Hayley's correspondences
The Fitzwilliam Museum holds the world’s largest collection of manuscript material relating to William Hayley (1745-1820).
He is little-known today, but, in the late eighteenth century he was acclaimed as a poet, a multi-lingual scholar of the arts, and the author of the bestselling and highly influential The Triumphs of Temper, a mock-epic poem advising young women on how to attract and keep a husband, which ran to 16 editions during his lifetime.
As well as poetry, Hayley wrote plays and biographies, the most successful of which was his life of the poet William Cowper. As his letters to Anna Seward show, he was a champion of women's writing. As his letters to his first wife Eliza demonstrate, he tended to be less supportive in a domestic context than in his professional ones.
Towards the end of his life, Hayley's work fell out of fashion. Posthumously (mostly because of his difficult relationship with the artist-poet William Blake), he has tended to be dismissed as a dilettante. But, over the past decade or so, scholars have begun to reassess his contribution to literary and visual culture. The extracts we've included from his long correspondence with John Flaxman give some indication of the extent of his influence.