Article ID: CBB202341709

‘The Astronomic Muse’: Charles Burney and Astronomy (2021)

unapi

Late in life, musicologist Dr Charles Burney composed Astronomy: An Historical and Didactic Poem, a twelve-canto poem on the history of astronomy, uniting his two amateur pastimes, poetry and astronomy. The poem led to friendship with Court Astronomer William Herschel, and for years Burney shared the work-in-progress, modelled (I argue) on Erasmus Darwin's scientific poems, in scribal coteries. Between 1807 and 1812, however, Burney burned the manuscript; only fragments survive. While biographer Roger Lonsdale attributes this destruction to Burney's ‘realization that for years he had been boring his friends’, I argue it was his fear, as he prepared the poem for publication, that the changing literary marketplace would damage his reputation as man of letters. My re-dating of the major fragment reinforces this argument.

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Authors & Contributors
Shearer, Emily Carroll
Purton, Valerie
Goldstein, Amanda Jo
Boswell, Michelle Suzanne Lang
Zimmerman, Virginia Lee-Alice
Wiegand, Dometa J.
Concepts
Science and literature
Poetry and poetics
Science and culture
Publishers and publishing
Popular culture
Romanticism
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
Enlightenment
Places
Great Britain
Arctic regions
United States
Germany
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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