Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803-1829

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This edition presents and contextualizes an archive of letters -- belonging to the Wordsworth Trust -- that reveal the creative and personal significance of the friendship between William Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont. 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, collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and the letters reveal 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 chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship that included Lady Beaumont and Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that—in influence, creativity, and affection—rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended critical 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.