Edward Jerningham was a poet who moved in high society during the second half of the 18th century. Born at the family home of Costessey Park in 1737, he died in London on 17 November 1812. A writer of liberal views, he was savagely satirised later in life.
Life
Edward Jerningham was the third son of Sir George Jerningham and belonged to a family which had lived in Norfolk since Tudor times. Since they were Roman Catholic, he was educated first at the English College at Douai in France, and afterwards in Paris. In September 1761 he came to England to be present at the coronation of George III and brought with him a fair knowledge of Greek and Latin and a thorough mastery of French and Italian. Having an interest in religion, he examined the points of difference between Anglicanism and the Catholic Church and eventually adopted the former during the 1790s. He corresponded with Anna Seward on religious subjects and at the end of his life wrote some theological works.
Belonging to the family of a baronet, he moved in high society, having among his chief friends Lords Chesterfield, Harcourt, Carlisle, and Horace Walpole - who often referred to him as ‘the charming man’. He was also a friend of the Prince Regent, at whose request he arranged the library then kept at the Brighton Pavilion. Their relations were close enough for Jerningham to act as go-between during the affair between Lady Jersey and the Prince. His poetry went through several editions and his work also included four plays: Margaret of Anjou: an historical interlude (1777), the tragedy The Siege of Berwick (1794), and the comedies The Welch Heiress (1795) and The Peckham Frolic: or Nell Gwyn (1799). The first three were acted without much success and the last was never performed. In the theatre world he was a particular friend of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who nevertheless is said to have caricatured him as Sir Benjamin Backbite in The School for Scandal (1777).
Poetry
“Jerningham is a literary magpie whose poetry is overwrought with allusive echoes of other poets,” comments a modern critic, only echoing the opinion of Jerningham's contemporaries. Fanny Burney, for example, mentioned to one of her correspondents in 1780 that “I have been reading his poems, if his they may be called”; and even his friend Horace Walpole admitted “in truth he has no genius: there is no novelty, no plan and no suite in his poetry; though many of the lines are pretty”. He was a good imitator, however, and even something of a literary barometer, straddling the transition from Augustan literature to early Romanticism, which explains his interest to students of his period today.
At the outset of his literary career, Jerningham mixed with the circle about Thomas Gray, although he never met the poet himself. However, like many at the time, he began by writing a close imitation of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in "The Nunnery” (1762). Jerningham then followed it up in successive years with other poems on similar themes in which the connection with Gray's work, though less close, was maintained in theme, form and emotional tone: “The Magdalens: an elegy” (1763); “The Nun: an elegy” (1764); and “An Elegy Written Among the Ruins of an Abbey” (1765), which is derivative of similar use of the ruin theme in elegiac works such as Edward Moore’s “An elegy, written among the ruins of a nobleman's seat in Cornwall”. Monastic themes were an obvious choice for a Catholic raised in Europe, but they are singular for being penetrated by notes of erotic passion. What is left unfulfilled in “The Nunnery”, wasting its sweetness on the desert air, is any chance of married life or sexual dalliance. And where the latter had been irregularly fulfilled, then it found a retreat in the recently opened refuge for reformed prostitutes, the setting of “The Magdalens”. There the religious connotations are intensified by Jerningham's description of its inmates “kneeling at yon rail” in “Nun-clad Penance” in the church where men of fashion such as himself went to hear them sing.