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

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

UPDATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The essay William Shenstone and the Leasowes: The English Landscape Garden in Transition, c.1740-1763 was written in 1993-4 and consequently uses no material published after 1994. This updated bibliography lists some of the relevant material that has been published since that date.

Books

Stephen Bending et al, Arcadian greens rural: William Shenstone and the Poetics of Landscape Gardening at The Leasowes, Hagley and Enville, and at Little Sparta (Leeds: New Arcadian Press, 2002)
Audrey Duggan, The World of William Shenstone (Studley: Brewin Books, 2004)
Sandro Jung, Poetic Meaning in the Eighteenth-Century Poems of Mark Akenside and William Shenstone (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002)
Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds 1720-1800 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)
Timothy Mowl, Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape (Stroud: Sutton, 2000)
Frederick Doveton Nichols, Thomas Jefferson: Landscape Architect (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003)
Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

Periodical articles

Paul Baines, ‘Writing, gender and discipline in Shenstone's The School-Mistress: “Tway birchen sprays”’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 26, no. 2 (2003)
F. D. A. Burns, ‘William Shenstone’s years at Oxford’, Notes and Queries, no. 243 (1998)
Christopher Gallagher, ‘The Leasowes: a history of the landscape’, Garden History, vol. 24, no. 2 (1996)
Sandro Jung, ‘Mentorship and “patronage” in mid-eighteenth-century England: William Shenstone reconsidered’, Bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, no. 54 (2002)

LIST OF LINKS

When this essay was written in 1993-4 the internet was not really a factor in academic research. How things have changed. Listed below are some of the most accurate, reliable and useful resources currently available that deal with William Shenstone, his life, his work, and his garden.

William Shenstone at the Literary Heritage West Midlands site run by Shropshire County Council - offers the full texts of Shenstone’s songs and ballads, odes, levities, elegies and moral pieces, and also the inscriptions which he composed for many of the features at the Leasowes.

The Leasowes page at Gardenvisit.com - provides information for intending visitors to the garden, a brief description of the site and two pictures.

The Leasowes Project - Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council have a comprehensive and well-illustrated account of the Leasowes and of the archaeological and restoration project that has been ongoing since the late 1990s.

The National Portrait Gallery - the NPG has a number of images of William Shenstone in its collection, including portraits by Thomas Ross (1738) and Edward Alcock (1760)

William Shenstone. the Leasowes and Landscape Gardening - an excellent resource from the Revolutionary Players site, which is devoted to ‘the history of the Industrial Revolution in the West Midlands in Britain between the years 1700 and 1830’. A detailed and richly-illustrated account of Shenstone’s life, his writings and his work at the Leasowes.

Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1) - the text of Shenstone’s essay, taken from Hunt & Willis’s The Genius of the Place (and thus omitting an essential footnote found in Shenstone’s original), can be found at the website of the University of Texas at Austin, and can also be downloaded as a PDF file.

Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (2) - an annotated version of Shenstone’s essay, edited and introduced by Stephen Bending and Andrew McRae, is available at the University of Southampton’s web site. This version is taken direct from The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone (1764), unlike that at the University of Texas (see link above), and therefore includes Shenstone’s vital footnote.

The Leasowes - an interesting page on Shenstone and the Leasowes by Dominique Césari, part of her fascinating site Parcs à fabriques: French Anglo-Chinese Gardens. The page in French: Les Leasowes - un modèle de jardin romantique.

Gartenkunst, Landwirtschaft und Dichtung bei William Shenstone und seine Ferme Ornée “The Leasowes” im Spiegel seines literarischen Zirkels - Simone Schulz’s 2004 doctoral thesis (English title Gardening, Agriculture and Poetry: William Shenstone’s Ferme Ornée The Leasowes and his literary circle) is available in full, as PDF files or in zip format, at the Freie Universität Berlin web site.

© Ralph Harrington 1994 and 2006. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Citation information
Please note that proper attribution is required by the licence conditions pertaining to this work, as well as being good scholarly practice. For preference, please cite this thesis as if referring directly to the printed version.
To cite print version: Ralph Harrington, William Shenstone and the Leasowes: The English Landscape Garden in Transition, c.1740-1763 (unpub. M.St. thesis, University of Oxford, 1994)
Location of this section (stable URL): http://www.greycat.org/papers/shen11.htm

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