GRAY in CAMBRIDGE

Gray’s Early Life

Gray was born in London, the only surviving son of a money-scrivener and a milliner, whose marriage was unsuccessful. He was brought up in part by the family of a maternal uncle, who taught at Eton College, where another uncle was also an assistant master. Eton was formative for Gray in terms of friendships and scholarly direction. The countryside around Eton and nearby Stoke Poges, where his mother and her sisters took a house from 1742, was similarly decisive to the sense of place expressed in his poetry. Twickenham, where his school friend, Horace Walpole, built an extraordinary house at Strawberry Hill, was another nearby location which shaped the cultural environment both for Gray’s writing and its reception.

Gray comes to Peterhouse.

Admitted 1734.

A talented student…

‘In 5tam Novembris’ (On the 5th of November), probably composed around 1735 as an undergraduate exercise. Several examples of Gray’s verse compositions whether as a schoolboy at Eton or as an undergraduate survive: ‘behold, suddenly the golden light of Heaven shines forth until the black vault lies open to the searcher. And you may see the plot revealed and the works of death, and marvel at the caverns filled with their own sulphur.’

Tripos verses (for the Second Tripos list of 24 March 1737), a printed sheet published annually and which, from 1748, accompanied the Tripos lists, consisting of Latin verses commissioned by the Proctors and Moderators from undergraduates. Gray’s poem on the topic ‘Luna est habitabilis’ (That the moon is habitable) was probably commissioned by James Brown, who was a Moderator for the Tripos in 1737, and later became Gray’s firm friend: ‘England, which for so long has held sway over the sea and so often set the winds to work and ruled the waves, will assume the symbols of power in the sky…’ The poem was later published in Musæ Etonenses (1755), but here represents Gray’s first (anonymous) appearance in print. The second poem published here, on whether the planets are inhabited, was by the future antiquarian and ancient historian, Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), like Gray an Etonian, and then a scholar of King’s.

Friends, here and there.

Thomas Wharton, an undergraduate at Pembroke, became one of Gray’s firmest friends, and part of a broader network, begun at Eton and widened at Cambridge, of supporters who welcomed him to their homes and encouraged his reading and writing. Wit sustained these relationships, which were epistolary as well as being conducted in London during the season and on trips that Gray made away from Cambridge during the vacation. After accompanying Walpole on the Grand Tour (where they temporarily fell out), Gray returned to Cambridge in 1742, intending to study law.  He remained as a Fellow-Commoner, first at Peterhouse and then, from 1756, at Pembroke.

Letters from Thomas Gray to James Brown. Brown (1709-84) entered Pembroke in 1726 and was later President and Senior Fellow of Pembroke. Gray hoped that Brown might succeed Long as Master when the latter fell ill in the mid-1750s. When Long finally died, aged 90, in 1770, Brown did indeed succeed him, eventually serving as Vice-Chancellor. He was an executor of Gray’s will. These letters (dated 26 July 1760, 13 June 1761, 19 July 1762, and 25 October 1760) reveal something of the regularity of contact and intimacy of discussion between Gray and his friends. Public events (the death of George II) jostle with gossip (one letter was written from Thomas Wharton’s house (Old Park, Durham) and discussed Mason’s deportment as Precentor at York Minster: ‘his scarf sits the fullest about his ears: his surplice has the most the air of lawn-sleeves you can imagine in so short a time; he begins to complain of qualms and indigestions… in short il tranche du Prelat’) and with day-to-day life in Cambridge (‘Pray let Bleek [Gray’s female bedmaker] make an universal rummage of cobwebs, and massacre all spiders, old and young, that live behind window-shutters and books’).

Gray escapes to Pembroke.

Admitted 1756.

From Peterhouse to Pembroke

Gray’s relationships with authority, whether in Peterhouse or Pembroke, or in the University, were not always smooth. He disliked successive Masters of Peterhouse (in particular, the minor poet, John Whalley) and often felt that the Master of Pembroke stood in the way of his friends’ chances of election to Fellowships. In 1762, Gray was finally disappointed in his long efforts to succeed Shallet Turner, Fellow of Peterhouse and Regius Professor of Modern History, and he was regularly critical of the administration of the University and its teaching. Nevertheless, both his published and his manuscript poetry reflect the influence of life in Cambridge. On the one hand, Gray satirised Heads of House (‘never a barrel the better herring’, that is ‘all equally bad’) in a manuscript poem, recently acquired by Peterhouse, and probably written in the late 1740s. On the other, he returned to Cambridge and to print in triumph when the Duke of Grafton, formerly an undergraduate at Peterhouse in Gray’s time and the employer of his friend, Richard Stonehewer, assumed the Chancellorship of the University. The ‘Ode for Music’ that accompanied Grafton’s installation in 1769 (‘hail their Fitzroy’s festal morning’) recalled Milton’s Comus, and the scattering by grace of ignorance and sin, servitude and flattery, which do not ‘Dare the Muse’s walk to stain,/ While bright-eyed Science watches round:/ Hence, away, ’tis holy Ground!’

Remembering Mr. Grey.

Only much later did the teaching of English literature as a part of the history of the eighteenth century play a role in returning local attention to Gray. A.W. Ward championed the place of literature in discussions for the creation of the Historical Tripos in the 1870s and Leslie Stephen and Edmund Gosse served as the first two Clark lecturers in English at Trinity College at the end of the 1880s. In 1885, Gosse, who edited Gray’s works, prompted Pembroke to establish a memorial to the poet. In 1809, the College had received a substantial bequest of Gray’s papers, including his commonplace books, from the estate of Richard Stonehewer. Leonard Whibley, who in 1935 edited Gray’s correspondence, also oversaw a remarkable expansion in Pembroke’s holdings of both manuscripts and printed books related to the poet. The generosity of Pembroke in allowing many of its treasures to join this exhibition reminds us of Gray’s own success in building friendship between fellowships.

Gray’s friends in Cambridge, as well as his old colleges of Peterhouse and Pembroke have sought to keep alive his memory. Gray is depicted in both college halls, in a stained glass window next to the Duke of Grafton at Peterhouse as part of refurbishments in the early 1870s by Morris & Co, and as a bust near high table at Pembroke by Hamo Thornycroft. The Thomas Gray Room at Pembroke features many paintings of and relating to Thomas Gray.

Posthumous works.

One hundred copies were privately printed for William Mason, from notes that Gray had originally written on the blank pages of Kitchen’s English Atlas. Mason gave this copy to an as yet unidentified ‘T.F.T.’, who remarks on its annotations: ‘This book has been terribly soil’d and misus’d (tho’ not intentionally) by Mr P—e of St John’s; who is not remarkable for cleanliness.’ It is interleaved with additions, which include references to Long’s observatory at Pembroke and to Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill, and sites that have been visited are marked with a cross.

In another edition, Supplement to the Tour through Great Britain (London: Printed for G. Kearsley, 1787), there was the provision of blank spaces for travellers to add their own observations, arranged by county.

Collecting relics.

As well as depicting Thomas Gray, both colleges have built collections of material with an association.

Peterhouse owns a pocket-book, consisting of four erasable leaves (treated with glue and gesso), with the days of the week printed at the head, bound in red niger with gold tooling, and housed in a slip-case with a slot for a stylus: ‘Mr Gray’s Memorandum-Book, given me by Mr Mason, in November 1771’, according to Edward Bedingfield of Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk.

Bedingfield (b. 1730) tried to call on Gray in Cambridge in 1755, and subsequently met him there in 1756. By then, Bedingfield was a recipient of correspondence and drafts for the Odes from the poet, as well as of the inkstand with whose contents Gray had penned the ‘Elegy’. Gray visited Bedingfield in York, and Mason remarked in 1763 ‘what a favrite I am of Mr Bedingfields. I might have had an agate & gold snuf-box from him the other day, & why think you? Only because I gave him an Etching of Mr Gray… This said Gentleman is shortly going to leave York… to say the truth I am not displeas’d… for of all the Admirers I have had in my time, I think he would tire me the most was I to have much of him’ (Mason to Gray, 28 June 1763).

Paintings

Pembroke has two portraits of Gray, the first a copy of the contemporary portrait by John Giles Eccardt which had been commissioned by Horace Walpole and a second by Benjamin Wilson painted shortly after Gray’s death.