Edward Jerningham

[2] Belonging to the family of a baronet, he moved in high society, having among his chief friends Lords Chesterfield, Harcourt, Carlisle, and Horace Walpole - who often referred to him as ‘the charming man’.

[3] His poetry went through several editions and his work also included four plays: Margaret of Anjou: an historical interlude (1777),[4] the tragedy The Siege of Berwick (1794),[5] and the comedies The Welch Heiress (1795)[6] and The Peckham Frolic: or Nell Gwyn (1799).

Fanny Burney, for example, mentioned to one of her correspondents in 1780 that “I have been reading his poems, if his they may be called”;[10] and even his friend Horace Walpole admitted “in truth he has no genius: there is no novelty, no plan and no suite in his poetry; though many of the lines are pretty”.

There the religious connotations are intensified by Jerningham's description of its inmates “kneeling at yon rail” in “Nun-clad Penance” in the church where men of fashion such as himself went to hear them sing.

Jerningham's contribution was to shift the story into the context of the growing movement against the slave trade by making Yarico an African negro who draws attention to the anomaly in Christian doctrine that allows such discrimination against those of another race.

[22] One example of the transitional nature of Jerningham's work is found in his “Enthusiasm”,[23] a quasi-philosophical poem in which the “Enthusiastic Maid, Daughter of Energy” is put on trial in a heaven for her bad effect on the progress of civilization.

In the second part she is defended as inspiring the spirit of self-sacrifice, the signing of Magna Carta, and the defiance of received ideas as exemplified by Christopher Columbus and Martin Luther.

Most historical allusions in “Enthusiasm” are so clothed in obscurity that they have to be identified by footnotes, and the heavenly landscape is encumbered with such abstractions borrowed from the odes of Gray and William Collins as “Meek Toleration, heav’n-descending Maid” and Superstition who “Extends, in thunder cloath’d, her threat’ning arm”.

Jerningham’s poem is a work of elegiac antiquarianism not very different from descriptions by other poets of the time[27] and with the same aesthetic appreciation of the melancholy scene as is found in J. M. W. Turner’s 1794 watercolour of the abbey ruins (see opposite).

Wordsworth pays sly homage to this almost obligatory sensibility by interpreting the “wreaths of smoke” rising from the local ironworks as possible evidence “of some Hermit’s cave” upslope.

At the start of his attack on the group in The Baviad (1794), Gifford makes “Some sniv’lling Jerningham at fifty weep/ O’er love-lorn oxen and deserted sheep,”[34] and the reputation of weak sentimentality was to stick to him for the next two centuries.