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Joseph Spence

Kingsclere, 1699 - 1768, Surrey

BiographySpence, Joseph (British garden designer and author, 1699-1768)
Note: British academic and hobby gardener (Dictionary of national biography).

Biography:

Spence, Joseph [pseud. Sir Harry Beaumont] (1699–1768), literary scholar and anecdotist, was born at Kingsclere, north Hampshire, on 28 April 1699. His father, Joseph (bap. 1661, d. 1715), was rector of Winnal in Winchester and precentor of the cathedral. His mother, Mirabella, née Collier (1670–1755), was granddaughter of Sir Thomas Lunsford (1610–1653). Joseph was their eldest son; two other boys and a girl survived to adulthood.

In 1709 Joseph was sent to school in Mortimer, close to his birthplace, after which he was briefly at Eton College before moving to Winchester College in 1715; his early education was paid for by Mrs Fawkener, a relative. He matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 11 April 1717, but did not go up until he was admitted as scholar or probationary fellow at New College on 22 April 1720. He was advanced to full fellowship on 30 April 1722, took his BA on 9 March 1724 and MA on 2 November 1727, and was ordained in the Oxford diocese on 5 June 1726. His early literary friends included fellow Wykehamists Robert Lowth, Christopher Pitt, Glocester Ridley, and Edward Young.

Spence's Essay on Pope's ‘Odyssey’ (1726) brought its author the friendship of Pope, who commented upon the manuscript of part two of the Essay (published 1727). Thanks partly to the Essay and partly to Pope's influential friends, Spence was elected to the Oxford chair of poetry (stipend £180 p.a., later increased to £200) on 11 July 1728; he held the post for ten years, the maximum allowed. Also in July 1728 he was presented to the New College living of Birchanger, Essex; but he continued to hold his fellowship and live mostly in Oxford when not travelling abroad. He became a regular visitor to Pope's house and began taking notes of conversations with Pope and other literary and public figures.

Recommended by Pope, Spence was travelling companion of Charles Sackville, Lord Middlesex (later second duke of Dorset), on a grand tour which lasted from December 1730 to July 1733 and included stays of several months each in Dijon, Lyons, Venice, and Florence. During Spence's absence abroad, his Account of Stephen Duck was published (1731): the first of his studies of ‘natural genius’. Back in Oxford he lectured and made unremarkable contributions to poetry collections marking royal weddings, births, and deaths. He wrote ‘The Charliad’, a feeble imitation of Pope's Dunciad, and, in prose, a Scriblerian–satirical ‘Life of Charles Magot’ (both unpublished). In honour of his first pupil and at Pope's suggestion he published An Account of Lord Buckhurst (1736) and an edition of Gorboduc, censured as spurious by the antiquary Thomas Coxeter.

Between May 1737 and February 1738 Spence was in the Netherlands, Flanders, and France as travelling companion of John Morley Trevor (1717–1743), a distant relative of the duke of Newcastle, and between September 1739 and November 1741 he travelled in Italy with Henry Fiennes Clinton, earl of Lincoln, later second duke of Newcastle under Lyme. During each tour Spence wrote frequent lively, graphic, and amusing letters to his mother, which he later edited for publication but never published.

Lord Lincoln's powerful relatives brought patronage Spence's way. On 4 June 1742 he became regius professor of modern history at Oxford (worth £400 p.a.), an appointment confirmed under the new reign in 1761. Also in 1742 Spence exchanged Birchanger for the richer New College living of Great Horwood, Buckinghamshire (about £500 p.a.). He did not reside at Horwood, but made annual visits, when he distributed generous charity. He relinquished his New College fellowship and settled with his mother in London about 1742, whence he often visited Pope.

Spence wrote occasionally for his friend Robert Dodsley's periodical, The Museum (1746); he contributed advice (and one poem) to Dodsley's Collection of Poems (1748–58). His long gestated Polymetis was published as a lavishly illustrated folio in February 1747 and earned him at least £1450 by subscription and sale of copyright. Conceived during Spence's first visit to Italy and with much of its material collected there, Polymetis was intended to show how the works of ancient artists and of Roman poets illustrate and explain one another. It was attacked in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laokoon (1766) and, though new editions appeared in 1755 and 1774, and abridged versions for the use of schools were current until the 1820s, it sank fairly quickly from serious notice. However, it proved an invaluable guide to mythological images for Keats.

In 1748 Lord Lincoln gave Spence the lifetime use of a house he owned at Byfleet, Surrey. Spence moved there with his mother (aged nearly eighty) and, using profits from Polymetis, developed his long-standing interest in landscape gardening. Already he had laid out at Birchanger a small, simple version of Pope's Twickenham garden, he had planted extensively at Great Horwood, and, in London, had provided garden plans and notes for friends. Now at Byfleet he developed his 30 acre estate as a ferme ornée (like nearby Wooburn, home of Philip Southcote), and improved his own views when neighbours asked his advice about landscaping their estates. Though he never completed his gardening treatise, ‘Tempe’, for which he made many notes, he translated Jean-Denis Attiret's influential account of the emperor of China's gardens, which praises ‘beautiful disorder’. This translation was published (1752) as the work of Sir Harry Beaumont, a pen name Spence adopted also for Crito (1752), a slight, genteel, classically inspired work on aesthetics, and Moralities (1753), a miscellany of prose essays, Aesopian fables, and translations, mostly reprinted from Dodsley's Museum. Crito, like the Essay on Pope's ‘Odyssey’ and Polymetis, was in dialogue form because the first person singular seemed arrogant to Spence.

In 1752 Spence procured the living of Byfleet for his friend Stephen Duck. In the next two years he published accounts of two other ‘natural geniuses’ of humble origin: Robert Hill, the learned tailor, and Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet. Spence promoted a subscription edition of Blacklock's poems and in 1758 travelled with Dodsley to see Blacklock in Scotland, visiting William Shenstone at The Leasowes for a week en route. In the same year he arranged for the printing at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill Press of his Parallel in the Manner of Plutarch (1758) between a famously learned Florentine librarian and Robert Hill, in order to raise funds for Hill. Spence also contributed notes to the edition of Virgil (1753) by Joseph Warton and edited the Remarks on Virgil (1768) of another Wykehamist friend, Edward Holdsworth.

On 24 May 1754 Spence was installed as a prebendary of Durham, a preferment in the gift of the bishop, Richard Trevor. Byfleet continued to be Spence's main home but he spent more than the minimum of three weeks' residence annually at Durham, where he improved the garden of his prebendal estate and those of neighbours, including the bishop and the earl of Darlington at Raby. His travels took him, weeks at a time, to landscape gardens where his advice was solicited. Sometimes Dodsley travelled with him; it was on one of their northern excursions in 1764 that Dodsley died at Spence's Durham house.

In June 1766 Spence suffered a mild stroke during his annual journey north. He made his will at Sedgefield, Durham, on 4 August 1766, and on 24 March 1767 sold his copyrights (including rights over unpublished works) to James Dodsley for £100. On 20 August 1768 he was found lying on his face in the shallow ornamental waters of his garden at Byfleet, probably drowned in a fit. He was buried at St Mary's, Byfleet, four days later. His wealth at death was more than £1800, not counting the voluminous unpublished writings bequeathed to his executors and residuary legatees (Lowth, Ridley, and the Revd Edward Rolle) with the request that nothing further of his should be printed, unless by their joint judgement and approbation.

Spence's unpublished writings included edited ‘travelling letters’, notes for a gardening treatise, notes for a biographical history of English poetry, and valuable ‘Anecdotes’ noted from conversations with Pope and others. The executors decided that nothing should be printed, and cancelled the agreement with James Dodsley. A handsomely bound transcript of the ‘Anecdotes’ was presented to Spence's patron the duke of Newcastle (formerly Lord Lincoln); other papers, including a fuller text of the ‘Anecdotes’ than the Newcastle transcript, were lost to view until they were acquired by a bookseller named Carpenter, who commissioned Samuel Weller Singer to prepare an edition. By the end of the century material from the Newcastle transcript had appeared in Warburton's edition of Pope, Joseph Warton's Essay on Pope, Ruffhead's biography of Pope, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Malone's biography of Dryden, and elsewhere. The copy of much of the Newcastle transcript made by Malone came into the hands of John Murray (1778–1843): he and Carpenter raced to print, and rival editions of the Anecdotes were published in January 1820 on, it was said, the same day. As Singer had very much more material, his version was incomparably better than Murray's. The authoritative edition is by James M. Osborn (1966).

Spence's Anecdotes is his chief claim to fame. Primarily valuable as a rich biographical source for others, it reflects its scribe: self-effacing, conscientious, discriminating, knowledgeable, and kindly. His friends commended his sweet temper and amiability; he is portrayed as the benevolent Phesoi Ecneps in Tales of the Genii (1764) by James Ridley, son of his friend Glocester. Spence was about 5 feet tall and spindly; he was a valetudinarian; he never married.

James Sambrook
Sources A. Wright, Joseph Spence: a critical biography (1950) · J. Spence, Observations, anecdotes, and characters, of books and men, ed. J. M. Osborn, new edn, 2 vols. (1966) · J. Spence, Letters from the grand tour, ed. S. Klima (1975) · J. Spence, Anecdotes, observations, and characters, of books and men, ed. S. W. Singer, 2nd edn (1858) · The correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburn, 5 vols. (1956) · registers of admissions and of business transacted, New College, Oxford · P. D. Mundy, ‘Extracts from letters from Joseph Spence, 1739–1762’, N&Q, 189 (1945), 252–5, 271–3 · Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, 1.643–5, 2.373–7, 8.98 · M. Laird, The flowering of the landscape garden: English pleasure grounds, 1720–1800 (1999) · R. W. King, ‘Joseph Spence of Byfleet’, Garden History, 6/3 (1978), 38–64; 7/3 (1979), 29–48; 8/3 (1980), 44–65, 77–114 · Walpole, Corr., vols. 17, 20, 30, 40 · Foster, Alum. Oxon. · Venn, Alum. Cant. · T. F. Kirby, Winchester scholars: a list of the wardens, fellows, and scholars of ... Winchester College (1888), 225 · Fasti Angl. (Hardy), 3.315, 530
Archives BL, corresp. and accounts of tours, Egerton MSS 2234–2235 · BL, lectures, Add. MS 17281 · Hunt. L., corresp. and literary MSS · U. Nott., corresp. and papers · Yale U., Beinecke L., bound literary MSS and papers · Yale U., Beinecke L., letters and papers :: Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Christopher Pitt
Likenesses R. Carriera, pastel drawing, 1741, priv. coll. [see illus.] · T. Cook, engraving (after engraving by G. Vertue), repro. in Spence, Observations, vol. 2, frontispiece · G. Vertue, line engraving (after I. Whood), BM, NPG; repro. in J. Spence, Polymetis (1747)
Wealth at death £1813 15s. 10d.: Wright, Joseph Spence, 175–6, 247
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James Sambrook, ‘Spence, Joseph (1699–1768)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/26111, accessed 5 Nov 2015]

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Last Updated8/7/24

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