Christopher Anstey, poet, was son of the Rev. Christopher Anstey, rector of Brinkley, Cambridgeshire, where he was born in 1724–5. He was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. He was originally designed for the church, but his degrees being withheld from him, he retired into privacy “upon a competent fortune.” He was rusticated from the university…. He entered the army, and having married a daughter of Cabert of Allbury Hall, Herts, he obtained a seat in parliament for Hertford by his father-in-law’s influence. One of the most glaring of current literary blunders is the common statement that the “New Bath Guide,” of Christopher Anstey was in a great measure built on Smollett’s novel of “Humphrey Clinker.” The facts are that the “New Bath Guide” was published in 1766, whilst “Humphrey Clinker” was not written until 1770, and was first published in 1771…. The “Election Ball, in Poetical Letters from Mr. Inkle at Bath to his wife at Gloucester,” sustained the reputation won by the “Guide.” It seems to us even more brilliant in its wit, and finely touched as verse. Other productions in verse and prose have long passed into oblivion. The poetical works were collected in 1808 (2 vols.) by the author’s son John, himself author of “The Pleader’s Guide,” in the same vein with the “New Bath Guide.” He died on 3d August, 1805.

Personal

  Mr. Anstey was often with me, and you will believe he was very droll and entertaining; but what recommends him more, is his great attention to his family. He has eight children. He instructs his boys in the Greek and Latin, so that they are fitted for the upper forms of Eton School, where their education is finished. He has a house in the Crescent, at which he resides the greatest part of the year. Mrs. Anstey is a very sensible, amiable woman, and does not deal in the gossip of the place.

The New Bath Guide, 1766

  Have you read the “New Bath Guide?” It is the only thing in fashion, and is a new and original kind of humour.

  It is a set of letters in verse, in all kind of verses, describing the life at Bath, and incidentally everything else; but so much wit, so much humour, fun, and poetry, so much originality, never met together before. Then the man has a better ear than Dryden or Handel. Apropos to Dryden, he has burlesqued his St. Cecilia, that you will never read it again without laughing. There is a description of a milliner’s box in all the terms of landscape, painted lawns and chequered shades, a Moravian ode, and a Methodist ditty, that are incomparable, and the best names that ever were composed.

  The very ingenious scheme of describing the various effects produced upon different members of the same family by the same objects, was not original, though it has been supposed to be so. Anstey the facetious author of the “New Bath Guide,” has employed it six or seven years before “Humphrey Clinker” appeared. But Anstey’s diverting satire was but a light sketch compared to the finish and elaborate manner in which Smollett has, in the first place, identified his characters, and then fitted them with language, sentiments, and powers of observation, in exact correspondence with their talents, temper, condition, and disposition.

  Is not the fashion as well as faction of the time thus reflected to us vividly? Now, all excepting Christopher Anstey are forgotten, of these admired ones; nor is it likely that even Anstey would have been noticed with anything but a sneer, if, besides being a scholar and a wit, he had not also been a member of parliament. Beyond the benches of the Houses, too, or the gossip of St. James’s, this affluence reached. It was social rank that had helped Anstey, for this poem of the “New Bath Guide,” to no less a sum than two hundred pounds; it was because Goldsmith had no other rank than as a man of letters, depressed and at that time very slowly rising, that his “Traveller” had obtained for him only twenty guineas.

  The versification of this is remarkably graceful, and the spirit of good-humoured raillery is admirably kept up. The similarity of the metre and the subject of Moore’s “Fudge Family in Paris,” suggests a comparison which may be worked out not at all unfavorable to Anstey.

  Perhaps the best description of Bath in its heyday of fashion and popularity a century ago, is to be found in the verse of Anstey, burlesque although it be. “The New Bath Guide,” written in a light and tripping manner, well adapted to the subject and little previously known, had an immense vogue in its day; a vogue all the greater that some of the characters were supposed to be real, and the poignancy of personal satire was added to general pleasantry. It is so far forgotten by the general reader, that the extracts upon which I may venture will probably be as good as new. I do not apologize for a few omissions rendered necessary by the better manners of our times.

  “The New Bath Guide” does not rise or aspire to rise above a rattling vivacity, and has been far surpassed in brilliancy by later productions in the same style; but it is entitled to be remembered as the earliest successful attempt of its class.

General

  Since the first edition of the “Bath Guide,” never was a duller goose than Anstey!

  His other works hardly required the investigation of their date. In the decline of life he meditated a collection of his letters and poems; but letters recovered from the repositories of dead friends are but melancholy readings; and, probably overcome by the sensations which they excited, he desisted from his collection.

  A painter and a poet were, perhaps, never more similar to each other in their talents than the contemporaries Bunbury and Anstey. There is in both an admirable power of seizing the ludicrous and the grotesque in their descriptions of persons and incidents in familiar life; and this accompanied by an elegance which might have seemed scarcely compatible with that power. There is in both an absence of any extraordinary elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and higher interest to the laughable itself, by mingling it with the marvellous, and which has placed Aristophanes so far above all his followers…. On the whole, he has the rare merit of having discovered a mode of entertaining his readers, which belongs exclusively to himself.

  Anstey never repeated the success of the “New Bath Guide.” His reputation as a rhymester and humorist attracted attention to his subsequent performances, but they have neither the freshness nor the vivacity of his first effort.