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

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

I. PRIMARY SOURCES

Works by William Shenstone

The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone, Esq., ed. Robert Dodsley (2 vols., Dublin, 1764)
The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone, Esq; Vol. III, Containing Letters to Particular Friends from the Year 1739-1763 (London, 1769)
Duncan Mallam (ed.), Letters of William Shenstone (Minneapolis, MN, 1939)
Marjorie Williams (ed.), The Letters of William Shenstone (Oxford, 1939)

Works making reference to Shenstone and the Leasowes

Anon., Particulars and Conditions of Sale of the Leasowes (London, 1795)
Anon., A Companion to the Leasowes, Hagley, and Enville; with A Sketch of Fisherwick, near Lichfield (Birmingham, 1789; repr. with illustration and slightly amended preface, 1800)
Anon., A Description of Hagley, Envil and the Leasowes, wherein All the Latin Inscriptions are translated and every particular Beauty described (Birmingham, c.1800)
Jabez Maud Fisher, An American Quaker in the British Isles: The Travel Journals of Jabez Maud Fisher, 1775-1779, ed. K. Morgan (Oxford, 1993)
William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, On Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmorland (2 vols., London, 1786)
Louis Stanislas Comte de Girardin, Promenade ou itinéraire des jardins d’Ermenonville (Paris, 1788)
Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote: or, the Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffrey Wildgoose (3 vols., London, 1773)
--- Columella: or, the Distressed Anchoret (2 vols., London, 1779)
--- Recollections of Some Particulars in the Life of the Late William Shenstone, Esq. (London, 1788)
Joseph Heely, Letters on the Beauties of Hagley, Envil, and the Leasowes. With Critical Remarks: and Observations on the Modern Taste in Gardening (2 vols., London, 1777)
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book 1766-1824, ed. E. M. Betts (Philadelphia, PA, 1944)
Samuel Johnson, The Poetical Works of William Shenstone, with the Life of the Author, by Samuel Johnson LL.D. (‘The Poets of Great Britain, Vol. LIV’; London, 1807)
George W. Johnson, A History of English Gardening, Chronological, Biographical, Literary, and Critical (London, 1829)
J. C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (London, 1822)
William H. Marshall, Planting and Ornamental Gardening, A Practical Treatise (London, 1785)
--- Planting and Rural Ornament, Being a Second Edition, with Large Additions, of Planting and Ornamental Gardening, A Practical Treatise (2 vols., London, 1796)
George Mason [published anonymously], An Essay on Design in Gardening (London, 1768)
--- An Essay on Design in Gardening, first published in MDCCLXVIII. Now greatly Augmented (London, 1795)
Thomas Percy, Reliques of English Poetry (2 vols., London, 1876)
--- The Percy Letters, general eds. Cleanth Brooks & A. F. Falconer (9 vols., New Haven, CT, 1977)
Humphrey Repton, The Art of Landscape Gardening: including his Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening and Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, ed. John Nolen (London & New York, 1907)
Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn (2 vols., Oxford, 1966)
Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (London, 1770)
Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour through the North of England (4 vols., 1770)

II. SECONDARY SOURCES

Books

Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Aldershot, 1988)
Mavis Batey & Paul Lambert, The English Garden Tour: A View into the Past (London, 1990)
Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860 (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA, 1986)
William A. Brogden, ‘The ferme ornée and changing attitudes to agricultural improvement’, in Robert P. Maccubbin & Peter Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Williamsburg, VA, 1984)
Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford, 1978)
Douglas D. C. Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden (New Haven, CT, 1993)
Derek Clifford, A History of Garden Design (London, 1962; 2nd edn., 1966)
James Stevens Curl, Georgian Architecture (Newton Abbot, 1993)
Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, William Shenstone and the Leasowes (Dudley, 1988)
Patrick Goode & Michael Lancaster (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Gardens (Oxford, 1986)
Ian A. Gordon (ed.), Shenstone’s Miscellany 1759-1763 (Oxford, 1952)
Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening (Harmondsworth, 1960)
--- The English Landscape Garden (Aylesbury, 1977)
Peter Hughes & David Williams (eds.), The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto, 1971)
A. R. Humphreys, William Shenstone: an Eighteenth-Century Portrait (Cambridge, 1937)
John Dixon Hunt, William Kent: Landscape Garden Designer (London, 1987)
--- ‘“Ut pictura poesis”: the garden and the picturesque in England (1710-1750)’, in Monique Mosser & George Teyssot (eds.), The History of Garden Design: the Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day (London, 1991)
--- Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1992)
John Dixon Hunt & Peter Willis (eds.), The Genius of the Place: the English Landscape Garden 1620-1820 (Cambridge, MA, 1975; new edn. 1988)
David Jacques, Georgian Gardens: the Reign of Nature (London, 1991)
Robert P. Maccubbin & Peter Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Williamsburg, VA, 1984)
Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope 1731-1743 (Toronto, 1969)
Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1925)
Peter Martin, Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: the Gardening World of Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT, 1984)
Monique Mosser & George Teyssot (eds.), The History of Garden Design: the Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day (London, 1991)
Ronald Paulson, ‘The pictorial circuit and related structures in eighteenth-century England’, in Peter Hughes & David Williams (eds.), The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto, 1971)
Alexander Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (7 vols., Oxford, 1956)
Simon Pugh, Garden-Nature-Language (Manchester, 1988)
--- ‘Received ideas on pastoral’, in Monique Mosser & George Teyssot (eds.), The History of Garden Design: the Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day (London, 1991)
Monro E. Purkis, William Shenstone: Poet and Landscape Gardener (Wolverhampton, 1931)
James Sambrook, ‘Parnell’s garden tours: Hagley and the Leasowes’, in Robert P. Maccubbin & Peter Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Williamsburgh, VA, 1984)
--- James Thomson 1700-1748: A Life (Oxford, 1991) Jeffry B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thomson (Evanston, IL, 1973)
Christopher Thacker, The Genius of Gardening: the History of Gardens in Britain and Ireland (London, 1994)
Virgil, The Eclogues and Georgics, ed. R. D. Williams (New York, 1979)
David Watkin, The English Vision: the Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape and Garden Design (London, 1982)
Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton, NJ, 1978)
Marjorie Williams, William Shenstone: a Chapter in Eighteenth-Century Taste (Birmingham, 1935)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973)
Peter Willis, Charles Bridgeman and the English Landscape Garden (London, 1977)
Anthony C. Wood & William Hawkes, Sanderson Miller of Radway and his Work at Wroxton (Banbury, 1969)

Periodical articles

Carole Fabricant, ‘Binding and dressing Nature’s loose tresses: the ideology of Augustan landscape design’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 8 (1979), pp. 109-35
John Dixon Hunt, ‘Emblem and expressionism in the eighteenth-century landscape garden’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. XI (1971), no. 4, pp. 489-96
R. W. King, ‘The ferme ornée: Philip Southcote and Woburn Farm’, Garden History, vol. II (1974), pp. 27-60
Hal Moggeridge, ‘Notes on Kent’s landscape garden at Rousham’, Journal of Garden History, vol. VI (1986), no. 3, pp. 187-226
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, pp. 187-217
John Riely, ‘Shenstone’s walks: the genesis of the Leasowes’, Apollo, no. 110 (1979), pp. 202-9
Max F. Schulz, ‘The circuit walk of the eighteenth-century landscape garden, and the pilgrim’s circuitous progress’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. XV (1981), no. 1, pp. 1-25

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