Anne Hunter’s Poetry in Manuscript: a Rare Discovery

Abstract

ANNE HUNTER (1742–1821) was a popular lyric poet, whose songs, ballads, and odes circulated widely among patrons of salons in London during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hunter was the only member of her family with artistic inclinations: her father, Robert Home, was a surgeon in Berwickshire; her husband, John Hunter, whom she married in 1771, was a distinguished anatomist and surgeon; and neither her daughter nor her son became writers (two other offspring died in childhood). After her husband’s death in 1793, his debts and the terms of his will left her without a home or livelihood. Queen Charlotte’s bounty sustained her until the sale of her husband’s effects in 1799 relieved her distress. She passed her final years quietly in the company of her nephew, Dr Matthew Baillie, and close friends. In Hunter’s youth, the editors of The Lark: Being a Select Collection of the Most Celebrated and Newest Songs, Scots and English (1765) printed her setting of an old Scottish air, ‘The Flowers of the Forest’. Her primary foray into publication, however, came in 1802 when some of her friends persuaded her to publish a collection of her verses: POEMS. By Mrs. JOHN HUNTER.1 There are no modern editions of Hunter’s poems, and this initial compilation, dedicated to her son, John Banks Hunter, Esq., represents almost all of her published work. Hunter humbly offered her reason for submitting her poetry for public consumption: ‘The very favourable reception which has for some years past been given to Lyric Poetry, whether ancient or modern, induces me to offer this small volume to the public, consisting chiefly of Odes, Ballads, and Songs’.2 From the outset, Hunter cultivated the image of an amateur author, who wrote as a hobby and allowed some of her efforts into print at the encouragement of others. During her lifetime (and to the present), she was best known for a song, ‘A pastoral Song’ (better known as ‘Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair’), which her friend, Franz Joseph Haydn, set and published in Second sett of Dr. Haydn’s VI original canzonettas for the voice with an accompaniment for the Piano-Forte (1795) (a year earlier, he had published Dr. Haydn’s VI Original Canzonettas for the voice with an accompaniment for the Piano-Forte, Dedicated to Mrs. John Hunter). Marion Scott claimed that Haydn’s friendship with John Hunter led to a productive relationship with Anne that resulted in the two volumes of canzonettas.3