Gray, the marketplace, and the masculine poet - Thomas Gray

Criticism, Fall, 1993 by Linda Zionkowski

"A Long Story" bears the distinction of being, in Mason's words, the "least popular of all [Gray's] productions" (Memoirs, 227). Written in 1750, the poem was published only once with Gray's approval, in Designs by Mr R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr T. Gray (1753); upon Gray's request, Dodsley omitted it from the 1767 edition of his poems, and Mason included it in his Memoirs rather than in his collection of Gray's verse (1775). Part of the public's dislike for the poem arises from the private nature of the events it narrates. "A Long Story" owed its genesis to a particular instance of aristocratic condescension: residing near Gray at Stoke Poges, Lady Cobham sent her niece, Henrietta Speed, and her companion, Lady Schaub, to relay her compliments on the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Gray, who was absent at the time, returned their visit and wrote "A Long Story" to commemorate the event.

Yet while these verses originated in circumstances recalling the days of patron-client relations, they call into question received wisdom about the benefits of such relations. In the poem it immediately becomes clear that the implied audience - the aristocratic ladies and gentlemen assembled to hear the tale - and not the speaker controls the poem's discourse. After four stanzas of details about the manor house and its history, a voice interrupts the narrator, chastising him for his loquacity; responding to the commanding tone of the interrupter, the speaker adopts a plainer, more direct narrative style: "A house there is (and that's enough)' (21). The poet's subordination appears even more plainly in the following stanzas. Lady Schaub and Henrietta Speed are described as a "brace of warriors" and "Amazon"(s) commissioned by Lady Cobham to "rid the manor of such vermin" (52) as the poet Gray; Gray, by contrast, takes the form of a "wicked imp" whose diminutive size enables him to escape the clutches of the masculine warrior-women ("Under a tea-cup he might lie,/ Or creased, like dogs-ears, in a folio" [67-68]). His safety, however, lasts only a short time. Unable to resist the spell of the ladies' calling card, the poet finds himself whisked to the manor house where the wealth and status of the peeress and her entourage (which includes the ghosts of her female ancestors) so awe the poet that "his rhetoric forsook him" (117); his power of persuasion is ineffectual before the majesty of class prerogative. He can only defend his versemaking to the polite circle by disclaiming his talent and subordinating his authority to theirs:

|He once or twice had penned a sonnet;

|Yet hoped that he might save his bacon:

|Numbers would give their oaths upon it,

|He ne'er was for a conjurer taken.'

Despite the advice of the "ghostly prudes" who were her forbears, Lady Cobham possesses sufficient noblesse oblige to forgive the poet and invite him to dinner. Aristocratic conduct has changed since the time of "fierce Queen Mary": the social power of upperclass women in Gray's day reveals itself through civility instead of severity, and condescension replaces corporal punishment in keeping the poet, like other social inferiors, in line.