Richard Polwhele

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Richard Polwhele (January 6, 1760 - March 12, 1838) was an English clergyman, poet and topographer.

[edit] Biography

Born at Truro, Cornwall, Polwhele was educated at Truro grammar school, where he precociously published The Fate of Llewellyn. He went on to Christ Church, Oxford, continuing to write poetry, but leaving Oxford without taking a degree. In 1782 he was ordained curate, married Loveday Warren, and moved to a curacy at Kenton, Devon. On his wife's death in 1793, Polwhele was left with three children; later the same year he married Mary Tyrrell, briefly taking up a curacy at Exmouth before being appointed to the small living of Manaccan in Cornwall in 1974. From 1806, when he took up a curacy at Kenwyn, Truro, he was non-resident at Manaccan: Polwhele angered Manaccan parishioners with his efforts to restore church and vicarage.

When in Devon, Polwhele had edited Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (2 vols, 1792) for an Exeter literary society; however, Essays by a Society of Gentlemen at Exeter (1796) caused a rift between Polwhele and other society members. Polwhele had by this time begun his History of Devonshire: this appeared in 3 volumes, 1793-1806, but his coverage was uneven and subscribers deserted. His 7-volume History of Cornwall appeared 1803-1808, with a new edition in 1816.

Polwhele's volumes of poetry included The Art of Eloquence, a didactic poem (1785), The idylls, epigrams, and fragments of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, with the elegies of Tyrtaeus (1786), The English Orator (1796), Influence of Local Attachment (1796), and Poetic Trifles (1796). However, The Unsex'd Females, a Poem (1798), a defensive reaction to women's literary self-assertion, is today perhaps Polwhele's most notorious poetic production: in the poem Hannah More is Christ to Mary Wollstonecraft's Satan.

Polwhele contributed to the Gentleman's Magazine and (1799-1805) to the Anti-Jacobin Review. He published sermons, theological essays for the Church Union Society, and attacks on Methodism (although he befriended his main Methodist antagonist, Samuel Drew). At the end of his life, retired to his estate in Polwhele, he worked to produce Traditions and Recollections (2 vols, 1826) and Biographical Sketches (3 vols, 1831). He died at Truro.

[edit] External links

• W. P. Courtney, ‘Polwhele, Richard (1760–1838)’, rev. Grant P. Cerny, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 19 Feb 2007
• 'Polwhele, Richard 1760-1838' at WorldCat Identities
• Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females: A Poem, Addressed to the Author of the Pursuit of Literature. London: Printed for Cadell and Davies, in the Strand. 1798.
• Anna Seward, Sonnet to the Rev. Richard Polwhele, on his poem upon the influence of local attachment