Abstract
Thomas Gray was born in London, in relatively humble circumstances, but because of family connections he was educated at Eton (c. 1725–34), where his closest friends were Horace Walpole (the Prime Minister’s son), Richard West and Thomas Ashton: they formed themselves into a close-knit artistic group nicknamed ‘The Quadruple Alliance’. All but West went on to Cambridge, and, shortly after leaving the university with the intention of studying law, Gray accepted an invitation to accompany Walpole on the Grand Tour to Italy. Their letters home to West describing their crossing of the Alps and the Grande Chartreuse are key documents in the development of a rhetoric of the sublime in eighteenth-century travel literature.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Ruddick, W. (1992). Gray, Thomas (1716–71). In: Raimond, J., Watson, J.R. (eds) A Handbook to English Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22288-9_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22288-9_34
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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