Mark Akenside

Poet and physician, born in Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, NE England, UK. In 1744 he published his best-known work, the didactic poem Pleasures of the Imagination. His haughty and pedantic manner was caricatured in Tobias Smollett's Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1757). In 1761 he was appointed one of the physicians to the queen.

Mark Akenside (November 9, 1721 – June 23, 1770), was an English poet and physician.

Akenside was born at Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of a butcher; All his relations were dissenters, and, after attending the free school of Newcastle, and a dissenting academy in the town, he was sent (1739) to Edinburgh to study theology with a view to becoming a minister, his expenses being paid from a special fund set aside by the dissenting community for the education of their pastors.

After one winter as a theology student, he changed to medicine. In 1741 he left Edinburgh for Newcastle and began to call himself surgeon, though it is doubtful whether he practised, and from the next year dates his life-long friendship with Jeremiah Dyson (1722-1776).

During a visit to Morpeth in 1738, he had the idea for his didactic poem, The Pleasures of the Imagination, which was well received, and was subsequently translated into more than one foreign language. His aim, Akenside tells us in the preface, was "not so much to give formal precepts, or enter into the way of direct argumentation, as, by exhibiting the most engaging prospects of nature, to enlarge and harmonize the imagination, and by that means insensibly dispose the minds of men to a similar taste and habit of thinking in religion, morals and civil life."

William Warburton took offence at a note added by Akenside to the passage in the third book dealing with ridicule. Accordingly he attacked the author of the Pleasures of the Imagination--which was published anonymously--in a scathing preface to his Remarks on Several Occasional Reflections, in answer to Dr Middleton ... (1744). This was answered, nominally by Dyson, in An Epistle to the Rev. Mr Warburton, in which Akenside probably had a hand.

Returning to England he unsuccessfully attempted to establish a practice in Northampton. In 1744 he published his Epistle to Curio, attacking William Pulteney (afterwards Earl of Bath) for having abandoned his liberal principles to become a supporter of the government, and in the next year he produced a small volume of Odes on Several Subjects, in the preface to which he lays claim to correctness and a careful study of the best models. His friend Dyson had meanwhile left the bar, and had become, by purchase, clerk to the House of Commons. Akenside had come to London and was trying to make a practice at Hampstead. Dyson took a house there, and did all he could to further his friend's interest in the neighbourhood. But Akenside's arrogance and pedantry frustrated these efforts, and Dyson then took a house for him in Bloomsbury Square, making him independent of his profession by an allowance stated to have been £300 a year, but probably greater, for it is asserted that this income enabled him to "keep a chariot," and to live "incomparably well." In January 1759 he was appointed assistant physician, and two months later principal physician to Christ's Hospital, but he was charged with harsh treatment of the poorer patients, and his unsympathetic character prevented the success to which his undeniable learning and ability entitled him. At the accession of George III both Dyson and Akenside changed their political opinions, and Akenside's conversion to Tory principles was rewarded by the appointment of physician to the queen. Dyson became secretary to the treasury, lord of the treasury, and in 1774 privy councillor and cofferer to the household.

Akenside died at his house in Burlington Street, where the last ten years of his life had been spent. His friendship with Dyson puts his character in the most amiable light. Writing to his friend so early as 1744, Akenside said that the intimacy had "the force of an additional conscience, of a new principle of religion," and there seems to have been no break in their affection. He left all his effects and his literary remains to Dyson, who issued an edition of his poems in 1772.

Akenside's verse was better when it was subjected to severer metrical rules.