Tom Lockwood, Music Research Seminar - 25 February 2026

This paper reports and explores a pair of manuscript memorial texts on the death of Henry Purcell from the papers of the poet and diplomat, George Stepney (1663-1707).

Apparently not previously noted, among Stepney’s many letter books are manuscript witnesses to John Dryden’s ‘An Ode…In Memory of Mr. H. Purcell’ and the Latin ‘Epitaphium Henrici Purcell’ inscribed on his gravestone in Westminster Abbey.

Neither of the two texts in manuscript quite agrees with their later printed or lapidary witnesses, and after considering those points of difference, this paper will explore some of the connections that might have taken these texts to the Hague, where Stepney was living in 1695.

In part a consideration of Stepney’s own cultural connections, the new manuscript evidence presented here may also provide an opportunity to think about Dryden’s relationships with Purcell and with Blow, and the importance of Westminster to all four men.

Tom Lockwood is Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is a contributor to The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature (2025), writing there on Dryden and Congreve, and has articles recently in print or forthcoming on Aphra Behn and Sir Roger L’Estrange (both with Maureen Bell, in The Review of English Studies and The Library), and on Robert Stephens and Nell Gwyn (in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and Historical Research). He has never given a paper involving either John Blow or Henry Purcell before.