd volumes respectively of that Collection (1748) were reprinted the Schoolmistress and Hercules; the 4th volume (1755) contained the Pastoral Ballad, &c.; while in the 5th volume (1758) the opening 48 pages were devoted to verses written by Shenstone between 1730 and 1750, some of which would not have appeared had not Shenstone been ill at the time of publication. A lengthy correspondence with Dodsley is in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 28959).

An urn was erected to his memory in Halesowen church.

Portraits of Shenstone are prefixed to his Poems and to Graves's Recollections.

Schopenhauer mentions Shenstone in his discussion of equivocation. “[C]oncepts,” Schopenhauer asserted, “which in and by themselves contain nothing improper, yet the actual case brought under them leads to an improper conception “ are called equivocations. He continued:

But a perfect specimen of a sustained and magnificent equivocation is Shenstone’s incomparable epitaph on a justice of the peace, which in its high-sounding lapidary style appears to speak of noble and sublime things, whereas under each of their concepts something quite different is to be subsumed, which appears only in the last word of all as the unexpected key to the whole, and the reader discovers with loud laughter that he has read merely a very obscene equivocation."

Memorials

• One of the 5 houses of Solihull School is named after him.
• One of the 4 houses of The Earls High School (formerly Halesowen Grammar School) is named after him.
• Solihull School's annual publication is named after him - The Shenstonian.
• Louis-René Girardin built a memorial in the French town of Ermenonville.
• A prominent public house (pub) in Halesowen (Queensway) is named "The William Shenstone". The walls are adorned with engravings of The Leasowes in Shenstone's time.
• Two roads in the area near to his home in the Leasowes Park are named in his honour: Shenstone Valley Road and Shenstone Avenue.

In popular culture

In a letter written in 1741 Shenstone became the 1st person to record the use of "floccinaucinihilipilification". In the 1st edition of the Oxford English Dictionary this was recognized as the longest word in the English language.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems on Various Occasions. Oxford, UK: Leon Lichfield, 1737.
• The Judgement of Hercules: poem. London: Robert Dodsley, 1741.
• The School-mistress: A poem in imitation of Spenser. London: Robert Dodsley, 1742; London: H. Milford, for Oxford University Press, 1924.
• The Whole Poetical Works. (2 volumes), Edinburgh: J. Robertson, 1773.
• Hope: A pastoral. Salisbury, UK: Fowler, 1785.
• The Parting Lovers. Salisbury, UK: Fowler, 1785.
• Poetical Works. (2 volumes), London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1798.
• Poems. Chiswick, UK: Press of C. Whittingham, 1822.
• Poetical Works (edited by George Gilfillan). Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1854; New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.
• Songs. London: Swan Press, 1930.

Non-fiction

• Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening. in Works, 1764; New York: Garland, 1982.
• Essays on Men and Manners. London: J. Parsons, 1794.

Collected editions

• Works: In verse and prose. (2 volumes), London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1764; Edinburgh: Alexander Donaldson, 1765 Volume I, Volume II
  • (3 volumes), London: J. Dodsley, 1769. Volume III
• Select Works: In verse and prose. London: Thomas Fleming, 1770.
• Shenstone's Miscellany, 1759-1763 (edited by Ian A. Gordon). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1952.

Letters

• Letters (edited by Duncan Mallam). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press / London: H. Milford / Oxford University Press, 1939.
• Correspondence of Thomas Percy and William Shenstone (edited by Cleanth Brooks). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

The Landskip by William Shenstone 1714 1763

See also

• The Shenstone circle
• List of British poets
• Timeline of British poetry

References

•  Aitken, George Atherton (1897) "Shenstone, William" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 52 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 48-50  . Wikisource, Web, Feb. 28, 2018.
• Richard Graves, Recollections of some particulars in the Life of the Late William Shenstone (1788);
• H. Sydney Grazebrook, The Family of Shenstone the Poet (1890).
• Lennox Morison, "Shenstone," in the Gentleman's Magazine 289 (1900), 196–205.
• Alexander Chalmers, English Poets (1810, vol. xiii.), with " Life " by Samuel Johnson.
• Poetical Works of William Shenstone in Library Edition of the British Poets (1854) with "Life" by George Gilfillan
• T.D'lsraeli, "The Domestic Life of a Poet: Shenstone vindicated," in Curiosities of Literature.
• "Burns and Shenstone," in Furth in Field (1894), by "Hugh Haliburton" (J.L. Robertson).

External links

Poems

• "The Landscape"
• "Inscription"
• Shenstone, William (1714-1763) 2 poems at Representative Poetry Online
• "Written at an Inn at Henley" - Poem of the Week at The Guardian
• Shenstone in The English Poets: An anthology: Suffering and Sympathy (from The School-mistress), "Pastoral Ballad," "The Dying Kid," Much Taste and Small Estate (from The Progress of Taste
• The Schoolmistress: A poem in imitation of Spenser: (1737), (1742), (1748)
• William Shenstone info & 7 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830
• "Levities; or, Pieces of Humour" (22 poems)
• William Shenstone at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (47 poems)
• William Shenstone at AllPoetry (106 poems)
• William Shenstone at PoemHunter (107 poems)
• William Shenstone at Poetry Nook (167 poems)

Books

• Complete text, with annotations, of Shenstone's Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764)
• Selected Works
• William Shenstone at Amazon.com

About

• William Shenstone in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• William Shenstone at NNDB
• William Shenstone at Literary Heritage West Midlands
• "Nature Dressed and Redressed: William Shenstone and the Leasowes, and the English landscape garden in transition, c.1740-1763
• The Leasowes at GardenVisit.com

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Shenstone, William