Gray · 1750
The Elegy at Stoke Poges
Between the autumn of 1742 and the late summer of 1750, in the upstairs back-parlour of his mother's house at West End Cottage, Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire (a small village three miles north of Slough), Thomas Gray, the thirty-four-year-old Cambridge-fellow son of a London scrivener, working at intervals over eight years, composed a thirty-two-stanza poem on the burial of the rural poor in the parish churchyard of St Giles Stoke Poges. The poem, titled *Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard*, was finished in June 1750. Gray sent the manuscript to his friend Horace Walpole, who circulated it in manuscript through the literary London of the summer of 1750. The piracy threat of an imminent unauthorised printing in the *Magazine of Magazines* forced Gray to publish through the reputable bookseller Robert Dodsley on the fifteenth of February 1751. *Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard* sold through eleven editions in the first two years, was, by Samuel Johnson's standing 1781 *Lives of the Poets*, *the most quoted poem in English*, and was, by General James Wolfe's report to his fellow officers in the boats descending the St Lawrence on the night of the twelfth of September 1759 (the night before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham), the piece Wolfe recited to his junior officers with the remark: *gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow*. The churchyard at Stoke Poges remains the reading-pilgrimage site of late-Georgian English-literary tourism.
It is twenty past eight on the evening of a Thursday in late June 1750, in the upstairs back-parlour of West End Cottage at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, three miles north of Slough, in long midsummer light through the west casement. He is thirty-three years old (Gray was born on the twenty-sixth of December 1716, so in his thirty-fourth year). He is Thomas Gray, born at 41 Cornhill in central London on the twenty-sixth of December 1716, son of Philip Gray the London scrivener and Dorothy Antrobus (whose brother Robert was the Eton schoolmaster who had taken the eight-year-old Thomas in to be schooled at Eton at the family's expense), schooled at Eton (where he had been the inseparable Quadruple Alliance of Walpole, West, Ashton and himself), at Peterhouse Cambridge (where he is, in standing 1750, a Fellow), in his thirty-third year of an exceedingly retiring life.
On the desk in front of him is the eight-year-old manuscript of the Elegy, in his fine clerk's hand on octavo pages, with the eighteen successive marginal pencil corrections of the eight years' redrafting. The thirty-two stanzas have been the project of his slow Cambridge-Stoke Poges life since the first draft of the first eight stanzas in the autumn of 1742 (in the months immediately after the death of his close friend Richard West, the event that, by the biographical record, was the originating personal occasion of the poem).
He thinks: the redrafting is done. The final form of the closing four stanzas, including the epitaph on the unnamed rural-poor figure that closes the poem, is the version I cannot improve further.
He thinks: the literary London will not accept the publication graciously. The literary London is in the Pope-and-Swift post-Augustan moment of literary politics, and the pastoral-elegiac form of the Elegy is the not-yet-fashionable form. The poem is going to be received as a country-curiosity.
He thinks: Horace [Walpole] has been pressing me for the manuscript for six months. Horace will, on receiving the manuscript, circulate the fair copies in the London literary circle and the poem will, within six weeks, be in the London bookseller-pirates' hands.
He thinks: I shall send the manuscript to Horace tomorrow, with the letter giving him the one-month exclusive-circulation period. After the month I shall write to Dodsley.
Gray sent the manuscript to Walpole on the twelfth of June 1750. The pirate-printing threat came to a head at the end of January 1751, when Gray learned that the Magazine of Magazines was about to print an unauthorised version. He wrote to Dodsley the same week. The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard was published as a sixteen-page sixpenny pamphlet by Robert Dodsley of Tully's Head on the fifteenth of February 1751, with the print-run of about a thousand copies. The first edition sold out in two months. Eleven further editions appeared in the first two years. By 1781, the date of Samuel Johnson's standing Lives of the Poets, the Elegy was, in Johnson's words, the piece of English verse that has been more often quoted than any other since the Restoration.
The anecdote of General James Wolfe's recitation of the piece on the boats descending the St Lawrence on the night of the twelfth of September 1759 (the night before the dawn-attack on the Plains of Abraham at Quebec) is preserved in the memoir of John Robison the Edinburgh professor (who had been Wolfe's junior officer on the boats; Robison's standing 1804 memoir for the Edinburgh Review is the source). Wolfe, by Robison's report, recited the penultimate stanza of the Elegy (the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, / and all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, / awaits alike th'inevitable hour, / the paths of glory lead but to the grave) and added the remark: gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow. The capture of Quebec the next morning, at the cost of Wolfe's own life (he was hit at first light), was the decisive battle of the Seven Years War in North America.
Thomas Gray died at Pembroke College Cambridge (the college he had moved to from Peterhouse in 1756 after the student-prank in which Peterhouse undergraduates had set off a fire-alarm at three in the morning and Gray had climbed out of the window of his rooms by a rope-ladder he kept for the purpose; he had moved colleges the next day in the well-known Cambridge prickliness of his mature life) on the thirtieth of July 1771, fifty-four years old, of gout-and-related-causes. By his own pre-arranged instruction he was buried in the churchyard at Stoke Poges, in the same vault as his mother, on the south side of the church, immediately under the window of the upstairs back-parlour at West End Cottage where the Elegy had been written. The grave is unmarked except for a single small stone of local Buckinghamshire limestone, by Gray's own instructions. The churchyard at Stoke Poges has been a literary-pilgrimage site since at least 1799 (the date of the first published guidebook to the Elegy-country); it is in the care of the parish today, with the burial vault of Gray on the south wall of the church.