Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771)
Cornhill, London

Thomas Gray was born into a below-middle class family in which his father was a "money - scrivener." The family kept a small shop. At an early age, his father exposed Thomas to family abuse and thus Thomas was removed from the family and sent to Eton College in 1725 to be with his uncle Robert who fathered him and provided him with education until 1734. Eton's atmosphere heavily influenced Gray throughout his life. His antiquarian interests, central in many of his works, and which he always was to follow passionately, were first roused at Eton. After Eton, Gray matriculated at Peterhouse College. Gray's habits, as at Eton, were studious and reflective, and he began to write Latin verse of considerable merit. Walpole and Gray kept up a correspondence with West, communicating poems, and occasionally writing in French and Latin. All three contributed to a volume of Hymeneals in 1736. Gray also wrote at college the Tripos verses "Luna Habitabilis", published in the Musae Etonenses. Apart from a few translations, Gray had not yet composed any English poetry. Gray studied for himself alone, and scarcely anything remains, apart from a vast accumulation of notes, to attest to his profound and varied scholarship. Gray left Peterhouse College in 1738 without a degree, and passed some months at his father's house in Cornhill, probably intending to study law at the Inner Temple to which he had been admitted as early as 1735. Yet Gray was in no haste to begin his studies. In 1739, Walpole and Gray set out on the prolonged continental tour. They spent the remainder of that year in France, and crossed the Alps in November. It is typical of the scholarly bent of his mind that he studied the De Bello Gallico as he travelled through France. In Paris Gray cultivated a taste for the French classical dramatists, especially Racine, whom he afterwards tried to imitate in the fragmentary tragedy in blank verse Agrippina. At Reggio, however, a violent quarrel took place, the precise circumstances of which are unknown. Obviously, both Walpole and Gray developed in rather different directions both in their personalities and respective interests. The two friends parted in anger and were not reconciled until 1745. Throughout his years abroad Gray had been a careful sightseer, made notes in picture-galleries, visited churches, and brushed up his classical associations. He observed, and afterwards advised, the judicious custom of always recording his impressions on the spot. Gray had continued his studies abroad throughout his journey, and had acquired an intimate knowledge of classical and modern art, but, at the age of 25, he had not prepared himself for any sort of career. Gray resumed his work on the unfinished and unstageable tragedy Agrippina, which was inspired by a performance of a Racine play in Paris. As part of their literary intercourse, Gray submitted the fragment to his friend. West's criticism, however, seems to have put an end to it. In the next couple of years Gray spent his summers at Stoke to which his mother and Mary Antrobus had retired from business in December 1742. The two women were joined by their sister Anne (1676-1758), the widowed Mrs Rogers, whose husband Jonathan had been a retired attorney who had lived in Burnham parish till his death in October 1742. The three sisters took a house together at West End, Stoke Poges

Criticism

As a poet Gray was admired and influential out of all proportions to his ambitions and modest output of verse. The whole of his anthumously published poetry amounted to less than 1000 lines. He was unquestionably one of the least productive and yet a precursor of the romantic revival which was soon to come. Gray's poetry was strongly marked by the taste for sentiment controlled by classical ideals of restraint and composure that characterized the later Augustans, without the inward emotional exploration displayed by the Romantics of the 1790-1820 generation: he shows sensitive response to natural environment without the sense of organic union with human nature. He almost worshipped Dryden and loved Racine as heartily as Shakespeare. He valued polish and symmetry as highly as the school of Pope, and shared their taste for didactic reflection and for pompous personification. Yet he also shared the taste for sensibility which found expression in the romanticism of the following period. In poetry he was regarded as an innovator. Gray was in his own time a distinguished practitioner of poetic form by reason of his abandonment of the close discipline of the heroic couplet for the greater rhetorical freedom of his odes in a form nevertheless sanctioned by antiquity. A man of studious instincts, of a retiring and somewhat melancholy temperament, he nevertheless set his mark upon his age. It had been a lifetime of reading, of reflection, of essentially unsupervised and uncreative study and research in the academic seclusion of Cambridge, diversified only by little outward incident.

Additional Information
Thomas Gray: Interactive Online Commentary - http://www.thomasgray.org/

Sources:

"Thomas Gray." Briticanna Online. 2001.
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