Thomas
Hope: Triumph, Tragedy,
Obverse Worlds
Jerry
Nolan
Thomas Hope was the eldest son of John Hope (1737-1781), a
Dutch merchant of Scottish extraction and a member of a very wealthy and
powerful family of merchants and bankers who had settled, four generations
earlier, in Holland. Thomas was born on 30 August 1769 in Amsterdam. By the
early 1780s the merchant bank of Hope & Co were in the business of raising large
sums for kings and governments throughout Europe and in the United States of
America, and were recognised as one of Europe’s greatest banking dynasties.
After the death of his father in 1784, Thomas shared his father’s fortune with
his two brothers but appears never to have been active in the management of the
lucrative family business, which remained the source of his considerable wealth,
and he began as a young man to devote intellect, fortune, time and energy to the
arts, with the study of the architecture of ancient civilisations as the
starting point. In a letter written in 1804 to Francis Annesley Esq. M.P
‘Observations on the Plans and Elevations designed by James Wyatt, Architect,
for Downing College, Cambridge’, Hope closely linked his early interest in
architecture with his travels.
‘No sooner did I become master of my own actions, which
unfortunately happened at the early age of eighteen, than disdaining any longer
to ride my favourite hobby only in the confinement of the closet, I hastened in
quest of food for it to almost all the different countries where any could be
expected. Egyptian architecture I went to investigate on the banks of the Nile,
Grecian on the shores of Ionia, Sicily and the Peloponneus. Four different times
I visited Italy to render familiar to me all the shades of the infinitely varied
styles of building peculiar to that interesting country, from the most rude
attempts of the Etruscan to the last degraded ones of the Lombards. Moorish
edifices I examined on the coast of Africa, and among the ruins of Granada,
Seville, and Cordova. The principle of the Tartar and Persian construction I
studied in Turkey and in Syria.’
From 1787 onwards, Hope spent most of
the following eight years travelling as a student of cultures. During these
travels, Hope stayed for about a year in Istanbul/Constantinople where his
considerable skill in drawing was practised – some 350 drawings of the life
style which he observed among the rich and powerful in the Ottoman Empire now
form part of the collections held by the Benaki Museum, Athens.
After years of travel, Hope, at the age
of twenty six, returned to acquire an Adam House in Duchess Street, Portland
Place, London – a city where other members of his family had fled during 1794 in
anticipation of the French invasion of Holland. Hope was to establish himself in
London, for the rest of his life: as a scholarly collector of art, an interior
designer and a patron of artists and craftsmen. Unfortunately very few of Hope
personal papers have survived. Records show how Hope’s considerable wealth
enabled him to collect, especially on his oriental travels, many paintings,
sculptures, antique objects and books, which were displayed at first in the
Duchess Street mansion and later at the Deepdene, his country house in Surrey.
Hope was joined in London by his brother Henry, another art collector and
patron. Hope became influential in many London societies connected with the arts
such as the Dilettanti, the Royal Society of Arts and the Society of
Antiquaries. In 1804 Hope opened exhibition galleries, after having had the
Duchess Street house extended by one of the foremost architects and designers of
the period, Charles Heathcote Tatham, where visitors paid for admission by
ticket. The popular view of Hope was as ‘the Furniture Man’. The sobriquet was
regarded as a compliment by enthusiastic supporters; but in the case of
hostile critics, it was often used as a term of ridicule and an opportunity for
caricature, most memorably in the portrait of Hope and his wife as La Belle
et La Bête by the artist Antoine Dubost who had failed to be commissioned by
La Bête! Hope’s ambitions to influence taste pressed on regardless of criticism
as he sketched designs for furniture, room interiors and costumes which he
included in books for which he wrote accompanying scholarly texts. The main
thrust of Hope’s project in this area of interest was to advance historically
based knowledge of design. Eventually the number of his books as designer
were: Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807); Costumes of
the Ancients (1809); Designs of Modern Costumes (1812); and
posthumously An Historical Essay on Architecture, with the illustrations
based on early Hope drawings (1835). Hope triumphantly adapted many of these
designs for the interior decoration of his house in Duchess Street and for the
house in Deepdene, Surrey which he bought after his marriage and commissioned
the architect William Atkinson to alter according to Hope’s own plans.
After some years of anxious searching
among notable women for a wife and the future mother of his children, eventually
Hope was introduced to the beautiful youngest daughter of William de la Poer
Beresford, Archbishop of Tuam in Ireland and later first Baron Decies, who a
little reluctantly accepted his proposal. Hope was so pleased by this triumph
that when the Archbishop handed over three thousand pounds, Hope handed the
dowry back to Louisa when they were married in 1806. Apart from his children,
what Louisa quickly facilitated were Hope’s plans to entertain and court in a
grand manner the fashionable world of London. An old friend of the Irish family,
the novelist Maria Edgeworth, recorded her impressions of the Hopes at home at
both the Duchess Street mansion and Deepdene, in letters written to her own
family in Ireland. In May 1813, Edgeworth wrote about a grand reception in
Duchess Street: ‘We have been to a grand night at Mrs. Hope’s – furniture Hope –
rooms really deserve the French epithet superbe! All of the beauty rank
and fashion that London can assemble I believe I may say in the newspaper style
was there and we observed that the beauties past fifty bore the belle. The
Prince Regent stood holding converse with Lady Elizabeth Monck one third of the
night… About 900 people were at this assembly… I asked him (Hope) who somebody
was who was passing and he answered “I really don’t know. I don’t know half the
people here nor do they know me or Mrs. Hope even by sight. Just now I was
behind a lady who thought she was making her speech to Mrs. Hope but she was
addressing her compliments to some stranger.’
In 1817 the Hope family (father, mother
and three young sons) went on a tour of Italy. On the tour there was great joy
when one of Hope’s favourite protégés, the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen,
made marble busts of the family which included a bust of Hope showing him as a
dignified and calm thinker; but there followed horror on the death of his
beloved 7 year old son Charles in Rome; after which the boy’s ashes were taken
back home to Deepdene where a mausoleum was erected within the year for the
casket with his ashes. When Edgeworth visited the Hopes at the Deepdene in April
1819, she noted a change in Hope and his wife: ‘Mr. Hope himself has in his
whole appearance marks of having suffered much. The contrast between their
depression of spirits and the magnificence of everything about them is striking
and speaks volumes of moral philosophy to the observer’. Perhaps it was after
the unexpected death of his Charles that Hope experienced not only a sense of
personal tragedy but a growing self-confidence which enabled him to express his
wider human sympathies and well-informed views of the wider world than had so
far appeared in his writings and his entertainments. About this time, Hope
began work on the novel which was published by John Murray in 1819 as
Anastasius or Memoirs of a Greek, written at the close of the eighteenth century
in three volumes. Hope held back from revealing his authorship of Anastasius
in the first edition, choosing to adopt the mask of an anonymous editor of a
recently found ill-written manuscript which was being brought to public notice
for readers with an interest in the regions ‘once adorned by the Greeks, and now
defaced by the Turks.’ The erasures and imperfections of the journal were used
as a justification of the editor’s knowledgeable and enlightening notes at the
back of each volume. In the light of the immediate success of the novel, Murray
persuaded Hope to reveal his identity as author in the second edition of 1820
which would now include a map of the travels of Anastasius, some extensive
pruning of the text which did not include any revision of the novel’s narrative
flow. The revelation that Hope was the author was greeted with widespread
incredulity in the literary journals. In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
(September, 1821), there appeared a facetious article entitled ‘On Anastasius.
By – Lord Byron’ by Christopher North who argued strongly that there was
evidence on every page that Byron actually wrote the novel. This challenge to
his authorship provoked Hope, in a strong echo of his previous summary of
travels to back up his knowledge of world architecture, to proclaim in a letter
to the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine from Duchess Street dated Oct. 9,
1821 that not only had he written the novel but that it was all based on his
travels in the Orient some twenty years earlier, a significant time before Lord
Byron’s work appeared:
‘I beg to state, that in the course of long and various
travels, I resided nearly a twelvemonth at Constantinople; visited the arsenal
and bagnio frequently; witnessed the festival of Saint George, saw Rhodes, was
in Egypt, in Syria, and in every other place which I attempted to describe
minutely; collected my eastern vocabulary… on the spot, and whilst writing my
work; … adopted a fictitious hero in order to embody my observations in the East
in a form less trite than that of a journal; avoiding all antiquarian
descriptions studiously, as inconsistent with the character assumed; for the
same reason, omitted my name on the title-page.’
What most puzzled Hope’s Regency
contemporaries about his claim to authorship of Anastasius was the
pressing psychological question as to why and how Hope, the self-professed
neo-classical aesthete and the generous host at the magnificent houses of the
Duchess Street mansion and Deepdene, could have ever written such a romantic
novel which entered convincingly into the character of Anastasius, the young
highly intelligent rebellious youngest son from a wealthy Greek Orthodox family
on the island of Chios, who was imagined by Hope as an intrepid traveller, the
Muslim convert Selim, and the ambitious mercenary soldier who achieved social
and cultural mobility, political insights, and a blistering degree of
self-knowledge once he had fearlessly vaulted well beyond the frontiers of
parochial Chios to experience periods in prison and among the poor on the
streets of Constantinople before fighting against Austrians, Russians and Arab
factions during the twilight years of the Ottoman empire. What probably most
attracted the admiration of contemporaries like Lord Byron and William Beckford
was Hope’s unexpected ability to express deep intensity of feeling in the story
of Anastasius/Selim, careering across the whole Christian/Muslim divides within
the Ottoman empire, embracing friends and lovers and killing assorted enemies
and recounting utterly unexpected desert adventures like his encounters with
the Wahhabee tribes (Chapters V-IX in Volume III). Nothing of this romantic
resourcefulness surfaced during his grand receptions when his wife glittered
and he often seemed cumbersome and shy. However acute observers of the 1798
portrait by Sir William Beechey of Hope as a rich Oriental traveller hanging in
the Duchess Street mansion might not have been so surprised if they had spotted
the depiction in the background of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, a mosque for Muslim
pilgrims at one the most revered Muslim sites in the whole of Turkey as a
prophetic sign of Hope’s stirring passion for Islam which then cascaded onto
the pages of Anastasius.
The triumph of Anastasius among
the reading public continued until 1849, the year of its last edition, after
which the novel drifted into neglect and virtual oblivion. One suspects that
from the very beginning, his family were not too keen on the novel. The family
view was expressed in The Book of the Beresford Hopes by Henry William
Law and Irene Law with an Introduction by Viscountess Ullswater, published in
1928. Irene Law was Thomas Hope’s great-granddaughter and her aunt Viscountess
Ullswater was his granddaughter. Both women were descended through the line of
Hope’s youngest son Alexander. According to the Laws, Anastasius can be
best understood as one of Thomas Hope’s ‘recreations’, a straying away from his
neo-classical ideas – with some ‘literary help’ from the tutor to his sons, the
Anglican clergyman. Rev. J. Hitchens. The Laws included an extract of a letter
from Hitchens to Louisa which praises Anastasius along generalised lines:
‘Whenever it makes its appearance, of the splendour with which it will shine,
and the wonder and admiration and speculation which it will excite there can be
no doubt. A new star will have appeared, and the learned will seize on it as a
theme for their criticism, and the curious as an object for their speculation,
and all as a matter of wonder and amazement’. Perhaps the purple passage was
included by the Laws as an expression of gratitude to the memory of the
flattering Hitchens for his devotion to Louisa who had nominated him as a
trustee of the settlement made on her second marriage. However, other comments
strongly suggest that probably the only section of Anastasius deemed
wonderful and admirable by the Beresford Hopes would have been Hope’s preface to
the second edition in which the author referred to his wife Louisa as ‘the sole
partner of all my joys and sorrows whose fair form but enshrines a mind the
fairer,’ The financial success of the book prompted Hope to purchase the
so-called ‘Anastasius pearls’ (two rows) for his wife ‘from the profits’. The
‘Anastasius pearls’ were another example of the cult of Louisa as a supreme
beauty which glowed forth from the picture and engraving of 1812 in which George
Dawe painted a radiant Louisa posing on the bottom steps of staircase before an
overawed and adoring dog. The striking difference between Dawe’s lovely
representation of Louisa and Hope’s representation in the 1798 Beechey portrait
was noted by the Laws with some relish: ‘Thomas, himself a short and rather ugly
man, was represented in Turkish costume by Sir William Beechey, who thus
succeeded in hiding his physical defects, and giving him a more or less romantic
appearance.’ Here was the Beresford Hope family’s own distinctive version of
the theme of La Belle and Le Bête!
The Laws suggested that the initial
reluctance of Louisa to accept Hope’s marriage proposal was linked to her
earlier affection for a childhood friend, William Carr Beresford, the
illegitimate son of her uncle, the Earl of Tyrone and the first Marquis of
Waterford. Carr, who was born in 1768. After a period of tough military training
in Strasbourg, Beresford’s tours of military service from 1785 onwards included
such places as Nova Scotia, France, Corsica, the West Indies, India, Egypt,
South America, India, Portugal and Brazil. The period of military service for
which he became best known was his spell as Marshal in the Portuguese army,
fighting alongside a fellow Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, in the Peninsular
War (1809-1811). In 1811 Beresford began dabbling in Tory parliamentary politics
in County Waterford in Ireland. In 1828 his old comrade-in-arms appointed him
to the post of master-general of the ordnance in Wellington’s first ministry.
In his novel Thomas Hope imagined Anastasius/Selim as a soldier in the ranks of
the Turkish armies in the latter days of the Ottoman Empire where the grim
realities of the battlefields, the appalling political intrigues of the period,
and reflections on the collapse of empire were not excluded from the records.
The exposure of such gory goings on was far removed from the manners of the
Duchess street mansion and the Deepdene, and somewhat closer to the London’s
Holland House set where Hope was more intellectually at one with certain Whig
causes. Edgeworth’s strongest sympathies always lay with Louisa and she was
always frank about her dislike of the Egyptian influences in the interior
decoration of the Deepdene which she described as ‘hideous’; but in April 1822,
she warmed a little to the storyteller in Hope: ‘The Deepdene is beautiful at
this time of year – The hawthorn hedges – the tender green of the larch and
sycamore in full leaf. We had a delightful walk one morning – Mr. Hope all the
time conversing very agreeably and telling me anecdotes – fresh from life’. Yet
nowhere in Edgeworth’s published correspondence is there any mention of
Anastasius. Perhaps the very idea of reading it seemed beyond the reach of
her imagination?
Louisa tried to secure an offer of a
peerage to her husband by using the good services of Wellington; but even Hope’s
offer of ten thousand pounds for that honour was rebuffed by Wellington’s
short-lived Tory government in the late 1820s. Probably with a great masked
sigh of relief, Hope turned to concentrate on writing a vast philosophical work,
to be entitled An Essay on the Origins and Prospects of Man with the
objective of exploring explicitly his unusual ideas about the nature of the
universe, the origin of species and the diversity of human cultures which would
amount to the fullest fruition of his world travelling in the external and
internal worlds. Hope’s death at the age of 62 prevented this very ambitious
work being brought to full fruition. Apparently against the wishes of his
family, the work was posthumously published in three volumes by Murray in the
year of Hope’s death which led to a very great deal of incomprehension among the
reviewers. An Essay was cursorily, if courteously, dismissed by the
Laws: ‘The book seems worthy of mention, inasmuch as in the passages quoted
there is certainly a suggestion of the idea of evolution, but as far as can be
judged, it appearance made no impression at the time, and none reaped the reward
or gained the applause that the author anticipated.’ Edgeworth recorded her last
encounter with Hope a few days before his death in February 1831 when that she
‘followed Mrs. Hope through all the magnificent apartments and then up to their
attics and through and through room after room till I got into his retreat and
then a feeble voice from an armchair “Oh my dear Miss Edgeworth, my kind friend
to the last”. And I saw a figure sunk like La Harpe – in figured silk robe de
chamber and night cap – death in his pallid sunk shrunk face. A gleam of
affectionate pleasure lighted it for an instant and straight it sunk again’.
Edgeworth’s reference to La Harpe evoked the memorable costume of the
controversial French literary critic whom she had met in Paris before he died.
After Hope’s death, Louisa received letters of sympathy from her friend at Court
and frequent guest at recaptions, Queen Adelaide, wife of William IV.
In 1832 Marshal Lord Beresford married
Hope’s widow. Beresford joyously responded to the devotion of his stepson
Alexander, then a schoolboy at Harrow. At this time Alexander’s older
brothers, Henry, Thomas and Adrian, became conscious of the need for financial
independence and determined to curtail Marshal Beresford’s involvement in their
family, a position which was being much welcomed by their mother and brilliant
young Harrovian brother. In 1836 Lord and Lady Beresford purchased Bedgebury
Park, in Kent, the seat of Francis Law whose descendant Henry William would
marry Irene Beresford Hope. His brother-in-law, Henry Philip Hope, helped to pay
for extensions to Bedgebury Park. On Henry Philip’s death in 1834, there was
open warfare between the Marshal and his disobedient stepsons who battled in the
courts for a greater share of the Hope inheritance, which included the family’s
collection of jewels. The retired Marshal had a battle on another front where he
engaged in an acrimonious verbal battle with Sir William Napier in three angry,
somewhat ponderous, long pamphlets about alleged mishandling of the Albuera
campaign during the Peninsular War in 1811. The Laws recorded how Louisa changed
as Lady Beresford: while she retained her old fondness for jewels and of
wealth, largely as a result of the influence of Alexander – Cambridge University
luminary, Tory M.P. and one of the most vocal leaders of the Anglican High
church party – she began to devote some of her wealth to educational and pious
objects and ‘observed Church seasons and ordinances with far greater regularity
than of old.’ Lady Beresford died in 1851 and bequeathed the Anastasian pearls
to her eldest son, Henry Thomas. Marshal Beresford died in 1854, whereupon his
titles became extinct. Thereafter, Alexander decided to found a Beresford Hope
dynasty by changing his family name to Beresford Hope, a change which had been
the wish of his stepfather. Alexander married Mildred, daughter of J.B.W.
Gascoyne-Cecil and niece of Robert, the third Marquess of Salisbury and future
Tory prime minister. Alexander and Mildred had three sons and seven daughters.
Their daughter Mary married James William Lowther, later the first Viscount
Ullswater and speaker of the House of Commons. The male line of Beresford Hopes
lasted two generations and ended when Alexander’s grandson, Harold Thomas, died
in 1917. As the most publicly honoured of Thomas Hope’s sons – closely
associated with Lord Salisbury’s coterie of relatives and decorated with
honorary doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic – Alexander felt in 1861 that
he might deign for one reason only to pigeon hole his father as ‘a man of
genius’ in The English Cathedral of the 19th Century as he
looked back on his childhood in Duchess Street:
I may be allowed to leave on record that
impression of early but vivid recollections of the taste, the fancy, the eye for
colour and form, which characterised the whole conception. The style was not
suited for practical use, and so the experiment broke down; but it was the
experiment of a man of genius, and not to be confused with the contemporary and
parallel, but far more insipid, Empire epoch of French art. The great fact for
which Thomas Hope deserves the gratitude of posterity… was that he, first of
Englishmen, conceived and taught the idea of art – manufacture, of allaying the
beauty of form to the wants and productions of common life.
In reality, Hope’s legacy as the
Furniture man was already in decline in A.J.B. Beresford-Hope’s lifetime.
Duchess Street house was sold off in 1850 by Henry Thomas Hope, great friend of
Disraeli, Young England politician, promoter of the London and Westminster Joint
Stock Bank, patron of the Great Exhibition, after which the Duchess Street house
was demolished in 1851. The Deepdene was modified by Henry Thomas into a
pioneering example of a Victorian High Renaissance palazzo and
landscaping, and remained in the possession of the Hope family until 1917, when
it was sold off and the collections appeared in Christie Sales Catalogues. Quite
a few of the objects which had been illustrated by Hope in Household
Furniture were bought by the great enthusiast for a Regency Revival in
furniture, the playwright Edward Knoblock, who went on to trumpet his Hope
collection. Subsequently the stripped-out Deepdene building was used as a hotel,
and after having being reordered into British Rail offices, was finally sold off
and demolished in 1969. In the grounds remains the mausoleum erected by Hope in
1818 over the buried ashes of Charles and consecrated as the family burial place
by Louisa’s cousin, Lord John Beresford, Bishop of Raphoe and afterwards
Archbishop of Armagh. Of the 33 tomb-recesses, only 9 were filled over the years
and the last internment was that of the 8th Duke of Newcastle in 1941
before the mausoleum was sealed up in 1957 and lurks in the countryside as an
obscure monument to the tragedy of a forgotten Hope.
In retrospect, one of the roots of
Hope’s personal tragedy seems to have been that, for all of his anxious
protestations of love of Louisa, and genuine gratitude for her acceptance of him
as her husband, there was in their arranged marriage a disconnectedness of mind,
a sense of separateness which was perpetuated among the Beresford Hopes and
recorded by the Laws. Certainly Alexander seems to have had little respect or
understanding for the diversity of his father’s vision, possibly because in
parts it included radical criticism of the conventional wisdom of the High
Anglicanism which Alexander espoused. Alexander’s political convictions included
admiration for Stonewall Jackson’s part in the American Civil war. Clearly
Thomas Hope’s youngest son felt closest to his stepfather and expressed that
adoration by organising at the church in Kilndown school, on the first Sunday
after the Marshal’s funeral, a solemn missa pro defunctis, with the
Beresford motto Nil nisi cruce displayed on large black wall hangings.
There is a very sad irony in the fact that Alexander was determined to restrict
his father’s triumphs to the world of furniture design. When Alexander was in
the womb, Hope was creating the character of Alexis as the son of Anastasius who
became the solar star leading his father out of the desert and whose death as a
child in Trieste was the blow from which Anastasius would never recover. The
inspiration for Alexis was his deceased son Charles who in the Laws version of
family history was, by intention or an oversight, omitted from the family tree
included at the front of their book: neither was the Sir Thomas Lawrence
portrait of Charles as an Infant Bacchus, commissioned by Hope in 1816,
reproduced by the Laws. If Alexander ever yielded to the temptation to glance
over his father’s novel in later years, doubtless he would have grown ever more
determined never to be mentioned in the same breath as poor Alexis! It was left
to the daughter of Henry Thomas, Henrietta, who married Lord Lincoln, later the
6th Duke of Newcastle, to take care of the Lawrence portrait of
Charles as a central part of the Hope legacy, a tradition which has been
preserved by subsequent Dukes of Newcastle.
Hope had his contrasting triumphs: as
the ‘Furniture Man’ and as the ‘Anastasius/Selim man’. During his lifetime, few
of Hope’s guests, not even the attentive Edgeworth, seem to have understood, or
even sensed, the sources of his great imaginative power when he first turned to
write about the obverse of western cultures and civilisations as a direct
consequence of his travels in the Orient shortly after the early death of a
beloved son. In the tradition of the Beresford Hopes, Hope enthusiasts today
still choose to value one side of the Hope coin and to devalue the other. The
Hope Exhibition at the V & A in London and at the Bard in New York will provide
a prominent showcase to appreciate one triumph; and this edition of Anastasius,
the first in a single volume, ought to prompt the same people, and many others,
to respond to the both. What a tragic loss of opportunity if the two sides of
Hope are not at last pieced together in the wake of 2008, the year of the
exhibition and the book.
Selected Bibliography
A.J.C. Hare, editor, The Life and
Letters of Maria Edgeworth. 2 vols. (London; Arnold, 1894)
Henry William Law & Irene Law, The
Book of the Beresford Hopes (London: Heath Cranton, 1925)
Sandor Baugarten, Le Crepuscule Neo-Classique:
Thomas Hope (Paris: Didier, 1958)
David Watkin, Thomas Hope and the
Neo-Classical Idea (London: Murray, 1968)
Christina Colvin, editor, Maria
Edgeworth: Letters from England 1813-1844 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)
Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A
Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972)
Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford University Press 2004-7): The entries for
Hope Family (c.1700-1813) by John Orbell; Henry Thomas Hope (1808-1862) by Mary
S. Millar; William Carr Beresford (1768-1854) by Gordon L. Teffeteller;
Alexander James Beresford Beresford-Hope (1820-1887) by J. Mordaunt Crook.
Gordon W. Batchelor, The Beresfords
of Bedgebury Park (Goudhurst: W.J.C. Musgrave, 1996)
Note:
Thanks to the foresight of the current John Murray, the immensely valuable
family publishing archive, consisting of over 150,000 manuscript items, together
with ledgers and letter books have been placed for safe-keeping within the
National Library of Scotland with access for all. Those wishing to research
Thomas Hope’s literary connections to the fabled John Murray publishing company
are urged to visit the Murray Archive.
The John Murray Archive
National Library of Scotland
George IV Bridge
Edinburgh
EH1 1EW
Telephone: +44 (0)131 623 3878
Or visit the John Murray Archive
online: www.nls.uk/jma/index.html
Jerry Nolan is a
London-based freelance writer who has researched forms of Irish transcultural
nationalism in writers who are marginalised in standard accounts of the Irish
Literary Revival, including Edward Martyn, George Russell (AE), James Cousins
and James Stephens. His ongoing research is concerned with the work of three
writers who looked to the East for inspiration: William Beckford (Vathek),
Tom Moore (Lalla Rookh) and Thomas Hope (Anastasius). His website
is: www.jerrynolanwriter.com
