Overview

Sir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that – in influence, creativity, and affection – rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.

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9781802073669

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'Jessica Fay's edition of the letters of the Beaumonts to the Wordsworths now makes possible a two-way understanding of their personal relationship as well as a new perspective on the creative relationship Wordsworth and Beaumont experienced. [...] Beaumont has left us an abundance of epistolary evidence to assess his impact on Wordsworth. In the words of Magnuson, these letters let us hear both sides of their conversation.' Richard Matlak, Review 19 ‘This archive of letters has not been unfamiliar to biographers, but no one has been willing to take on the labor of editing them in their entirety. We must be grateful that Jessica Fay has done so and that she has done it so splendidly. The annotation is exemplary… however; it is really two books in one. The volume appears in the Romantic Reconfigurations series from Liverpool University Press and reconfiguration is what Fay achieves. An introduction that is so substantial it could almost have appeared as a monograph on its own presents the most nuanced account yet of the Wordsworth-Beaumont relationship… [The Collected Letters] is another comparably significant contribution to Wordsworthian scholarship.’ Stephen Gill, The Wordsworth Circle ‘[E]xemplary foundational scholarship… Fay’s volume also opens these intersections of aesthetics and politics to women’s voices… In Lady Beaumont’s thirteen letters to William and her many postscripts to her husband’s letters, we hear a voice that would stand her ground against some of Wordsworth’s most intransigent positions, such as his long opposition to Catholic emancipation.’ Eric C. Walker, European Romantic Review

Author Information

Jessica Fay is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham.

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