Author: THOMSON (James):
Title: The Castle of Indolence: An Allegorical Poem. Written in Imitation of Spenser. By James Thomson.
Description: London: Printed for A. Millar..., 1748. FIRST EDITION. 4to, 234 x 177 mms., pp. [iv], 81 [82 blank], 19th century half calf, marbled boards, gilt spine; a good to very good copy, with the bookplates of Ray Livingston Murphy and Eric Gerald Stanley on the front paste-down end-paper. In her short life, Ray Livingstson Murphyj (1923 - 1953) amassed a considerable collection of books, manuscripts, and works of art, some bequeathed to repositories, librarians, and museums in the United States. Eric Gerald Stanley FBA 1923 – 2018) was a British Anglo-Saxonist; he was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1977 to 1991 and was emeritus professor until his death. James Sambrook in ONDB has written an excellent exposition of this, Thomson's final poem: "Thomson's The Castle of Indolence, published in May 1748, was conceived about 1733 as detached Spenserian stanzas satirizing himself and friends. By 1742, when Thomas Morell (1703–1784), curate at Kew Chapel, wrote his Spenserian stanzas about Thomson's poem, its non-completion because of its author's indolence was a joke among those friends, some of whom are identifiable among the castle-dwellers in the completed poem. One of them, the physician John Armstrong (1708/9–1779), contributed four stanzas on diseases resulting from indolence. Thomson himself is in the poem as a bard 'more fat than bard beseems' (canto 1, line 604). The castle is described seductively as an earthly paradise, presided over by a smooth-tongued epicurean wizard, but in the second canto of the poem it is overthrown by a stern and energetic 'Knight of Industry'. Thomson's conventional message is that the penalty of Adam is hard, but idleness is worse. However, the poem also implicitly dramatizes a conflict between the didactic public poet and the romantic dreamer. Canto 1, stanza 40, has perhaps the earliest published reference in English to the Aeolian harp." Although over a century old, Edward Payson Morton's 1913 article in Modern Philology, "The Spenserian Stanza in the Eighteenth Century" provides a useful guide to early emulations of The Faerie Queene. James Beattie deployed the Spenserian stanza in what was by far his most successful publication, The Minstrel (1771 - 1774), which has been reprinted more than a hundred times.

Keywords: