Thomas Traherne

Thomas Traherne was born circa 1636 in Hereford, England. An Anglican clergyman and mystical poet, he attended Brasenose College, Oxford, and became the rector of Credenhill in 1657. His most famous work, Centuries of Meditations, was discovered in the early 20th century. In his lifetime, Thomas Traherne published only one book, Roman Forgeries (1673). Traherne never married and had no children. He died on September 27, 1674, in Teddington, Middlesex, and was buried there under the church where he had preached.

Unlike other figures of the “Metaphysical Revival,” such as John Donne and George Herbert, whose works were widely known and discussed in the 18th and 19th centuries, the rediscovery of Traherne is owed almost entirely to 20th-century scholarship. 

Even though much of Traherne’s work remains unpublished, the discovery of his work is one of the great stories of modern literary scholarship. In the winter of 1896–1897, William T. Brooke came across two manuscripts at a London bookstall. Thinking that they might be the work of Henry Vaughan, he showed them to Alexander Grosart. Convinced that they were Vaughan’s, Grosart prepared to bring out a new edition of Vaughan, though he died before the edition could be published. After Grosart’s death in 1899, the manuscripts were acquired by Bertram Dobell, who decided they were the work of someone other than Vaughan. Brooke’s research on an anonymous work, A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation, part of which he had anthologized in The Churchman’s Manual of Private and Family Devotion (1883), proved helpful to Dobell, and, after spending time with this research, Dobell recognized that the author of the manuscripts and the author of A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation were the same person. The preface to the latter work identified him as chaplain to “the late Lord Keeper Bridgman.”

Once Dobell consulted his contemporary, Anthony Wood, the connection between Bridgman and Traherne was established. Traherne was known to have written Christian Ethicks (1675), and Dobell discovered that some of the poetry in this work was almost identical to a passage in one of the manuscripts, thus confirming Traherne’s authorship. This manuscript, called “Centuries,” comprised short prose passages interspersed with a few poems. Half of the other manuscript was poetry, the rest being devoted to prose extracts and notes. Dobell brought out an edition of the poetry in 1903, and in 1908 he published “Centuries” as Centuries of Meditations.