Christopher Anstey (31 October 1724 – 3 August 1805) was an English poet who also wrote in Latin. After a period managing his family's estates, he moved permanently to Bath and died after a long public life there. His poem, The New Bath Guide, brought him to fame and began an easy satirical fashion that was influential throughout the second half of the 18th century. Later he wrote An Electoral Ball, another burlesque of Bath society that allowed him to develop and update certain themes in his earlier work. Among his Latin writing were translations and summaries based on both these poems; he was also joint author of one of the earliest Latin translations of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which went through several editions both in England and abroad.
Life Anstey was the third child and only son of the Rev. Dr. Christopher Anstey, the rector of Brinkley in Cambridgeshire, and his wife Mary Thompson, born on 31 October 1724 in Trumpington. He was educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself for his Latin verses. He became a fellow of his college in 1745 but the degree of M.A. was withheld from him in 1749 owing to his defiance of the university authorities and the offence caused by an address that is said to have begun "Doctors without doctrine, artless masters of arts, and bachelors more worthy of the rod than the laurel..."Anstey, pp. vi–vii. He joined the Middle Temple in 1746, but was not called to the bar.
In 1754, having succeeded to the prosperous family estates (including Anstey Hall in Trumpington), Anstey withdrew from the university. Two years later, he married Ann Calvert (1732–1812), daughter of Felix Calvert and the sister of his friend John Calvert of Albury Hall, Hertfordshire. For a considerable time Anstey lived the life of a country squire, cultivating letters as well as his estates, but publishing little of any note for many years. His family grew to include thirteen children, eight of whom survived him.
Following a period of depression aggravated by ill health after the death of a beloved sister in 1760, Anstey was advised to take the waters at the fashionable spa of Bath. Impressed by the place, he returned annually and decided to settle there permanently in 1770, his home being at No. 4 Royal Crescent for the next thirty-five years. In 1766, he achieved fame following the publication of The New Bath Guide: or Memoirs of the B__n__r__d Family in a series of Poetical Epistles, which went through some twenty editions before 1800. The work was enthusiastically praised for its gently satirical humour by such literary figures as Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray.
Later Anstey composed a work in the same vein, An Election Ball, in Poetical Letters from Mr Inkle at Bath to his Wife at Gloucester, published in 1776. The theme had been suggested to him at the literary gatherings of the Batheaston Literary Circle which he had been attending and to the last of whose regular anthologies he contributed. Other suggested themes occasioned published works of some length, but the connection did his reputation more damage than otherwise and was ended with the death of the coterie's patroness, Anna, Lady Miller, in 1781.Bishop pp. 68ff. In the years that followed, he thought of collecting his poems for general publication but the project was only finally completed by his son John in 1808.
Although Anstey declared himself uninterested in public office,Anstey p. xii. he had served as High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire for 1770–71, on the eve of his move to Bath. Once there, he busied himself in various philanthropic ventures, such as supporting the scheme for the support of the poor on behalf of which the Batheaston Circle's Poetical Amusements were sold. In addition he served between 1781 and 1795 on the board of governors of Bath Hospital, for whom he wrote effective fund-raising poems.Anstey pp. l–liii. Later he supported the work of Hannah More, in whose series of Cheap Repository Tracts appeared his long ballad, "The Farmer's Daughter, a poetical tale" (1795). His final Latin poem, the Alcaic stanzas addressed to Edward Jenner on his work on inoculation (1803),Anstey pp. 499–503. demonstrated the persistence of his humanitarian interests.
Anstey's normally strong constitution gave way early in 1805. He died on 3 August, and was buried at St. Swithin's Church in Walcot, Bath. Later a white marble memorial tablet was placed in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
Poetry
In Latin Poetry in Latin makes up only a quarter of Anstey's published output, but his poetical career both began and ended with it. His first major work was a translation undertaken in collaboration with his friend William Hayward Roberts, also a Fellow at King's College at the time, and published anonymously in 1762. This was Eligia Scripta in Coemeterio Rustico Latine reddita, a version of Thomas Gray's already celebrated "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" of 1751, on which they worked in consultation with the author himself.
Commenting on the draft sent him, Gray remarked that "Every language has its idiom, not only of words and phrases, but of customs and manners, which cannot be represented in the tongue of another nation, especially of a nation so distant in time and place, without constraint and difficulty; of this sort, in the present instance, are the curfew bell, the Gothic Church, with its monuments, organs and anthems, the texts of Scripture, &c. There are certain images, which, though drawn from common nature, and every where obvious, yet strike us as foreign to the turn and genius of Latin verse; the beetle that flies in the evening, to a Roman, I guess, would have appeared too mean an object for poetry." And further on he enquires, "Might not the English characters here be romanized? Virgil is just as good as Milton, and Cæsar as Cromwell."Thomas Gray archive
Gray's stance was traditionalist and did not take account of the way Vincent Bourne's poems had already demonstrated how Latin could be adapted to express contemporary reality. Preferring the latter's approach, for the most part, Anstey's version tries to remain faithful to Gray's text and certainly retains the historical English names rather than making Roman substitutes.Garrison, James D., A Dangerous Liberty: Translating Gray's Elegy, University of Delaware 2009, p. 153ff. It was published anonymously in 1762 and was later to appear in the 1768 and 1775 Irish editions of Gray's poems, along with an Italian and two other Latin versions of the Elegy.Thomas Grey archive In 1778 there appeared an emended translation in which the introductory lines were signed C. A. et W. H. R.Editio nova prioribus emendatior, Stanford University This was subsequently reprinted in Venice in 1794 and from there made its way into Alessandro Torri's multilingual anthology of translations of the Elegy, published in Verona in 1817.Google Books
In later years Anstey went on to translate himself. First there was his version of "Letter XIV" from The New Bath Guide, that was only included in the posthumous collected edition of his work. This was a 'humorous and whimsical' tour de force with both internal and end-rhymes, exactly fitting the spirit of the original.Anstey p. 95. Secondly, there was the résumé of the themes in his later The Election Ball in a 1777 Latin epistle to its would-be illustrator Coplestone Warre Bampfylde,Ad C.W. Bampfylde, arm. epistola poetica familiaris, in qua continentur tabulæ quinque ab eo excogitatæ, quæ personas repræsentant poematis cujusdam Anglicani, cui titulus: An election ball, (Bath 1777) of which an English adaptation, 'translated and addressed to the ladies', appeared separately in the same year.A familiar epistle to G.W. Bampfylde, London 1777, Google Books Anstey's other translation during that time was of the fables of John Gay, undertaken originally for the guidance of his sons, whom he was preparing for entrance into Eton. This was published anonymously in a badly edited state, then subsequently revised for a new edition in 1798. However, reviewers complained of its rigid metres and 'diffusion extended into weakness' as being badly fitted to the sprightly octosyllabics of Gay's original.The Analytical Review, London 1799, pp. 615–17. It had too much of the schoolroom about it.
In English Anstey was principally known for his long epistolary poem, The New Bath Guide. He never quite recaptured the success of that work, which was continuously in print throughout his lifetime, although he returned to humorous depiction of the same Bath types in such works as An Election Ball and "The Decayed Macaroni". Finding little to admire in such sequels, Horace Walpole judged that Anstey "ought to have shot himself the moment he had finished the Bath Guide",Bishop p. 67. but others since have seen more to respect.
Gray described the Guide as having "a new and original kind of humour",Cossic, p. 14. although in terms of the Classical models of his time it could be described as satire on the good-natured Horatian model. The alternative sharp Juvenilian style of the recently deceased satirist Charles Churchill was not for him.Cossic, p. 43. Indeed, in an unfinished poem preserved by his son, he had declared himself
Instead he made his subject matter the familiar follies of the landed squirearchy in a poem that, "while it includes a number of particular and topical Bath references to give the flavour of the place and time, has sufficient scope and is written from enough of a detached viewpoint to make its critique of manners and morals of enduring application."Bishop, p. 61. The work's eventual frontispiece clarifies Anstey's good-natured aim. Pictured there is a procession of the fashionable headed by a monkey and a Momus clown with, in leash, the fashionable crowd they lead by the nose.
Commenting on the appearance of the Guide, published far away in Cambridge on the other side of the country by an unknown author, his son later marvelled that "It was hardly possible that a work of this description...could have made its appearance under circumstances of greater disadvantage."Anstey, p. xx. The title was an added hindrance at first, since the third edition of the official city guide, now titled The New Bath Guide or useful pocket companion, had been published in 1765, the year before Anstey's work.Google Books Though it provided a useful point of reference to readers, repeated editions of the pocket companion, 'corrected and much enlarged', continued to sow confusion for as long as the two books continued to appear.
The Guide relates the misadventures of the three naïve children of a Northern squire, as reported by them over the course of fifteen letters to friends and parents, and incidentally give a comic picture of life in the spa. In a far departure from the Augustan manner common until then, the style is colloquial and written in loose anapaestic tetrameters, later to be characterised as the "Anstey measure" or "Bath-guide verse".John Strachan, British Satire, 1785-1840, Volume 3, Taylor & Francis 2003
The inventiveness of the rhymes and the puns on the ridiculous names given to the characters adds further humour here.