A Critical Edition of the Verse of Lord John Hervey

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The project is to produce a critical edition of all the verse that can be identified of Lord John Hervey (1696-1743). As a key supporter of Sir Robert Walpole, and a close friend of Queen Caroline, Hervey is well known to historians. He is an important primary source of information about events and personalities during much of Walpole's administration, especially in his letters to Stephen and Henry Fox, and in his manuscript Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign of George II, not published in full until 1931, that he left incomplete after the Queen's death. He is also important to historians of gender and sexuality for reasons indicated by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's remark that the world consisted of 'men, women, and Herveys'. To students and scholars of literature, he is most familiar as the object of a satirical attack by Alexander Pope that portrayed him as vain, unprincipled and effeminate. Pope's attack has proved so successful that hardly anyone has paid serious attention to Hervey's verse, even though his skills as memoirist, political pamphleteer and letter-writer are well-recognized. Furthermore, research into Hervey's life and writings has been dominated by historical and biographical rather than literary concerns. Yet this very talented man wrote verse throughout his life, and much of it is accomplished. While some of it was printed, not always with his consent, much of it survives in manuscripts scattered among various libraries and archives. The proposed edition aims to bring to light all his verse that can be found and to make it available.The work for the edition falls into two main parts. First, bibliographical and archival research is needed to locate and identify verse by Hervey and then transcribe and edit it. For printed texts, this requires work in several major research libraries, as some are very rare and have not been digitized. Texts that survive only in manuscripts present more of a challenge. Although the majority are in three main collections, at the British Library, the West Suffolk Record Office at Bury St Edmunds, and the Harrowby Manuscripts Trust at Sandon Hall, Stafford, there is also material in, for example, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds (which has, however, been digitized), and the Portland Collection at the University of Nottingham. Second, the verse in these texts, some of which occurs in letters, has to be transcribed accurately and then presented in a clear, accessible form with details of differences between copies where more than one exists, and notes on biographical, historical or literary contexts, and also on unusual expressions and allusions.It is important that such an edition be produced both for literary and for historical reasons. While Hervey's verse is not on a footing with Pope's, it is of much greater literary value than has been appreciated. This was recognized in the eighteenth century by the quite prominent place he occupies in the best-known verse anthology of the period, Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands, yet his verse that exists only in manuscript is virtually or, in a few cases, completely unknown. Examples of unpublished material that will be of special interest are his verse tragedy Agrippina, which is modelled on parallels between Nero and his mother and Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Queen Caroline; his rendering into verse of the first three books of Fénelon's Les Aventures de Télémaque; some of the extempore verse he embedded in letters; and three lesbian love poems that do not seem to have a satirical intent transcribed by his friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Publication of a critical edition of Hervey's verse will make such material available for the first time. It will provide the basis for a much fairer and more accurate assessment of his significance as a writer, and it will prove an important source for historians as well as for students and scholars of literature.