The Treatment of Pain/Suffering in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’ (1812) Anonymous College

When the ‘Great Cornhill Fire’ of 1748 swept through the Cornhill district in the centre of London, it obliterated nearly two blocks of the city, destroying more than one hundred homes, causing multiple deaths, and triggering widespread looting in the area (Mansfield). In the three years following this, painter and critic William Hogarth began work on his ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’, a series of engravings illustrating what Hogarth perceived to be the potential cruelty of humanity (Warren). Whilst initially such pieces of information may seem unrelated to one another, in the context of this essay, they serve to exemplify the collective experiences and feelings of pain and suffering which marked the ‘long eighteenth century’ society within which Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) was written.

Similarly, the obvious and immediate context of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’ includes the Napoleonic Wars, within which it is estimated around six million people died (Gates), and rising tensions with America that made further war with the newly independent United States. Such societal contexts, in addition to (as will be explored during the course of this comparison), the more personal...