The Life of Mark Akenside: The Breakthrough to Modernity

i

ii

THE LIFE OF MARK AKENSIDE

The Breakthrough to Modernity

BARBARA C. MORDEN

iii

In memory of

Dr Robin Dix 1956–2007

Akenside scholar

iv

Mark Akenside 1721–1770

v

Foreword

‘O! attend

Whoe’er thou art whom these delights can touch;

Whom nature’s aspect, nature’s simple garb

Can thus command [.]’

The Pleasures of the Imagination, Bk I, ll. 173–5

Mark Akenside was a brilliant poet and polymath whose significance was recognised by his peers and immediate successors: in a perceptive introductory essay to a popular edition, the poet and critic A. L. Barbauld praised Akenside’s ability to ‘make Poetry and Philosophy to go hand in hand’, and exhorted readers to ‘pay him the grateful regard which we owe to genius exerted in the cause of liberty and philosophy, of virtue and of taste.’¹ However, for various reasons, Akenside was to fall into obscurity. In this illuminating book, Dr Morden brings Akenside to a new readership in his full glory as a poet of distinction whose poetics influenced not only his contemporaries, but also two generations of Romantic poets. Morden’s fine appreciation of poetry of the period means this study is rich in apposite quotation of Akenside and his admirers: this is a study that is fired by enthusiasm and generous in its sharing of insight.

The book opens with some myth-busting, and a robust reclaiming of Akenside as a proud Northerner. (Indeed, Barbauld saw Akenside’s Pleasure of Imagination as exemplifying ‘the taste vifor moral beauty which has so distinguished our northern seminaries’.)² His various political and scientific interests are outlined, and attention is rightly drawn to the importance of the Protestant Dissenting community, an important link between Akenside and S.T. Coleridge. Building on the superb scholarship of the late Robin Dix, Morden provides an enjoyable and thought-provoking tour of Akenside’s poetry, setting it in its context but also demonstrating its importance to Coleridge, William Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley, and John Keats, all of whom – like Barbauld – were drawn to Akenside’s poetics of liberty and his night-sky poetry.

I was fascinated to learn, on p. 98, that such was the influence of Akenside to Keats’ circle that Charles Lamb even coined the term ‘akensidise’ to signify a rejection of classical shackles in favour of liberty. The word illuminates Akenside’s lasting power as an innovative and admired predecessor for even second generation Romantic poets, and is also, as Morden shows us, useful in understanding Akenside’s influence on J.M.W. Turner’s painting. This is indeed a book that is both readable and approachable, as her mentor Robin Dix requested, but it goes beyond its remit in offering fresh insight into this neglected author; I recommend it to you highly, and wish you pleasure in reading it.

Dr Emma Major,

University of York, 2022

Notes

1. A. L. Barbauld, ‘Essay on Akenside’s Poem on the Pleasures of Imagination’, in The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside (London: T. Cadell, 1796), 12, 36.

2. Barbauld, ‘Essay’, Pleasures of Imagination, 9.

vii

Preface

The purpose of this book is to honour a promise made to Dr Robin Dix before his untimely death in 2007. At that time, he approved and encouraged me to write a ‘readable’ and ‘approachable’ book which would once again bring Mark Akenside’s name to the fore. He was more than generous with his time and goodwill towards the task. This book has been some time in the writing, but now in the 200th anniversary year of Akenside’s birth, is the moment to make it public. So, as Akenside himself asked: ‘What need [more] words/To paint its pow’r now?’ (PTI, Bk 1, ll. 245–6).

All quotations from Akenside’s work are taken from The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. Robin Dix (Associated University Presses, 1996). Throughout the book The Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, is cited as TPI and the later version The Pleasures of The Imagination, 1772, as TPTI.

Before each chapter there is a short resumé of the ‘Argument’ – this follows the precedent of Mark Akenside himself, who was careful to offer such navigation through his poetry for the benefit of his readers. viii

ix

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One:Newcastle Scholar

Chapter Two:A Radical Student and Satirist

Chapter Three:Akenside the Lover and Medical Man

Chapter Four:A Prometheus Unbound

Chapter Five:Interlude I: A Collection of Odes

Chapter Six:Towards Relativity and Subjectivity

Chapter Seven:Musing and Conversations

Chapter Eight:Poetic Colour

Chapter Nine:Interlude II: The Inscriptions

Chapter Ten:A Valediction and Conclusion

List of Illustrations

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

x

1

Introduction

On 21 November 1821 a group of gentlemen with literary interests met together in a shop on Butchers Bank in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. They were there to celebrate the centenary of the birth of a famous poet and son of the town: Mark Akenside. Aeneas Mackenzie in his Discourse and Historical Account of the town and county of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1827, tells us that after reading poems in his honour, the group adjourned to the George Inn in the Cloth Market, where they ‘sat down to an elegant entertainment’ – which implies a good dinner and multiple toasts to Akenside’s memory.

Today, if you walk up Butchers Bank, now known as Akenside Hill with a pub bearing his name at the bottom, very few are conscious of who Akenside was and why he should be remembered, let alone celebrated. Indeed, if we read the information board outside the Church of All Saints at the top of the Bank, the suggestion is that, when successful and living in London, he spurned his place of origin, and for that reason is unworthy of any fond memory. This is, in fact, an unfounded slander which has persisted through the centuries.

There is no evidence to suggest that, once a person of note in London, he was, in the words of his first biographer Charles Bucke (1832), ‘very much ashamed of the comparative lowness of his birth’. Nor did he cut himself off from his Northern relations. Rather the contrary. In 1748 Akenside’s brother Thomas is recorded as having died, not in his native Newcastle but in London, suggesting that in his final illness he was cared for by 2his younger sibling. In a letter dated 1762, there is evidence that Mark was in the habit of regularly keeping in touch with his aged mother through his sister Dorothy. And, in 1768 he was left a legacy of £50 in the will of an uncle from Morpeth. None of this suggests any kind of breakdown in family relations. Nevertheless, the falsehood persists. Akenside’s name is still used to describe anyone who denies their provincial origins (the Akenside Syndrome). Far more positive is the evidence in his poetry that the landscapes of his native Tyne Valley were central to Akenside’s development and that he was proud to own it. As he wrote in his ‘Ode on the Winter Solstice’ of 1745: ‘Old Tyne shall listen to my tale/And echo down the bord’ring vale/The liquid melody prolong’.

The Old George Inn, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, est. 1582

3Dr Mark Akenside achieved great things in his lifetime: a reputation as a scholar and philosopher; recognition from the scientific and medical establishment; appointment as Physician to Queen Charlotte; and notoriety for his obsession with all things relating to ancient Greece. Above all, he was then and should now be acknowledged as a poet of consequence – nationally and internationally. Mark Akenside influenced generations of artists we now call Romantic. Wordsworth, Coleridge and the painter Turner were all indebted to his work and contributed to an international following. His major achievement, the epic poem The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and its unfinished variant The Pleasures of The Imagination (published posthumously in 1772), evidence his literary importance and his contribution to the history of cultural ideas.

Akenside’s work asserts the workings of the Imagination to be a dynamic and creative process. It is an idea that runs quite contrary to the belief of many early eighteenth-century writers, that the Imagination was a passive, mechanical operation based on a recombining of empirical experiences. This was a process closed and limited in scope, condemned merely to the assemblage and reassemblage of the data of sense experience. By contrast, Akenside considered the imaginative process of the artist-poet to be generative and exploratory, triggered by the interaction of individual perception and the natural environment. At moments, while very conscious of the poetic tradition, he celebrates a mind unfettered by convention and precedent, in open-ended, transgressive and collaborative poetry. For instance, in The Pleasures of Imagination, he takes the reader on a dynamic roller-coaster ride into realms of speculation, across the globe and out into cosmic space where the spirit ‘springs aloft’:

Thro’ fields of air; pursues the flying storm;

Rides on the volley’d lightning through the heavens; 4

Or yok’d with whirlwinds and the northern blast

Sweeps the long tract of day…

TPI, Bk 1, ll. 183–90

This is exciting, sensational verse that deserves to be read, preferably aloud and in a public space …

5

Chapter One

Newcastle Scholar

Born son of a butcher, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1721; family of Unitarian faith; schooling; vocation as a poet; publication aged sixteen in the Gentleman’s Magazine; early influences of