GRAY as READER
Gray as Reader and Annotator.
Peterhouse borrowing register and one of the books borrowed by Gray (Peterhouse, Perne Library, L. 4. 15).
The collections at Peterhouse and Pembroke allow one to gain a particular insight into Gray’s activities as a reader and annotator of books. They demonstrate both his long-term interest in history and geography, and in penetrating the depth of classical literary culture, and the care with which he assembled, distilled, and represented what he had read for his own future use.
Gray’s reading and emulation of Latin verse had begun at Eton and continued to form the main vehicle for his expression until about 1742. His studies from the time that he arrived in Cambridge broadened his knowledge of classical history and geography and induced greater familiarity with Greek authors (he complained much later of the neglect of Plato’s writings at Cambridge). They introduced him to the natural history of Pliny, as well as acquainting him with Don Quixote.
Peterhouse, Perne Library, MS 411: Borrowing register, covering the period 1721-47.
Gray became a Fellow-Commoner of Peterhouse in 1742 but has no page of his own in the borrowing register (as he later did not at Pembroke, where his status was the same). Instead, others have borrowed for him, including his tutor, George Birkett, who took books not just for Gray but also for others of his pupils.
Gray’s hand, however, does appear in the register, for example borrowing and returning books on classical history, geography, and Roman law, under the account of Peter Nourse (Fellow and Vicar of Cherry Hinton) in 1745.
Entry for George Birkett, left hand page. Peterhouse borrowing register.
Much of Gray’s reading was done using the libraries of others: those of the two Colleges but also, from the late 1750s, that of the newly founded British Museum. Gray bought and annotated his own books and shared books with his friends. He read not only the classical languages, vastly expanding his range in Greek authors during the 1740s, but also French and Italian and was inspired by (and critical of) the Ossianic revival of interest in Celtic literature. Gray admired Tasso and Dante was a subject for translation and emulation, as well as Gray’s prime models, Horace and Pindar. The history of British poetry was a focus in Gray’s reading and note-taking, and Gothic imaginings of that history and its relationship to British liberties helped to shape his writing, notably in ‘The Bard’. Chaucer, Hickes’ thesaurus of Anglo-Saxon, and Lewis’ life of John Wyclif all figured in his reading at Pembroke.
Façade of Montagu House, looking across the forecourt, later the British Museum; a fountain in foreground, statues, shrubbery and lawned areas in forecourt; published state. c.1715. Collection: British Museum.
Browse: Gray’s digitised Commonplace Book, Volume 1. Collection: Pembroke College Library.
Thomas Gray’s name written on the frontispiece of Romanae Urbis Topographiae (Pembroke, 8.10.20).
Curiosity and reading
Gray was interested in the discipline of chronology and in the contemporary discovery of oriental civilisations and religions, as well as in the pagan classical past. From the library at Pembroke, he devoured a succession of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travellers’ accounts of the Middle East and beyond. He read widely in the periodical press of contemporary scientific discovery, notably the histories and memoirs of the French Académie royale des sciences and the Acta eruditorum.
Particularly in the 1760s, Gray reinterpreted his understanding of natural history and of the canon of British writing on the observation and classification of the natural world through the prism of the discoveries of the Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus (1707-78). When he was still at Peterhouse, he read James Gibbs’ study of architecture, and, from the library at Pembroke, he borrowed widely in accounts of English antiquities, county histories, and the history of London.
Pembroke College, LC.II.272: Jacques Dalechamps, Historia generalis plantarum, 2 vols (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1586-7). Annotations in Gray’s hand.
Gray made no distinction between his own books and those of others when it came to marking passages for his own use, and volumes in the collections both at Peterhouse and, especially, at Pembroke show signs of his annotation. Gray’s notebooks and commonplace books demonstrate the effort that he put into recording and ordering the knowledge that he gathered, frequently reworking his reading for his own purposes in lists, genealogies, and chronologies, sometimes accompanied by maps or diagrams that he drew. These digests, like the notes that he kept regularly for a weather diary, were in many ways typical of eighteenth-century intellectual practice, but in Gray’s case they show a particular concern with temporal recording and with the ordering of change in human and natural history. They also demonstrate his concern that historical knowledge should inform contemporary politics and his interest in the transformation of British liberty at the meridian of imperial expansion through the conquests of the Seven Years’ War.
Further annotations in Gray’s hand.
The first volume of one of the standard herbals of the sixteenth century, shown above open to the entry on blackthorn, sloes, and gooseberries, as identified in Gray’s English annotations. The book had been in the library at Pembroke since 1662 when it was donated by Mark Franck. Gray borrowed it through Brown in March 1755. References to these plants appear in Gray’s diary of natural and meteorological observations for that year.
Notes by Gray on Virgil and Horace in Pembroke College, GRA 2/2: The New Daily Journal; or, Useful Memorandum and Account Book for the Year 1760 (London: J. Scott, 1760).
Poetry and reading
Gray’s poetry was shaped by his reading, in form, allusion, and even subject matter. Reading was also a subject for Gray’s wit, both at his own expense and that of others. In a mock dialogue, reminiscent of ‘The Battle of the Books’, that he composed for Richard West (a member of the ‘quadruple alliance’ that Gray had forged with Walpole and Thomas Ashton at Eton) in 1738, the books are overheard speaking among one another. Gray here took on the personae of Mme de Sévigné, Aristotle, Bussy Rabutin, La Bruyère, Locke, Virgil, Henry More, George Cheyne, Euclid, Boileau, and Swift.
They, in turn, parodied Strabo, Malebranche, Johann Friedrich Gronovius, Ovid, and John Ray. ‘For why should not books talk as well as Crabs & Mice & flies & Serpents do in Esop’, Gray asked, before putting the answer in Swift’s mouth: ‘“I and the Bible are enough for any one’s library.” This last ridiculous Egotism made me laugh so heartily that I disturbd my poor books & they talk’d no more.’
PERNE LIBRARY
BOOKS BORROWED BY THOMAS GRAY AT PETERHOUSE
Reading Life at Peterhouse.
Wide interests.
The Perne library contains many books read or with connections to Gray. The books photographed above were borrowed on behalf of Gray from the library of Peterhouse and entered as lent to him in the borrowing register.
As an undergraduate and (from 1742) a Fellow-Commoner, Gray required the sponsorship of the Master or a Fellow to borrow books from the College Library.
The volumes displayed include editions of Greek and Roman orators, philosophers, lawyers, and historians, works of geography and ancient history, and accounts of more modern history.
The Perne also has a copy of Les Amours de Henry IV (Cologne, 1695), given by Gray to William Cole in 1737, when they were both young men at Cambridge.
Oriel window. Perne Library, Peterhouse.
Peterhouse, Perne Library, M.19.1: Les Amours de Henry IV (Cologne, 1695), given by Gray to William Cole in 1737, when they were both young men at Cambridge.
Detail of inscription.
Peterhouse, Perne Library, O.7.42: John Milton, Paradise Lost, edited by Richard Bentley (London: Jacob Tonson, 1732).
This copy of the Master of Trinity’s notorious edition of Milton belonged to John Whalley, Master of Peterhouse from 1733 to 1748.
A former Fellow of Pembroke, Whalley was a poet and Regius Professor of Divinity from 1748: ‘Dr Whalley, who has hated me ever since [a Fellowship election in 1745], thought fit to intimate to a large Table full of People, that I was a Kind of Atheist’ (Gray to Walpole, January or February 1748).
Notes made by Gray on the rulers of India, characteristic of the fuller expositions that Gray sometimes produced from his reading in his commonplace books. Gray read extensively in the library of the newly founded British Museum (especially in the period 1759-61, when he lived in Bloomsbury) and regarded the job of the Regius Professor of Modern History as consisting in part of commentary on current events. From the mid-1730s, he had also been engaged in reading on Middle Eastern and Oriental history, from the classical period to the modern day.
Peterhouse, Ward Library, MS 971 Gray 4: ‘The Present State of India, 1764’.
Pembroke College, GRA 4/10: notes on classical history (including the imprisonment of Greek politicians) made by Gray and inscribed repeatedly (perhaps by his friend): ‘Free Hor[ace] Walpole.’
PEMBROKE LIBRARY
BOOKS BORROWED BY THOMAS GRAY AT PEMBROKE
Reading Life at Pembroke.
Books borrowed by Gray at Pembroke.
The Borrowers
Gray’s extensive borrowing at Pembroke was often sponsored by friends such as William Trollope. Trollope seems to have sponsored Gray’s use of the library, although several fellows, including Brown and Gray’s other great friend, Thomas Wharton, assisted him in borrowing books (both before and after he moved to Pembroke, as a later register shows).
Books that Gray borrowed here encompassed a wide range of mostly contemporary literature in history and chronology, as well as natural history, and copies of both the recent English translation of the Qur’an by George Sale and the Cambridge Professor Simon Ockley’s guide to oriental languages. Most of the books that Gray borrowed remain at Pembroke, although by no means all were annotated by him.
Key to the door of the Old Library at Pembroke.
Pembroke College, LC.II.238: Borrowing register, entry for Mr Brown.
Entry for Marmora Oxoniensia.
Reading Natural History
Gary was fascinated by natural history and many of the books he read and engaged with sought to engage with nature in all its forms from plants to spiders.
One work in the Pembroke collection read by Gray, was Albertus Seba’s Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri, 4 vols (Amsterdam, 1734-65) which is full of his annotations on the life-cycle and appearance of American butterflies and moths. Seba (1665-1736) was an Amsterdam pharmacist who amassed remarkable collections of natural specimens, later sold to Peter the Great. From the early 1760s, when he first encountered the work of Linnaeus, Gray became an avid student of natural as well as civil history, converting his observation of plants and animals into more formal study of taxonomy and appearances.
Pembroke College, LC.II.270: Albertus Seba, Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri, 4 vols (Amsterdam, 1734-65). Pembroke College, GRA 3/3/3: A letter from Gray to his friend James Brown (perhaps 14 May 1765).
A letter from Gray to his friend James Brown (perhaps 14 May 1765) describes a visit to the bookshop of Thomas Becket at Tully’s Head near Surrey Street in the Strand, where he viewed the final volume of Seba and recommended its purchase to complete the set at Pembroke (earlier volumes of which had been donated by Wrightson Mundy), despite the high price, uneven engraving, and poor descriptions of specimens.
Detail of butterflies.
From snails to spiders…
Pembroke College, LC.II.188: Martin Lister, Historiæ animalium Angliæ (London: John Martyn, 1678).
The York naturalist and physician, Lister (1639-1712), gave pioneering accounts of English spiders and snails, as well as other molluscs, in this volume. Gray has again annotated it to identify specimens and species. The book, also bound by Clarke and Bedford, was later in the collection of Alfred Robert Denison (1816-87).
Pembroke College, LC.II.143: George Scott (ed.), Select Remains of the Learned John Ray (London: James Dodsley and J. Walter, 1760).
Ray (1627-1705) had been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, before he retreated to Black Notley in Essex. He was perhaps the most significant naturalist of late seventeenth-century England, and the author of histories of plants, birds, and fishes, in part in collaboration with his friend, patron, and travelling companion, Francis Willoughby. In a mock dialogue between books in a library, written in December 1738, Gray put these words into the voice of a copy of John Locke: ‘Certainly our owner must have very confused ideas, to jumble us so strangely together, he has associated me with Ovid & Ray the Naturalist.’ Based on papers held by Ray’s literary executor, William Derham, this volume presents an account of his travels across the British Isles in the early 1660s. Gray has annotated it heavily with names and additional information about the plants and animals described, here (pp. 182-3) those found at Berwick and on the coastal islands of Northumberland. After the sale of Gray’s books (by the heirs of his friend, Richard Stonehewer) in 1845, the volume belonged to Sir William Tite, who also owned Gray’s copy of the Systema naturae of Linnaeus. It was bound, perhaps for him, by Clarke and Bedford.
Some of Gray’s annotations in Select Remains of the Learned John Ray.
Pembroke College, GRA 3/1/1: A note, perhaps written in 1771, by Gray identifying a specimen of a Bohemian waxwing using both Pennant and Linnaeus. The specimen was sent to him by the President of St John’s College, George Ashby, a fellow student of Linnaeus.
Pembroke College, GRA 2/2: The New Daily Journal; or, Useful Memorandum and Account Book for the Year 1755/ 1760(London: J. Scott, 1755/ 1760).
November entry.
Pembroke have a number of pocket diaries used by Gray to record information ranging from financial accounts to observations of natural history to the weather (including notes of temperature and wind direction). The entries in early April for example record the coming of spring, as well as the receipt of a legacy to buy a mourning ring from the Dowager Viscountess Cobham (an early reader of the ‘Elegy’ in manuscript), whom Gray often visited in the Manor House at Stoke Poges, and a tip to the servant of his friend, George Montagu, on whom Gray called on 16 April.
THE ELEGY
