English clergyman and religious writer, educated at Oxford and Cambridge. Although he remained throughout his life an Anglican clergyman, Hervey was strongly influenced by John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodist Christianity (though the two would later feud over doctrinal matters), and Hervey was much more tolerant of evangelical Christianity than was the case with most of his Anglican colleagues. Indeed, the remarkable popularity of his writings, particularly Meditations Among the Tombs, is attributable to his works’ appeal to evangelical sensibilities. The Meditations, Hervey’s most significant work, was first published in 1745, went through twenty-five editions before the end of the century, and continued to be popular well into the Nineteenth Century, even inspiring a blank verse “transposition,” by George Cocking, in 1819. (Hervey, true to his principles, gave to charity all of the proceeds from his writings.) Hervey’s delineations of "the dreadful pleasure inspired by gazing at fallen monuments and mouldering tombs," in the words of noted Gothic scholar Frederick S. Frank, make him a significant if long-overlooked member of the Graveyard School, and made his work an important influence on Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), with its subterranean passages and brooding castle, which of course became instant staples of Gothic literature.
Surely Hervey would have found great comfort in the fact he died on Christmas Day.
