Abstract
Descended from an established Derbyshire family and educated at Cambridge, William Gell embarked on several groundbreaking expeditions to the eastern Mediterranean at the beginning of the nineteenth century. His explorations included a systematic survey of the Greek mainland in the footsteps of Pausanius, a search for the site of Homeric Troy, and a study of Odysseus’ home island of Ithaca. Gell became known as “Classic Gell” and was knighted for his accomplishments. As a younger son and stepson, however, Gell’s financial prospects were precarious, therefore he welcomed an appointment as chamberlain in Caroline’s little court.
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Notes
- 1.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, “Thomas Blore.” There is no full-length biography of Gell; for a concise assessment of his character and archaeological attainments see Edith Clay, Sir William Gell in Italy. Also see Gell’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- 2.
Madden, The Literary Life of the Countess of Blessington, 2: 17.
- 3.
Clay, Sir William Gell in Italy, 28, n.
- 4.
Charles James Mathews, Life of Charles James Mathews, Charles Dickens, ed., 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1879), 1: 103.
- 5.
Gell’s sketch of his cottage is in his journal “Drawings by Sir William Gell, M.A., R.R.S., F.S.A.,” Gell papers, Derbyshire County Record Office. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grassmere Journals, Pamela Woof, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 145.
- 6.
Gell’s lost manuscripts appear from time to time. This one surfaced at a public library in 1951 and was published seventeen years later. Gell, A Tour of the Lakes Made in 1797 by William Gell, William Rollinson, ed. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Frank Graham, 1968).
- 7.
Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, E. de Selincourt, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1959), 1: 38.
- 8.
M. R. Bruce, “A Tourist in Athens, 1801,” Journal of Hellenistic Studies, 92 (1972): 173–75; M. I. Wiencke, “Fauvel’s Model of the Parthenon and Some Drawings of Gell from the Time of the Elgin Mission, 1801–03,” American Journal of Archaeology, 78 (1974): 184–85.
- 9.
Edward Dodwell, A Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece During the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806, 2 vols. (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1819) , 1: 322. But see Bruce, “A Tourist in Athens, 1801”: “[Dodwell’s account] combines inaccurate recollection of facts … and hindsight sentiment. There is no sign that in 1801 he felt ‘inexpressible mortification’ at the damage, though he may well have felt this four years later.”
- 10.
Bruce, “A Tourist in Athens, 1801,” 174.
- 11.
Bruce, “A Tourist in Athens, 1801,” 175.
- 12.
Glyn Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 153; Theodore Vrettros, A Shadow of Magnitude: The Acquisition of the Elgin Marbles (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 80–82.
- 13.
William Gell, The Topography of Troy , and Its Vicinity (London: Longman and O. Rees, 1804).
- 14.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, English Bards, and Scottish Reviewers, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1810), 80.
- 15.
The passage came after stanza XIII of Canto II where Byron was writing about the removal of the Elgin Marbles. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt, Thomas Moore, ed. (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1854), 76.
- 16.
Gell, Narrative of a Journey in the Morea (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 91.
- 17.
Gell to the Earl of Aberdeen, October 1804, British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MS. 43229, ff. 36–37. Some of Gell’s notebooks are in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the British Museum and the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library. Six more notebooks from this voyage and from his later expedition for the Dilettanti Society are in the British School at Athens; they are synopsized in A. M. Woodward and R. P. Austin, “Some Note-Books of Sir William Gell—I,” Annual of the British School at Athens 27 (1925–6): 67–80 and “Some Note-Books of Sir William Gell—II,” Annual of the British School at Athens 28 (1926–7): 107–127. The British School at Rome has a series of three of Gell’s notebooks. The Earl of Aberdeen had made a tour of Greece and returned with a strong passion for classical culture. He published a highly critical review of Gell’s Topography of Troy (Edinburgh Review 6 [July 1805]: 257–83) in collaboration with Sir William Drummond, but that did not inhibit Gell’s friendship with either man.
- 18.
William Gell, Itinerary of the Morea (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1807); Gell, Narrative of a Journey in the Morea (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823). There was also an Itinerary of the Morea : Being a Description of the Routes of That Peninsula (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1817) . It is a sparer version of the 1807 publication, presenting bare itinerary information with fewer maps and without illustrations.
- 19.
William Gell, The Itinerary of Greece, with a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo, and an Account of the Monuments of Antiquity at Present Existing in That Country , Compiled in the Years MDCCCI:II:V:VI (London: T. Payne, 1810).
- 20.
Gell, Itinerary of Greece (1810), i.
- 21.
The Itinerary of Greece; Containing One Hundred Routes in Attica, Bœtica, Phocis, Locris, and Thessaly (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1819) . Yet another edition of Itinerary of Greece was published in London in 1827.
- 22.
Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, Rowland E. Prothero, ed., 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1898–1904), 1: 360.
- 23.
Gell, Narrative of a Journey in the Morea , v.
- 24.
Gell, The Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807).
- 25.
Byron, Works of Lord Byron, 1: 351, 359.
- 26.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Life, Letters, and Journals of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore, ed. (London: John Murray, 1839), 76.
- 27.
A dozen of Gell’s Greek notebooks are in the British Museum, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Several more are in the Bodleian Library, Department of Western Manuscripts. Two are in the Bristol University Library.
- 28.
Terence Spencer, Fair Greece, Sad Relic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954), 205.
- 29.
Quoted in Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), 63.
- 30.
For the Dilettanti Society, see Lionel Cust and Sidney Colvin, History of the Society of Dilettanti (London: Macmillan, 1894); also Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008); Jason Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
- 31.
Gell to the Earl of Aberdeen, 3 December 1808, British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MS. 43229, f. 350.
- 32.
British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MS. 50135, f. 30.
- 33.
Gell to the Earl of Aberdeen, 3 December 1808, British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MS. 43229, f. 350. Gell’s Spanish sketchbook is in the British Museum, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Gell 12.
- 34.
Gell to the Earl of Aberdeen, 25 December 1808, British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MS 43229, ff. 366–67.
- 35.
William Gell, Views in Barbary and a Picture of the Dey of Algiers, Taken in 1813 by W.G. (London: Edward Orme, 1815).
- 36.
Gell to the Earl of Aberdeen, 3 December 1808, British Library, Department of Manuscripts, Add. MS. 43229, f. 350.
- 37.
Lionel Cust and Sidney Colvin, History of the Society of Dilettanti (London: Macmillan, 1894), 150.
- 38.
Cust and Colvin, History of the Society of Dilettanti , 152.
- 39.
Firmans (permits), letters of recommendation in Turkish, and miscellaneous papers associated with the Dilettanti Society expedition are in the Bodleian Library, Department of Western Manuscripts, MS. Turks. a.2.
- 40.
Mary Berry, Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry: From the Year 1783 to 1852, Lady Theresa Lewis, ed. 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1865), 2: 513–14. Six letters from Gell to Sir Henry Englefield, Secretary of the Society of Dilettanti, written during 1812 from Zante and Athens, are in the Getty Museum.
- 41.
Berry, Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, 2: 519.
- 42.
Henry Holland, Recollections of Past Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1872), 106.
- 43.
For a guide through the resulting bibliographical morass, see Charles Plouviez, “Straddling the Aegean: William Gell 1811–1813,” Travellers in the Levant: Voyagers and Visionaries, Sarah Searight and Malcolm Wagstaff, eds. (Durham: ASTENE, 2001), 42–56.
- 44.
An undated, unsigned, unaddressed letter in the Gell folder, Derbyshire County Record Office.
- 45.
For Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, see Iris Leveson Gower, The Face Without a Frown: Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1944); and Vere Foster, The Two Duchesses (London: Blackie & Son, 1898).
- 46.
Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, 1: 56–57.
- 47.
Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, 1: 207.
- 48.
Holme, Caroline, 155. Edith Clay showed me seven photostats of Caroline’s artwork from a private collection. They depict Sardinian people (i.e., “A Peasant of Cagliari”), which she would have made in the autumn or winter of 1815 during the first legs of her voyages around the Mediterranean.
- 49.
Brougham, The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham, 2: 113.
- 50.
Gell was technically a vice-chamberlain because nobility was necessary to be a full chamberlain.
- 51.
Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, 2: 335–36.
- 52.
Bury, The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting, 1: 108.
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Thompson, J. (2019). Sir William Gell. In: Queen Caroline and Sir William Gell. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98008-9_2
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