Tongues in trees: Hannah More and the nature inscription

Jarvis, Robin

Abstract

Hannah More's ill-fated engagement to the affluent William Turner of Belmont (an estate situated around six miles from Bristol) is a well-known episode of her early life. Turner and More shared a keen interest in gardening and are said to have planned the improvement of the estate together. More wrote a number of poems suggested by the natural environment and Turner arranged for some of these to be inscribed on wooden boards and attached to trees in appropriate locations. Two of these boards were later renewed by the Gibbs family, who acquired Belmont in the 1830s and eventually united it with the adjoining Tyntesfield estate. Like their predecessors, these second-generation boards fell into disrepair over time, but in a more recent resurrection the National Trust, who purchased Tyntesfield in 2002, installed new boards in the plantation in 2018 to create a Hannah More “poetry walk”. This chapter considers the Belmont poetry boards in terms of More's contribution to the genre of the nature inscription, a form with classical roots that entered English poetry via Mark Akenside and became popular with the Romantics, including Wordsworth and Southey. The poems, here studied as a group for the first time, are placed in their biographical and cultural context, alongside the four authenticated inscriptions. The chapter explores the relationship between two apparently dissimilar genres, the nature inscription and the epitaph, a genre at which More excelled, and casts light on a little-known and neglected area of her life and work.

• Publication Date: Jan 14, 2022
• Deposit Date: Feb 2, 2022
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 14-33
• Book Title: Hannah More in Context
• ISBN: 9781000518429; 9780367553203
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003092971-1
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/8584766