Elijah Fenton

 

My first teaching job, many years, was at Newcastle-under-Lyme school in Staffordshire. There hung above the door in the Memorial Hall a portrait of the 18^th century poet Elijah Fenton, which hangs above the door of the Memorial Hall, and on many occasions I wondered who Fenton was and why he appeared there. It was only recently that sought enlightenment from “The Lives of the English Poets”, by the great Doctor Samuel Johnson, who was himself a Lichfield man and proud of his Staffordshire origins.

  Elijah Fenton was born at Shelton in 1683, the eleventh child of a local landowner, and attended Cambridge University. He published a collection of poems and a verse drama, “Mariamne”, which was staged successfully. He also attracted the support of Alexander Pope, England’s greatest poet of the time, and assisted in the latter’s translation of Homer’s “Odyssey”, so he must have been a reputable scholar. But Johnson, though devoting six pages of his book to Fenton, only quotes two lines of his poetry, and even these he admits are not very good.

   Fenton was a Jacobite, which means that he did not accept George of Hanover, who became King George I in 1714, to be the legitimate King of England: instead he gave his support to the exiled James Edward Stuart (“the Old Pretender”) and his son Charles (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) who led the great risings of 1715 and 1745. Because of this, Fenton could never aspire to any official position, for that would involve an oath of loyalty to the Crown, and any patronage could only come his way from fellow Jacobites. Jacobitism was very strong in Staffordshire: Johnson himself never made any attempt to conceal his own Jacobite sympathies.

   Fenton left Staffordshire early in his career and moved south. He became a schoolmaster and tutor, and was briefly secretary to the Earl of Orrery, but Johnson admitted he found it impossible to trace Fenton’s career exactly. He was described as being amiable and well-liked, but also physically very lazy, lying in bed until late in the morning and seldom taking any exercise, which resulted in him being very corpulent. This possibly hastened his early death in 1730: Pope indeed said that he “died of indolence”!

   One difficulty remains. Investigating portraits of Fenton via Google, I found that none of them looked anything like the picture in the school Memorial Hall. I wondered who identified the portrait. And since Fenton died more than a century before the school was founded, precisely why his portrait should be hanging there, I had no more idea than when I started!