“Jerningham is a literary magpie whose poetry is overwrought with allusive echoes of other poets,” comments a modern critic, only echoing the opinion of Jerningham's contemporaries.
Fanny Burney, for example, mentioned to one of her correspondents in 1780 that “I have been reading his poems, if his they may be called”; and even his friend Horace Walpole admitted “in truth he has no genius: there is no novelty, no plan and no suite in his poetry; though many of the lines are pretty”. He was a good imitator, however, and even something of a literary barometer, straddling the transition from
Augustan literature to early
Romanticism, which explains his interest to students of his period today. At the outset of his literary career, Jerningham mixed with the circle about
Thomas Gray, although he never met the poet himself. However, like many at the time, he began by writing a close imitation of Gray's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in "The Nunnery” (1762). Jerningham then followed it up in successive years with other poems on similar themes in which the connection with Gray's work, though less close, was maintained in theme, form and emotional tone: “The Magdalens: an elegy” (1763); “The Nun: an elegy” (1764); and “An Elegy Written Among the Ruins of an Abbey” (1765), which is derivative of similar use of the ruin theme in elegiac works such as
Edward Moore’s “An elegy, written among the ruins of a nobleman's seat in Cornwall”. Monastic themes were an obvious choice for a Catholic raised in Europe, but they are singular for being penetrated by notes of erotic passion. What is left unfulfilled in “The Nunnery”, wasting its sweetness on the desert air, is any chance of married life or sexual dalliance. And where the latter had been irregularly fulfilled, then it found a retreat in the recently opened refuge for reformed prostitutes, the setting of “The Magdalens”. There the religious connotations are intensified by Jerningham's description of its inmates “kneeling at yon rail” in “Nun-clad Penance” in the church where men of fashion such as himself went to hear them sing. The penitent male equivalent is treated in “The Funeral of Arabert, Monk of La Trappe” (1771), and in the heroic epistle of “Abelard to Eloisa” (1792), which serves as a pendant to Pope's earlier “
Eloisa to Abelard” and, like it, is written in couplets. Jerningham's use of this theme introduces another of the questions surrounding his originality. There had already been nine poetical replies in Abelard's name to Pope's original epistle, stretching from 1720 to 1785, but his is singular in stressing the historical background to Abelard's story. Although the material was available, as it was to Pope, in
John Hughes’
Letters of Abelard and Heloise: with a particular account of their lives, amours, and misfortune, no one before him had thought to include the quarrel with
Bernard of Clairvaux and the indictment for heresy as among the pressures that Abelard was under. An analogous case is another of Jerningham’s heroic epistles, “Yarico to Inkle” (1766), of which there had also been several other examples under that title in the four decades before his appeared. The original story concerned an “Indian maid” who had saved a shipwrecked mariner on the North American coast and was subsequently sold by him into slavery. Jerningham's contribution was to shift the story into the context of the growing movement against the slave trade by making Yarico an African negro who draws attention to the anomaly in Christian doctrine that allows such discrimination against those of another race. One example of the transitional nature of Jerningham's work is found in his “Enthusiasm”, a quasi-philosophical poem in which the “Enthusiastic Maid, Daughter of Energy” is put on trial in a heaven for her bad effect on the progress of civilization. In the first half of the poem, a prosecuting seraph condemns her as the cause of the Muslim burning of the Alexandrian library and the Catholic massacres and persecution of Protestants in France. In the second part she is defended as inspiring the spirit of self-sacrifice, the signing of Magna Carta, and the defiance of received ideas as exemplified by
Christopher Columbus and
Martin Luther. At the end she clinches the argument with the example of
America's self-liberation, an instance of libertarian thinking that would very shortly be regarded as treasonable in the wake of the reaction to the
French Revolution. The poem had its admirers, but one contemporary review found it too prosaic in developing its thesis. Though it is argued there that the poetry is insufficient to encompass its subject, it is rather poetical convention that impedes the meaning. Most historical allusions in “Enthusiasm” are so clothed in obscurity that they have to be identified by footnotes, and the heavenly landscape is encumbered with such abstractions borrowed from the odes of Gray and
William Collins as “Meek Toleration, heav’n-descending Maid” and Superstition who “Extends, in thunder cloath’d, her threat’ning arm”. But it is only the change in versification that divides Jerningham's championship of the significance of the American revolution from
William Blake’s just four years later in
America: A Prophecy (1793). Otherwise the veiled manner and personified abstractions remain much the same. It is Jerningham’s meditative description of “Tintern Abbey” (1796) that indicates most vividly the interface between a past manner and what was to come immediately after in
William Wordsworth’s “
Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798). Jerningham’s poem is a work of elegiac antiquarianism not very different from descriptions by other poets of the time and with the same aesthetic appreciation of the melancholy scene as is found in
J. M. W. Turner’s 1794 watercolour of the abbey ruins (see opposite). Wordsworth pays sly homage to this almost obligatory sensibility by interpreting the “wreaths of smoke” rising from the local ironworks as possible evidence “of some Hermit’s cave” upslope. But otherwise he turns his back on both past and present and perceives the natural landscape as having an eternal moral force that resonates in the imagination. The contrast could not be stronger. ==An object of satire==