William Shenstone (1714-63), poet, landscape gardener and arbiter of taste, is remembered for a handful of poetic compositions, among which

is ranked his most important. Shenstone was an avid reader and continued to revise his poetry throughout his life, a fact explaining the numerous variants of his poems. There are three different versions of

, the first published in his juvenile Oxford collection of

of 1737. The poem was revised for separate publication in 1742 and further revised and enlarged (35 stanzas) for the publication in its final form in 1748 in Robert Dodsley's

.

When Shenstone started writing the poem, James Thomson had already been working on The Castle of Indolence (1748),

1038 words

Citation: Jung, Sandro. "The School-Mistress". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 October 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7653, accessed 23 November 2024.]