page_title: George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton
section_title: Poetry and patronage
hierarchical_section_title: George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton / Poetry and patronage
caption_attribution_description: English: Hagley, St John the Baptist Church - interior, memorial to Lucy Lyttelton née Fortescue (* c.1717; † 1747), the first wife of George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton (* 1709; † 1773).
context_page_description: George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, PC, known between 1751 and 1756 as Sir George Lyttelton, 5th Baronet, was a British statesman. As an author himself, he was also the supporter of other writers and as a patron of the arts made an important contribution to the development of 18th century landscape design.
context_section_description: Lord Lyttelton was a friend and supporter of Alexander Pope in the 1730s and of Henry Fielding in the 1750s; the latter dedicated his novel Tom Jones to Lyttelton. He had written his “Epistle to Mr. Pope, from a young gentleman at Rome” while still on European tour, advising him to abandon satire for a patriotic theme more worthy of his greatness. Later on the poem was used to preface editions of Pope's work.
  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”, 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. And William Gladstone acknowledged that his Church Principles was “completed beneath the shades of Hagley” as late as 1840.
  Despite his long political career, it was as a poet that Lyttelton was chiefly remembered in the 19th century. 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.” 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). 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.
  Another work with prior French counterparts was Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead (1760). Though these had Classical precedents, the more immediate models were François Fénelon’s Dialogues des morts anciens et modernes and Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's Nouveaux Dialogues des morts, which had also appeared in popular English translations as Dialogues of the Dead. The themes treated in Lyttelton's are political, literary and philosophical, although the characters sometimes stray from their expected role. Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift’s conversation is of politics, while 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).
  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. 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 trans
caption: Memorial inscription to Lucy Lyttelton, with her husband's poetical tribute, 1747
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