author
Thomas Purney
b. 1695
An early 18th-century English poet and clergyman, he is best remembered for pastoral verse and for writing about the nature of pastoral poetry. His life also took an unusual turn through work connected with Newgate Prison, giving his career a striking mix of literary and clerical worlds.
1 Audiobook
A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717)
by Thomas Purney
About the author
Born in 1695, Thomas Purney was an English poet and clergyman associated with the early 1700s. Sources available here connect him with Clare College, Cambridge, and with literary work published while he was still a young man, including Pastorals and A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral.
Purney is remembered less as a major canonical figure than as an interesting voice in the literary culture of his time. His writing shows a strong interest in pastoral poetry, both as a creative form and as a subject for criticism, which makes him notable to readers curious about how 18th-century writers argued about poetry as well as practiced it.
He also served in a role connected with Newgate Prison: the available sources identify him as an Ordinary of Newgate, and one source says he was born in Kent in 1695, ceased acting in the post in September 1725 because of ill health, and died on November 14, 1727. No clearly suitable portrait could be confirmed from the sources reviewed here.