The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803-1829: with a Study of the Creative Exchange between Wordsworth an [Paperback]

This edition presents and fully contextualizes an archive of letters that reveal the creative and personal significance of the friendship between William Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont. Spanning twenty-six years, this inter-familial correspondence comprises discussion of literature and painting, gardening and theatre, politics and religion, grief, hope, and aspiration.Sir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumont's friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth's mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that - in influence, creativity, and affection - rivals Wordsworth's more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another's work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.List of Illustrations
List of Letters
The Creative Exchange between Wordsworth and Beaumont
The Letters
Part I: 1803-1806
Part II: 1807-1813
Part III: 1814-1818
Part IV: 1819-1827
Part V: 1827-1829
Appendix I: Lady Beaumont's Reading: Thomas Barnard's 'Account of an English Hermit'
Appendix II: Paintinlcy