William Shenstone and the Leasowes
The English landscape garden in transition, c.1740-1763

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

[start page 1] William Shenstone at the Leasowes

William Shenstone, poet, essayist and landscape gardener, created one of the most celebrated landscape gardens of the eighteenth century at his estate, the Leasowes in Shropshire, between the early 1740s and his death in 1763. Shenstone was born on 14 November 1714[1] of a family of minor Warwickshire and Shropshire gentry, at the Leasowes, near Halesowen. The Leasowes was one of two properties owned by the family, the other being at nearby Quinstone. After receiving his early education at a local dame school, an experience that inspired one of his most successful poems, ‘The School Mistress’, and at the Solihull academy of Mr Crampton, he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, in May 1732. He remained on the college books for nearly ten years but never took his degree. Among his contemporaries at Oxford were Richard Jago (1715-81), who had also attended Mr Crampton’s academy, and Richard Graves (1715-1804), both of whom remained his life-long friends and correspondents. He had lost both his parents before going up to Oxford; his father, Thomas Shenstone, had died in 1724, while his mother, Ann (née Penn, a member of a wealthy and influential Shropshire family), died in April 1732, the month before he was matriculated. On his mother’s death, William’s guardianship was accepted by Thomas Dolman, the rector of Broome in Worcestershire, who was the husband of Ann’s sister, [end page 1] Mary Penn. William’s relationship with his guardian was close, and he always remembered Dolman with affection and gratitude.

William Shenstone’s poetic career began in 1737 while he was still at Oxford with the anonymous publication of Poems on Various Occasions, a small collection which he later attempted to suppress. In 1740 he wrote ‘The Judgement of Hercules’ which when published the following year met with some success and established his reputation. The appearance in 1742 of ‘The School Mistress’ (written in 1736) marked the high point of his career as a poet. He continued to write elegies, levities, odes and songs, which were published by his friend Robert Dodsley in a number of collections between 1748 and 1758. Shenstone’s works were frequently reprinted after his death until well into the nineteenth century, but he never achieved the recognition as a poet which he sought. He also wrote many essays; his Essay on Elegy, which was published with ‘The School Mistress’, was influential in the development of the elegy in English. His other essays, including Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, were not published until after his death. He was known for his enthusiasm for ‘ancient British’ themes[2] and had a great interest in traditional ballads and songs, collaborating with his friend Thomas Percy in the production of the Reliques of English Poetry. According to Percy’s preface to the Reliques, ‘The plan of the work was settled in concert with the late elegant Mr. Shenstone, who was to have borne a joint share in it, had not death unhappily prevented him’.[3] Shenstone was also of some literary significance as a compiler and editor of other peoples’ works; he helped to edit Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems by Various Hands (1748), and devoted much time and energy to compiling a Miscellany of verses by [end page 2] the many amateur and minor literary figures among his west midlands friends and acquaintances.[4]

On the death of Thomas Shenstone in 1724, the Leasowes came into the ownership of his father, William’s grandfather, also called William, and Shenstone lived for a time with a relative who was his grandfather’s tenant at the property. It was during this period that he began ‘improving’ the Leasowes; his letters from 1740 onwards refer to his early landscaping of that part of the estate which he called Virgil’s Grove, [5]and by 1743 he was involved in extensive works around the property.[6] In 1745 the elder William died and Shenstone took on the full management of the estate himself, living there permanently and devoting the rest of his life, and all his small income, to its improvement. He seems to have been inspired partly by the example of the small agricultural estate owned by a relative of Richard Graves, at Mickleton in Gloucestershire[7] (which in turn showed the influence of the celebrated ferme ornée created by Philip Southcote at Woburn Farm in Surrey), partly by a desire to make his small property rival for beauty and renown the much grander landscape owned by the Lyttletons at nearby Hagley, and partly by the image of himself as a poet in rural retirement residing in an arcadian environment which reflected his poetic mind and sensibility. As well as working on his own garden, he advised others on the landscaping of their grounds, notably his friend Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough, at Barrels near Henley-in-Arden, and George Grey, the fifth Earl of Stamford, at Enville. William Shenstone died of a fever on 11 February 1763. [end page 3]

The Leasowes in garden history

The middle of the eighteenth century was a time of constant flux and change in the theory and practice of gardening in England. One modern author has referred to the period from 1745 to 1760 as one of ‘intense theorizing and experimentation’[8] as the natural style which had emerged over the preceding half-century or so became the subject of vigorous debate and often widely different interpretations. William Shenstone’s garden at the Leasowes, created between the 1740s and the 1760s, occupies a crucial position in this period of transition.

When William Shenstone came into full-time residence at the Leasowes in the 1740s it was an unremarkable property, a small[9] grazing farm of woods, pasture-land and meadow about six miles west of Birmingham, in the rolling countryside just outside Halesowen (see Map 1). By the time of his death in 1763 the Leasowes was one of the most celebrated and influential English landscape gardens of the eighteenth century. it received large numbers of visitors from all classes of society, featured in many published accounts and descriptions, and achieved a significant place in contemporary and subsequent theories of gardening in the ‘natural style’. The attention paid to the Leasowes continued to grow even after the garden itself became increasingly neglected after Shenstone’s death. The sheer quantity of the published descriptions available, and the unreliability of many of them, led one writer to comment in 1795 that he would not be offering his readers a detailed account of the Leasowes, for [end page 4] ‘the public are already in possession of many, and perhaps more than they can profit by’.[10]

The important place that the Leasowes must be granted in English garden history is not based just on a retrospective assessment of its significance. The Leasowes was seen by contemporaries as marking a new departure in, and as making a major contribution to, the development of the modern, natural taste in gardening.[11] A modern scholar has called it ‘the most famous garden of its time’,[12] and it was undoubtedly one of the most visited, commented upon, described and discussed gardens of the century. It was featured in some of the most influential gardening books of the period, notably Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), William Marshall’s Planting and Ornamental Gardening (1785) and Planting and Rural Ornament (1796), and George Mason’s Essay on Design in Gardening (1768). Shenstone’s theory of gardening, as recorded in his essay Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening and embodied in the landscape at the Leasowes, was subsequently held up as offering a rival system of improvement to that of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Furthermore, Shenstone’s influence was not limited to his own country. Thomas Jefferson visited the Leasowes in 1786, and was inspired to create a garden in the ferme ornée style in America,[13] and Shenstone’s garden was particularly influential in France, where the Marquis René-Louis de Girardin called his elaborate gardens at Ermenonville ‘the Leasowes of [end page 5] France’.[14] Ermenonville contained monuments imitating several of Shenstone’s inscriptions, and a stone obelisk erected in honour of the English poet and gardener.[15] Even in the early nineteenth century, fifty years after Shenstone’s death, Madame de Genlis would recall in her memoirs the two oustandingly beautiful English gardens, still unequalled in France, as Stowe and the Leasowes.[16]

The Leasowes is a garden in which many of the important themes in the development of the natural style in gardening are present: the role of expressionism and associationism; the meaning of the picturesque in landscape; the conception of nature and the role of the improver in working with nature; the combination of the useful and the ornamental in the so-called ferme ornée; the garden as the expression of an individual sensibility; the incorporation of classical and native mythologies into the garden; the garden as a tourist attraction. An analysis of the Leasowes shows an art-form in transition, as the various movements, currents and innovations in the emergent natural style of gardening are mediated through the sensibility of one self-conscious, individual, and highly influential gardener.

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Notes

1. For Shenstone’s life see Dictionary of National Biography; Duncan Mallam (ed.), Letters of William Shenstone (Minneapolis, MN, 1939), introduction; Marjorie Williams, William Shenstone: A Chapter in Eighteenth-Century Taste (Birmingham, 1935); A. R. Humphreys, William Shenstone: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait (Cambridge, 1937); E. Monro Purkis, William Shenstone: Poet and Landscape Gardener (Wolverhampton, 1931).

2. See Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1769-1800 (Aldershot, 1988), p. 127.

3. Thomas Percy, Reliques of English Poetry (1765; London, 1876 edn.), vol. I, p. xv.

4. See Ian A. Gordon (ed.), Shenstone’s Miscellany 1759-1763 (Oxford, 1952), introduction, especially pp. xi-xii.

5. See Mallam, Letters, pp. 13, 41, 51, 83.

6. Richard Graves, Recollections of Some Particulars in the Life of the Late William Shenstone, Esq.(London, 1788), pp. 40, 48-50.

7. Martin Jacques, Georgian Gardens: The Reign of Nature (London, 1983), p. 52.

8. Jacques, Georgian Gardens, p. 12.

9. Thomas Jefferson estimated the area of the ferme ornée as 150 acres (Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book, ed. E. M. Betts (Philadelphia, PA, 1944), p. 113); the Particulars and Conditions of Sale of the Leasowes (London, 1795), p. 1, gave the area as 115 acres, but this did not include various outlying parts of the garden which were not owned by Shenstone but leased from his neighbours.

10. George Mason, An Essay in Design in Gardening (London, 1795 edn.), p. 120.

11. Mason, Essay on Design in Gardening (London, 1795 edn.), pp. 50-1; also Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (London, 1770), pp. 162ff.; George W. Johnson, A History of English Gardening (London, 1829), p. 267.

12. Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford, 1978), p. 238.

13. Jefferson, Garden Book, p. 113.

14. Eva Maria Neumeyer, ‘The landscape garden as a symbol in Rousseau, Goethe and Flaubert’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. VIII (1947), no. 2, p. 196, footnote; Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp. 73-4.

15. Louis Stanislas, Comte de Girardin, Promenade ou itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville (Paris, 1788), pp. 16-17, 34-5.

16. Quoted in Wiebenson, Picturesque Garden in France, p. 38.