James Thomson (1700–1748) was born in southern Scotland and spent his youth in Edinburgh. In 1725 he moved to England, where he spent the remainder of his life—mostly in or near London—except for a year or so touring France and Italy. In Scotland he had begun to write poetry; in England he alternated between poetry and drama. Some of his plays were very successful in their time, though they eventually died a quiet death, as befits 18th-century drama.

The book-length poem The Seasons is another matter. “Winter” first appeared in early 1726, with a revised edition a few months later. “Summer”, “Spring” and “Autumn”—in that order—followed at intervals of about a year. Finally, in June 1730, came the all-in-one version, with a long list of subscribers headed impres­sively by “THE QUEEN” (Caroline of Anspach, wife of George II).

About the Book

For a century and more after that first publication, The Seasons provided a steady income for artists and engravers throughout the English-speaking world. Most editions settled for one or two plates per Season, but in 1842 came the lavishly illustrated Bolton Corney edition. It didn’t begin and end with the pictures, though; the editor was also very concerned about getting the text just right:

“The poem is printed from the edition of 1746, which contains the final revision of the author—who died in 1748.”

It must have been fairly successful, as a second edition came out in 1847. That’s the one this etext is based on.

Almost every edition of The Seasons published after the author’s death includes four other pieces: a biography by Thomson’s friend Patrick Murdoch (d. 1774); an essay by John Aikin (1747–1822) from his 1778 edition; and two short poems, the “Ode on Thomson’s Death” by William Collins (1721–1759), and “Hymn” by Thomson himself. For his edition, Bolton Corney (1784–1870) retained three of the four, omitting the Aikin essay. It wasn’t because he didn’t approve of it, though:

“The most popular edition is that of the late Dr. Aikin. It has a preliminary essay on the plan of the poem, remarkable for its judicious criticism and classical terseness of style.”

I’ve included the essay here in case you want to see what you’re missing.

Pro tip: Resist the temptation to skip the “Advertisement”. At first glance it’s simply too cheesy to live—but it also gives details about prepa­ration of both the text and the illustrations. More details are buried in the editor’s footnotes to the Murdoch essay, especially Note 65.

Illustrations

The main text, consisting of four Seasons and the Hymn, uses the illustrations from the 1842/1847 Bolton Corney edition, placed as close as practicable to their original location. Details about artists and engravers are in the List of Illustra­tions, below.

Caution: Most illustrations were designed for specific locations in the book, wrapping around two, three or even all four sides of a group of lines. If your browser is set to an unusually large text size, the ends of some lines may collide with parts of a picture. Conversely, if you prefer small text, you may see some empty space. I don’t recommend trying to enjoy this book on a smartphone or similar small device.

For the other parts of the book—Murdoch’s Life of Thomson, Collins’s Ode, the Aikin essay—I’ve included illustrations from some other editions, ranging from 1730 to 1824. These include some fairly big names: the 1794 London edition featured the work of Thomas Stothard, R.A. (1755–1834), the 1824 edition that of Richard Westall, R.A. (1765–1836). Captions, if any, give the original printed titles.

And, finally: The little picture in the banner at the top of most pages is from the title page of the 1805 edition, which there wasn’t room to include.

Language and Formalities

This ebook is based on the 1847 (second) edition of the illustrated Seasons, published by Longman’s and edited by Bolton Corney. The Aikin essay is included from a different source.

Query: Why do the editors—whether in 1730 or in 1842—think the reader needs to be helped with spellings like “inspir’d” and “alarm’d” and “o’er”, while the same reader can be trusted to elide appropriately in all other environments? A random page from the middle of Spring yields: “The unfeeling”, “the oppo­nent” (pronounced Th’ unfeeling, th’ opponent); “Even so”, “Heaven” (pronounced E’en so, Heav’n); “neighbouring”, “brightening”, “vigourous” (pronounced neighb’ring, bright’ning, vig’rous). Answer: Oh, heck, who knows. One consequence is that -ed, written out, is always pronounced as a separate syllable: fabled, mingled, sprinkled, settled.

It is also not clear why Corney thought “choir” needed to be spelled “quire”, when 18th-century editions were content to use the modern spelling. It is especially distracting at Summer 190, where a reference to “the quire celestial” comes only a few lines before an extended metaphor about “Nature’s volume”, leading inevitably to mental pictures of a celestial printing press using quires of paper.

Double quotes are in the original; the typographic preference for single quotes was still a few decades away.

Illustrations have been moved to the nearest stanza break, or to the nearest sentence break if a stanza is unusually long. Line numbers have been regularized to multiples of ten. In the printed book, they were sometimes moved up or down one line, and were omitted entirely when there was a picture in the way.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the end of each section (Season or equivalent). The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is missing, but there is an appro­priately sized blank space.