Author: Graves, Richard
Biography:
GRAVES, Richard (1715-1804: ODNB)
The second son of Richard Graves (1677-1729), antiquary, and his wife Elizabeth Morgan (d 1723), he was born at Mickleton Manor in Mickleton, Gloucestershire, on 4 May 1715 and baptised on 10 May. He was educated at Roysse’s grammar school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, before entering Pembroke College, Oxford (matric 7 Nov. 1732, BA 25 June 1736). He made several important friends at Pembroke including the poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone (1714-63) about whom he published a memoir in 1788. Graves had intended studying medicine but after an illness decided on the church and, after taking his MA at All Souls, Oxford, in 1740 and being made a fellow of the college, he was ordained a deacon in 1741 and priest in 1743. He was curate at Tissington, Derbyshire, where he met Lucy Bartholomew, the daughter of a farmer. The two eloped to London where they were married in the Fleet prison on 2 Aug. 1747; their first child was born in Oct. 1747 and they went on to have three more sons and a daughter. Graves initially kept his marriage a secret and retained his fellowship until 1749. His family believed he had married beneath him but the union was a happy one: “The Parting,” one of the eight poems he contributed to Robert Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes (1748-58), reflects sadly on a time of brief separation when Lucy was in London. In 1749 he became the rector at Claverton, near Bath, and he retained that position until his death. He was vicar of Kilmarsdon, Somerset, from 1763 to 1794. He ran a boys’ school (one of his pupils was Thomas Robert Malthus who became a friend) and he was part of the Batheaston literary salon run by Anna Miller (q.v.). He died at Claverton on 23 Nov. 1804, predeceased by Lucy in 1777, and was buried in the Claverton churchyard on 1 Dec. 1804. Graves was a versatile and prolific writer; he wrote prose in addition to verse and was best known in his lifetime for his novel, The Spiritual Quixote (1773). He wrote three more novels: Columella (1779), Eugenius (1785), and Plexippus (1790), and he may have been the translator of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther, published in 1779. (ODNB 9 Sept. 2024; CCEd 9 Sept. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 9 Sept. 2024; EN1; Alumni Oxonienses; Electronic Enlightenment [Robert Dodsley correspondence] 9 Sept. 2024)