James Grainger, a London physician, accepted a four-year tour of duty overseeing plantations on St. Kitts between 1759 and 1763. He spent much time while there composing his long georgic poem, The Sugar-Cane.
Two important locations for this poem, saved in the file below, are Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts, and Leicester Square, the location of the fashionable drawing-room in which Grainger, after his return, famously read his poem to Dr. Johnson.
James Grainger's georgic poem, The Sugar-Cane: A Poem, in Four Books, drew on his experience in St. Christopher (now St. Kitts). As the author of his headnote in the Norton Anthology to American Literature, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 2003), reports, Grainger "evidently invested in slaves but soon decided that his fortune could be better served through marriage to a wealthy inhabitant. His new in-laws made him overseer of their considerable properties, and thus he acquired the in-depth knowledge of the sugar cane that informs his most famous work" (627). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provides a fuller explanation of Grainger's stay in St. Kitts:
In April 1759 Grainger left England on a four-year tour of the West Indies with John Bourryau, a former pupil and heir to property there. Grainger was to receive a life annuity of £200 for undertaking the trip. Their first destination was the island of St Kitts. Soon after their arrival Grainger married Miss Burt, daughter of William Burt, a Nevis planter and former governor of the island, whose widow Grainger attended for smallpox on the voyage out. They had two daughters, Louise Agnes and Eleanor. Grainger started practising as a physician on the island, and was entrusted by his wife's uncle, Daniel Mathew, with the management of his estates. Unable to afford to become a planter himself, he indulged in his favourite study of botany, and his scanty savings were invested in the purchase of slaves.
While travelling to different parts of the island to visit his patients, Grainger composed his principal work, The Sugar-Cane, a 2560-line poem in four books on the cultivation of the crop.
See Gordon See Goodwin, ‘Grainger, James (1721x4–1766)’, rev. Caroline Overy, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11234, accessed 26 Sept 2006.
The plantation lifestyle remains attractive to tourists, as we can see, for example, on this webpage maintained by the St. Kitts Tourism Authority.
The editors of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th ed., note that Grainger's poem "presented his lengthy narrative poem on the sugar cane to eager literati--the irascible Dr. Johnson included--at Reynolds's estate" (627). According to Martin Postle, biographer of Sir Joshua Reynolds, he then lived at 47 Leicester Square, "then among the most fashionable residential areas of the capital." While the house was demolished in 1937, a quick search of the internet reveals these (upside down) pictures of the home's staircase stored by British History Online.
Gordon Goodwin describes the reading in this Leicester Square drawing-room in his James Grainger entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
James Boswell relates that The Sugar-Cane was read in manuscript in Sir Joshua Reynolds's drawing-room, and that the ‘assembled wits’ were much amused by Grainger's account of the havoc wrought by rats in the sugar-fields. Dr Johnson spoke of the time when Grainger read the poem to him, and that when he came to the line, ‘Say, shall I sing of rats?’ Johnson cried ‘no’ with great vehemence (J. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. J. W. Croker, 1848, 834).
Goodwin also describes Grainger's pre-Caribbean medical and literary career, which included a feud with Smollett, as something of a failure. See Goodwin, ‘Grainger, James (1721x4–1766)’, rev. Caroline Overy, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11234, accessed 26 Sept 2006.
My source for the information about Reynolds' Leicester Square home is Martin Postle, ‘Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–1792)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed. (2004; Oxford UP, 2006), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23429, accessed 26 Sept 2006.
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