The Hermit in the Garden: from Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome

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Please contact Oxford University Press for more information about this book/author or to request a finished book. 212.726.6033 or [email protected] OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi T H E H E R M I T I N T H E G A R D E N 0001733601.INDD i 10/25/2012 9:15:26 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi Oxford University Press publications by Gordon Campbell AS AUTHOR The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance Renaissance Art and Architecture John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (co-author) Milton and the Manuscript of ‘De Doctrina Christiana’ (co-author) Very Interesting People: John Milton Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–2011 AS EDITOR The Holy Bible: Quatercentenary Edition The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts (2 vols.) The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture (2 vols.) The Grove Encyclopedia of Northern Renaissance Art (3 vols.) Renaissance Studies (10 vols.) The Review of English Studies (13 vols.) The Complete Works of John Milton (11 vols., in progress) W. R. Parker, Milton: A Biography (2 vols.) Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and other Plays AS CONTRIBUTOR Grove Art Online John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation The Journal of Theological Studies The Oxford Chronology of English Literature The Oxford Companion to English Literature The Oxford Companion to the Garden The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography The Oxford Handbook of Milton 0001733601.INDD ii 10/25/2012 9:15:26 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi the hermit in the Garden From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome • | • GORDON CAMPBELL 0001733601.INDD iii 10/25/2012 9:15:26 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Gordon Campbell 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–969699–4 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd. St Ives plc 0001733601.INDD iv 10/25/2012 9:15:26 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi PREFACE orty years ago I was living in York, writing a thesis on John F Milton. I had a tiny hermit’s cell in the university library, from which I could forage in the forest of books around me. I knew that long after his death Milton’s body had been dug up and parts of it sold, and one day I decided to read Edith Sitwell’s essay on the subject (‘On the benefi ts of posthumous fame’), which was included in her English Eccentrics: A Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women , fi rst published in 1933. As I scanned the contents page for the Milton essay, my eye lit on another, called ‘Ancients and Orna- mental Hermits’. The idea of keeping an ornamental hermit in one’s garden was entirely new to me (as it will be to many readers of this book), and I was captivated. The publication of this book represents my release from that long captivity. The revolution in garden design in eighteenth-century England brought follies into landscape gardens, and these follies often included hermitages. In some circles it was deemed desirable to hire a hermit to live in one’s hermitage. These were not religious fi gures, but rather secular hermits. They were fi gures in the landscape, but their existence refl ected a serious vein in Georgian culture. Who were these people? Why did landowners think it appropriate to have them in their gardens? What function did they serve? Why did some landowners style themselves hermits? Why did others build hermitages with imagined hermits who had perpetually stepped out for a v 0001733601.INDD v 10/25/2012 9:15:26 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi PREFACE moment? Where are these hermitages, and what do they look like? These are the questions that prompted the research that underpins this book. The documentary foundation for the study of ornamental hermits is disconcertingly sandy. The essay by Edith Sitwell that drew me into the subject was largely derivative, in that much of her material was drawn from John Timbs’s chapter on ‘Hermits and the Eremetical Life’ in his English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (1875). Timbs’s chapter was in turn also largely derivative, in that he took some of his core material from an essay by ‘Florence’ on ‘Hermits, Ornamental and Experimental’, in Notes and Queries (1852). ‘Flor- ence’ cites sources, but the material that he quotes is elusive. Is he reliable? And who was he? There has never been a book solely devoted to ornamental hermits and their hermitages, so there are no familiar tram tracks for me to follow. In constructing my own tracks, I have chosen to begin with a small house at Hadrian’s villa near Rome and range through sub- jects from Adam’s hut in Eden and a chapter in a novel by Rousseau to the retirement home of an American president and the palace of a Russian empress. The paths that connect the hermits and their hermitages do not follow the geometrical contours of Renaissance gardens, but rather resemble the winding paths of the mid-eighteenth century, the period when the fashion for garden hermitages was at its height. Readers who choose to follow these paths will have many occasions on which to pause for moments of pleasing melancholy. The paths are not strewn with footnotes, which are melancholic without being pleasurable, but I have appended a list of hermitages and full list of works consulted to enable the curious reader to pursue any brambled byways that arouse interest. I have tracked down vi 0001733601.INDD vi 10/25/2012 9:15:27 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi PREFACE as many hermits and hermitages as I could, but every foray into eighteenth-century correspondence seems to bring yet another hermitage to light, and the process could go on indefi nitely. I have there- fore decided to call a halt, and to declare myself content to hear from any reader who knows of a Georgian hermit or hermitage that I have overlooked. vii 0001733601.INDD vii 10/25/2012 9:15:27 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi 0001733601.INDD viii 10/25/2012 9:15:27 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS have spent most of my professional life in a tower at the University I of Leicester, ensconced in an elevated hermit’s cell with a view. Like Simeon Stylites on his pillar (in Gibbon’s account), I have ‘resisted the heat of thirty summers, and the cold of as many win- ters’, and enjoyed the company of many visitors who have climbed the tower expecting to be taught. I have also been reading in my tower, and in connection with this project have particularly benefi ted from the published version of an important lecture on garden hermitages delivered long ago by John Dixon Hunt. It was Professor Hunt, then a young lecturer in English, who fi rst interested me in garden history; he has since gone on to shape the discipline of garden history, of which he is now the doyen . I have also learnt much from the researches of Eileen Harris, published in essays in Country Life and in an edition of Thomas Wright’s Universal Architecture. Of more recent essays, I would single out one by Edward Harwood, who off ers a historically situated account of the signifi cance of the hermit in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. I have drawn exten- sively on excellent reference books, notably Barbara Jones’s Follies and Grottoes and James Howley’s Follies and Garden Buildings of Ireland. The solid scholarship of Timothy Mowl’s ‘Historic Gardens of England’ series (12 volumes to date) is a wonderful resource from which I have often benefi ted. Electronic assistance has come from a multitude of sources, but I am particularly grateful for the databases ix 0001733601.INDD ix 10/25/2012 9:15:27 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 10/25/2012, SPi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS of listed buildings in England, Ireland and Scotland, and for the vast amount of reliable material in Oxford Art Online and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography .

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