George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Duke of Newcastle
Preceded byHenry Bilson-Legge
Succeeded byHenry Bilson-Legge
Personal details
Born(1709-01-17)17 January 1709
Whig
Spouses
Lucy Fortescue
(m. 1742; died 1747)
Elizabeth Rich
(m. 1749)
EducationEton College
Alma materChrist Church, Oxford

George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton,

PC (17 January 1709 – 22 August 1773), known between 1751 and 1756 as Sir George Lyttelton, 5th Baronet, was a British statesman. As an author himself, he was also a supporter of other writers and as a patron of the arts made an important contribution to the development of 18th-century landscape design
.

Life

Lord Lyttelton was the eldest son of

Political career

Lyttelton was

Privy Councillor in 1754 and in the following year became briefly Chancellor of the Exchequer, but performed poorly in that role. In 1756 he was raised to the peerage as Lord Lyttelton, Baron of Frankley in the County of Worcester, and continued to speak in the House of Lords
until the year before he died.

Lyttelton was later described as "an amiable, absent-minded man, of unimpeachable integrity and benevolent character, with strong religious convictions and respectable talents", but ultimately as "a poor practical politician".[6] His political opponent Lord Hervey spitefully characterised his performance as a speaker as "a great flow of words that were always uttered in a lulling monotony, and the little meaning they had to boast of was generally borrowed from the commonplace maxims and sentiments of moralists, philosophers, patriots, and poets, crudely imbibed, half digested, ill put together, and confusedly refunded".[7]

Poetry and patronage

Hagley Hall

Lord Lyttelton was a friend and supporter of

Tom Jones to Lyttelton. He had written his "Epistle to Mr. Pope, from a young gentleman at Rome" while still on the European tour, advising him to abandon satire for a patriotic theme more worthy of his greatness.[8] Later on the poem was used to preface editions of Pope's work.[9]

Throughout his life, he acted as a friendly patron of poets. James Thomson, for whom Lyttelton eventually arranged a pension, was a frequent visitor to Hagley Hall. Joseph Warton he appointed his domestic chaplain and it was at his suggestion that David Mallet was made undersecretary to the Prince of Wales.

Lyttelton's own poetic reputation was guaranteed continuity by his work being included in the collection of English poets prefaced by Johnson's Lives. Variously annotated and augmented, the collection appeared in succeeding editions into the start of the 19th century. The monody "To the Memory of a Lady lately Deceased",[10] written on the death of his first wife, had an even longer lasting reputation. Though Thomas Gray found "parts of it too stiff and poetical", he especially praised the fourth stanza as "truly tender and elegiac". The poem was alluded to or parodied by others well into the 19th century, particularly the invocation of the "shades of Hagley" in the fifth stanza. Anna Seward, in answer to a correspondent who preferred Lyttelton's ode to the newly fashionable sonnet, ingeniously rearranged the lines of the poem into a series of sonnets, in which the "shades of Hagley" passage headed the second.[11] And William Gladstone acknowledged that his Church Principles was "completed beneath the shades of Hagley" as late as 1840.[12]

The plain memorial to Lord Lyttelton in St John the Baptist Church, Hagley
Memorial inscription to Lucy Lyttelton, with her husband's poetical tribute, 1747

Despite his long political career, it was as a poet that Lyttelton was chiefly remembered in the 19th century.[13] But he was author also of many works in prose, chiefly historical and theological. Two, however, are distinguished by their humour. Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan (1735) ironically comments on the idiosyncrasies of the time from the naïve point of view of an outsider. On attending a wedding ceremony in "one of their Mosques", for example, the visitor remarks that "Marriage here is esteemed a Religious Ceremony, and that I believe is one Reason among others why so little Regard is paid to it".[14] Oliver Goldsmith was later to borrow the same approach for his Chinese philosopher in Letters from a Citizen of the World to his Friends in the East (1760).[15] There were, nevertheless, French models for both in the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu (1721) and the Lettres Chinoises (1735) of Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, both of which had been translated soon after into English.[16]

Another work with prior French counterparts was Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead (1760).

Charles XII of Sweden proposes to Alexander the Great an alliance against Alexander Pope for insulting them both in a satire. Included among these conversations were three that Lyttleton had encouraged the bluestocking leader Elizabeth Montagu to write (Dialogues 26–8).[20]

All of Lyttelton's writing was collected shortly after his death by his nephew, G. E. Ayscough. In 1791 an edition of his poems appeared in Germany accompanied by J. G. Weigel's prose translations.[21] During his lifetime Lyttelton's Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul was translated into French in 1750 by Jean Deschamps (1707–67) and again in 1754 by the Abbé Antoine Guénée (1717-1803); his Dialogues of the Dead was also translated into French in 1760 as Dialogues des morts by Élie de Joncourt (1697-1765) and Jean Deschamps.[22]

Hagley Hall and grounds

Ossian memorial, Clent Hill

Lyttelton spent many years and a fortune developing Hagley Hall and

Neo-Palladian houses to be built in England.[23]

References

  1. ^ Lucy Fortescue biography, access date 3 December 2015
  2. ^ DNB 1885-1900
  3. ^ Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, London 1831, pp.391-4
  4. ^ "Office holders". Archived from the original on 15 March 2007. Retrieved 27 March 2008.
  5. ^ "Fellow details". Royal Society. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
  6. ^ DNB 1885-1900
  7. ^ Quoted from Hervey’s memoirs in The History of Parliament
  8. ^ Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive
  9. ^ Memoirs And Correspondence of George, Lord Lyttelton, London 1845, p.41
  10. ^ Text online
  11. ^ Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh 1811, vol. 1, pp.261-3
  12. ^ Google Books, p.iii
  13. ^ Dictionary of Geography, Descriptive, Physical, Statistical, and Historical, Forming a Complete General Gazetteer of the World
  14. ^ Letter 3, p.5
  15. ^ Online archive
  16. ^ Woo-Lih Dun Ho, Goldsmith’s Chinese Letters through Chinese Eyes, Boston University Graduate School 1950, p.3
  17. ^ Gutenberg
  18. ^ Hathi Trust
  19. ^ Google Books
  20. ^ Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology, Indiana University 1995, p.96
  21. ^ Lord Lyttelton's Gedichte, Englisch und Deutsch
  22. ^ DNB 1885-1900
  23. ^ Historic England, Hagley Hall

Bibliography

External links

Parliament of Great Britain
Preceded by
Robert Vyner
from 1754
Succeeded by
Political offices
Preceded by Secretary to Frederick, Prince of Wales
1737–1744
Succeeded by
Preceded by
The Earl of Lincoln
Cofferer of the Household
1754–1756
Succeeded by
Preceded by Chancellor of the Exchequer
1755–1756
Succeeded by
Peerage of Great Britain
New creation Baron Lyttelton
1756–1773
Succeeded by
Baronetage of England
Preceded by Baronet
(of Frankley)
1751–1773
Succeeded by