ST. JAMES'S STREET, A POEM, in blank verse. By Marmaduke Milton, esq.

[DUNSTER, Charles.]

Edité par London: printed for J. Debrett Piccadilly; and E. Harlow St. James's Street, 1790

A propos de cet article

4to, pp. [iv], 38; disbound. First and only edition. A topographical and topical poem by the Rev. Charles Dunster (1750-1816), who was rector of Petworth, Sussex, and thus a protégé of Lord Egremont. The inspiration for a composition in blank verse as well as the pseudonym came from Milton himself, in whom Dunster had an academic interest: he produced an annotated edition of Paradise Regained in 1795, and wrote also on Milton's supposed debt to Joshua Sylvester. From the fact that the poem was available from a St James's Street bookseller, Elizabeth Harlow, one can suppose that the habitués as well as the denizens of the street found the treatment of their locality flattering rather than biting. St James's Street had become fashionable, along with the rest of the area, after the redevelopment that began in the 1660s, and by the later 18th century the street was where the most socially-elevated clubs, shops and gaming-houses were to be found. Dunster - who never married - praises the beautiful women to be found there, but deplores the 'needless Ornament' of cosmetics and showy clothes, and admires in particular a flower-girl whom he celebrates as 'the Flora of St James's Street' in a rhyming section of some fifty lines in the middle of the poem (pp. 28-31). Otherwise he notes, without the condemnation that one might expect, the way in which the ladies are beginning to 'usurp the Whip and boldly grasp the Reins. with manly fortitude'. He also admires the fashionable gentlemen and the well-dressed servants, and, in a line which indicates class-distinction as well as colour barriers, comments on black footmen: . Sometimes at their head, Index of Rank or Opulence supreme, A sable Youth from Æthiopia's climes, In milk-white Turban dight, precedes the Train. (p. 14) This is quite a scarce poem: ESTC locates just four copies in the UK (BL, Cambridge, Durham and Bodleian), and six in the USA (Duke, Harvard, Huntington, Newberry, Penn and Yale).

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: ST. JAMES'S STREET, A POEM, in blank verse. By Marmaduke Milton, esq.
• Éditeur: London: printed for J. Debrett Piccadilly; and E. Harlow St. James's Street
• Date de parution: 1790
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Poetry