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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In a valuable article on “The Dating of Shenstone's Letters,” published some years ago, Professor John Edwin Wells succeeded in verifying or correcting the dates of eighty-nine of the one hundred eleven letters collected in volume iii of the poet's Works. Unfortunately, as Professor Wells noted in the introduction of his article, the dates assigned to these letters by the editor are not trustworthy:
The most casual reading of the studies of any of the persons connected with the Shenstone circle ever so slightly, causes one to realize that the earlier letters at least have been and are used considerably as bases for dating facts and events of minor literary and personal history of the time. The dating given by Dodsley in his edition of the Letters is the dating generally accepted without further consideration. Study of the letters, however, indicates that the year given in the dating of many of the letters, is evidently not Shenstone's but has been inserted by the editor ... The dating of many of the letters is incorrect.
1 Anglia, xxxv (1912), 429–452.
2 When in the following pages I cite as evidence the date of a Shenstone letter in volume iii of the Works, it is to be understood that the date is accepted by Wells, unless the contrary is noted. The date of any other published letter is not used for evidence without verification. In every case where the date of a manuscript letter is used the date is legibly written in the author's hand and is clearly untampered with.
3 In this and in the following headings, the Roman numeral and the date in parenthesis refer to the number of the letter and its date as given in the Works. This is followed by (1) a note of my conclusion and (2) a note of Wells' conclusion only if he has attempted to determine the date.
4 Wells' remark (p. 442) that xxv (May, 1742) should be placed before xxiii (December, 1741) and xxiv seems to be a typographical error. He probably intended that xxv should be placed between xxiii and xxiv. But the evidence for either arrangement is doubtful.
5 Select Letters, between ... Duchess of Somerset, Lady Luxborough, Miss Dolman, Mr. Whistler, Mr. R. Dodsley, William Shenstone Esq. and others, etc. Published by [Thomas] Hull, 2 vols., 1778, ii, 15.
6 Ibid.
7 See Hull, Select Letters, ii, 65, 68; Graves, Recollections, p. 103 ff.
8 A possible objection to this anterior limit must be met here. In xxxviii is also this remark, “I am perfectly impatient to unbosom my soul to you, and to see Mrs. Jago.” Now, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, as well as previous biographers of Jago, his first marriage took place in 1744. But this date is erroneous, for in xxxi, which without doubt belongs to 1743, Shenstone writes to Jago, “Do you not think everything in nature strangely improved since you were married, from the tea table to the warming pan? I want to see Mrs. Jago's handwriting, that I may judge of her temper.”
9 He had been rector of Broome, near Kidderminster. The reference in xl to Broom confused Wells, who wrote, “ ‘ Broom is disposed of—I do not know upon what inducement,‘ can (?) hardly refer to the death of the Reverend Dr. Broome, Pope's coadjutor, November 16, 1745.” The reference is, of course, to the disposal of the living of Broome, which, I conjecture from further references in xl, Shenstone had hoped to procure for Graves.
10 Hull, Select Letters, ii, 46–49. The date of Whistler's letter is confirmed by its comment on Thomson's and Lyttleton's visit to the Leasowes, mentioned in xli, which Wells dates between August 18 and December, 1746.
11 Letters Written by ... Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone, 1775. The B.M. manuscript collection consists of Shenstone's letters to Lady Luxborough.
12 Lillian Dickins and Mary Stanton, An Eighteenth Century Chronicle, London, 1910, p. 171.
13 The date of her letter can be confirmed by its numerous correlations with her preceding and succeeding letters and by its allusion to the recent arrival of Mrs. Dewes at Mapleburrough Green, which Mrs. Dewes writes of in her letter of August 12, 1750, to Bernard Granville. Delany, Mrs. Mary Granville, Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. by Lady Llandover (London, 1861), 1st Series, ii, 578.
14 B.M. Add. MSS. 28959, fol. 78 f. This manuscript collection contains correspondence of Shenstone and Dodsley.