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| Cottage in Needwood Forest (Joseph Wright) |
Found a few years ago in a job lot is this manuscript copy of a poem which ranks among the most famous ‘local’ poems in the English language. Needwood Forest was published privately in Lichfield in 1776 by one Francis Noel Mundy, a Derbyshire squire alarmed by plans to cut down and enclose much of the large Staffordshire forest he had known since his childhood.
To head a campaign against these plans he composed a long poem in couplets, influenced by Milton and Spenser, that celebrated its delights. Anxious to enlist the support of the great and good, Mundy allowed the manuscript to be circulated among a local coterie, some of whom made copies. Anna Seward, the ‘ Swan of Lichfield’ and Dr Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, and also of Lichfield, a celebrated physician, inventor, and author of another long scientific poem, The Botanic Garden, were among those who saw the poem in manuscript and contributed lines to it.
The main problem with my manuscript copy is that whoever created it could not be described as literary in any meaningful way. If we compare it to the published text
