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English literature
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The 18th century. The novel
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Daniel Defoe
"Robinson Crusoe"
CHARTER I-VII,
CHARTER VIII-XX
Illustrations by N. C. Wyeth
Samuel
Richardson
"Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded"
LETTER I-XXXI,
LETTER XXXII
Illustrations by Joseph
Highmore
Henry Fielding
"The
History of Tom Jones, a foundling"
BOOK I-IV, BOOK V-XI, BOOK XII-XVIII
Tobias Smollett
"THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE
PICKLE"
VOLUME I,
VOLUME II
Laurence Sterne
"The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" VOLUME
I,
II,
III,
IV
Illustrations by George
Cruikshank
Sarah Fielding
Charlotte Lennox
Richard Graves
John Cleland
"Fanny
Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure"
Illustrations by Avril Paul
Henry Mackenzie
Horace Walpole
"The Castle
of Otranto"
William Beckfor
"The History of
Caliph Vathek"
Ann Radcliffe
"The Mysteries of Udolpho"
VOLUME 1-2,
VOLUME 3,
VOLUME
4
Matthew Lewis
"The Monk"
Fanny Burney
William Collins
Thomas Gray
Thomas Parnell
Robert Blair
James Macpherson
Christopher Smart
William Cowper
Isaac Watts
Lady Mary Montagu
Hannah More
Anna Seward
Charlotte Smith
Robert Burns
"Poems
& Songs"
BOOK I,
BOOK II
Oliver Goldsmith
"She Stoops to Conquer"
Samuel Johnson
PART I
"Rasselas,
Prince of Abyssinia", PART II-III
"LIVES
OF THE POETS"
Nicholas Rowe
Hester
Lynch Piozzi
Sir John Hawkins
James Boswell
Edward
Gibbon
George Berkeley
I.
"An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision",
II.
"THREE DIALOGUES BETWEEN HYLAS AND
PHILONOUS"
Samuel Clarke
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The major novelists
Defoe
Such ambitious debates on society and human nature ran
parallel with the explorations of a literary form finding
new popularity with a large audience, the novel.
Daniel
Defoe came to sustained prose fiction late in a career of
quite various, often disputatious writing. The variety of
interests that he had pursued in all his occasional work
(much of which is not attributed to him with any certainty)
left its mark on his more-lasting achievements. His
distinction, though earned in other fields of writing than
the polemical, is constantly underpinned by the generous
range of his curiosity. Only someone of his catholic
interests could have sustained, for instance, the superb
Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–27). This
is a vivid county-by-county review and celebration of the
state of the nation, which combines an antiquarian’s
enthusiasm with a passion for trade and commercial progress.
He brought the same diversity of enthusiasms into play in
writing his novels. The first of these,
Robinson
Crusoe
(1719), an immediate success at home and on the Continent,
is a unique fictional blending of the traditions of Puritan
spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the
nature of man as social creature and an extraordinary
ability to invent a sustaining modern myth. A Journal of the
Plague Year (1722) displays enticing powers of
self-projection into a situation of which Defoe can only
have had experience through the narrations of others, and
both Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724) lure the reader
into puzzling relationships with narrators the degree of
whose own self-awareness is repeatedly and provocatively
placed in doubt.
Daniel Defoe
"Robinson Crusoe"
CHARTER I-VII,
CHARTER VIII-XX
Illustrations
by N. C. Wyeth

English author
born 1660, London, Eng.
died April 24, 1731, London
Main
English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, author of Robinson Crusoe
(1719–22) and Moll Flanders (1722).
Early life.
Defoe’s father, James Foe, was a hard-working and fairly prosperous
tallow chandler (perhaps also, later, a butcher), of Flemish descent. By
his middle 30s, Daniel was calling himself “Defoe,” probably reviving a
variant of what may have been the original family name. As a
Nonconformist, or Dissenter, Foe could not send his son to the
University of Oxford or to Cambridge; he sent him instead to the
excellent academy at Newington Green kept by the Reverend Charles
Morton. There Defoe received an education in many ways better, and
certainly broader, than any he would have had at an English university.
Morton was an admirable teacher, later becoming first vice president of
Harvard College; and the clarity, simplicity, and ease of his style of
writing—together with the Bible, the works of John Bunyan, and the
pulpit oratory of the day—may have helped to form Defoe’s own literary
style.
Although intended for the Presbyterian ministry, Defoe decided
against this and by 1683 had set up as a merchant. He called trade his
“beloved subject,” and it was one of the abiding interests of his life.
He dealt in many commodities, traveled widely at home and abroad, and
became an acute and intelligent economic theorist, in many respects
ahead of his time; but misfortune, in one form or another, dogged him
continually. He wrote of himself:
No man has tasted differing fortunes more,
And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.
It was true enough. In 1692, after prospering for a while, Defoe went
bankrupt for £17,000. Opinions differ as to the cause of his collapse:
on his own admission, Defoe was apt to indulge in rash speculations and
projects; he may not always have been completely scrupulous, and he
later characterized himself as one of those tradesmen who had “done
things which their own principles condemned, which they are not ashamed
to blush for.” But undoubtedly the main reason for his bankruptcy was
the loss that he sustained in insuring ships during the war with
France—he was one of 19 “merchants insurers” ruined in 1692. In this
matter Defoe may have been incautious, but he was not dishonourable, and
he dealt fairly with his creditors (some of whom pursued him savagely),
paying off all but £5,000 within 10 years. He suffered further severe
losses in 1703, when his prosperous brick-and-tile works near Tilbury
failed during his imprisonment for political offenses, and he did not
actively engage in trade after this time.
Soon after setting up in business, in 1684, Defoe married Mary
Tuffley, the daughter of a well-to-do Dissenting merchant. Not much is
known about her, and he mentions her little in his writings, but she
seems to have been a loyal, capable, and devoted wife. She bore eight
children, of whom six lived to maturity, and when Defoe died the couple
had been married for 47 years.

Robinson
Crusoe
Mature life and works.
With Defoe’s interest in trade went an interest in politics. The first
of many political pamphlets by him appeared in 1683. When the Roman
Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685, Defoe—as a staunch
Dissenter and with characteristic impetuosity—joined the ill-fated
rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, managing to escape after the
disastrous Battle of Sedgemoor. Three years later James had fled to
France, and Defoe rode to welcome the army of William of
Orange—“William, the Glorious, Great, and Good, and Kind,” as Defoe was
to call him. Throughout William III’s reign, Defoe supported him
loyally, becoming his leading pamphleteer. In 1701, in reply to attacks
on the “foreign” king, Defoe published his vigorous and witty poem The
True-Born Englishman, an enormously popular work that is still very
readable and relevant in its exposure of the fallacies of racial
prejudice. Defoe was clearly proud of this work, because he sometimes
designated himself “Author of ‘The True-Born Englishman’” in later
works.
Foreign politics also engaged Defoe’s attention. Since the Treaty of
Rijswijk (1697), it had become increasingly probable that what would, in
effect, be a European war would break out as soon as the childless king
of Spain died. In 1701 five gentlemen of Kent presented a petition,
demanding greater defense preparations, to the House of Commons (then
Tory-controlled) and were illegally imprisoned. Next morning Defoe,
“guarded with about 16 gentlemen of quality,” presented the speaker,
Robert Harley, with his famous document “Legion’s Memorial,” which
reminded the Commons in outspoken terms that “Englishmen are no more to
be slaves to Parliaments than to a King.” It was effective: the
Kentishmen were released, and Defoe was feted by the citizens of London.
It had been a courageous gesture and one of which Defoe was ever
afterward proud, but it undoubtedly branded him in Tory eyes as a
dangerous man who must be brought down.
What did bring him down, only a year or so later, and consequently
led to a new phase in his career, was a religious question—though it is
difficult to separate religion from politics in this period. Both
Dissenters and “Low Churchmen” were mainly Whigs, and the
“highfliers”—the High-Church Tories—were determined to undermine this
working alliance by stopping the practice of “occasional conformity” (by
which Dissenters of flexible conscience could qualify for public office
by occasionally taking the sacraments according to the established
church). Pressure on the Dissenters increased when the Tories came to
power, and violent attacks were made on them by such rabble-rousing
extremists as Dr. Henry Sacheverell. In reply, Defoe wrote perhaps the
most famous and skillful of all his pamphlets, “The Shortest-Way With
The Dissenters” (1702), published anonymously. His method was ironic: to
discredit the highfliers by writing as if from their viewpoint but
reducing their arguments to absurdity. The pamphlet had a huge sale, but
the irony blew up in Defoe’s face: Dissenters and High Churchmen alike
took it seriously, and—though for different reasons—were furious when
the hoax was exposed. Defoe was prosecuted for seditious libel and was
arrested in May 1703. The advertisement offering a reward for his
capture gives the only extant personal description of Defoe—an
unflattering one, which annoyed him considerably: “a middle-size spare
man, about 40 years old, of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured
hair, but wears a wig, a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a
large mole near his mouth.” Defoe was advised to plead guilty and rely
on the court’s mercy, but he received harsh treatment, and, in addition
to being fined, was sentenced to stand three times in the pillory. It is
likely that the prosecution was primarily political, an attempt to force
him into betraying certain Whig leaders; but the attempt was evidently
unsuccessful. Although miserably apprehensive of his punishment, Defoe
had spirit enough, while awaiting his ordeal, to write the audacious
“Hymn To The Pillory” (1703); and this helped to turn the occasion into
something of a triumph, with the pillory garlanded, the mob drinking his
health, and the poem on sale in the streets. In An Appeal to Honour and
Justice (1715), he gave his own, self-justifying account of these events
and of other controversies in his life as a writer.
Triumph or not, Defoe was led back to Newgate, and there he remained
while his Tilbury business collapsed and he became ever more desperately
concerned for the welfare of his already numerous family. He appealed to
Robert Harley, who, after many delays, finally secured his
release—Harley’s part of the bargain being to obtain Defoe’s services as
a pamphleteer and intelligence agent.
Defoe certainly served his masters with zeal and energy, traveling
extensively, writing reports, minutes of advice, and pamphlets. He paid
several visits to Scotland, especially at the time of the Act of Union
in 1707, keeping Harley closely in touch with public opinion. Some of
Defoe’s letters to Harley from this period have survived. These trips
bore fruit in a different way two decades later: in 1724–26 the three
volumes of Defoe’s animated and informative Tour Through the Whole
Island of Great Britain were published, in preparing which he drew on
many of his earlier observations.
Perhaps Defoe’s most remarkable achievement during Queen Anne’s
reign, however, was his periodical, the Review. He wrote this serious,
forceful, and long-lived paper practically single-handedly from 1704 to
1713. At first a weekly, it became a thrice-weekly publication in 1705,
and Defoe continued to produce it even when, for short periods in 1713,
his political enemies managed to have him imprisoned again on various
pretexts. It was, effectively, the main government organ, its political
line corresponding with that of the moderate Tories (though Defoe
sometimes took an independent stand); but, in addition to politics as
such, Defoe discussed current affairs in general, religion, trade,
manners, morals, and so on, and his work undoubtedly had a considerable
influence on the development of later essay periodicals (such as Richard
Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Tatler and The Spectator) and of the
newspaper press.
Later life and works.
With George I’s accession (1714), the Tories fell. The Whigs in their
turn recognized Defoe’s value, and he continued to write for the
government of the day and to carry out intelligence work. At about this
time, too (perhaps prompted by a severe illness), he wrote the best
known and most popular of his many didactic works, The Family Instructor
(1715). The writings so far mentioned, however, would not necessarily
have procured literary immortality for Defoe; this he achieved when in
1719 he turned his talents to an extended work of prose fiction and
(drawing partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways such as
Alexander Selkirk) produced Robinson Crusoe. A German critic has called
it a “world-book,” a label justified not only by the enormous number of
translations, imitations, and adaptations that have appeared but by the
almost mythic power with which Defoe creates a hero and a situation with
which every reader can in some sense identify.
Here (as in his works of the remarkable year 1722, which saw the
publication of Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel
Jack) Defoe displays his finest gift as a novelist—his insight into
human nature. The men and women he writes about are all, it is true,
placed in unusual circumstances; they are all, in one sense or another,
solitaries; they all struggle, in their different ways, through a life
that is a constant scene of jungle warfare; they all become, to some
extent, obsessive. They are also ordinary human beings, however, and
Defoe, writing always in the first person, enters into their minds and
analyzes their motives. His novels are given verisimilitude by their
matter-of-fact style and their vivid concreteness of detail; the latter
may seem unselective, but it effectively helps to evoke a particular,
circumscribed world. Their main defects are shapelessness, an
overinsistent moralizing, occasional gaucheness, and naiveté. Defoe’s
range is narrow, but within that range he is a novelist of considerable
power, and his plain, direct style, as in almost all of his writing,
holds the reader’s interest.
In 1724 he published his last major work of fiction, Roxana, though
in the closing years of his life, despite failing health, he remained
active and enterprising as a writer.
Assessment.
A man of many talents and author of an extraordinary range and number of
works, Defoe remains in many ways an enigmatic figure. A man who made
many enemies, he has been accused of double-dealing, of dishonest or
equivocal conduct, of venality. Certainly in politics he served in turn
both Tory and Whig; he acted as a secret agent for the Tories and later
served the Whigs by “infiltrating” extremist Tory journals and toning
them down. But Defoe always claimed that the end justified the means,
and a more sympathetic view may see him as what he always professed to
be, an unswerving champion of moderation. At the age of 59 Defoe
embarked on what was virtually a new career, producing in Robinson
Crusoe the first of a remarkable series of novels and other fictional
writings that resulted in his being called the father of the English
novel.
Defoe’s last years were clouded by legal controversies over allegedly
unpaid bonds dating back a generation, and it is thought that he died in
hiding from his creditors. His character Moll Flanders, born in Newgate
Prison, speaks of poverty as “a frightful spectre,” and it is a theme of
many of his books.
Reginald P.C. Mutter
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Richardson

Pamela; or,
Virtue Rewarded
The enthusiasm prompted by
Defoe’s best novels demonstrated
the growing readership for innovative prose narrative.
Samuel Richardson, a prosperous London printer, was the next
major author to respond to the challenge. His
Pamela; or,
Virtue Rewarded (1740, with a less-happy sequel in 1741),
using (like all Richardson’s novels) the epistolary form,
tells a story of an employer’s attempted seduction of a
young servant woman, her subsequent victimization, and her
eventual reward in virtuous marriage with the penitent
exploiter. Its moral tone is self-consciously rigorous and
proved highly controversial. It was a publishing sensation,
not only selling in large numbers but also provoking
parodies and imitations, attacks and eulogies. As well as
being popular, it was the first such work of prose fiction
to aspire to respectability, indeed moral seriousness. For
contemporaries, the so-called “rise of the novel” began
here. The strength of Pamela was its exploitation of what
Richardson was to call “writing to the moment”: the
capturing in the texture of her letters the fluctuations of
the heroine’s consciousness as she faces her ordeal. Pamela
herself is the writer of almost all the letters, and the
technical limitations of the epistolary form are strongly
felt, though
Richardson’s ingenuity works hard to mitigate
them. But Pamela’s frank speaking about the abuses of
masculine and gentry power sounds the skeptical note more
radically developed in Richardson’s masterpiece,
Clarissa;
or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–48), which has a just
claim to being considered the greatest of all English tragic
novels. Clarissa uses multiple narrators and develops a
profoundly suggestive interplay of opposed voices. At its
centre is the taxing soul debate and eventually mortal
combat between the aggressive, brilliantly improvisatorial
libertine Lovelace and the beleaguered Clarissa, maltreated
and abandoned by her family but sternly loyal to her own
inner sense of probity. The tragic consummation that grows
from this involves an astonishingly ruthless testing of the
psychological natures of the two leading characters. Even in
its own day, Clarissa was widely accepted as having
demonstrated the potential profundity, moral or
psychological, of the novel. It was admired and imitated
throughout Europe. After such intensities, Richardson’s
final novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54),
is perhaps inevitably a less ambitious, cooler work, but its
blending of serious moral discussion and a comic ending
ensured it an influence on his successors, especially
Jane
Austen.
Samuel Richardson
"Pamela,
or Virtue Rewarded"
LETTER I-XXXI,
LETTER
XXXII
Illustrations by
Joseph Highmore

English novelist
baptized Aug. 19, 1689, Mackworth, near Derby, Derbyshire, Eng. died July 4, 1761, Parson’s Green, near London
Main English novelist who expanded the dramatic possibilities of the novel by
his invention and use of the letter form (“epistolary novel”). His major
novels were Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48).
Richardson was 50 years old when he wrote Pamela, but of his first 50
years little is known. His ancestors were of yeoman stock. His father,
also Samuel, and his mother’s father, Stephen Hall, became London
tradesmen, and his father, after the death of his first wife, married
Stephen’s daughter, Elizabeth, in 1682. A temporary move of the
Richardsons to Derbyshire accounts for the fact that the novelist was
born in Mackworth. They returned to London when Richardson was 10. He
had at best what he called “only Common School-Learning.” The perceived
inadequacy of his education was later to preoccupy him and some of his
critics.
Richardson was bound apprentice to a London printer, John Wilde.
Sometime after completing his apprenticeship he became associated with
the Leakes, a printing family whose presses he eventually took over when
he set up in business for himself in 1721 and married Martha Wilde, the
daughter of his master. Elizabeth Leake, the sister of a prosperous
bookseller of Bath, became his second wife in 1733, two years after
Martha’s death. His domestic life was marked by tragedy. All six of the
children from his first marriage died in infancy or childhood. By his
second wife he had four daughters who survived him, but two other
children died in infancy. These and other bereavements contributed to
the nervous ailments of his later life.
In his professional life Richardson was hardworking and successful.
With the growth in prominence of his press went his steady increase in
prestige as a member, an officer, and later master, of the Stationers’
Company (the guild for those in the book trade). During the 1730s his
press became known as one of the three best in London, and with
prosperity he moved to a more spacious London house and leased the first
of three country houses in which he entertained a circle of friends that
included Dr. Johnson, the painter William Hogarth, the actors Colley
Cibber and David Garrick, Edward Young, and Arthur Onslow, speaker of
the House of Commons, whose influence in 1733 helped to secure for
Richardson lucrative contracts for government printing that later
included the journals of the House.
In this same decade he began writing in a modest way. At some point,
he was commissioned to write a collection of letters that might serve as
models for “country readers,” a volume that has become known as Familiar
Letters on Important Occasions. Occasionally he hit upon continuing the
same subject from one letter to another, and, after a letter from “a
father to a daughter in service, on hearing of her master’s attempting
her virtue,” he supplied the daughter’s answer. This was the germ of his
novel Pamela. With a method supplied by the letter writer and a plot by
a story that he remembered of an actual serving maid who preserved her
virtue and was rewarded by marriage, he began writing the work in
November 1739 and published it as Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, a year
later.
Most of the story is told by the heroine herself. On the death of
Pamela’s mistress, her son, Mr. B, begins a series of stratagems
designed to end in Pamela’s seduction. These failing, he abducts her and
renews his siege in earnest. Pamela preserves her virtue, and halfway
through the novel Mr. B offers marriage. In the second half Richardson
shows Pamela winning over those who had disapproved of the misalliance.
Though the novel was immensely popular, Richardson was criticized by
those who thought his heroine a calculating minx or his own morality
dubious. Actually his heroine is a vividly imagined blend of the artful
and the artless. She is a sadly perplexed girl of 15, with a divided
mind, who faces a real dilemma because she wants to preserve her virtue
without losing the man with whom she has fallen in love. Since
Richardson wrote the novel from Pamela’s point of view, it is less clear
that Mr. B’s problem arises from his having fallen in love with a
servant, who, traditionally, would have been merely a target for
seduction. In a clever twist, he is converted by her letters, which he
has been intercepting and reading. The author resolved the conflicts of
both characters too facilely, perhaps, because he was firmly committed
to the plot of the true story he had remembered. When the instantaneous
popularity of Pamela led to a spurious continuation of her story, he
wrote his own sequel, Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1742), a
two-volume work that did little to enhance his reputation.
By 1744 Richardson seems to have completed a first draft of his
second novel, Clarissa: or, The History of a Young Lady, but he spent
three years trying to bring it within the compass of the seven volumes
in which it was published. He first presents the heroine, Clarissa
Harlowe, when she is discovering the barely masked motives of her
family, who would force her into a loveless marriage to improve their
fortunes. Outside the orbit of the Harlowes stands Lovelace, nephew of
Lord M and a romantic who held the code of the Harlowes in contempt. In
her desperate straits, Clarissa appraises too highly the qualities that
set Lovelace beyond the world of her family, and, when he offers
protection, she runs off with him. She is physically attracted by if not
actually in love with Lovelace and is responsive to the wider horizons
of his world, but she is to discover that he wants her only on his own
terms. In Lovelace’s letters to his friend Belford, Richardson shows
that what is driving him to conquest and finally to rape is really her
superiority. In the correspondence of Clarissa and her friend Anna Howe,
Richardson shows the distance that separates her from her confidant, who
thinks her quixotic in not accepting a marriage; but marriage as a way
out would have been a sacrifice to that same consciousness of human
dignity that had led her to defy her family. As the novel comes to its
long-drawn-out close, she is removed from the world of both the Harlowes
and the Lovelaces, and dies, a child of heaven. In providing confidants
for his central characters and in refusing to find a place in the social
structure into which to fit his sorely beset heroine, Richardson made
his greatest advances over Pamela. He was determined, as his postscript
indicates, to write a novel that was also a tragedy.
Richardson’s third novel was his bow to requests for the hero as a
good man, a counter-attraction to the errant hero of Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones (1749). Fielding had been among those who thought Pamela a
scheming minx, as he had shown in his parody An Apology for the life of
Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741). In spite of Fielding’s critical praise of
Clarissa and the friendship that later developed between Richardson and
Fielding’s sister, Sarah, Richardson never forgave the author of what he
stigmatized as “that vile Pamphlet Shamela.” In The History of Sir
Charles Grandison (1753–54), he provides a hero who is a model of
benevolence. He faces little that a good heart cannot remedy and
extricates himself from the nearest thing to a dilemma that he has to
encounter: a “divided love” between an English woman, Harriet Byron, and
an Italian, Signora Clementina. He is saved for Harriet by the
last-minute refusal of the Roman Catholic Clementina to marry a firmly
committed English churchman. The uneasy minds of Clementina and Harriet
are explored with some penetration, but Sir Charles faces nothing in his
society or within himself that requires much of a struggle. Furthermore,
his dilemma is not so central to the novel as were those of Pamela and
Clarissa. He is surrounded with a large cast of characters who have
their parts to play in social comedy that anticipates the novel of
manners of the late 18th century.
Richardson was an indefatigable reviser of his own work, and the
various editions of his novels differ greatly. Much of his revision was
undertaken in anxious, self-censoring response to criticism; the
earliest versions of his novels are generally the freshest and most
daring.
Richardson’s Pamela is often credited with being the first English
novel. Although the validity of this claim depends on the definition of
the term novel, it is not disputed that Richardson was innovative in his
concentration on a single action, in this case a courtship. By telling
the story in the form of letters, he provided if not the “stream” at
least the flow of consciousness of his characters, and he pioneered in
showing how his characters’ sense of class differences and their
awareness of the conflict between sexual instincts and the moral code
created dilemmas that could not always be resolved. These
characteristics reappear regularly in the subsequent history of the
novel. Above all, Richardson was the writer who made the novel a
respectable genre.
Richardson had disciples when he died. Some of them show the
influence of Clarissa, which seems to have been most responsible for the
cult of Richardson that arose on the European continent. It was
Grandison, however, that set the tone of most of Richardson’s English
followers and for Jane Austen, who was said to have remembered “every
circumstance” in this novel, everything “that was ever said or done.” By
the end of the 18th century, Richardson’s reputation was on the wane
both in England and abroad. It was reborn in the late 20th century,
however, and Clarissa is now widely admired as one of the great
psychological novels of European literature.
William Merritt Sale, Jr.
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Fielding
Henry Fielding turned to novel writing after a successful
period as a dramatist, during which his most popular work
had been in burlesque forms. Sir Robert Walpole’s Licensing
Act of 1737, introduced to restrict political satire on the
stage, pushed Fielding to look to other genres. He also
turned to journalism, of which he wrote a great deal, much
of it political. His entry into prose fiction had something
in common with the burlesque mode of much of his drama.
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741), a
travesty of Richardson’s Pamela, transforms the latter’s
heroine into a predatory fortune hunter who cold-bloodedly
lures her booby master into matrimony.
Fielding continued
his quarrel with
Richardson in The History of the Adventures
of Joseph Andrews (1742), which also uses Pamela as a
starting point but which, developing a momentum of its own,
soon outgrows any narrow parodic intent. His hostility to
Richardson’s sexual ethic notwithstanding,
Fielding was
happy to build, with a calm and smiling sophistication, on
the growing respect for the novel to which his antagonist
had so substantially contributed. In Joseph Andrews and
The
History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749),
Fielding openly
brought to bear upon his chosen form a battery of devices
from more traditionally reputable modes (including epic
poetry, painting, and the drama). This is accompanied by a
flamboyant development of authorial presence.
Fielding the
narrator buttonholes the reader repeatedly, airs critical
and ethical questions for the reader’s delectation, and
urbanely discusses the artifice upon which his fiction
depends. In the deeply original Tom Jones especially, this
assists in developing a distinctive atmosphere of
self-confident magnanimity and candid optimism. His fiction,
however, can also cope with a darker range of experience.
The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), for
instance, uses a mock-heroic idiom to explore a derisive
parallel between the criminal underworld and England’s
political elite, and Amelia (1751) probes with sombre
precision images of captivity and situations of taxing moral
paradox.
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Henry Fielding
"The
History of Tom Jones, a foundling" BOOK I-IV,
BOOK V-XI,
BOOK XII-XVIII

English author
born April 22, 1707, Sharpham Park, Somerset, Eng.
died Oct. 8, 1754, Lisbon
Main
novelist and playwright, who, with Samuel Richardson, is considered a
founder of the English novel. Among his major novels are Joseph Andrews
(1742) and Tom Jones (1749).
Early life.
Fielding was born of a family that by tradition traced its descent to a
branch of the Habsburgs. The 1st earl of Denbigh, William Fielding, was
a direct ancestor, while Henry’s father, Col. Edmund Fielding, had
served under John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, an early 18th-century
general, “with much bravery and reputation.” His mother was a daughter
of Sir Henry Gould, a judge of the Queen’s Bench, from whom she
inherited property at East Stour, in Dorset, where the family moved when
Fielding was three years old. His mother died just before his 11th
birthday. His father having married again, Fielding was sent to Eton
College, where he laid the foundations of his love of literature and his
considerable knowledge of the classics. There he befriended George
Lyttelton, who was later to be a statesman and an important patron to
him.
Leaving school at 17, a strikingly handsome youth, he settled down to
the life of a young gentleman of leisure; but four years later, after an
abortive elopement with an heiress and the production of a play at the
Drury Lane Theatre in London, he resumed his classical studies at the
University of Leiden in Holland. After 18 months he had to return home
because his father was no longer able to pay him an allowance. “Having,”
as he said, “no choice but to be a hackney-writer or a
hackney-coachman,” he chose the former and set up as playwright. In all,
he wrote some 25 plays. Although his dramatic works have not held the
stage, their wit cannot be denied. He was essentially a satirist; for
instance, The Author’s Farce (1730) displays the absurdities of writers
and publishers, while Rape upon Rape (1730) satirizes the injustices of
the law and lawyers. His target was often the political corruption of
the times. In 1737 he produced at the Little Theatre in the Hay (later
the Haymarket Theatre), London, his Historical Register, For the Year
1736, in which the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, was represented
practically undisguised and mercilessly ridiculed. It was not the first
time Walpole had suffered from Fielding’s pen, and his answer was to
push through Parliament the Licensing Act, by which all new plays had to
be approved and licensed by the lord chamberlain before production.
The passing of this act marked the end of Fielding’s career as a
playwright. The 30-year-old writer had a wife and two children to
support but no source of income. He had married Charlotte Cradock in
1734, this time after a successful elopement, the culmination of a
four-year courtship. How much he adored her can be seen from the two
characters based on her, Sophia Western in Tom Jones and Amelia in the
novel of that name: one the likeness of her as a beautiful,
high-spirited, generous-minded girl, the other of her as a faithful,
much-troubled, hard-working wife and mother. To restore his fortunes,
Fielding began to read for the bar, completing in less than three years
a course normally taking six or seven. Even while studying, however, he
was editing, and very largely writing, a thrice-weekly newspaper, the
Champion; or, British Mercury, which ran from November 1739 to June
1741. This, like some of his later journalism, was strongly
anti-Jacobite.
Maturity.
As a barrister, Fielding, who rode the Western Circuit (a judicial
subdivision of England) twice a year, had little success. In 1740,
however, Samuel Richardson published his novel Pamela: or, Virtue
Rewarded, which tells how a servant girl so impressed her master by
resistance to his every effort at seduction that in the end “he thought
fit to make her his wife.” Something new in literature, its success was
unparalleled. A crop of imitations followed. In April 1741 there
appeared a parody entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela
Andrews, satirizing Richardson’s sentimentality and prudish morality. It
was published anonymously and, though Fielding never claimed it, Shamela
was generally accepted as his work in his lifetime, and stylistic
evidence supports the attribution.
Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was published anonymously in 1742.
Described on the title page as “Written in Imitation of the Manner of
Cervantes, author of Don Quixote,” it begins as a burlesque of Pamela,
with Joseph, Pamela’s virtuous footman brother, resisting the attempts
of a highborn lady to seduce him. The parodic intention soon becomes
secondary, and the novel develops into a masterpiece of sustained irony
and social criticism, with, at its centre, Parson Adams, one of the
great comic figures of literature and a striking confirmation of the
contention of the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky that
the positively good man can be made convincing in fiction only if
rendered to some extent ridiculous. Fielding explains in his preface
that he is writing “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose.” He was certainly
inaugurating a new genre in fiction.
Joseph Andrews was written in the most unpropitious circumstances:
Fielding was crippled with gout, his six-year-old daughter was dying,
and his wife was “in a condition very little better.” He was also in
financial trouble, from which he was at least temporarily rescued by the
generosity of his friend the philanthropist Ralph Allen, who appears in
Tom Jones as Mr. Allworthy.
In 1743 Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, works old
and new, of which by far the most important is The Life of Mr. Jonathan
Wild the Great. Here, narrating the life of a notorious criminal of the
day, Fielding satirizes human greatness, or rather human greatness
confused with power over others. Permanently topical, Jonathan Wild,
with the exception of some passages by his older contemporary, the
Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, is perhaps the grimmest satire in
English and an exercise in unremitting irony.
After the Miscellanies Fielding gave up writing for more than two
years, partly, perhaps, out of disappointment with the rewards of
authorship, partly in order to devote himself to law. His health was
bad; his practice at the bar did not flourish; worst of all, his wife
was still ill. In the autumn of 1744 he took her to Bath for the
medicinal waters; she “caught a fever, and died in his arms.” According
to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the 18th-century letter writer and
Fielding’s cousin, his grief “approached to frenzy,” and it was almost a
year before he recovered his fortitude. By then he had taken a house in
London in the Strand (on the site of the present law courts), and there
he lived with his daughter, his sister Sarah, also a novelist, and Mary
Daniel, who had been his wife’s maid. In 1747, to the derision of
London, he married Mary, who was pregnant by him. According to Fielding
himself, writing shortly before his death, she discharged “excellently
well her own, and all the tender offices becoming the female character .
. . besides being a faithful friend, an amiable companion, and a tender
nurse.”
In 1745 came the Jacobite Rebellion (an attempt to restore the
descendants of the deposed Stuart king James II), which led Fielding to
write the pamphlet “A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain. In
Which the Certain Consequences of the Present Rebellion, Are Fully
Demonstrated. Necessary To Be Perused by Every Lover of his Country at
This Juncture.” An upholder of the Church of England, he warned of the
implications of this rising led by the Roman Catholic pretender to the
throne, Prince Charles Edward. A month later, he became editor of a new
weekly paper, The True Patriot: And the History of Our Own Times, which
he wrote almost single-handedly until it ceased publication on the
defeat of the Pretender at the Battle of Culloden (April 16, 1746). A
year later, Fielding edited another one-man weekly called The Jacobite’s
Journal, the title reflecting its ironical approach to current affairs.
Its propaganda value was deemed so great that the government purchased
2,000 copies of each issue for free distribution among the inns and
alehouses of the kingdom.
Fielding was now a trusted supporter of the government. His reward
came in 1748, when he was appointed justice of the peace (or magistrate)
for Westminster and Middlesex, with his own courthouse, which was also
his residence, in Bow Street in central London. The office carried no
salary; former Bow Street magistrates had made what they could out of
the fees paid by persons brought before them and, often, out of bribes.
Fielding was a magistrate of a different order. Together with his blind
half brother, John Fielding, also a magistrate, he turned an office
without honour into one of great dignity and importance and established
a new tradition of justice and the suppression of crime in London. Among
other things, Fielding strengthened the police force at his disposal by
recruiting a small body of able and energetic “thieftakers”—the Bow
Street Runners. To improve relations between the law and the public, he
started a newspaper, The Covent Garden Journal, in which the following
appeared regularly:
All persons who shall for the future suffer by robbers, burglars,
etc., are desired immediately to bring or send the best description they
can of such robbers, etc., with the time, and place, and circumstances
of the fact, to Henry Fielding, Esq., at his house in Bow Street.
Last years.
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling was published on Feb. 28, 1749.
With its great comic gusto, vast gallery of characters, and contrasted
scenes of high and low life in London and the provinces, it has always
constituted the most popular of his works. Like its predecessor, Joseph
Andrews, it is constructed around a romance plot. The hero, whose true
identity remains unknown until the denouement, loves the beautiful
Sophia Western, and at the end of the book he wins her hand. Numerous
obstacles have to be overcome before he achieves this, however, and in
the course of the action the various sets of characters pursue each
other from one part of the country to another, giving Fielding an
opportunity to paint an incomparably vivid picture of England in the
mid-18th century. The introductory chapters at the beginning of each
Book make it clear how carefully Fielding had considered the problem of
planning the novel. No novelist up until then had so clear an idea of
what a novel should be, so that it is not surprising that Tom Jones is a
masterpiece of literary engineering. The characters fall into several
distinct groups—romance characters, villainous characters, Jonsonian “humours,”
“low” comic characters, and the virtuous Squire Allworthy, who remains
in the background and emerges to ensure the conventional happy ending.
The novel is further marked by deft alternations between humour and
romance, occasional tricks straight from the theatre, and above all the
speed and ease of the dialogue. The reading of this work is essential
both for an understanding of 18th-century England and for its revelation
of the generosity and charity of Fielding’s view of humanity.
Two years later Amelia was published. Being a much more sombre work,
it has always been less popular than Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews.
Fielding’s mind must have been darkened by his experiences as a
magistrate, as it certainly had been by his wife’s death, and Amelia is
no attempt at the comic epic poem in prose. Rather, it anticipates the
Victorian domestic novel, being a study of the relationship between a
man and his wife and, in the character of Amelia, a celebration of
womanly virtues. It is also Fielding’s most intransigent representation
of the evils of the society in which he lived, and he clearly finds the
spectacle no longer comic.
His health was deteriorating. By 1752 his gout was so bad that his
legs were swathed in bandages, and he often had to use crutches or a
wheelchair. In August of 1753 he decided to go to Bath for rest and the
waters. That year was a particularly bad one for crime in London,
however, and on the eve of his leaving he was invited by Thomas Pelham-Holles,
Duke of Newcastle (then secretary of war), to prepare a plan for the
Privy Council for the suppression of “those murders and robberies which
were every day committed in the streets.” His plan, undertaking “to
demolish the then reigning gangs” and to establish means of preventing
their recurrence, was accepted, and despite the state of his health—to
gout had been added asthma and dropsy—he stayed in London for the rest
of the year, waging war against criminal gangs with such success that
“there was, in the remaining month of November, and in all December, not
only no such thing as a murder, but not even a street-robbery
committed.”
In the following June, Fielding set out for Portugal to seek the sun,
writing an account of his journey, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon.
This work presents an extraordinarily vivid picture of the tortuous
slowness of 18th-century sea travel, the horrors of contemporary
medicine, the caprices of arbitrary power as seen in the conduct of
customs officers and other petty officials, and, above all, his
indomitable courage and cheerfulness when almost completely helpless,
for he could scarcely walk and had to be carried on and off ship.
Fielding landed at Lisbon on Aug. 7, 1754. He died in October and was
buried in the British cemetery at Lisbon.
Assessment.
Sir Walter Scott called Henry Fielding the “father of the English
novel,” and the phrase still indicates Fielding’s place in the history
of literature. Though not actually the first English novelist, he was
the first to approach the genre with a fully worked-out theory of the
novel; and in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, which a modern
critic has called comic epic, epic comedy, and domestic epic,
respectively, he had established the tradition of a realism presented in
panoramic surveys of contemporary society that dominated English fiction
until the end of the 19th century.
Walter E. Allen
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Smollett
Tobias Smollett had no desire to rival
Fielding as a formal
innovator, and today he seems the less audacious innovator.
His novels consequently tend to be rather ragged assemblings
of disparate incidents. But, although uneven in performance,
all of them include extended passages of real force and
idiosyncrasy. His freest writing is expended on grotesque
portraiture in which the human is reduced to fiercely
energetic automatism.
Smollett can also be a stunning
reporter of the contemporary scene, whether the subject be a
naval battle or the gathering of the decrepit at a spa. His
touch is least happy when, complying too facilely with the
gathering cult of sensibility, he indulges in rote-learned
displays of emotionalism and good-heartedness. His most
sustainedly invigorating work can perhaps be found in The
Adventures of Roderick Random (1748),
The Adventures of
Peregrine Pickle (1751),
and (an altogether more interesting
encounter with the dialects of sensibility) The Expedition
of Humphry Clinker (1771). The last was his only epistolary
novel and perhaps the outstanding use of this form for comic
purposes.
Tobias Smollett
"THE ADVENTURES OF PEREGRINE PICKLE" VOLUME I,
VOLUME II

Scottish novelist in full Tobias George Smollett
baptized March 19, 1721, Cardross, Dumbartonshire, Scot. died Sept. 17, 1771, near Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]
Main Scottish satirical novelist, best known for his picaresque novels The
Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine
Pickle (1751) and his epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(1771).
Smollett came of a family of lawyers and soldiers, Whig in politics
and Presbyterian in religion. In 1727 or 1728 he entered Dumbarton
grammar school, proceeding from there to the University of Glasgow and
apprenticeship to William Stirling and John Gordon, surgeons of that
city. His first biographer states that he “attended the anatomical and
medical lectures,” and, if his first novel, Roderick Random, may be
taken as evidence, he also studied Greek, mathematics, moral and natural
philosophy, logic, and belles lettres. He left the university in 1739
without a degree and went to London, taking with him his play The
Regicide. A year later he was commissioned surgeon’s second mate in the
Royal Navy and appointed to HMS Chichester, which reached Port Royal,
Jam., on Jan. 10, 1741. It is probable that Smollett saw action in the
naval bombardment of Cartagena (now in Colombia). The expedition was
disastrous; he would later describe its horrors in Roderick Random. In
Jamaica he met and was betrothed to—and perhaps there married—an
heiress, Anne Lassells. He returned to London alone to set up as a
surgeon on Downing Street, Westminster, his wife joining him in 1747. He
failed to secure a production of The Regicide, but in 1746, after the
defeat of the Jacobite rebels at Culloden, he wrote his most famous
poem, “The Tears of Scotland.” He had by now moved to cheaper
accommodations in Chapel Street, Mayfair, no doubt because, despite
litigation, he had managed to recover only a fraction of his wife’s
considerable dowry, which was invested in land and slaves. It was in
Chapel Street that he wrote Advice and Reproof, verse satires in the
manner of the Roman poet Juvenal.
In 1748 Smollett published his novel The Adventures of Roderick
Random, in part a graphic account of British naval life at the time, and
also translated the great picaresque romance Gil Blas from the French of
Alain-René Lesage. In 1750 he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal
College, Aberdeen. Later in the year he was in Paris, searching out
material for The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. This work contains a
great comic figure in Hawser Trunnion, a retired naval officer who,
though living on dry land, insists on behaving as though he were still
on the quarterdeck of one of his majesty’s ships at sea.
In 1752 he published “An Essay on the External Use of Water,” an
attack on the medicinal properties of the waters of a popular English
health resort, Bath (he would resume the attack in his later novel The
Expedition of Humphry Clinker). The essay made him many enemies and
little money. His financial difficulties were intensified by his
generosity in lending money to a hack writer called Peter Gordon, who
employed legal stratagems to avoid repayment. Smollett came to blows
with Gordon and his landlord and was sued by them for £1,000 and £500,
respectively, on charges of trespass and assault. In the event, Smollett
was required to pay only small damages. He was now living at Monmouth
House, Chelsea, where he was host to such leading literary figures as
the authors Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as to the actor
David Garrick and John Hunter, a famous surgeon and anatomist. On
Sundays, if one may take a passage in Peregrine Pickle as
autobiographical, Smollett threw his house open to “unfortunate brothers
of the quill,” whom he regaled with “beer, pudding, and potatoes, port,
punch, and Calvert’s entire butt-beer.” He himself seems to have been a
man irascible, pugnacious, infinitely energetic, courageous, and
generous.
The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom (now, with The History and
Adventures of an Atom, the least regarded of his novels) appeared in
1753. It sold poorly, and Smollett was forced into borrowing from
friends and into further hack writing. In June 1753 he visited Scotland
for the first time in 15 years; his mother, it is said, recognized him
only because of his “roguish smile.” Back in London, Smollett set about
a commitment to translate Don Quixote from the Spanish of Miguel de
Cervantes, and this translation was published in 1755. Smollett was
already suffering from tuberculosis. Early in 1756 he became editor of
The Critical Review, a Tory and church paper, at the same time writing
his Complete History of England, which was financially successful. This
work relieved the financial pressure that he had felt all his adult
life. A year later, his farce The Reprisal: or, The Tars of Old England
was produced at Drury Lane and brought him a profit of almost £200. In
1758 he became what today might perhaps be called general editor of
Universal History, a compilation of 58 volumes; Smollett himself wrote
on France, Italy, and Germany. His friendship with the politician John
Wilkes enabled him to secure the release of Francis Barber, Samuel
Johnson’s black servant, from the press-gang. But a libel on Admiral Sir
Charles Knowles in The Critical Review led to Smollett’s being sentenced
to a fine of £100 and three months’ imprisonment in the King’s Bench
Prison. He seems to have lived there in some comfort and drew on his
experiences for his novel The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
(1762), which was serialized in The British Magazine, of which Smollett
became editor in 1760.
Two years later he became editor of The Briton, a weekly founded to
support the prime minister John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute. He was also
writing an eight-volume work entitled The Present State of all Nations,
and he had begun a translation, in 36 volumes, of the varied works of
the French writer Voltaire. Smollett was now seriously ill; attempts to
secure a post as physician to the army in Portugal and as British consul
in Marseille or Madrid were fruitless. In 1763 the death of his only
child, Elizabeth, who was 15 years old, overwhelmed him “with
unutterable sorrow.” He severed his connection with The Critical Review
and, as he said, “every other literary system,” retiring with his wife
to France, where he settled at Nice.
In 1766 Smollett published Travels Through France and Italy, his one
nonfiction work that is still read. It is a satire on both tourists and
those who batten on them, and its jaundiced version of traveling on the
Continent led to Smollett’s appearance as the splenetic Smelfungus in
Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey (1768). He returned to
England in that year, visited Scotland, and at Christmas was again in
England (at Bath), where he probably began what is his finest work, The
Expedition of Humphry Clinker, an epistolary novel that recounts the
adventures of a family traveling through Britain. In 1768, steadily
weakening in health, he retired to Pisa, Italy. During the autumn of
1770 he seems to have written the bulk of Humphry Clinker, which was
published on June 15, 1771.
Smollett is not the equal of his older contemporaries, the novelists
Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, but he is unrivaled for the pace
and vigour that sustain his comedy. He is especially brilliant in the
rendering of comic characters in their externals, thus harking back to
the manner of the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson and looking forward to
that of the novelist Charles Dickens. By modern criteria, his art as a
satirical novelist is defective, his model being the “picaresque” novel,
relating loosely linked episodes in the life of a rogue hero. But his
panoramic picture of the life of his times is surpassed only by that
given by Henry Fielding, while his account of conditions in the Royal
Navy is especially valuable.
Walter E. Allen
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Sterne

William Hogarth
Illustration to the novel "Tristram Shandy"
An experiment of a radical and seminal kind is
Laurence
Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759–67), which, drawing on a
tradition of learned wit from Erasmus and Rabelais to Burton
and Swift, provides a brilliant comic critique of the
progress of the English novel to date. It was published in
five separate installments over the course of some eight
years and has an open-endedness all its own. The
part-by-part publication also enabled
Sterne to manipulate
public responses and even to make the reception of one
volume the subject matter for satire in a later volume. The
focus of attention is shifted from the fortunes of the hero
himself to the nature of his family, environment, and
heredity, and dealings within that family offer repeated
images of human unrelatedness and disconnection. Tristram,
the narrator, is isolated in his own privacy and doubts how
much, if anything, he can know certainly even about himself.
Sterne is explicit about the influence of Lockean psychology
on his writing, and the book, fascinated with the fictive
energies of the imagination, is filled with characters
reinventing or mythologizing the conditions of their own
lives. It also draws zestful stimulus from a concern with
the limitations of language, both verbal and visual, and
teases an intricate drama out of Tristram’s imagining of,
and playing to, the reader’s likely responses. Sterne’s A
Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)
similarly defies conventional expectations of what a travel
book might be. An apparently random collection of scattered
experiences, it mingles affecting vignettes with episodes in
a heartier, comic mode, but coherence of imagination is
secured by the delicate insistence with which
Sterne ponders
how the impulses of sentimental and erotic feeling are
psychologically interdependent. It was a powerful influence
on later, less-ironic sentimental writing. In Sterne’s wake
it was common for works of fiction to include the
declaration “A Sentimental Novel” on their title pages.
Laurence Sterne
"The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman"
VOLUME THE FIRST,
VOLUME THE SECOND,
VOLUME THE THIRD,
VOLUME THE FOURTH
Illustrations by
George Cruikshank

British writer
born Nov. 24, 1713, Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ire. died March 18, 1768, London, Eng.
Main Irish-born English novelist and humorist, author of Tristram Shandy
(1759–67), an early novel in which story is subordinate to the free
associations and digressions of its narrator. He is also known for the
novel A Sentimental Journey (1768).
Life. Sterne’s father, Roger, though grandson of an archbishop of York, was an
infantry officer of the lowest rank who fought in many battles during
the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). In Flanders, Roger married
Agnes, the widow of an officer, but of a social class much below
Roger’s. The regiment retired to Ireland, and there Laurence was born.
Most of his early childhood was spent in poverty, following the troops
about Ireland. Later, Sterne expressed his affection for soldiers
through his portraits in Tristram Shandy of the gentle uncle Toby and
Corporal Trim.
At age 10, Sterne was sent to school at Hipperholme, near Halifax,
where his uncle, Richard Sterne, whose estate was nearby, could look out
for him. He grew into a tall, thin man, with a long nose but likable
face. Sterne attended Jesus College, Cambridge, on a scholarship. At
college he met his great friend John Hall-Stevenson (Eugenius in his
fiction) and also suffered his first severe hemorrhage of the lungs. He
had incurable tuberculosis.
After graduating he took holy orders and became vicar of
Sutton-on-the-Forest, north of York. He soon became a prebendary (or
canon) of York Minster and acquired the vicarage of Stillington. At
first he was helped by another uncle, Jaques Sterne, precentor of York
and archdeacon of Cleveland, a powerful clergyman but a mean-tempered
man and a rabid politician. In 1741–42 Sterne wrote political articles
supporting the administration of Sir Robert Walpole for a newspaper
founded by his uncle but soon withdrew from politics in disgust. His
uncle became his archenemy, thwarting his advancement whenever possible.
Sterne fell in love with Elizabeth Lumley, a cousin to Elizabeth
Montagu, the bluestocking. They married in 1741. According to the
account of an acquaintance, Sterne’s infidelities were a cause of
discord in the marriage.
As a clergyman Sterne worked hard but erratically. In two
ecclesiastical courts he served as commissary (judge), and his frequent
sermons at York Minster were popular. Externally, his life was typical
of the moderately successful clergy. But Elizabeth, who had several
stillborn children, was unhappy. Only one child, Lydia, lived.
In 1759, to support his dean in a church squabble, Sterne wrote A
Political Romance (later called The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat),
a Swiftian satire of dignitaries of the spiritual courts. At the demands
of embarrassed churchmen, the book was burned. Thus, Sterne lost his
chances for clerical advancement but discovered his real talents.
Turning over his parishes to a curate, he began Tristram Shandy. An
initial, sharply satiric version was rejected by Robert Dodsley, the
London printer, just when Sterne’s personal life was upset. His mother
and uncle both died. His wife had a nervous breakdown and threatened
suicide. Sterne continued his comic novel, but every sentence, he said,
was “written under the greatest heaviness of heart.” In this mood, he
softened the satire and told about Tristram’s opinions, his eccentric
family, and ill-fated childhood with a sympathetic humour, sometimes
hilarious, sometimes sweetly melancholic—a comedy skirting tragedy.
At his own expense, Sterne published the first two volumes of The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman at York late in 1759,
but he sent half of the imprint to Dodsley to sell in London. By March
1760, when he went to London, Tristram Shandy was the rage, and he was
famous. Dodsley’s brother James, the new proprietor, brought out a
second edition of the novel, and two volumes of sermons followed. The
witty, naughty “Tristram Shandy,” or “Parson Yorick,” as Sterne was
called after characters in his novel, was the most sought-after man in
town. Although the timing was coincidental, Lord Fauconberg, a Yorkshire
neighbour, presented him with a third parish, Coxwold. Sterne returned
north joyfully to settle at Coxwold in his beloved “Shandy Hall,” a
charming old house that is now a museum. He began to write at Shandy
Hall during the summers, going to London in the winter to publish what
he had written. James Dodsley brought out two more volumes of Tristram
Shandy; thereafter, Sterne became his own publisher. In London he
enjoyed the company of many great people, but his nights were sometimes
wild. In 1762, after almost dying from lung hemorrhages, he fled the
damp air of England into France, a journey he described as Tristram’s
flight from death. This and a later trip abroad gave him much material
for his later Sentimental Journey. Elizabeth, now recovered, followed
him to France, where she and their daughter settled permanently. Sterne
returned to England virtually a single man.
In 1767 he published the final volume of Tristram Shandy. Soon
thereafter he fell in love with Eliza Draper, who was half his age and
unhappily married to an official of the East India Company. They carried
on an open, sentimental flirtation, but Eliza was under a promise to
return to her husband in Bombay. After she sailed, Sterne finished A
Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick, published
it to acclaim early in 1768, and collapsed.
Lying in his London lodgings, he put up his arm as though to ward off
a blow, saying, “Now it is come,” and died. Soon after burial at London,
Sterne’s body was stolen by grave robbers, taken to Cambridge, and used
for an anatomy lecture. Someone recognized the body, and it was quietly
returned to the grave. The story, only whispered at the time, was
confirmed in 1969: Sterne’s remains were exhumed and now rest in the
churchyard at Coxwold, close to Shandy Hall.
Works. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was published in nine slim volumes (released in
five installments) from 1759 to 1767. In it the narrator, Tristram, sets
out to do the impossible—to tell the story of his life. He begins with
the story of his conception—an innocent remark of his mother upsetting
his father’s concentration and causing poor Tristram to be conceived a
weakling. To understand that, Tristram must then explain John Locke’s
principle of the association of ideas. This, in turn, embroils him in a
discussion of his parents’ marriage contract, his Uncle Toby, Parson
Yorick, the midwife, and Dr. Slop. He has so much to tell that he does
not get himself born until the third volume. Finally reality dawns upon
Tristram: it takes more time to tell the story of his life than it does
to live it; he can never catch himself.
At one level Tristram Shandy is a satire upon intellectual pride.
Walter Shandy thinks he can beget and rear the perfect child, yet
Tristram is misconceived, misbaptized, miseducated, and circumcised by a
falling window sash. He grows to manhood an impotent weakling whose only
hope of transcending death is to tell the story of himself and his
family. Finally, Tristram turns to the sweet, funny story of his Uncle
Toby’s amours with the Widow Wadman, concluding the novel at a point in
time years before Tristram was born. A hilarious, often ribald novel,
Tristram Shandy nevertheless makes a serious comment on the isolation of
people from each other caused by the inadequacies of language and
describes the breaking-through of isolation by impulsive gestures of
sympathy and love. A second great theme of the novel is that of time—the
discrepancy between clock time and time as sensed, the impinging of the
past upon the present, the awareness that a joyous life inexorably leads
to death. Modern commentators regard Tristram Shandy as the ancestor of
psychological and stream-of-consciousness fiction.
Sterne’s second and last novel, A Sentimental Journey, is the story
of Yorick’s travels through France; Sterne did not live to complete the
part on Italy. He called it a “sentimental” journey because the point of
travel was not to see sights or visit art collections, but to make
meaningful contact with people. Yorick succeeds, but in every adventure,
his ego or inappropriate desires and impulses get in the way of
“sentimental commerce.” The result is a light-hearted comedy of moral
sentiments. A Sentimental Journey was translated into many languages,
but the translations tended to lose the comedy and emphasize the
sentiments. Abroad Sterne became the “high priest of sentimentalism,”
and as such had a profound impact upon continental letters in the second
half of the 18th century.
Arthur H. Cash
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Other novelists
The work of these five giants was accompanied by experiments
from a number of other novelists. Sarah Fielding, for
instance, Henry’s sister, wrote penetratingly and gravely
about friendship in The Adventures of David Simple (1744,
with a sequel in 1753). Charlotte Lennox in The Female
Quixote (1752) and Richard Graves in The Spiritual Quixote
(1773) responded inventively to the influence of Miguel de
Cervantes, also discernible in the writing of
Fielding,
Smollett, and
Sterne. Cervantes’s influence was much
increased by a series of translations of his Don Quixote,
including
Smollett’s of 1755. This particular work of
fiction had become an honorary work of English literature.
John Cleland’s
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (known as
Fanny Hill; 1748–49) chose a more contentious path; in his
charting of a young girl’s sexual initiation, he experiments
with minutely detailed ways of describing the physiology of
intercourse.
In emphatic contrast, Henry Mackenzie’s The Man
of Feeling (1771) offers an extremist and rarefied version
of the sentimental hero, while
Horace Walpole’s
The Castle
of Otranto (1765) playfully initiated the vogue for
Gothic
fiction.
William Beckford’s
Vathek (1786),
Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and
Matthew Lewis’s
The
Monk (1796) are among the more distinctive of its
successors. But the most engaging and thoughtful minor
novelist of the period is Fanny Burney, who was also an
evocative and self-revelatory diarist and letter writer. Her
first novel, Evelina (1778), best shows Burney’s satirical
talents. Written in letters, it charts the fortunes and
misfortunes of an ingenuous heroine encountering the
delights and dangers of Georgian London for the first time.
Of Burney’s novels, Evelina and Camilla (1796) in particular
handle with independence of invention and emotional insight
the theme of a young woman negotiating her first encounters
with a dangerous social world.
Gothic novel

European Romantic,
pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of
mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it
underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries.
Called Gothic because
its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval
buildings and ruins, such novels commonly used
such settings as castles or monasteries equipped
with subterranean passages, dark battlements,
hidden panels, and trapdoors. The vogue was
initiated in England by
Horace Walpole’s
immensely successful
Castle of Otranto
(1765). His most respectable follower was
Ann Radcliffe,
whose
Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) and Italian (1797) are among the
best examples of the genre. A more sensational
type of Gothic romance exploiting horror and
violence flourished in Germany and was
introduced to England by
Matthew Gregory Lewis
with
The Monk
(1796). Other landmarks of Gothic fiction are
William
Beckford’s
Oriental romance
Vathek
(1786) and Charles Robert Maturin’s
story of an Irish Faust, Melmoth the
Wanderer (1820). The classic horror
stories
Frankenstein
(1818), by
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley,
and
Dracula
(1897), by
Bram Stoker,
are in the Gothic tradition but introduce the
existential nature of humankind as its
definitive mystery and terror.
Easy targets for
satire, the early Gothic romances died of their
own extravagances of plot, but Gothic
atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the
fiction of such major writers as the Brontë
sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
and even Dickens in Bleak House and
Great Expectations. In the second half of
the 20th century, the term was applied to
paperback romances having the same kind of
themes and trappings similar to the originals.
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Sarah Fielding
born Nov. 8, 1710, East Stour,
Dorset, Eng.
died April 9, 1768, Bath, Somerset
English author and translator whose novels were
among the earliest in the English language and
the first to examine the interior lives of women
and children.
Fielding was the younger sister of the novelist
Henry Fielding, whom many readers believed to be
the author of novels she published anonymously,
although he denied these speculations in print.
She lived with her brother following the death
of his wife in 1744. That year she published her
first book, The Adventures of David Simple, a
novel whose comic prose style imitated that of
both her brother and his chief literary rival,
Samuel Richardson, who was also one of her close
friends. With the sequel, The Adventures of
David Simple, Volume the Last: In Which His
History Is Concluded (1753), she developed a
style more distinctly her own, which shows
greater intricacy of feeling, fuller development
of character, and a reduced reliance on plot.
The Governess (1749) is didactic and portrays
with comic sensibility the hazards of British
social life for the moral development of women.
Considered the first novel for girls in the
English language, it was an immediate success
and went through five editions in Fielding’s
lifetime while inspiring numerous imitations.
She published only one book under her own
name, a translation from the ancient Greek of
Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates (1762), a
significant achievement in that few women of
Fielding’s time acquired a scholarly command of
Classical languages. Other works include a
collaboration with her friend Jane Collier
titled The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable (1754).
Although didacticism frequently overshadows the
narrative drive of Fielding’s prose, critics
credit her as an innovator with a shrewd sense
of human motive and keen ironic humour.
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Charlotte Lennox

born 1729/30, probably Gibraltar
died Jan. 4, 1804, London, Eng.
English novelist whose work, especially
The Female Quixote, was much admired by
leading literary figures of her time, including
Samuel Johnson and the novelists Henry Fielding
and Samuel Richardson.
Charlotte Ramsay was the daughter of a
British army officer who was said to have been
lieutenant governor of the colony of New York.
This claim has been dismissed, however, in light
of evidence that she went to live in or near
Albany, New York, in 1739, when her father was
posted there as captain of a company of foot
soldiers. In 1743, after her father’s death, she
returned to England, apparently to live with
relatives. She attempted to earn a living as an
actress but was not successful and is said to
have turned to literary work. Her Poems on
Several Occasions was published in 1747, and
that same year she married Alexander Lennox. She
made the first comparative study of William
Shakespeare’s source material, called Shakespear
Illustrated; . . . (1753–54), a project in which
she may have been assisted by Dr. Johnson. The
book takes Shakespeare to task for his plot
adaptations and his lack of morality.
Lennox’s first novel was The Life of Harriot
Stuart (1751). The Female Quixote (1752) and
Henrietta (1758) followed. She attempted to
write for the stage as well but met with only
slight success.
Despite the friendship of Johnson and
Richardson and the approbation of Fielding,
Lennox made little from the sale of her books.
She died in poverty.
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Richard Graves
Richard Graves (4 May 1715 – 23
November 1804) was an English minister, poet,
and novelist.
Born at Mickleton Manor, Mickleton,
Gloucestershire, to Richard Graves, gentleman,
and his wife, Elizabeth, Graves was a student at
Abingdon School and Pembroke College, Oxford. He
was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, until
January 1749, when the college revoked his
fellowship because of his marriage to Lucy
Bartholomew, a farmer's daughter from Aldworth.
(At the time, All Souls College automatically
withdrew funding from any fellow who married.)
He also served as rector of Claverton, near
Bath, and was an enthusiastic collector of
poems, a translator, essayist and correspondent.
His best-known work is the picaresque novel, The
Spiritual Quixote (1773). The Spiritual Quixote
was a satire of John Wesley, George Whitefield,
and Methodism in general, which he saw as a
threat to his Anglican congregation.
He served as chaplain to Mary Townshend,
Countess Chatham and as private tutor to Prince
Hoare and Thomas Malthus. He was a close friend
of William Shenstone, Anthony Whistler, lowborn
Ralph Allen, and William Warburton.
He and Lucy had five children, including a
son of the same name who was vicar of Great
Malvern.
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John Cleland
"Fanny
Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure"
Illustrations by Avril Paul

born 1709
died Jan. 23, 1789, London
English novelist, author of the notorious
Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure.
After serving as a consul at Smyrna and
later as an agent of the British East India
Company in Bombay, Cleland became a penniless
wanderer who drifted from place to place and was
apparently confined several times in English
debtors’ prisons. In such reduced circumstances,
he wrote Fanny Hill (1748–49) for
a fee of 20 guineas. An elegant, flowery work of
pornography describing the activities of a
London prostitute, this novel has enjoyed
enormous popularity for more than two centuries
as a classic of erotic literature. When
originally published, it was immediately
suppressed (an action later repeated many
times), and Cleland was called before the Privy
Council. He pleaded his extreme poverty and was
not sentenced. Instead, Lord Granville, thinking
him talented, secured him a yearly pension of
£100, that he might put his gifts to better use.
Thereafter, he became a journalist, playwright,
and amateur philologist.
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Henry Mackenzie

born , Aug. 26, 1745, Edinburgh
died Jan. 14, 1831, Edinburgh
Scottish novelist, playwright, poet, and
editor, whose most important novel, The Man of
Feeling, established him as a major literary
figure in Scotland. His work had considerable
influence on Sir Walter Scott, who dedicated his
Waverley novels to him in 1814.
Mackenzie’s early works include imitations of
traditional Scottish ballads, but, on moving to
London to study law after 1765, he began to
imitate English literary styles in which
“sentiment” was then becoming a powerful
literary influence. His mawkish novel The Man of
Feeling (begun 1767, published 1771) was a
best-seller. Settling in Scotland from 1768,
Mackenzie wrote two more novels: The Man of the
World (1773), portraying a villainous hero, and
Julia de Roubigné (1777), imitating Richardson’s
Clarissa. He also wrote a play, edited two
periodicals, and helped found learned societies.
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Horace Walpole
"The Castle
of Otranto"

born Sept. 24, 1717, London
died March 2, 1797
English writer, connoisseur, and collector
who was famous in his day for his medieval
horror tale The Castle of Otranto, which
initiated the vogue for Gothic romances. He is
remembered today as perhaps the most assiduous
letter writer in the English language.
The youngest son of the prime minister Sir
Robert Walpole, he was educated at Eton and at
King’s College, Cambridge. In 1739 he embarked
with his Eton schoolmate, the poet Thomas Gray
(later to write “An Elegy Written in a Country
Church Yard”), on a grand tour of France and
Italy, in the midst of which they quarrelled and
separated. They were later reconciled, and
Walpole remained throughout his life an
enthusiastic admirer of Gray’s poetry. On his
return to England in 1741, Walpole entered
Parliament, where his career was
undistinguished, although he attended debates
regularly until 1768. In 1791 he inherited the
peerage from a nephew, a grandson of Robert
Walpole. He remained unmarried, and on his death
the earldom became extinct.
The most absorbing interests of his life were
his friendships and a small villa that he
acquired at Twickenham in 1747 and transformed
into a pseudo-Gothic showplace known as
Strawberry Hill. Over the years he added
cloisters, turrets, and battlements, filled the
interior with pictures and curios, and amassed a
valuable library. The house was open to tourists
and became widely known in Walpole’s own
lifetime. He established a private press on the
grounds, where he printed his own works and
those of his friends, notably Gray’s Odes of
1757. Strawberry Hill was the stimulus for the
Gothic revival in English domestic architecture.
Walpole’s literary output was extremely
varied. The Castle of Otranto (1765), which was
first published anonymously, succeeded in
restoring the element of romance to contemporary
fiction. In it he furnished the machinery for a
genre of fiction wherein the wildest fancies
found refuge. He also wrote The Mysterious
Mother (1768), a tragedy with the theme of
incest; amateur historical speculations such as
Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King
Richard the Third (1768); and a genuine
contribution to art history, Anecdotes of
Painting in England, 4 vol. (1762–71).
His most important works were intended for
posthumous publication. His private
correspondence of some 4,000 letters constitutes
a survey of the history, manners, and taste of
his age. Walpole revered the letters of Mme de
Sévigné (1626–96) and, following her example,
consciously cultivated letter writing as an art.
His most substantial correspondence was with
Horace Mann, a British diplomat whom Walpole met
on his grand tour and with whom he maintained
contact for 45 years, although the two never met
again. Walpole’s correspondence, edited by W.S.
Lewis and others, was published in 48 volumes
(1937–83).
Walpole also left Memoirs (first published
1822–59) of the reigns of George II and III, a
record of political events of his time.
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William Beckford
"The History of
Caliph Vathek"

born Sept. 29, 1760, London, Eng.
died May 2, 1844, Bath, Somerset
eccentric English dilettante, author of the
Gothic novel Vathek (1786). Such writers as
George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Stéphane Mallarmé
acknowledged his genius. He also is renowned for
having built Fonthill Abbey, the most
sensational building of the English Gothic
revival.
Beckford was the only legitimate son of William
Beckford the Elder, twice lord mayor of London,
and was the heir to a vast fortune accumulated
by three generations of his Beckford ancestors,
who were sugar planters in Jamaica. His mother
was descended from Mary Stuart. He was a
precocious child, and his natural talents were
given every encouragement. At five he received
piano lessons from the nine-year-old W.A.
Mozart. He also received training in
architecture and drawing from prominent
teachers. He inherited his fortune in 1770, upon
the death of his father.
In 1778, after a period of travel and study
in Europe, Beckford returned to England, where
he later met the 11-year-old son and heir of
Viscount Courtenay, a boy for whom Beckford felt
strong romantic (but probably not sexual)
attraction. Following a lavish three-day
Christmas party held in the boy’s honour at
Fonthill, Beckford conceived the story of the
caliph Vathek, a monarch as impious as he is
voluptuous, who builds a tower so high that from
it he can survey all the kingdoms of the world.
Vathek challenges Mohammed in the seventh heaven
and so brings about his own damnation and his
banishment to the subterranean kingdom ruled by
Eblis, prince of darkness.
Completed in outline in three days and two
nights, the tale was written in French during
the first four months of 1782, in all the gaiety
of a London society greeting the inheritor of a
fortune. A protégé of Lord Chancellor Thurlow,
with a seat in the House of Commons, and married
to the beautiful Lady Margaret Gordon, Beckford
was expecting to be elevated to the peerage in
December 1784. In the autumn of that year,
scandal broke when he was charged with sexual
misconduct with young Courtenay. Reports of the
scandal were quickly spread, and, though
Beckford’s guilt was never proved, in mid-1785
he, with his wife and baby daughter, was forced
into exile. In May 1786, in Switzerland, his
wife died of puerperal fever after giving birth
to a second daughter. About that time, Beckford
also learned that Vathek, which he had given to
the Reverend Samuel Henley for translation,
would be published anonymously, with a preface
in which Henley claimed that it had been taken
directly from the Arabic. Beckford remained
abroad for many years. From 1796, after his
return to England, he devoted his energies to
his Gothic “abbey” at Fonthill. His architect
was James Wyatt, but Beckford himself supervised
the planning and building of what became the
most extraordinary house in England. He lived
there as a recluse, collecting curios, costly
furnishings and works of art and reading the
library of Edward Gibbon, which he had purchased
in its entirety. In 1807 the house’s great
central tower collapsed and was rebuilt.
Beckford’s extravagances forced him to sell his
estate in 1822. The tower later collapsed again,
destroying part of the building.
Beckford’s literary reputation rests solely
on Vathek. Though all agree that it is uneven
and stylistically uncertain, the strength of its
final image has sustained Beckford’s reputation
for more than two centuries. A classic among
Gothic novels, the book is a masterpiece of
fantastic invention and bizarre detail. Among
Beckford’s other published works are accounts of
his travels, two parodies of Gothic and
sentimental novels, and a journal, Life at
Fonthill, 1807–22.
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Ann Radcliffe
"The Mysteries of Udolpho"
VOLUME 1-2,
VOLUME 3,
VOLUME
4

born July 9, 1764, London, Eng.
died Feb. 7, 1823, London
the most representative of English Gothic
novelists. She stands apart in her ability to
infuse scenes of terror and suspense with an
aura of romantic sensibility.
Radcliffe’s father was in trade, and the
family lived in well-to-do gentility. In 1787,
at the age of 23, she married William Radcliffe,
a journalist who encouraged her literary
pursuits. Ann Radcliffe led a retired life and
never visited the countries where the fearful
happenings in her novels took place. Her only
journey abroad, to Holland and Germany, was made
in 1794 after most of her books were written.
The journey was described in her A Journey Made
in the Summer of 1794 (1795).
Her first novels, The Castles of Athlin and
Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790)
were published anonymously. She achieved fame
with her third novel, The Romance of the Forest
(1791), a tale of 17th-century France. Her next
work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), by which
she became the most popular novelist in England,
tells how the orphaned Emily St. Aubert is
subjected to cruelties by guardians, threatened
with the loss of her fortune, and imprisoned in
castles but is finally freed and united with her
lover. Strange and fearful events take place in
the haunted atmosphere of the solitary castle of
Udolpho, set high in the dark and majestic
Apennines.
With The Italian (1797), Radcliffe realized
her full stature as a writer. It shows not only
improved dialogue and plot construction, but its
villain, Schedoni, a monk of massive physique
and sinister disposition, is treated with a
psychological insight unusual in her work. She
made considerable sums of money from The
Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, selling
the copyright of the former for £500 and that of
the latter for £800. Radcliffe published no more
fiction in her lifetime; it seems likely that
she ceased to write novels as soon as it was no
longer financially necessary to do so. She was
notoriously shy about being addressed in person
as an author.
In the last 20 years of her life Radcliffe
wrote mostly poetry. Her poems (1816) and her
posthumous novel Gaston de Blondeville (1826),
which includes a good deal of verse, were
comparatively unsuccessful.
There is little physical horror in
Radcliffe’s “tales of terror,” and elements that
seem to be supernatural are usually found to
have some rather disappointing natural
explanation. Her characterization is usually
weak, her historical insight is almost
nonexistent, and her stories abound in
anachronisms and impossibilities. But
Radcliffe’s admirers cared as little for
“realism” or accuracy as she did. They reveled
in her romanticized views of nature, her
intimations of evil, and her prolonged scenes of
suspense.
Sir Walter Scott called her “the first
poetess of romantic fiction,” and her many
admirers included Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and Christina Rossetti. Writing in
the tradition of the novel of sensibility, she
boldly focused the themes of nascent Romanticism
in her stories and paved the way for the greater
talents of Scott and the Romantic poets.
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"The Monk"
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Matthew Lewis
"The Monk"

born July 9, 1775, London, Eng.
died May 14, 1818, at sea
English novelist and dramatist who became
famous overnight after the sensational success
of his Gothic novel The Monk (1796). Thereafter
he was known as “Monk” Lewis.
Educated at Westminster School and Christ
Church, Oxford, Lewis served as attaché to the
British embassy at The Hague and was a member of
Parliament from 1796 to 1802. In 1812 he
inherited a fortune and large properties in
Jamaica. Sincerely interested in the conditions
of his 500 slaves, he made two West Indian
voyages, contracted yellow fever on his return
from the second, and died at sea.
The Monk, written when Lewis was 19, was
influenced by the leading Gothic novelist, Ann
Radcliffe, and also by stronger contemporary
German Gothic literature. Its emphasis on horror
rather than romance, its violence, and its
eroticism made it avidly read, though
universally condemned. Its success was followed
by a popular musical drama in the same vein, The
Castle Spectre (performed 1797; published 1798),
which was produced by the dramatist Richard
Brinsley Sheridan. Lewis’ other lasting work was
a triumph of a very different nature, the
Journal of a West India Proprietor (published
1834), attesting to his humane and liberal
attitudes.
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Fanny Burney

byname of Frances d’Arblay, née
Burney
born June 13, 1752, King’s Lynn, Norfolk,
England
died January 6, 1840, London
English novelist and letter writer, daughter
of the musician Charles Burney, and author of
Evelina, a landmark in the development of the
novel of manners.
Fanny educated herself by omnivorous reading
at home. Her literary apprenticeship was much
influenced by her father’s friend Samuel Crisp,
a disappointed author living in retirement. It
was to “Daddy” Crisp that she addressed her
first journal letters, lively accounts of the
musical evenings at the Burneys’ London house
where the elite among European performers
entertained informally for gatherings that might
include David Garrick, Dr. Johnson, Edmund
Burke, and Richard Sheridan. Considered the
least promising of the clever Burney children,
Fanny moved unnoticed in the circles of the
great, confiding her observations to Crisp.
Her practice of observing and recording
society led eventually to her novel Evelina, or
The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the
World. Evelina revealed its author to be a keen
social commentator with an attentive ear for
dialect and the differentiation of London
speech. It concerns the development of a young
girl, unsure of herself in society and subject
to errors of manners and judgment. The plot
terminates with Evelina’s marriage after the
mistakes stemming from her untutored girlhood
have been surmounted. A novel treating
contemporary manners in an elegant and decorous
way and depending for the development of its
plot upon the erring and uncertain conduct of
the heroine was an innovation that pointed the
way for the novels of Jane Austen. Published
anonymously in 1778, Evelina took London by
storm. No one guessed it was by shy Fanny
Burney, then 26.
When the secret was out, Burney’s debut into
literary society was launched by the fashionable
hostess Mrs. Thrale. Once the young woman
overcame her shyness she could match wits with
Dr. Johnson himself, who was very kind to her
between 1779 and 1783 when they both made long
visits to the Thrales. Burney’s journals from
this period have been prized for their vignettes
of contemporary scenes and celebrities and for
Burney’s own secretly expressed delight in being
famous.
Her next novel, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an
Heiress, 5 vol. (1782), incorporated morally
didactic themes along with the social satire of
Burney’s first novel into a more complex plot.
Though lacking the freshness and spontaneity of
Evelina, this novel was equally well received,
but Burney’s success was shadowed by the death
of Henry Thrale in 1781, of Crisp in 1783, and
of Dr. Johnson in 1784. These years also brought
a disappointment in love, when the ambiguous
attentions of a young clergyman came to nothing.
In 1785 Burney was presented to Queen
Charlotte and King George III and in 1786 was
invited to court as second keeper of the robes,
where she remained for five unhappy years.
Eventually her health suffered, and she was
allowed to resign in 1791. Her journals of the
period loyally repress court gossip of the years
of the king’s madness (1788–89) but contain
interesting accounts of public events like the
trial of Warren Hastings.
In 1793, when she was 41, Burney married
Alexandre d’Arblay, a former adjutant general to
Lafayette, then a penniless French émigré living
in England. They had one son. In 1796 she wrote
a potboiler, Camilla: or a Picture of Youth, and
on its proceeds the d’Arblays built a house in
Surrey, where they moved in 1797. While on a
visit to France with her husband and son in
1802, she was forced by the renewal of the
Napoleonic Wars to stay for 10 years. After
Waterloo (1815) the d’Arblays returned and
settled at Bath, where d’Arblay died in 1818.
Mme d’Arblay then retired to London, where she
devoted her attention to her son’s career and to
the publication of her father’s Memoirs (1832).
An edition of her journals and letters in eight
volumes was published 1972–80.
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Poets and poetry after Pope
Eighteenth-century poetry
after Pope produced nothing that can compete with
achievements on the scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy,
but much that was vital was accomplished. William Collins’s
Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747),
for instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a
resonant insistence on the imagination and the passions as
poetry’s true realm. The odes also mine vigorously the
potentiality of personification as a medium for poetic
expression. In An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard
(1751), Thomas Gray revisited the terrain of such recent
poems as Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death (1722) and
Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) and discovered a tensely
humane eloquence far beyond his predecessors’ powers. In
later odes, particularly The Progress of Poesy (1757), Gray
successfully sought close imitation of the original Pindaric
form, even emulating Greek rhythms in English, while
developing ambitious ideas about cultural continuity and
renewal. Gray’s fascination with the potency of primitive
art (as evidenced in another great ode, The Bard, 1757) is
part of a larger movement of taste, of which the
contemporary enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s alleged
translations of Ossian (1760–63) is a further indicator.
Another eclectically learned and energetically
experimental poet is Christopher Smart, whose renown rests
largely on two poems. Jubilate Agno (written during
confinement in various asylums between 1758/59 and 1763 but
not published until 1939) is composed in free verse and
experiments with applying the antiphonal principles of
Hebrew poetry to English. A Song to David (1763) is a
rhapsodic hymn of praise, blending enormous linguistic
vitality with elaborate structural patterning. Both contain encyclopaedic gatherings of recondite and occult lore,
numerous passages of which modern scholarship has yet to
explicate satisfactorily, but the poetry is continually
energized by minute alterations of tone, startling
conjunctions of material, and a unique alertness to the
mystery of the commonplace. Smart was also a superb writer
of hymns, a talent in which his major contemporary rival was
William Cowper in his Olney Hymns (1779). Both are worthy
successors to the richly inventive work of Isaac Watts in
the first half of the century. Elsewhere, Cowper can write
with buoyant humour and satiric relaxation, as when, for
instance, he wryly observes from the safety of rural
seclusion the evils of town life. But some of his most
characterful poetry emerges from a painfully intense
experience of withdrawal and isolation. His rooted Calvinism
caused him periods of acute despair when he could see no
hope of admission to salvation, a mood chronicled with grim
precision in his masterly short poem The Castaway (written
1799). His most extended achievement is The Task (1785), an
extraordinary fusion of disparate interests, working calmly
toward religious praise and pious acceptance.
There was also a significant number of inventive and
sometimes popular women poets in the period. “Literary
ladies” were often celebrated and sometimes became respected
public figures. Their poetic ventures were encouraged by the
growth in publishing generally and, in particular, by the
invention of magazines and literary journals. Many of the
leading women poets of the period first published in the
Gentleman’s Magazine. The most notable woman poet of the
early 18th century is probably Lady Mary Montagu, who still
composed for manuscript circulation rather than publication.
She also wrote, in letters, her sparkling Embassy to
Constantinople (often called Turkish Letters), published
posthumously in 1763. Notable female poets later in the
century include Mary Leapor, a Northhamptonshire kitchen
servant who was also a witty verse satirist, celebrated by
contemporaries only after her early death. Much admired in
their own lifetimes were Anna Seward and Hannah More, both
of whom wrote much miscellaneous prose as well as poetry,
and Charlotte Smith, whose sonnets were hugely popular in
the 1780s.
William Collins

born Dec. 25, 1721, Chichester, Sussex, Eng.
died June 12, 1759, Chichester
pre-Romantic English poet whose lyrical odes
adhered to Neoclassical forms but were Romantic
in theme and feeling. Though his literary career
was brief and his output slender, he is
considered one of the finest English lyric poets
of the 18th century.
He was educated at Winchester College, where he
formed one of the most stable and fruitful
relationships of his unstable life: his
friendship with the poet and critic Joseph
Warton. When only 17, under the influence of
Pope’s Pastorals, he composed his four Persian
Eclogues (1742; 2nd ed., Oriental Eclogues,
1757), the only one of his works to be esteemed
in his lifetime. In 1744 he published his verse
Epistle: Addrest to Sir Thomas Hanmer on his
Edition of Shakespeare’s Works, containing his
exquisite “Dirge from Cymbeline.”
Collins graduated from Magdalen College,
Oxford (1743), and went to London in 1744. An
inheritance, supplemented by an allowance from
his uncle, enabled him to live as a
man-about-town. He made friends with Dr.
Johnson, who expressed respect for his talents
and, later, concern for his fate. By 1746
extravagance and dissipation had put Collins
deeply in debt. He agreed to collaborate with
Warton on a volume of odes. The two men’s poems
eventually appeared separately that December
(the title page of Collins’ Odes being dated
1747). Warton’s collection was well received,
but Collins’ Odes on Several Descriptive and
Allegorical Subjects was barely noticed. Though
disappointed, Collins continued to perfect the
style exemplified in his “Ode to Simplicity.”
In 1749 Collins’ uncle died, leaving him
enough money to extricate himself from debt. In
the next few months he wrote his “Ode on the
Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of
Scotland,” which anticipates many of the
attitudes and interests of the Romantic poets.
Threatened after 1751 by mental illness and
physical debility, which he tried to cure by
travel, Collins was confined in a mental asylum
in 1754. Released to the care of his sister, he
survived wretchedly in Chichester for five more
years, neglected and forgotten by his literary
friends, who believed him dead. His work,
however, became influential and admired after
his death.
The standard edition of his poems, The Poems
of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver
Goldsmith (1976), was edited by Roger Lonsdale.
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Thomas Gray

born Dec. 26, 1716, London
died July 30, 1771, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire,
Eng.
English poet whose “An Elegy Written in a
Country Church Yard” is one of the best known of
English lyric poems. Although his literary
output was slight, he was the dominant poetic
figure in the mid-18th century and a precursor
of the Romantic movement.
Born into a prosperous but unhappy home, Gray
was the sole survivor of 12 children of a harsh
and violent father and a long-suffering mother,
who operated a millinery business to educate
him. A delicate and studious boy, he was sent to
Eton in 1725 at the age of eight. There he
formed a “Quadruple Alliance” with three other
boys who liked poetry and classics and disliked
rowdy sports and the Hogarthian manners of the
period. They were Horace Walpole, the son of the
prime minister; the precocious poet Richard
West, who was closest to Gray; and Thomas
Ashton. The style of life Gray developed at
Eton, devoted to quiet study, the pleasures of
the imagination, and a few understanding
friends, was to persist for the rest of his
years.
In 1734 he entered Peterhouse, Cambridge,
where he began to write Latin verse of
considerable merit. He left in 1738 without a
degree and set out in 1739 with Walpole on a
grand tour of France, Switzerland, and Italy at
Sir Robert Walpole’s expense. At first all went
well, but in 1741 they quarreled—possibly over
Gray’s preferences for museums and scenery to
Walpole’s interest in lighter social
pursuits—and Gray returned to England. They were
reconciled in 1745 on Walpole’s initiative and
remained somewhat cooler friends for the rest of
their lives.
In 1742 Gray settled at Cambridge. That same
year West died, an event that affected him
profoundly. Gray had begun to write English
poems, among which some of the best were “Ode on
the Spring,” “Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard
West,” “Hymn to Adversity,” and “Ode on a
Distant Prospect of Eton College.” They revealed
his maturity, ease and felicity of expression,
wistful melancholy, and the ability to phrase
truisms in striking, quotable lines, such as
“where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be
wise.” The Eton ode was published in 1747 and
again in 1748 along with “Ode on the Spring.”
They attracted no attention.
It was not until “An Elegy Written in a
Country Church Yard,” a poem long in the making,
was published in 1751 that Gray was recognized.
Its success was instantaneous and overwhelming.
A dignified elegy in eloquent classical diction
celebrating the graves of humble and unknown
villagers was, in itself, a novelty. Its theme
that the lives of the rich and poor alike “lead
but to the grave” was already familiar, but
Gray’s treatment—which had the effect of
suggesting that it was not only the “rude
forefathers of the village” he was mourning but
the death of all men and of the poet
himself—gave the poem its universal appeal.
Gray’s newfound celebrity did not make the
slightest difference in his habits. He remained
at Peterhouse until 1756, when, outraged by a
prank played on him by students, he moved to
Pembroke College. He wrote two Pindaric odes,
“The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard,”
published in 1757 by Walpole’s private
Strawberry Hill Press. They were criticized, not
without reason, for obscurity, and in
disappointment, Gray virtually ceased to write.
He was offered the laureateship in 1757 but
declined it. He buried himself in his studies of
Celtic and Scandinavian antiquities and became
increasingly retiring and hypochondriacal. In
his last years his peace was disrupted by his
friendship with a young Swiss nobleman, Charles
Victor de Bonstetten, for whom he conceived a
romantic devotion, the most profound emotional
experience of his life.
Gray died at 55 and was buried in the country
churchyard at Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire,
celebrated in his “Elegy.”
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Thomas Parnell

born 1679, Dublin
died 1718, Chester, Eng.
Irish poet, essayist, and friend of Alexander
Pope, who relied on Parnell’s scholarship in his
translation of the Iliad. Parnell’s poetry,
written in heroic couplets, was esteemed by Pope
for its lyric quality and stylistic ease. Among
his best poems are “An Elegy to an Old Beauty”
and “Night Piece on Death,” said to have
influenced Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a
Country Church Yard.”
Parnell contributed to The Spectator and the
Guardian and was a member, with Swift and Gay,
of the literary Scriblerus Club. After Parnell’s
death, Pope collected his poetry and published
it in a volume called Poems on Several Occasions
(1722). The work was republished in 1770 with
additional poems and a life of Parnell by Oliver
Goldsmith.
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Robert Blair
born 1699, Edinburgh, Scot.
died Feb. 4, 1746, Athelstaneford, East Lothian
Scottish poet remembered for a single poem, The
Grave, which was influential in giving rise to
the graveyard school of poetry.
Educated in Edinburgh and Holland, Blair was
ordained in 1731 and appointed to Athelstaneford,
East Lothian. He was happily married, had six
children, and devoted his leisure to poetry,
botany, and optical experiments.
The Grave (1743), a long, uneven poem in
blank verse, is a reflection on human mortality
in mortuary imagery. Though it appeared a year
after Edward Young’s The Complaint: Or,
Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality, it
is apparently uninfluenced by that work but
reflects the general tendency to exploit
sensibility and pathos that coexisted peacefully
with 18th-century Rationalism. The Grave has
none of the oppressive self-pity or
pretentiousness of Night-Thoughts. Its blend of
Scottish ghoulishness and brisk sermonizing is
presented in Shakespearean rhythms with a
certain natural cheerfulness. William Blake made
12 illustrations that appeared in the 1808
edition.
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James Macpherson

born October 27, 1736, Ruthven, Inverness,
Scotland
died February 17, 1796, Belville, Inverness
Scottish poet whose initiation of the
Ossianic controversy has obscured his genuine
contributions to Gaelic studies.
Macpherson’s first book of poems, The Highlander
(1758), was undistinguished; but after
collecting Gaelic manuscripts and having orally
transmitted Gaelic poems transcribed with the
encouragement of the poet John Home and the
financial support of the rhetorician Hugh Blair,
he published Fragments of Ancient
Poetry…Translated from the Gallic or Erse
Language (1760), Fingal (1762), and Temora
(1763), claiming that much of their content was
based on a 3rd-century Gaelic poet, Ossian. No
Gaelic manuscripts date back beyond the 10th
century. The authenticity of Ossian was
supported by Blair, looked on with skepticism by
the Scottish philosopher David Hume, admired
with doubt by the English poet Thomas Gray, and
denied by the panjandrum of English letters,
Samuel Johnson. None of the critics knew Gaelic.
Macpherson often injected a good deal of
Romantic mood into the originals, sometimes
closely followed them, and other times did not.
His language was strongly influenced by the
Authorized Version of the Bible. The originals
were published only after Macpherson’s death.
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Christopher Smart

born April 11, 1722, Shipbourne, Kent, Eng.
died May 21, 1771, London
English religious poet, best known for A Song to
David (1763), in praise of the author of the
Psalms, notable for flashes of childlike
penetration and vivid imagination. In some
respects his work anticipated that of William
Blake and John Clare.
After his education at the University of
Cambridge, Smart was elected a fellow of
Pembroke Hall (1745), but at about the age of 27
he became a hack writer in London. He was three
times confined for madness (a mild religious
mania), but his strange yet engaging personality
won him such friends as Samuel Johnson,
actor-manager David Garrick, playwright Oliver
Goldsmith, and both Dr. Charles Burney, the
musicologist, and his daughter, Fanny, the
novelist. Smart died in a debtor’s prison.
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William Cowper

born Nov. 26, 1731, Great Berkhamstead,
Hertfordshire, Eng.
died April 25, 1800, East Dereham, Norfolk
one of the most widely read English poets of his
day, whose most characteristic work, as in The
Task or the melodious short lyric “The Poplar
Trees,” brought a new directness to 18th-century
nature poetry.
Cowper wrote of the joys and sorrows of everyday
life and was content to describe the minutiae of
the countryside. In his sympathy with rural
life, his concern for the poor and downtrodden,
and his comparative simplicity of language, he
may be seen as one in revolt against much
18th-century verse and as a forerunner of Robert
Burns, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. While he is often gently humorous in
his verse, the sense of desolation that was
never far below the surface of his mind is
revealed in many of his poems, notably “The
Castaway.”
After the death of his mother when he was
six, Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”), the son of an
Anglican clergyman, was sent to a local boarding
school. He then moved to Westminster School, in
London, and in 1750 began to study law. He was
called to the bar in 1754 and took chambers in
London’s Middle Temple in 1757. During his
student days he fell in love with his cousin,
Theodora Cowper, and for a while the two were
engaged. But Cowper was beginning to show signs
of the mental instability that plagued him
throughout his life. His father had died in
1756, leaving little wealth, and Cowper’s family
used its influence to obtain two administrative
posts for him in the House of Lords, which
entailed a formal examination. This prospect so
disturbed him that he attempted suicide and was
confined for 18 months in an asylum, troubled by
religious doubts and fears and persistently
dreaming of his predestined damnation.
Religion, however, also provided the comfort
of Cowper’s convalescence, which he spent at
Huntingdon, lodging with the Reverend Morley
Unwin, his wife Mary, and their small family.
Pious Calvinists, the Unwins supported the
evangelical revival, then a powerful force in
English society. In 1767 Morley Unwin was killed
in a riding accident, and his family, with
Cowper, took up residence at Olney, in
Buckinghamshire. The curate there, John Newton,
a leader of the revival, encouraged Cowper in a
life of practical evangelism; however, the poet
proved too frail, and his doubt and melancholy
returned. Cowper collaborated with Newton on a
book of religious verse, eventually published as
Olney Hymns (1779).
In 1773 thoughts of marriage with Mary Unwin
were ended by Cowper’s relapse into near
madness. When he recovered the following year,
his religious fervour was gone. Newton departed
for London in 1780, and Cowper again turned to
writing poetry; Mrs. Unwin suggested the theme
for “The Progress of Error,” six moral satires.
Other works, such as “Conversation” and
“Retirement,” reflected his comparative
cheerfulness at this time.
Cowper was friendly with Lady Austen, a widow
living nearby, who told him a story that he made
into a ballad, “The Journey of John Gilpin,”
which was sung all over London after it was
printed in 1783. She also playfully suggested
that he write about a sofa—an idea that grew
into The Task. This long discursive poem,
written “to recommend rural ease and leisure,”
was an immediate success on its publication in
1785. Cowper then moved to Weston, a
neighbouring village, and began translating
Homer. His health suffered under the strain,
however, and there were occasional periods of
mental illness. His health continued to
deteriorate, and in 1795 he moved with Mary
Unwin to live near a cousin in Norfolk, finally
settling at East Dereham. Mrs. Unwin, a
permanent invalid since 1792, died in December
1796, and Cowper sank into despair from which he
never emerged.
Robert Southey edited his writings in 15
volumes between 1835 and 1837. Cowper is also
considered one of the best letter writers in
English, and some of his hymns, such as “God
Moves in a Mysterious Way” and “Oh! For a Closer
Walk with God,” have become part of the folk
heritage of Protestant England. The Letters and
Prose Writings, in two volumes, edited by James
King and Charles Ryskamp, was published in
1979–80.
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Isaac Watts

born July 17, 1674, Southampton, Hampshire,
Eng.
died Nov. 25, 1748, Stoke Newington, London
English Nonconformist minister, regarded as the
father of English hymnody.
Watts, whose father was a Nonconformist, studied
at the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington,
London, which he left in 1694. In 1696 he became
tutor to the family of Sir John Hartopp of Stoke
Newington (a centre of religious dissent) and of
Freeby, Leicestershire, and preached his first
sermons in the family chapel at Freeby. He was
appointed assistant to the minister of Mark Lane
Independent (i.e., Congregational) Chapel,
London, in 1699 and in March 1702 became full
pastor. He was apparently an inspiring preacher.
Because of a breakdown in health (1712) he went
to stay, intending a week’s visit, with Sir
Thomas Abney in Hertfordshire; he remained with
the Abneys for the rest of his life.
Watts wrote educational books on geography,
astronomy, grammar, and philosophy, which were
widely used throughout the 18th century. He is
now best known, however, for his hymns. The
famous hymns were written during Watts’s Mark
Lane ministry. His first collection of hymns and
sacred lyrics was Horae Lyricae (1706), quickly
followed by Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707),
which included “When I Survey the Wondrous
Cross,” “There is a Land of Pure Delight,” and
others that have become known throughout
Protestant Christendom. The most famous of all
his hymns, “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”
(from his paraphrase of Ps. 90), and “Jesus
Shall Reign” (part of his version of Ps. 72),
almost equally well known, were published in The
Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the
New Testament . . . (1719). He also wrote
religious songs especially for children; these
were collected in Divine Songs for the Use of
Children (1715).
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Lady Mary Montagu

baptized May 26, 1689, London, Eng.
died Aug. 21, 1762, London
the most colourful Englishwoman of her time and
a brilliant and versatile writer.
Her literary genius, like her personality, had
many facets. She is principally remembered as a
prolific letter writer in almost every
epistolary style; she was also a distinguished
minor poet, always competent, sometimes
glittering and genuinely eloquent. She is
further remembered as an essayist, feminist,
traveler, and eccentric. Her beauty was marred
by a severe attack of smallpox while she was
still a young woman, and she later pioneered in
England the practice of inoculation against the
disease, having noticed the effectiveness of
this precaution during a stay in Turkey.
The daughter of the 5th Earl of Kingston and
Lady Mary Fielding (a cousin of the novelist
Henry Fielding), she eloped with Edward Wortley
Montagu, a Whig member of Parliament, rather
than accept a marriage that had been arranged by
her father. In 1714 the Whigs came to power, and
Edward Wortley Montagu was in 1716 appointed
ambassador to Turkey, taking up residence with
his wife in Constantinople (now Istanbul). After
his recall in 1718, they bought a house in
Twickenham, west of London. For reasons not
wholly clear, Lady Mary’s relationship with her
husband was by this time merely formal and
impersonal.
At Twickenham Lady Mary embarked upon a
period of intense literary activity. She had
earlier written a set of six “town eclogues”
that were witty adaptations of the Roman poet
Virgil. In these, she was helped by her friends
John Gay and Alexander Pope (who later turned
against her, satirizing her in The Dunciad and
elsewhere, to which attacks Lady Mary replied
with spirit, though she quickly abandoned poetic
warfare). Among the works that she then composed
was an anonymous and lively attack on the
satirist Jonathan Swift (1734), a play,
Simplicity (written c. 1735), adapted from the
French of Pierre Marivaux, and a series of crisp
essays dealing obliquely with politics and
directly with feminism and the moral cynicism of
her time.
In 1736 Lady Mary became infatuated with
Francesco Algarotti, an Italian writer on the
arts and sciences who had come to London to
further his career, and she proposed that they
live together in Italy. She set out in 1739,
pretending to her husband and friends that she
was traveling to the continent for reasons of
health. Algarotti, however, did not join her,
for he had been summoned to Berlin by Frederick
II the Great, from whom he could expect greater
rewards; and, when at length they met in Turin
(1741), it proved a disagreeable experience. In
1742 she settled in the papal state of Avignon,
France, where she lived until 1746. She then
returned to Italy with the young Count Ugo
Palazzi, with whom she lived for the next 10
years in the Venetian province of Brescia. Her
letters from there to her daughter Mary, the
Countess of Bute, contain descriptions of her
essentially simple life. In 1756 she moved to
Venice and, after her husband’s death in 1761,
began planning her return to England. She set
out in September of that year and was reunited
with her daughter. Discontented in London, she
would have returned to Italy; but she was
seriously ill with cancer and died only seven
months after her homecoming.
Lady Mary’s literary reputation chiefly rests
on 52 superb Turkish embassy letters, which she
wrote after her return as the ambassador’s wife
in Constantinople, using her actual letters and
journals as source material. The letters were
published in 1763 from an unauthorized copy and
were acclaimed throughout Europe. Later editions
of her letters, sanctioned by her family, added
selections from her personal letters together
with most of her poetry. The Complete Letters of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vol. (ed. Robert
Halsband, 1965–67), was the first full edition
of Lady Mary’s letters.
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Hannah More

born Feb. 2, 1745, Stapleton, Gloucestershire,
Eng.
died Sept. 7, 1833, Bristol, Gloucestershire
English religious writer, best known as a
writer of popular tracts and as an educator of
the poor.
As a young woman with literary aspirations, More
made the first of her visits to London in
1773–74. She was welcomed into a circle of
Bluestocking wits and was befriended by Sir
Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, and Edmund Burke
and, particularly, by David Garrick, who
produced her plays The Inflexible Captive (1775)
and Percy (1777). After Garrick’s death in 1779
she forsook writing for the stage, and her
strong piety and Christian attitudes, already
intense, became more marked.
Through her friendship with the abolitionist
philanthropist William Wilberforce, she was
drawn to the Evangelicals. From her cottage in
Somerset, she began to admonish society in a
series of treatises beginning with Thoughts on
the Importance of the Manners of the Great to
General Society (1788). In the climate of alarm
over the French Revolution, her fresh and
forceful defense of traditional values met with
strong approval.
Her Village Politics (1792; under the
pseudonym of Will Chip), written to counteract
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, was so successful
that it led to the production of a series of
“Cheap Repository Tracts.” Produced at the rate
of three a month for three years with the help
of her sisters and friends, the tracts sold for
a penny each, 2,000,000 being circulated in a
single year. They advised the poor in
ingeniously homely language to cultivate the
virtues of sobriety and industry and to trust in
God and in the kindness of the gentry.
Like most of her educated contemporaries,
More believed that society was static and that
civilization depended upon a large body of the
poor, for whom the best education was one that
reconciled them to their fate. Hence she
established clubs for women and schools for
children, in which the latter were taught the
Bible, catechism, and skills thought to befit
their station. She persevered in her efforts in
spite of much opposition and abuse from country
neighbours, who thought that even the most
limited education of the poor would destroy
their interest in farming, and from the clergy,
who accused her of Methodism.
Her final popular success as a writer was her
didactic novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife
(1808). The feminist movement in the second half
of the 20th century revived interest in her
Strictures on the Modern System of Female
Education, 2 vol. (1799; edited by Gina Luria,
1974).
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Anna Seward

born Dec. 12, 1747, Eyam, Derbyshire,
Eng.
died March 25, 1809, Lichfield, Staffordshire
English poet and author of a sentimental and
poetical novel, Louisa (1784); she was popular
in her day because of her rarity value as a
woman poet and for her cult of sentiment.
Often called the “Swan of Lichfield,” she
became a member there of a literary circle that
included William Hayley, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas
Day, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Her verse was
inferior, however, and she embarrassed Sir
Walter Scott (with whom she had corresponded) by
making him her literary executor.
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Charlotte Smith

born May 4, 1749, London, Eng.
died Oct. 28, 1806, Tilford, near Farnham,
Surrey
née Turner
English novelist and poet, highly praised by the
novelist Sir Walter Scott. Her poetic attitude
toward nature was reminiscent of William
Cowper’s in celebrating the “ordinary” pleasures
of the English countryside. Her radical
attitudes toward conventional morality (the
novel Desmond tells of the innocent love of a
man for a married woman) and political ideas of
class equality (inspired by the French
Revolution) gained her notoriety, but her work
belongs essentially with that of the derivative
18th-century romantic tradition of women
novelists.
Smith’s husband fled to France to escape his
creditors. She joined him there, until, thanks
largely to her, he was able to return to
England. In 1787, however, she left him and
began writing to support her 12 children.
Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, which she had
published in 1784, had been well received, but
because novels promised greater financial
rewards, she wrote, after some free translations
of French novels, Emmeline; or, The Orphan of
the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde; or, The Recluse
of the Lake (1789). Desmond appeared in 1792 and
was followed by her best work, The Old
Manor-House (1793). Toward the end of her life,
she turned to writing instructive books for
children, the best being Conversations
Introducing Poetry for the Use of Children
(1804).
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Burns
The 1780s brought publishing success to
Robert Burns for his
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). Drawing on
the precedents of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, Burns
demonstrated how Scottish idioms and ballad modes could lend
a new vitality to the language of poetry. Although born a
poor tenant farmer’s son, Burns had made himself well versed
in English literary traditions, and his innovations were
fully premeditated. His range is wide, from uninhibitedly
passionate love songs to sardonic satires on moral and
religious hypocrisy, of which the monologue Holy Willie’s
Prayer (written 1785) is an outstanding example. His work
bears the imprint of the revolutionary decades in which he
wrote, and recurrent in much of it are a joyful hymning of
freedom, both individual and national, and an instinctive
belief in the possibility of a new social order.
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Robert Burns
"Poems &
Songs"
BOOK I,
BOOK II

born Jan. 25, 1759, Alloway, Ayrshire, Scot.
died July 21, 1796, Dumfries, Dumfriesshire
Main
national poet of Scotland, who wrote lyrics and songs in the Scottish
dialect of English. He was also famous for his amours and his rebellion
against orthodox religion and morality.
Life
Burns’s father had come to Ayrshire from Kincardineshire in an endeavour
to improve his fortunes, but, though he worked immensely hard first on
the farm of Mount Oliphant, which he leased in 1766, and then on that of
Lochlea, which he took in 1777, ill luck dogged him, and he died in
1784, worn out and bankrupt. It was watching his father being thus
beaten down that helped to make Robert both a rebel against the social
order of his day and a bitter satirist of all forms of religious and
political thought that condoned or perpetuated inhumanity. He received
some formal schooling from a teacher as well as sporadically from other
sources. He acquired a superficial reading knowledge of French and a
bare smattering of Latin, and he read most of the important 18th-century
English writers as well as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. His
knowledge of Scottish literature was confined in his childhood to orally
transmitted folk songs and folk tales together with a modernization of
the late 15th-century poem “Wallace.” His religion throughout his adult
life seems to have been a humanitarian deism.
Proud, restless, and full of a nameless ambition, the young Burns did
his share of hard work on the farm. His father’s death made him tenant
of the farm of Mossgiel to which the family moved and freed him to seek
male and female companionship where he would. He took sides against the
dominant extreme Calvinist wing of the church in Ayrshire and championed
a local gentleman, Gavin Hamilton, who had got into trouble with the
Kirk Session for sabbath breaking. He had an affair with a servant girl
at the farm, Elizabeth Paton, who in 1785 bore his first illegitimate
child, and on the child’s birth he welcomed it with a lively poem.
Burns developed rapidly throughout 1784 and 1785 as an “occasional”
poet who more and more turned to verse to express his emotions of love,
friendship, or amusement or his ironical contemplation of the social
scene. But these were not spontaneous effusions by an almost-illiterate
peasant. Burns was a conscious craftsman; his entries in the commonplace
book that he had begun in 1783 reveal that from the beginning he was
interested in the technical problems of versification.
Though he wrote poetry for his own amusement and that of his friends,
Burns remained restless and dissatisfied. He won the reputation of being
a dangerous rebel against orthodox religion, and, when in 1786 he fell
in love with Jean Armour, her father refused to allow her to marry Burns
even though a child was on the way and under Scots law mutual consent
followed by consummation constituted a legal marriage. Jean was
persuaded by her father to go back on her promise; Robert, hurt and
enraged, took up with another girl, Mary Campbell, who died soon after;
on September 3 Jean bore him twins out of wedlock. Meanwhile, the farm
was not prospering, and Burns, harassed by insoluble problems, thought
of emigrating. But he first wanted to show his country what he could do.
In the midst of his troubles he went ahead with his plans for publishing
a volume of his poems at the nearby town of Kilmarnock. It was entitled
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and appeared on July 31, 1786.
Its success was immediate and overwhelming. Simple country folk and
sophisticated Edinburgh critics alike hailed it, and the upshot was that
Burns set out for Edinburgh on Nov. 27, 1786, to be lionized,
patronized, and showered with well-meant but dangerous advice.
The Kilmarnock volume was a remarkable mixture. It included a handful
of first-rate Scots poems: “The Twa Dogs,” “Scotch Drink,” “The Holy
Fair,” “An Address to the Deil,” “The Death and Dying Words of Poor
Maillie,” “To a Mouse,” “To a Louse,” and some others, including a
number of verse letters addressed to various friends. There were also a
few Scots poems in which he was unable to sustain his inspiration or
that are spoiled by a confused purpose. In addition, there were six
gloomy and histrionic poems in English, four songs, of which only one,
“It Was Upon a Lammas Night,” showed promise of his future greatness as
a song writer, and what to contemporary reviewers seemed the stars of
the volume, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” and “To a Mountain Daisy.”
Burns selected his Kilmarnock poems with care: he was anxious to
impress a genteel Edinburgh audience. In his preface he played up to
contemporary sentimental views about the natural man and the noble
peasant, exaggerated his lack of education, pretended to a lack of
natural resources and in general acted a part. The trouble was that he
was only half acting. He was uncertain enough about the genteel
tradition to accept much of it at its face value, and though, to his
ultimate glory, he kept returning to what his own instincts told him was
the true path for him to follow, far too many of his poems are marred by
a naïve and sentimental moralizing.
Edinburgh unsettled Burns, and, after a number of amorous and other
adventures there and several trips to other parts of Scotland, he
settled in the summer of 1788 at a farm in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire. At
Edinburgh, too, he arranged for a new and enlarged edition (1787) of his
Poems, but little of significance was added to the Kilmarnock selection.
He found farming at Ellisland difficult, though he was helped by Jean
Armour, with whom he had been reconciled and whom he finally married in
1788.
In Edinburgh Burns had met James Johnson, a keen collector of
Scottish songs who was bringing out a series of volumes of songs with
the music and who enlisted Burns’s help in finding, editing, improving,
and rewriting items. Burns was enthusiastic and soon became virtual
editor of Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum. Later, he became involved
with a similar project for George Thomson, but Thomson was a more
consciously genteel person than Johnson, and Burns had to fight with him
to prevent him from “refining” words and music and so ruining their
character. Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) and the first
five volumes of Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs
for the Voice (1793–1818) contain the bulk of Burns’s songs. Burns spent
the latter part of his life in assiduously collecting and writing songs
to provide words for traditional Scottish airs. He regarded his work as
service to Scotland and quixotically refused payment. The only poem he
wrote after his Edinburgh visit that showed a hitherto unsuspected side
of his poetic genius was Tam o’Shanter (1791), a spirited, narrative
poem in brilliantly handled eight-syllable couplets based on a folk
legend.
Meanwhile, Burns corresponded with and visited on terms of equality a
great variety of literary and other people who were considerably “above”
him socially. He was an admirable letter writer and a brilliant talker,
and he could hold his own in any company. At the same time, he was still
a struggling tenant farmer, and the attempt to keep himself going in two
different social and intellectual capacities was wearing him down. After
trying for a long time, he finally obtained a post in the excise service
in 1789 and moved to Dumfries in 1791, where he lived until his death.
His life at Dumfries was active. He wrote numerous “occasional” poems
and did an immense amount of work for the two song collections, in
addition to carrying out his duties as exciseman. The outbreak of the
French Revolution excited him, and some indiscreet outbursts nearly lost
him his job, but his reputation as a good exciseman and a politic but
humiliating recantation saved him.
Assessment
Burns was a man of great intellectual energy and force of character who,
in a class-ridden society, never found an environment in which he could
fully exercise his personality. The fact is that Scottish culture in his
day could provide no intellectual background that might replace the
Calvinism that Burns rejected. The Edinburgh literati of Burns’s day
were second raters, but the problem was more than one of personalities.
The only substitute for the rejected Calvinism seemed to be a
sentimental deism, a facile belief in the good heart as all, and this
was not a creed rich or complex enough to nourish great poetry. That
Burns in spite of this produced so much fine poetry shows the strength
of his unique genius, and that he has become the Scottish national poet
is a tribute to his hold on the popular imagination.
Burns perhaps exhibited his greatest poetic powers in his satires.
There is also a remarkable craftsmanship in his verse letters, which
display a most adroit counterpointing of the colloquial and the formal.
But it is by his songs that Burns is best known, and it is his songs
that have carried his reputation round the world. Burns is without doubt
the greatest songwriter Great Britain has produced.
Burns wrote all his songs to known tunes, sometimes writing several
sets of words to the same air in an endeavour to find the most apt poem
for a given melody. Many songs which, it is clear from a variety of
evidence, must have been substantially written by Burns he never claimed
as his. He never claimed “Auld Lang Syne,” for example, which he
described simply as an old fragment he had discovered, but the song we
have is almost certainly his, though the chorus and probably the first
stanza are old. (Burns wrote it for a simple and moving old air that is
not the tune to which it is now sung, as Thomson set it to another
tune.) The full extent of Burns’s work on Scottish song will probably
never be known.
It is positively miraculous that Burns was able to enter into the
spirit of older folk song and re-create, out of an old chorus, such
songs as “I’m O’er Young to Marry Yet,” “Green Grow the Rashes, O,” and
a host of others. It is this uncanny ability to speak with the great
anonymous voice of the Scottish people that explains the special feeling
that Burns arouses, feelings that manifest themselves in the “Burns
cult.”
David Daiches
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Goldsmith
Two other major poets, both of whom also achieved
distinction in an impressive array of nondramatic modes,
demand attention:
Goldsmith and Johnson.
Oliver Goldsmith’s
contemporary fame as a poet rested chiefly on The Traveller
(1764), The Deserted Village (1770), and the incomplete
Retaliation (1774). The last, published 15 days after his
own death, is a dazzling series of character portraits in
the form of mock epitaphs on a group of his closest
acquaintances. The Traveller, a philosophical comparison of
the differing national cultures of western Europe and the
degrees of happiness their citizens enjoy, is narrated by a
restless wanderer whose heart yet yearns after his own
native land, where his brother still dwells. In The Deserted
Village the experience is one of enforced exile, as an
idealized village community is ruthlessly broken up in the
interests of landed power. A comparable story of a rural
idyll destroyed (though this time narrative artifice allows
its eventual restoration) is at the centre of his greatly
popular novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He was also a
deft and energetic practitioner of the periodical essay,
contributing to at least eight journals between 1759 and
1773. His Citizen of the World, a series of essays
originally published in The Public Ledger in 1760–61, uses
the device of a Chinese traveler whose letters home comment
tolerantly but shrewdly on his English experiences. He also
produced two stage comedies, one of which,
She Stoops to
Conquer (1773), is one of the few incontrovertible
masterpieces of the theatre after the death of Farquhar in
1707.

Oliver Goldsmith
"She
Stoops to Conquer"

Irish author
born Nov. 10, 1730, Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ire. died April 4, 1774, London
Main Anglo-Irish essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made
famous by such works as the series of essays The Citizen of the World,
or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), the poem The Deserted
Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the play
She Stoops to Conquer (1773).
Life Goldsmith was the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, the Rev. Charles
Goldsmith, curate in charge of Kilkenny West, County Westmeath. At about
the time of his birth, the family moved into a substantial house at
nearby Lissoy, where Oliver spent his childhood. Much has been recorded
concerning his youth, his unhappy years as an undergraduate at Trinity
College, Dublin, where he received the B.A. degree in February 1749, and
his many misadventures before he left Ireland in the autumn of 1752 to
study in the medical school at Edinburgh. His father was now dead, but
several of his relations had undertaken to support him in his pursuit of
a medical degree. Later on, in London, he came to be known as Dr.
Goldsmith—Doctor being the courtesy title for one who held the Bachelor
of Medicine—but he took no degree while at Edinburgh nor, so far as
anyone knows, during the two-year period when, despite his meagre funds,
which were eventually exhausted, he somehow managed to make his way
through Europe. The first period of his life ended with his arrival in
London, bedraggled and penniless, early in 1756.
Goldsmith’s rise from total obscurity was a matter of only a few
years. He worked as an apothecary’s assistant, school usher, physician,
and as a hack writer—reviewing, translating, and compiling. Much of his
work was for Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review. It remains amazing that
this young Irish vagabond, unknown, uncouth, unlearned, and unreliable,
was yet able within a few years to climb from obscurity to mix with
aristocrats and the intellectual elite of London. Such a rise was
possible because Goldsmith had one quality, soon noticed by booksellers
and the public, that his fellow literary hacks did not possess—the gift
of a graceful, lively, and readable style. His rise began with the
Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), a
minor work. Soon he emerged as an essayist, in The Bee and other
periodicals, and above all in his Chinese Letters. These essays were
first published in the journal The Public Ledger and were collected as
The Citizen of the World in 1762. The same year brought his Life of
Richard Nash, of Bath, Esq. Already Goldsmith was acquiring those
distinguished and often helpful friends whom he alternately annoyed and
amused, shocked and charmed—Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas
Percy, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and James Boswell. The obscure
drudge of 1759 became in 1764 one of the nine founder-members of the
famous Club, a select body, including Reynolds, Johnson, and Burke,
which met weekly for supper and talk. Goldsmith could now afford to live
more comfortably, but his extravagance continually ran him into debt,
and he was forced to undertake more hack work. He thus produced
histories of England and of ancient Rome and Greece, biographies, verse
anthologies, translations, and works of popular science. These were
mainly compilations of works by other authors, which Goldsmith then
distilled and enlivened by his own gift for fine writing. Some of these
makeshift compilations went on being reprinted well into the 19th
century, however.
By 1762 Goldsmith had established himself as an essayist with his
Citizen of the World, in which he used the device of satirizing Western
society through the eyes of an Oriental visitor to London. By 1764 he
had won a reputation as a poet with The Traveller, the first work to
which he put his name. It embodied both his memories of tramping through
Europe and his political ideas. In 1770 he confirmed that reputation
with the more famous Deserted Village, which contains charming vignettes
of rural life while denouncing the evictions of the country poor at the
hands of wealthy landowners. In 1766 Goldsmith revealed himself as a
novelist with The Vicar of Wakefield (written in 1762), a portrait of
village life whose idealization of the countryside, sentimental
moralizing, and melodramatic incidents are underlain by a sharp but
good-natured irony. In 1768 Goldsmith turned to the theatre with The
Good Natur’d Man, which was followed in 1773 by the much more effective
She Stoops to Conquer, which was immediately successful. This play has
outlived almost all other English-language comedies from the early 18th
to the late 19th century by virtue of its broadly farcical horseplay and
vivid, humorous characterizations.
During his last decade Goldsmith’s conversational encounters with
Johnson and others, his foolishness, and his wit were preserved in
Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Goldsmith eventually became deeply
embroiled in mounting debts despite his considerable earnings as an
author, though, and after a short illness in the spring of 1774 he died.
Assessment When Oliver Goldsmith died he had achieved eminence among the writers of
his time as an essayist, a poet, and a dramatist. He was one “who left
scarcely any kind of writing untouched and who touched nothing that he
did not adorn”—such was the judgment expressed by his friend Dr.
Johnson. His contemporaries were as one in their high regard for
Goldsmith the writer, but they were of different minds concerning the
man himself. He was, they all agreed, one of the oddest personalities of
his time. Of established Anglo-Irish stock, he kept his brogue and his
provincial manners in the midst of the sophisticated Londoners among
whom he moved. His bearing was undistinguished, and he was unattractive
physically—ugly, some called him—with ill-proportioned features and a
pock-marked face. He was a poor manager of his own affairs and an
inveterate gambler, wildly extravagant when in funds, generous sometimes
beyond his means to people in distress. The graceful fluency with words
that he commanded as a writer deserted him totally when he was in
society—his conversational mishaps were memorable things. Instances were
also cited of his incredible vanity, of his constant desire to be
conspicuous in company, and of his envy of others’ achievements. In the
end what most impressed Goldsmith’s contemporaries was the paradox he
presented to the world: on the one hand the assured and polished
literary artist, on the other the person notorious for his ineptitudes
in and out of society. Again it was Johnson who summed up the common
sentiment. “No man,” he declared, “was more foolish when he had not a
pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.”
Goldsmith’s success as a writer lay partly in the charm of
personality emanated by his style—his affection for his characters, his
mischievous irony, and his spontaneous interchange of gaiety and
sadness. He was, as a writer, “natural, simple, affecting.” It is by
their human personalities that his novel and his plays succeed, not by
any brilliance of plot, ideas, or language. In the poems again it is the
characters that are remembered rather than the landscapes—the village
parson, the village schoolmaster, the sharp, yet not unkindly portraits
of Garrick and Burke. Goldsmith’s poetry lives by its own special
softening and mellowing of the traditional heroic couplet into simple
melodies that are quite different in character from the solemn and
sweeping lines of 18th-century blank verse. In his novel and plays
Goldsmith helped to humanize his era’s literary imagination, without
growing sickly or mawkish. Goldsmith saw people, human situations, and
indeed the human predicament from the comic point of view; he was a
realist, something of a satirist, but in his final judgments unfailingly
charitable.
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Johnson’s poetry and prose
Goldsmith belonged to the circle of a writer of still ampler
range and outstanding intellect,
Samuel Johnson. Pope
recognized Johnson’s poetic promise as it was exhibited in
London (1738), an invigorating reworking of Juvenal’s third
satire as a castigation of the decadence of contemporary
Britain. Johnson’s finest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes
(1749), also takes its cue from Juvenal, this time his 10th
satire. It is a tragic meditation on the pitiful spectacle
of human unfulfillment, yet it ends with an urgent prayer of
Christian hope.
But, great poet though he was, the lion’s share of
Johnson’s formidable energies was expended on prose and on
editorial work. From his early years in London, he lived by
his pen and gave himself unstintingly to satisfy the
booksellers’ demands. Yet he managed to sustain a remarkable
coherence of ethical ambition and personal presence
throughout his voluminous labours. His twice-weekly essays
for The Rambler (1750–52), for instance, consistently show
his powers at their fullest stretch, handling an impressive
array of literary and moral topics with a scrupulous
intellectual gravity and attentiveness. Many of the
preoccupations of The Vanity of Human Wishes and the Rambler
essays reappear in Rasselas (1759), which catalogues with
profound resource the vulnerability of human philosophies of
life to humiliation at the hands of life itself.

Samuel Johnson.
"LIVES
OF THE POETS".
SWIFT, ROWE,
THOMSON, WATTS, ADDISON, HALIFAX.
Samuel Johnson
PART I
"Rasselas,
Prince of Abyssinia"
PART II-III "LIVES
OF THE POETS"

born Sept. 18, 1709, Lichfield, Staffordshire,
Eng.
died Dec. 13, 1784, London
English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and
lexicographer, regarded as one of the greatest
figures of 18th-century life and letters.
Johnson once characterized literary
biographies as “mournful narratives,” and he
believed that he lived “a life radically
wretched.” Yet his career can be seen as a
literary success story of the sickly boy from
the Midlands who by talent, tenacity, and
intelligence became the foremost literary figure
and the most formidable conversationalist of his
time. For future generations, Johnson was
synonymous with the later 18th century in
England. The disparity between his circumstances
and achievement gives his life its especial
interest.
Early life
Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael
Johnson, a bookseller, and his wife, Sarah. From
childhood he suffered from a number of physical
afflictions. By his own account, he was born
“almost dead,” and he early contracted scrofula
(tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands). Because
of a popular belief that the sovereign’s touch
was able to cure scrofula, he was taken to
London at the age of 30 months and touched by
the queen, whose gold “touch piece” he kept
about him for the rest of his life. This was
succeeded by various medical treatments that
left him with disfiguring scars on his face and
neck. He was nearly blind in his left eye and
suffered from highly noticeable tics that may
have been indications of Tourette syndrome.
Until he began to speak, new acquaintances
sometimes took him for an idiot, as did the
artist William Hogarth, who came to admire him
greatly. Despite his many physical afflictions,
Johnson was strong, vigorous, and, after a
fashion, athletic. He liked to ride, walk, and
swim, even in later life. He was tall and became
huge. A few accounts bear witness to his
physical strength—as well as his character—such
as his hurling an insolent theatregoer together
with his seat from the stage into the pit or his
holding off would-be robbers until the arrival
of the watch.
From his earliest years Johnson was
recognized not only for his remarkable
intelligence but also for his pride and
indolence. In 1717 he entered grammar school in
Lichfield. The master of the school, John
Hunter, was a learned though brutal man who
“never taught a boy in his life—he whipped and
they learned.” This regime instilled such terror
in the young boy that even years later the
resemblance of the poet Anna Seward to her
grandfather Hunter caused him to tremble. At
school he made two lifelong friends: Edmund
Hector, later a surgeon, and John Taylor, future
prebendary of Westminster and justice of the
peace for Ashbourne. In 1726 Johnson visited his
cousin, the urbane Reverend Cornelius Ford in
Stourbridge, Worcestershire, who may have
provided a model for him, though it was Ford’s
conviviality and scholarship rather than his
dissipation (he is thought to be one of those
depicted carousing in Hogarth’s A Midnight
Modern Conversation [1733]) that attracted
Johnson.
In 1728 Johnson entered Pembroke College,
Oxford. He stayed only 13 months, until December
1729, because he lacked the funds to continue.
Yet it proved an important year. While an
undergraduate, Johnson, who claimed to have been
irreligious in adolescence, read a new book,
William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life, which led him to make concern for his
soul the polestar of his life. Despite the
poverty and pride that caused him to leave, he
retained great affection for Oxford. He would
later say with reference to the poets of his
college, “We were a nest of singing birds.” In
1731, the year of his father’s death, his first
publication, a translation of Pope’s Messiah
into Latin, appeared in A Miscellany of Poems,
along with the poetry of other Oxford students.
Pope was the leading poet of the age, and
throughout most of his lifetime Johnson would
comment on Pope’s achievement in various
writings.
In the following year Johnson became
undermaster at Market Bosworth grammar school, a
position made untenable by the overbearing and
boorish Sir Wolstan Dixie, who controlled
appointments. With only £20 inheritance from his
father, Johnson left his position with the
feeling that he was escaping prison. After
failing in his quest for another teaching
position, he joined his friend Hector in
Birmingham. In 1732 or 1733 he published some
essays in The Birmingham Journal, none of which
have survived. Dictating to Hector, he
translated into English Joachim Le Grand’s
translation of the Portuguese Jesuit Jerome
Lobo’s A Voyage to Abyssinia, an account of a
Jesuit missionary expedition. Published in 1735,
this work shows signs of the mature Johnson,
such as his praise of Lobo, in the preface, for
not attempting to present marvels: “He meets
with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes,
his crocodiles devour their prey without tears,
and his cataracts fall from the rock without
deafening the neighbouring inhabitants.”
In 1735 Johnson married Elizabeth Porter, a
widow 20 years his senior. Convinced that his
parents’ marital unhappiness was caused by his
mother’s want of learning, he would not follow
their example, choosing instead a woman whom he
found both attractive and intelligent. His
wife’s marriage settlement enabled him to open a
school in Edial, near Lichfield, the following
year. One of his students, David Garrick, would
become the greatest English actor of the age and
a lifelong friend, though their friendship was
not without its strains. It was with Garrick
that some of the unflattering accounts of
Johnson’s wife originated, and his mimicry of
the couple later became a favourite comic
setpiece of his. While at Edial, Johnson began
his historical tragedy Irene, which dramatizes
the love of Sultan Mahomet (Mehmed II) for the
lovely Irene, a Christian slave captured in
Constantinople. The school soon proved a
failure, and he and Garrick left for London in
1737.
The Gentleman’s Magazine and early
publications
In 1738 Johnson began his long association
with The Gentleman’s Magazine, often considered
the first modern magazine. He soon contributed
poetry and then prose, including panegyrics on
Edward Cave, the magazine’s proprietor, and
another contributor, the learned Elizabeth
Carter. Johnson intended to translate the
Venetian Paolo Sarpi’s The History of the
Council of Trent but was forestalled by the
coincidence of another Johnson at work on the
same project. However, his biography of Sarpi,
designed as a preface to that work, appeared in
The Gentleman’s Magazine, as did a number of his
early biographies of European scholars,
physicians, and British admirals.
In 1738 and 1739 he published a series of
satiric works that attacked the government of
Sir Robert Walpole and even the Hanoverian
monarchy: London (his first major poem), Marmor
Norfolciense, and A Compleat Vindication of the
Licensers of the Stage. London is an “imitation”
of the Roman satirist Juvenal’s third satire. (A
loose translation, an imitation applies the
manner and topics of an earlier poet to
contemporary conditions.) Thales, the poem’s
main speaker, bears some resemblance to the poet
Richard Savage, of whom Johnson knew and with
whom he may have become friendly at this time.
Before he leaves the corrupt metropolis for
Wales, Thales rails against the pervasive
deterioration of London (and English) life,
evident in such ills as masquerades, atheism,
the excise tax, and the ability of foreign
nations to offend against “English honour” with
impunity. The most famous line in the poem (and
the only one in capitals) is: “SLOW RISES WORTH,
BY POVERTY DEPRESSED,” which may be taken as
Johnson’s motto at this time. When the poem
appeared anonymously in 1738, Pope was led to
predict that its author would be “déterré”
(unearthed). Pope undoubtedly approved of
Johnson’s politics along with admiring his
poetry and tried unsuccessfully to arrange
patronage for him. Marmor Norfolciense satirizes
Walpole and the house of Hanover. A Compleat
Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage is an
ironic defense of the government’s Stage
Licensing Act of 1737 requiring the lord
chamberlain’s approval of all new plays, which
in 1739 led to the prohibition of Henry Brooke’s
play Gustavus Vasa attacking the English monarch
and his prime minister by Swedish analogy. The
latter two works show the literary influence of
the Irish writer Jonathan Swift.
Johnson at this time clearly supported the
governmental opposition, which was composed of
disaffected Whigs, Tories, Jacobites (those who
continued their allegiance to the Stuart line of
James II), and Nonjurors (those who refused to
take either the oath of allegiance to the
Hanover kings or the oath of abjuration of James
II and the Stuarts). Despite claims to the
contrary, Johnson was neither a Jacobite nor a
Nonjuror. His Toryism, which he sometimes
expressed for shock value, was based upon his
conviction that the Tories could be counted upon
to support the Church of England as a state
institution. When Johnson attacked Whiggism or
defended Toryism (an ideology for him more than
a practical politics, especially since Tories
remained a minority throughout most of his
lifetime), he always took an outsider’s
position. Later in life he expressed a high
regard for Walpole.
In 1739 Johnson published a translation and
annotation of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Pierre
de Crousaz’s Commentary on Pope’s philosophical
poem An Essay on Man. Although he was able to
show that many of Crousaz’s critical
observations rested on a faulty French
translation, Johnson often agreed with his
judgment that some of Pope’s philosophical and
social ideas are marred by complacency. About
this time Johnson tried again to obtain a
position as a schoolteacher. His translations
and magazine writings barely supported him; a
letter to Cave is signed “impransus,” signifying
that he had gone without dinner. Despite his
claim that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote
except for money,” he never made a hard bargain
with a bookseller and often received relatively
little payment, even for large projects. He also
contradicted his assertion frequently by
contributing prefaces and dedications to the
books of friends without payment.
From 1741 to 1744 Johnson’s most substantial
contribution to The Gentleman’s Magazine was a
series of speeches purporting to represent the
actual debates in the House of Commons. This
undertaking was not without risk because
reporting the proceedings of Parliament, which
had long been prohibited, was actually punished
since the spring of 1738. The series was dubbed
Debates in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia, and
this Swiftian expedient gives the speeches
satiric overtones. Their status was complicated
by the fact that Johnson, who had visited the
House of Commons only once, wrote the debates on
the basis of scant information about the
speakers’ positions. Hence they were political
fictions, though paradoxically they appeared to
be fact masquerading as fiction. Johnson later
had misgivings about his role in writing
speeches that were taken as authentic and may
have stopped writing them for this reason. While
Johnson’s claim that he “took care that the Whig
dogs should not have the best of it” has become
notorious, Johnson’s Walpole defends himself
skillfully, and many of the debates seem
even-handed.
In the early 1740s Johnson continued his
strenuous work for The Gentleman’s Magazine;
collaborated with William Oldys, antiquary and
editor, on a catalog of the great Harleian
Library; helped Dr. Robert James, his Lichfield
schoolfellow, with A Medicinal Dictionary; and
issued proposals for an edition of Shakespeare.
His Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of
Macbeth (1745), intended as a preliminary sample
of his work, was his first significant
Shakespeare criticism. In 1746 he wrote The Plan
of a Dictionary of the English Language and
signed a contract for A Dictionary of the
English Language. His major publication of this
period was An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard
Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (1744). If, as
Johnson claimed, the best biographies were
written by those who had eaten and drunk and
“lived in social intercourse” with their
subjects, this was the most likely of his many
biographies to succeed. The Life was widely
admired by, among others, the painter Joshua
Reynolds, and it was reviewed in translation by
the French philosopher Denis Diderot. Although
Johnson had few illusions about his
self-publicizing friend’s conduct and character,
he nonetheless became his defender to a
significant extent. Johnson’s title supports
Savage’s claim to be the bastard son of a
nobleman—a claim of which others have been
highly skeptical—but his biography, in its
mixture of pathos and satire, at once
commemorates and criticizes Savage. Johnson
thought that Savage’s poverty cost society a
great deal:
On a bulk, in a cellar, or in a glasshouse
among thieves and beggars, was to be found the
author of The Wanderer, …the man whose remarks
on life might have assisted the statesman, whose
ideas of virtue might have enlightened the
moralist, whose eloquence might have influenced
senates, and whose delicacy might have polished
courts.
Yet the conclusion leaves no doubt about
Johnson’s ultimate judgment: “negligence and
irregularity, long continued, will make
knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius
contemptible.” If Johnson served as defense
attorney throughout much of the biography, no
prosecutor could have summed up the case against
Savage more devastatingly.
Maturity and recognition
The Vanity of Human WishesIn 1749 Johnson
published The Vanity of Human Wishes, his most
impressive poem as well as the first work
published with his name. It is a panoramic
survey of the futility of human pursuit of
greatness and happiness. Like London, the poem
is an imitation of one of Juvenal’s satires, but
it emphasizes the moral over the social and
political themes of Juvenal. Some of the
definitions Johnson later entered under “vanity”
in his Dictionary suggest the range of meaning
of his title, including “emptiness,”
“uncertainty,” “fruitless desire, fruitless
endeavour,” “empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle
show; unsubstantial enjoyment; petty object of
pride,” and “arrogance.” He portrays historical
figures, mainly from England and continental
Europe (Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, Charles XII of
Sweden, the Persian king Xerxes I), alternating
them with human types (the traveler, the rich
man, the beauty, the scholar), often in
juxtaposition with their opposites, to show that
all are subject to the same disappointment of
their desires. The Vanity of Human Wishes is
imbued with the Old Testament message of
Ecclesiastes that “all is vanity” and replaces
Juvenal’s Stoic virtues with the Christian
virtue of “patience.” The poem surpasses any of
Johnson’s other poems in its richness of imagery
and powerful conciseness.
The theatreJohnson’s connections to the
theatre in these years included writing several
prologues, one for Garrick’s farce Lethe in 1740
and one for the opening of the Drury Lane
theatre. Garrick, now its manager, returned the
favours. Early in 1749 Johnson’s play Irene was
at last performed. Thanks to Garrick’s
production, which included expensive costumes,
an excellent cast (including Garrick himself),
and highly popular afterpieces for the last
three performances, the tragedy ran a
respectable nine nights. The audience objected
to seeing the apostate Greek Christian Irene
strangled by Sultan Mahomet—an innovation of
Garrick’s—and the murder was performed offstage
thereafter. Irene is Johnson’s least appealing
major work, and he is reported to have said when
hearing someone read it aloud, “I thought it had
been better.”
From The Rambler to The AdventurerWith The
Rambler (1750–52), a twice-weekly periodical,
Johnson entered upon the most successful decade
of his career. He wrote over 200 numbers, and
stories abound of his finishing an essay while
the printer’s boy waited at the door; in his
last essay he confessed to “the anxious
employment of a periodical writer.” The essays
cover a wide range of subjects. A large number
of them appropriately stress daily realities;
others are devoted to literature, including
criticism and the theme of authorship
(particularly the early ones, driven by the
writer’s consciousness of his own undertaking)
and to literary forms, such as the novel and
biography, that had not received much
examination. Whatever their topic, Johnson
intended his essays to “inculcate wisdom or
piety” in conformity with Christianity. In tone
these essays are far more serious than those of
his most important predecessor, Joseph Addison,
published in The Spectator (1711–12; 1714).
Johnson himself ranked them highly among his
achievements, commenting “My other works are
wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.”
Although The Rambler may have sold only 500
copies an issue on its first appearance—in his
last number he claimed he had “never been much a
favourite of the public”—it was widely reprinted
in provincial newspapers and sold well in later
editions.
Johnson’s Rambler series also was admired by
his wife Elizabeth, who praised its author by
saying, “I thought very well of you before this;
but I did not imagine you could have written any
thing equal to this.” She died on March 17,
1752, just three days after the publication of
its last number. In her later years “Tetty”
frequently lived away from him in Hampstead.
Signs of marital tensions may be glimpsed in
surviving letters and in Johnson’s prayers,
which were published after his death. He wrote a
sermon for her funeral that praises her
submissive piety—her “exact and regular”
devotions—as well as her charitable disposition.
A diary entry suggests that a year after
Elizabeth’s death Johnson was seeking a new wife
“without any derogation from dear Tetty’s
memory.” The one he most probably had in mind
was the pious Hill Boothby, to whom he wrote
with some frequency in the years immediately
following this resolve. Three dozen of her
letters to him, rarely quoted by biographers,
are in print. The relationship, however, came to
an end with her death in 1756.
During the course of one year starting in
March 1753, Johnson contributed 29 essays to his
friend John Hawkesworth’s periodical The
Adventurer, written in imitation of The Rambler.
Johnson purposely (and ineffectively) lightened
his style in order to hide his authorship. He
wanted his essays unrecognized, for he had given
them to Dr. Richard Bathurst, the friend whom he
said he loved more than any other, to sell as
his own, but he confessed his part to the
persistent Hill Boothby.
The Dictionary A Dictionary of the English
Language was published in two volumes in 1755,
six years later than planned but remarkably
quickly for so extensive an undertaking. The
degree of Master of Arts, conferred on him by
the University of Oxford for his Rambler essays
and the Dictionary, was proudly noted on the
title page. Johnson henceforth would be known in
familiar 18th-century style as “Dictionary
Johnson” or “The Rambler.” There had been
earlier English dictionaries, but none on the
scale of Johnson’s. In addition to giving
etymologies, not the strong point of Johnson and
his contemporaries, and definitions, in which he
excelled, Johnson illustrated usage with
quotations drawn almost entirely from writing
from the Elizabethan period to his own time,
though few living authors were quoted (the
novelists Samuel Richardson and Charlotte
Lennox, Garrick, Reynolds, and Johnson himself
among them). His preface boldly asserts that the
“chief glory of every people arises from its
authors,” and his book (the phrase he always
used for it) was his own claim to be ranked
among them. He was pleased that what took the
French Academy 40 years to perform for their
language was accomplished by one Englishman in 9
years. It may have been his desire to fix the
language by his work, yet he realized that
languages do not follow prescription but are
continually changing. Johnson did not work
systematically from a word list but marked up
the books he read for copying. Thus it is no
surprise that some earlier dictionaries contain
more words and that Johnson’s has striking
omissions (“literary” for one). Yet his
definitions were a great improvement over those
of his predecessors, and his illustrations from
writers since the Elizabethan Age form an
anthology and established a canon. Because he
insisted not only on correct usage but also on
morality and piety, the illustrations of words
often come from sermons and conduct books as
well as from a range of literature. The
skeptical philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the
writer Bernard de Mandeville, who praised the
public benefits of brothels, were excluded on
moral grounds, and in the Plan for the
Dictionary Johnson explains that the inclusion
of a writer could be taken as an invitation to
read his work.
Johnson had been persuaded to address his
Plan to the Earl of Chesterfield as his patron,
but his appeal had been met with years of
neglect. Johnson’s defensive pride was awakened
when the nobleman, learning of the impending
publication of the Dictionary, praised it in two
essays in The World, a weekly paper of
entertainment. His letter to Chesterfield is
often taken as sounding “the death-knell of
patronage,” which it did not. But it did assert
the dignity of the author.
Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with
unconcern on a man struggling for life in the
water, and, when he has reached ground,
encumbers him with help. The notice which you
have been pleased to take of my labours, had it
been early, had been kind; but it has been
delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy
it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it,
till I am known, and do not want it.
The Dictionary defines “patron” as “one who
countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a
wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid
with flattery.”
In its choice of authors and of illustrative
selections, the Dictionary is a personal work.
These give the whole the aspect of both an
encyclopaedia and a conduct book. Even though
Johnson defined “lexicographer” as “a writer of
dictionaries; a harmless drudge,” the drudgery
of the Dictionary fell into the decade of
Johnson’s most important writing and must be
seen in part as enabling it. The payment for the
Dictionary amounted to relatively little after
deductions were made for his six amanuenses and
his own expenses. He left his house in Gough
Square (now the most famous of Johnson museums)
for smaller lodgings in 1759, ending the major
decade of his literary activity famous and poor.
The Literary MagazineFrom 1756 onward Johnson
wrote harsh criticism and satire of England’s
policy in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) fought
against France (and others) in North America,
Europe, and India. This work appeared initially
in a new journal he was editing, The Literary
Magazine, where he also published his biography
of the Prussian king, Frederick II (the Great).
He also contributed important book reviews when
reviewing was still in its infancy. His bitingly
sardonic dissection of a dilettantish and
complacent study of the nature of evil and of
human suffering, A Free Enquiry into the Nature
and Origin of Evil, by the theological writer
Soame Jenyns, may well be the best review in
English during the 18th century:
This author and Pope perhaps never saw the
miseries which they imagine thus easy to be
borne. The poor indeed are insensible of many
little vexations which sometimes embitter the
possessions and pollute the enjoyments of the
rich. They are not pained by casual incivility,
or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment;
but this happiness is like that of a malefactor
who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when
the pincers are tearing his flesh.
The Idler
Johnson’s busiest decade was concluded with
yet another series of essays, called The Idler.
Lighter in tone and style than those of The
Rambler, its 104 essays appeared from 1758 to
1760 in a weekly newspaper, The Universal
Chronicle. While not admired as greatly as The
Rambler, Johnson’s last essay series contained
many impressive numbers, such as No. 84, in
which he praised autobiography over biography
and drew his self-portrait as “Mr. Sober,” a
consummate idler. The original No. 22, his
account of an old vulture explaining to her
offspring man’s propensities as a killer and
concluding that man more than any other animal
is “a friend to vultures,” was considered too
strong to be included in the collected editions.
RasselasJohnson’s essays included numerous
short fictions, but his only long fiction is
Rasselas (originally published as The Prince of
Abissinia: A Tale), which he wrote in 1759,
during the evenings of a single week, in order
to be able to pay for the funeral of his mother.
This “Oriental tale,” a popular form at the
time, explores and exposes the futility of the
pursuit of happiness, a theme that links it to
The Vanity of Human Wishes. Prince Rasselas,
weary of life in the Happy Valley, where
ironically all are dissatisfied, escapes with
his sister and the widely traveled poet Imlac to
experience the world and make a thoughtful
“choice of life.” Yet their journey is filled
with disappointment and disillusionment. They
examine the lives of men in a wide range of
occupations and modes of life in both urban and
rural settings—rulers and shepherds,
philosophers, scholars, an astronomer, and a
hermit. They discover that all occupations fail
to bring satisfaction. Rulers are deposed. The
shepherds exist in grubby ignorance, not
pastoral ease. The Stoic’s philosophy proves
hollow when he experiences personal loss. The
hermit, miserable in his solitude, leaves his
cell for Cairo. In his “conclusion in which
nothing is concluded,” Johnson satirizes the
wish-fulfilling daydreams in which all indulge.
His major characters resolve to substitute the
“choice of eternity” for the “choice of life,”
and to return to Abyssinia (but not the Happy
Valley) on their circular journey.
Johnson never again had to write in order to
raise funds. In 1762 he was awarded a pension of
£300 a year, “not,” as Lord Bute, the prime
minister, told him, “given you for anything you
are to do, but for what you have done.” This in
all likelihood meant not only his literary
accomplishments but also his opposition to the
Seven Years’ War, which the new king, George
III, and his prime minister had also opposed.
Although in his Dictionary Johnson had added to
his definition of “pension,” “In England it is
generally understood to mean pay given to a
state hireling for treason to his country,” he
believed that he could accept his with a clear
conscience.
Friendships and householdIn 1763 Johnson met
the 22-year-old James Boswell, who would go on
to make him the subject of the best-known and
most highly regarded biography in English. The
first meeting with this libertine son of a
Scottish laird and judge was not auspicious, but
Johnson quickly came to appreciate the
ingratiating and impulsive young man. Boswell
kept detailed journals, published only in the
20th century, which provided the basis for his
biography of Johnson and also form his own
autobiography.
Johnson participated actively in clubs. In
1764 he and his close friend Sir Joshua Reynolds
founded The Club (later known as The Literary
Club), which became famous for the distinction
of its members. The original nine members
included the politician Edmund Burke, the
playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir John
Hawkins, the historian of music whom Johnson was
to call “unclubable.” Boswell, whose 1768
account of the Corsican struggle against Genoese
rule and its revolutionary leader, General
Pasquale Paoli, earned him a reputation
throughout Europe, was admitted in 1773. Other
members elected later included Garrick, the
historian Edward Gibbon, the dramatist Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, the economist and moral
philosopher Adam Smith, and the Orientalist Sir
William Jones. In 1749 Johnson had been one of
10 members of the Ivy Lane Club, and the year
before his death he founded The Essex Head Club.
These clubs, at which he often “talked for
victory,” provided the conversation and society
he desired and kept him from the loneliness and
insomnia that he faced at home.
This is not to say that his house was empty
after the death of his wife. He had living with
him at various times Anna Williams, a blind
poet; Elizabeth Desmoulins, the daughter of his
godfather Dr. Samuel Swynfen, and her daughter;
Poll Carmichael, probably a former prostitute;
“Dr.” Robert Levett, a medical practitioner
among the poor; Francis Barber, Johnson’s black
servant, whom he treated in many ways like a son
and made his heir; and Barber’s wife Betsy. They
were at once recipients of Johnson’s charity and
providers of company, but the relationship among
them was not always amicable. In a letter of
1778 Johnson says, “We have tolerable concord at
home, but no love. Williams hates everybody;
Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love
Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll loves
none of them.”
In 1765 Johnson established a friendship that
soon enabled him to call another place “home.”
Henry Thrale, a wealthy brewer and member of
Parliament for Southwark, and his lively and
intelligent wife, Hester, opened their country
house at Streatham to him and invited him on
trips to Wales and, in 1775, to France, his only
tour outside Great Britain. Their friendship and
hospitality gave the 56-year-old Johnson a new
interest in life. Following her husband’s death
in 1781 and her marriage to her children’s music
master, Gabriel Piozzi, Hester Thrale’s and
Johnson’s close friendship came to an end. His
letters to Mrs. Thrale, remarkable for their
range and intimacy, helped make him one of the
great English letter writers.
The edition of Shakespeare The pension
Johnson had received in 1762 had freed him from
the necessity of writing for a living, but it
had not released him from his obligation to
complete the Shakespeare edition, for which he
had taken money from subscribers. His long delay
in bringing that project to fruition provoked
some satiric notice from the poet Charles
Churchill:
He for subscribers baits his hook,
And takes their cash—but where’s the book?
The edition finally appeared in eight volumes
in 1765. Johnson edited and annotated the text
and wrote a preface, which is his greatest work
of literary criticism. As editor and annotator
he sought to establish the text, freed from
later corruptions, and to explain diction that
by then had become obsolete and obscure.
Johnson’s approach was to immerse himself in the
books Shakespeare had read—his extensive reading
for his Dictionary eased this task—and to
examine the early editions as well as those of
his 18th-century predecessors. His annotations
are often shrewd, though his admiration reveals
at times different concerns from those of some
of his contemporaries and of later scholars.
In his Preface Johnson addressed several
critical issues. For one, he vigorously defends
Shakespeare against charges of failing to adhere
to the Neoclassical doctrine of the dramatic
unities of time, place, and action. Johnson
alertly observes that time and place are
subservient to the mind: since the audience does
not confound stage action with reality, it has
no trouble with a shift in scene from Rome to
Alexandria. Some critics had made similar points
before, but Johnson’s defense was decisive. He
also questions the need for purity of dramatic
genre. In defending Shakespearian tragicomedy
against detractors, he asserts that “there is
always an appeal open from criticism to nature.”
Echoing Hamlet, Johnson claims that Shakespeare
merits praise, above all, as “the poet of
nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a
faithful mirror of manners and of life.” He goes
on to say that “in the writings of other poets a
character is too often an individual: in those
of Shakespeare it is commonly a species” and
that “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are
occupied only by men.” These comments inveigh
against the rigid notions of decorum upheld by
critics, such as Voltaire, who would not allow
kings to be drunkards or senators to be
buffoons. Johnson’s concern for “general nature”
means that he is not much interested in
accidental traits of a character, such as the
“Romanness” of Julius Caesar or Brutus, but in
traits that are common to all humanity.
Dr. Johnson
In 1765 Johnson received an honorary Doctor
of Laws degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and
10 years later he was awarded the Doctor of
Civil Laws from the University of Oxford. He
never referred to himself as Dr. Johnson, though
a number of his contemporaries did, and
Boswell’s consistent use of the title in The
Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. made it popular.
The completion of the Shakespeare edition left
Johnson free to write by choice, and one such
choice was his secret collaboration with Robert
Chambers, professor of English law at the
University of Oxford from 1766 to 1773. While it
is difficult to determine just how much of
Chambers’ lectures Johnson may have written, his
help was clearly substantial, and the skilled
editor was valued by the dilatory professor.
Political pamphletsIn the early 1770s Johnson
wrote a series of political pamphlets supporting
positions favourable to the government but in
keeping with his own views. These have often
appeared reactionary to posterity but are worth
considering on their own terms. The False Alarm
(1770) supported the resolution of the House of
Commons not to readmit one of its members, the
scandalous John Wilkes, who had been found
guilty of libel. The pamphlet ridiculed those
who thought the case precipitated a
constitutional crisis. Thoughts on the Late
Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands
(1771) argued against a war with Spain over who
should become “the undisputed lords of
tempest-beaten barrenness.” This pamphlet, his
most admired and least attacked, disputes the
“feudal gabble” of the Earl of Chatham and the
complaints of the pseudonymous political
controversialist who wrote the Junius letters.
The Patriot (1774) was designed to influence an
upcoming election. Johnson had become
disillusioned in the 1740s with those members of
the political opposition who attacked the
government on “patriotic” grounds only to behave
similarly once in power. This essay examines
expressions of false patriotism and includes in
that category justifications of “the ridiculous
claims of American usurpation,” the subject of
his longest tract, Taxation No Tyranny (1775).
The title summarizes his position opposing the
American Continental Congress, which in 1774 had
passed resolutions against taxation by England,
perceived as oppression, especially since the
colonies had no representation in parliament.
Johnson argues that the colonists had not been
denied representation but rather had willingly
left the country where they had votes, that
England had expended vast sums on the colonies,
and that they were rightly required to support
the home country. The tract became notorious in
the colonies, contributing considerably to the
caricature of Johnson the arch-Tory. Yet this
view is too simplistic. His rhetorical question
to the colonists, “How is it that we hear the
loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of
Negroes?” can be traced in large part to a
principled and consistent stance against
colonial oppression.
Journey to the HebridesIn 1773 Johnson set
forth on a journey to the Hebrides. Given his
age, ailments, and purported opinion of the
Scots, Johnson may have seemed a highly unlikely
traveler to this distant region, but in the
opening pages of his A Journey to the Western
Islands of Scotland (1775) he confessed to a
longstanding desire to make the trip and the
inducement of having Boswell as his companion.
He was propelled by a curiosity to see strange
places and study modes of life unfamiliar to
him. His book, a superb contribution to
18th-century travel literature, combines
historical information with what would now be
considered sociological and anthropological
observations about the lives of common people.
(Boswell’s complementary narrative of their
journey, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,
with its rich store of Johnson’s conversation,
was published only in 1785, the year after
Johnson’s death.)
The Lives of the Poets
Johnson’s last great work, Prefaces,
Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the
English Poets (conventionally known as The Lives
of the Poets), was conceived modestly as short
prefatory notices to an edition of English
poetry. When Johnson was approached by some
London booksellers in 1777 to write what he
thought of as “little Lives, and little
Prefaces, to a little edition of the English
Poets,” he readily agreed. He loved anecdote and
“the biographical part” of literature best of
all. The project, however, expanded in scope;
Johnson’s prefaces alone filled the first 10
volumes (1779–81), and the poetry grew to 56
volumes. Johnson was angered by the appearance
of his name on the spines because he had neither
“recommended” nor “revised” these poets, except
for adding Isaac Watts, Sir Richard Blackmore,
John Pomfret, Thomas Yalden, and James Thomson
to the list.
The lives are ordered chronologically by date
of death, not birth, and range in length from a
few pages to an entire volume. Among the major
lives are those of Abraham Cowley, John Milton,
John Dryden, Joseph Addison, and Alexander Pope;
some of the minor ones, such as those of William
Collins and William Shenstone, are striking.
Johnson’s personal dislike of some of the poets
whose lives he wrote, such as John Milton and
Thomas Gray, has been used as a basis for
arguing that he was prejudiced against their
poetry, but too much has been made of this. His
opinions of a poet and his work diverge at times
as, for example, in the case of Collins. Johnson
liked the man but disapproved of his poetic
manner: “he puts his words out of the common
order, seeming to think, with some later
candidates for fame, that not to write prose is
certainly to write poetry.” He was justly proud
of The Life of Cowley, especially of its lengthy
discussion of the 17th-century Metaphysical
poets, of whom Cowley may be considered the last
representative. The Life of Pope is at once the
longest and best. Pope’s life and career were
fresh enough and public enough to provide ample
biographical material. Johnson found Pope’s
poetry highly congenial. His moving,
unsentimental account of Pope’s life is
sensitive to his physical sufferings and yet
unwilling to accept them as an excuse. His
riposte to Pope’s detractors, such as the poet
Joseph Warton, is vigorous and memorable: “It is
surely superfluous to answer the question that
has once been asked, whether Pope was a poet?
otherwise than by asking, in return, if Pope be
not a poet, where is poetry to be found?” Yet in
his masterly comparison of Pope and Dryden he
acknowledges Dryden as the greater poet.
Johnson divided his biographies into three
distinct parts: a narrative of the poet’s life,
a presentation of his character (summarized
traits), and a critical assessment of his main
poems. He adopted this method not because he
failed to perceive relationships between a
poet’s life and his works but because he did not
think that a good poet was necessarily a good
man. His method allowed him to make use of his
recognition that “a manifest and striking
contrariety between the life of an author and
his writings” can exist and to assign different
purposes to his analysis of his subjects’ lives
and their poetry. Johnson expressed a hope that
the biographical parts of his lives were
composed “in such a manner, as may tend to the
promotion of Piety,” and his moral intent is
borne out in his readiness to chastise failings
and to commend virtue. Johnson responded most
favourably to the works of poets from Dryden to
Pope and was skeptical of those produced in his
own generation, including the poetry of Gray,
Collins, and Shenstone, though he admired Gray’s
An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard.
Last years
Throughout much of his adult life Johnson
suffered from physical ailments as well as
depression (“melancholy”). After the loss of two
friends, Henry Thrale in 1781 and Robert Levett
in 1782, and the conclusion of The Lives of the
Poets, his health deteriorated. Above all, his
chronic bronchitis and “dropsy” (edema), a
swelling of his legs and feet, caused great
discomfort. In 1783 he suffered a stroke. His
last year was made still bleaker by his break
with Mrs. Thrale over her remarriage. He
compared himself at one point to those from whom
confessions were extorted by the placement of
heavy stones upon their chests. Yet he insisted
on fighting: “I will be conquered; I will not
capitulate.” A profoundly devout Anglican,
Johnson was in dread at the prospect of death
and judgment, for he feared damnation. Yet in
the winter of 1784, following a day of prayer
after which his edema spontaneously disappeared,
he entered into a previously unknown state of
serenity. He accepted this release from illness
as a sign that he might be saved after all and
referred to it as a “late conversion.” He died
on December 13 and was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Achievement and reputation
Johnson is well remembered for his
aphorisms, which contributed to his becoming,
after Shakespeare, the most frequently quoted of
English writers. Many of these are recorded in
Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
including his famous assertion: “Patriotism is
the last refuge of a scoundrel” and his
admonition: “Clear your mind of cant.” Others
appear in his own writings, including: “Marriage
has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.”
He possessed the gift of contracting “the great
rules of life into short sentences.”
Johnson’s criticism is, perhaps, the most
significant part of his writings. His assessment
of Dryden’s critical works holds good for his
own: “the criticism of Dryden is the criticism
of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems,
nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps
the censorer was not able to have committed; but
a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight
is mingled with instruction, and where the
author proves his right of judgment by his power
of performance.” Although some have spoken of
Johnson as a “literary dictator,” he rejected
the role for himself and in general spoke
against the notion of enforcing precepts. As a
critic and editor, through his Dictionary, his
edition of Shakespeare, and his Lives of the
Poets in particular, he helped invent what we
now call “English Literature.”
Religion was central to Johnson’s
understanding of literature and of the moral
life generally. His personal uneasiness about
religion seems traceable to an orthodox fear
that he might be among the damned. He saw
himself as someone who did not practice what he
preached and lived in dread that he would be, in
the words of St. Paul, a castaway. His watch
bore in Greek the biblical text, “The night
cometh,” a reminder of death and work left
undone.
Johnson is more complex than he is often
taken to be. His wide range of interests
included science and manufacturing processes,
and his knowledge seemed encyclopaedic. Although
his late political tracts in defense of the
government are antidemocratic, Johnson combined
a high regard for monarchy with a low opinion of
most kings. He frequently expressed minority or
unpopular views, such as his principled stands
against slavery, colonialism, and mistreatment
of indigenous peoples. He also urged better
treatment of prisoners of war, prostitutes, and
the poor generally, and he once tried to save a
convicted forger from the gallows.
If, as has often been claimed—largely because
of Boswell’s biography—we know Johnson as we
know few other people in history (or few other
characters in literature), we know him primarily
as a man who overcame a host of difficulties to
become the leading scholar and writer of his
age. His imposing scope made him what might now
be called a public intellectual. In the 19th
century the interest in Johnson centred on his
personality, the subject of Boswell’s biography.
In the 20th century his writings regained their
rightful prominence.
Robert Folkenflik
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Johnson’s forensic brilliance can be seen in his relentless
review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of
Evil (1757), which caustically dissects the latter’s
complacent attitude to human suffering, and his analytic
capacities are evidenced at their height in the successful
completion of two major projects, his innovative Dictionary
of the English Language (1755) and the great edition of
Shakespeare’s plays (1765). The former of these is in some
ways his greatest work of literary criticism, for it
displays the uses of words by means of illustrations culled
from the best writing in English. The latter played a major
part in the establishment of Shakespeare as the linchpin of
a national literary canon. It should be noted, however, that
Johnson’s was but the most critically inspired of a series
of major Shakespeare editions in the 18th century. These
include editions by Nicholas Rowe (1709),
Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1734), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744), and
William
Warburton (1747). Others, by Edward Capell (1768),
George Steevens (1773), and Edmund Malone (1790), would follow.
Johnson was but one of those helping to form a national
literature.
Johnson’s last years produced much political writing
(including the humanely resonant Thoughts on the Late
Transactions Respecting Falkland’s Islands, 1771); the
socially and historically alert Journey to the Western
Islands of Scotland, 1775; and the consummate Lives of the
Poets, 1779–81. The latter was the climax of 40 years’
writing of poetic biographies, including the multifaceted An
Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage (1744). These last
lives, covering the period from Cowley to the generation of
Gray, show Johnson’s mastery of the biographer’s art of
selection and emphasis and (together with the preface and
notes to his Shakespeare edition) contain the most
provocative critical writing of the century. Although his
allegiances lay with Neoclassical assumptions about poetic
form and language, his capacity for improvisatory
responsiveness to practice that lay outside the prevailing decorums should not be underrated. His final faith, however,
in his own creative practice as in his criticism, was that
the greatest art eschews unnecessary particulars and aims
toward carefully pondered and ambitious generalization. The
same creed was eloquently expounded by another member of the
Johnson circle, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his 15 Discourses
(delivered to the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, but
first published collectively in 1797).
The other prime source of Johnson’s fame, his reputation
as a conversationalist of epic genius, rests on the detailed
testimony of contemporary memorialists including Burney,
Hester Lynch Piozzi, and Sir John Hawkins. But the key text
is James Boswell’s magisterial Life of Samuel Johnson
(1791). This combines in unique measure a deep respect for
its subject’s ethical probity and resourceful intellect with
a far from inevitably complimentary eye for the telling
details of his personal habits and deportment. Boswell
manifests rich dramatic talent and a precise ear for
conversational rhythms in his re-creation and orchestration
of the debates that lie at the heart of this great
biography. Another dimension of Boswell’s literary talent
came to light in the 1920s and ’30s when two separate hoards
of unpublished manuscripts were discovered. In these he is
his own subject of study. The 18th century had not
previously produced much autobiographical writing of the
first rank, though the actor and playwright Colley Cibber’s
flamboyant Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740)
and Cowper’s sombre Memoir (written about 1766, first
published in 1816) are two notable exceptions. But the drama
of Boswell’s self-observations has a richer texture than
either of these. In the London Journal especially (covering
1762–63, first published in 1950), he records the processes
of his dealings with others and of his own self-imaginings
with a sometimes unnerving frankness and a tough willingness
to ask difficult questions of himself.
Boswell narrated his experiences at the same time as, or
shortly after, they occurred.
Edward Gibbon, on the other
hand, taking full advantage of hindsight, left in manuscript
at his death six autobiographical fragments, all having much
ground in common, but each telling a subtly different
version of his life. Though he was in many ways invincibly
more reticent than Boswell, Gibbon’s successive explorations
of his own history yet form a movingly resolute effort to
see the truth clearly. These writings were undertaken after
the completion of the great work of his life, The History of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). He
brought to the latter an untiring dedication in the
gathering and assimilation of knowledge, an especial
alertness to evidence of human fallibility and failure, and
a powerful ordering intelligence supported by a delicate
sense of aesthetic coherence. His central theme—that the
destruction of the Roman Empire was the joint triumph of
barbarism and Christianity—is sustained with formidable
ironic resource.
Michael Cordner
John Mullan
Nicholas Rowe

born June 20, 1674, Little Barford,
Bedfordshire, Eng.
died Dec. 6, 1718, London
English writer who was the first to attempt a
critical edition of the works of Shakespeare.
Rowe succeeded Nahum Tate as poet laureate in
1715 and was also the foremost 18th-century
English tragic dramatist, doing much to assist
the rise of domestic tragedy.
Rowe was called to the bar in 1696 and, an
ardent Whig, afterward held several minor
government posts. His early plays, The Ambitious
Step-Mother (1700) and Tamerlane (1702), are
reminiscent of John Dryden’s heroic drama in
their pomp and bluster but contain elements
presaging the spirit of sentiment that
characterizes The Fair Penitent (1703) and later
works. This latter play is of some literary
significance; its hero, Lothario, besides giving
a new word for an attractive rake to the English
language, was apparently the prototype of
Lovelace, the hero of Samuel Richardson’s novel
Clarissa. Rowe composed The Tragedy of Jane
Shore (1714) in imitation of Shakespeare’s
style, as he did The Tragedy of the Lady Jane
Grey (1715). His only comedy, The Biter (1704),
was a failure.
In The Works of Mr. William Shakespear;
Revis’d and Corrected, 6 vol. (1709; 9 vol.,
including poems, 1714), Rowe essentially
followed the fourth folio edition of 1685,
although he claimed to have arrived at the text
by comparing “the several editions.” He did,
however, restore some passages in Hamlet, Romeo
and Juliet, Henry V, and King Lear from early
texts. He abandoned the clumsy folio format (a 9
× 12-inch page size), listed the characters in
the plays, attempted act and scene divisions,
and supplied a life of Shakespeare that,
although composed for the most part of dubious
tradition, remained the basis for all
Shakespeare biographies until the early 19th
century. Rowe’s own poetic output included
occasional odes and some translations. His
version of the Roman poet Lucan’s Pharsalia,
written in heroic couplets and published
posthumously in 1718, was greatly admired
throughout the 18th century.
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Hester
Lynch Piozzi

born
Jan. 27, 1740, Bodvel, Carnarvonshire, Wales
died May 2, 1821, Clifton, Bristol, Eng.
English writer and friend of Samuel Johnson.
In 1763
she married a wealthy brewer named Henry Thrale.
In January 1765 Samuel Johnson was brought to
dinner, and the next year, following a severe
illness, Johnson spent most of the summer in the
country with the Thrales. Gradually, he became
part of the family circle, living about half the
time in their homes. A succession of
distinguished visitors came there to see Johnson
and socialize with the Thrales.
In 1781
Thrale died, and his wife was left a wealthy
widow. To everyone’s dismay, she fell in love
with her daughter’s music master, Gabriel
Piozzi, an Italian singer and composer, married
him in 1784, and set off for Italy on a
honeymoon. Dr. Johnson openly disapproved. The
resulting estrangement saddened his last months
of life.
When
news reached her of Johnson’s death, she hastily
compiled and sent back to England copy for
Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
during the last Twenty Years of his Life (1786),
which thrust her into open rivalry with James
Boswell. The breach was further widened when,
after her return to England in 1787, she brought
out a two-volume edition of Letters to and from
the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1788). Although
less accurate in some details than Boswell’s,
her accounts show other aspects of Johnson’s
character, especially the more human and
affectionate side of his nature.
When
many old friends remained aloof, Mrs. Piozzi
drew around her a new artistic circle, including
the actress Sarah Siddons. Her pen remained
active, and thousands of her entertaining,
gossipy letters have survived. She retained to
the end her unflagging vivacity and zest for
life.
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Sir John Hawkins

born , March 30, 1719, London
died May 21, 1789, London
English
magistrate, writer, and author of the first
history of music in English.
Hawkins was apprenticed as a clerk and became a
solicitor. In 1759 a legacy enabled him to sell
his practice. A Middlesex magistrate from 1761,
Hawkins was elected chairman of the quarter
sessions in 1765. He was knighted in 1772.
Hawkins
wrote, among other works, an annotated edition
of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1760) and
legal articles. His biography of Samuel Johnson,
published with his 1787 edition of Johnson’s
works, was superseded only by Boswell’s. Hawkins
was among Johnson’s closest friends and was an
executor of Johnson’s will.
Hawkins’
General History of the Science and Practice of
Music occupied him for 16 years. It was
published in five volumes in 1776, a few weeks
before Charles Burney’s celebrated General
History of Music. Hawkin’s book continues to be
invaluable as a mine of detailed information,
some of it unavailable elsewhere, but it was
eclipsed by Burney’s.
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James Boswell

born October 29, 1740, Edinburgh, Scotland
died May 19, 1795, London, England
friend
and biographer of Samuel Johnson (Life of
Johnson, 2 vol., 1791). The 20th-century
publication of his journals proved him to be
also one of the world’s greatest diarists.
Edinburgh and London
Boswell’s father, Alexander Boswell,
advocate and laird of Auchinleck in Ayrshire
from 1749, was raised to the bench with the
judicial title of Lord Auchinleck in 1754. The
Boswells were an old and well-connected family,
and James was subjected to the strong pressure
of an ambitious family.
Boswell
hated the select day school to which he was sent
at age 5, and from 8 to 13 he was taught at home
by tutors. From 1753 to 1758 he went through the
arts course at the University of Edinburgh.
Returning to the university in 1758 to study
law, he became enthralled by the theatre and
fell in love with a Roman Catholic actress. Lord
Auchinleck thought it prudent to send him to the
University of Glasgow, where he attended the
lectures of Adam Smith. In the spring of 1760 he
ran away to London. He was, he soon found,
passionately fond of metropolitan culture,
gregarious, high-spirited, sensual, and
attractive to women; and London offered just the
combination of gross and refined pleasures that
seemed to fulfill him. At this time he
contracted gonorrhea, an affliction that he was
to endure many times in the course of his life.
From
1760 to 1762 Boswell studied law at home under
strict supervision and sought release from
boredom in gallantry, in a waggish society
called the Soaping Club, and in scribbling. His
publications (many in verse and most of them
anonymous) give no indication of conspicuous
talent.
When
Boswell came of age, he was eager to enter the
foot guards. Lord Auchinleck agreed that if he
passed his trials in civil law, he would receive
a supplementary annuity and be allowed to go to
London to seek a commission through influence.
Boswell passed the examination in July 1762.
Anticipating great happiness, Boswell began, in
the autumn, the journal that was to be the
central expression of his genius. His great zest
for life was not fully savoured until life was
all written down, and he had a rare faculty for
imaginative verbal reconstruction. His journal
is much more dramatic than most because he wrote
up each event as though he were still living
through it, as if he had no knowledge of
anything that had happened later. People in his
journal talk and are given their characteristic
gestures.
Boswell’s second London visit lasted from
November 1762 to August 1763. Soon after his
arrival, he was informed of the birth in
Scotland of a son, Charles, for whom he arranged
Anglican Baptism. The mother (Peggy Doig) was
probably a servant. He met Oliver Goldsmith, the
novelist, playwright, and poet, as well as John
Wilkes, the radical politician and polemicist.
And on May 16, 1763, in the back parlour of the
actor and bookseller Thomas Davies, he secured
an unexpected introduction to Samuel Johnson,
whose works he admired and whom he had long been
trying to meet. Johnson was rough with him, but
Boswell kept his temper, went to call a week
later, and found himself liked—a great
friendship was initiated. Johnson was 53 years
old when they met, Boswell 22. There was
condescension on both sides on account of
differences in rank and intelligence. Having
become genuinely convinced that the scheme to
join the guards was not practicable, Boswell
capitulated to his father and consented to
become a lawyer. It was agreed that he should
spend a winter studying civil law at Utrecht and
should then make a modest foreign tour.
Continental tour
In Holland Boswell befriended and
unsuccessfully courted the novelist Isabella van
Tuyll van Serooskerken (later called Isabelle de
Charrière). He had been deeply affected by
Johnson’s piety and on Christmas Day, in the
ambassador’s chapel at The Hague, received
communion for the first time in the Church of
England. His pious program proved stimulating
for a time but palled when it had lost its
novelty. He received word that his little boy
had died. In the depression that ensued he had
recurring nightmares of being hanged. He was
discouraged to find that dissipation brought him
more happiness than chastity and hard work, and
he soon lapsed into his former promiscuity.
From
Utrecht, Boswell traveled to Berlin in the
company of the old Jacobite Earl Marischal,
friend and counselor of Frederick the Great, but
he was never able to meet the king. Passing
through Switzerland (December 1764), he secured
interviews with both Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Voltaire. Boswell stayed nine months in Italy,
devoting himself systematically to sightseeing.
At Naples he established an intimacy with Wilkes
(then outlawed) and traveled with Lord
Mountstuart, eldest son of the earl of Bute, the
chief target of Wilkes’s scurrilities.
The most
original act of his life followed when he made a
six weeks’ tour of the island of Corsica (autumn
1765) to interview the heroic Corsican chieftain
Pasquale de Paoli, then engaged in establishing
his country’s independence of Genoa. Paoli
succumbed to his charm and became his lifelong
friend. On his return to the mainland, Boswell
sent off paragraphs to the newspapers, mingling
facts with fantastic political speculation.
Scottish lawyer and laird
Back in Scotland, Boswell was admitted to
the Faculty of Advocates on July 26, 1766, and
for 17 years practiced law at Edinburgh with
complete regularity and a fair degree of
assiduity. His cherished trips to London were by
no means annual and until 1784 were always made
during the vacations. He was an able courtroom
lawyer, especially in criminal cases, but in
Scotland neither fortune nor fame could be won
in the criminal court.
In
February 1768 Boswell published An Account of
Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to That Island;
and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli and stepped into
fame. France had unmasked its intention of
annexing the island, and people were greedy for
information about Corsica and Paoli. Motives of
propaganda caused him to present himself in the
book as completely naive and to cut the tour to
a mere frame for the memoirs of Paoli, but the
result is still pleasing. Paoli, probably
wisely, is presented in a manner reminiscent of
that which the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch
employed in his lives of great men.
Between
1766 and 1769 Boswell amused himself with
various well-hedged schemes of marriage,
maintaining meantime a liaison with a young Mrs.
Dodds. Their daughter, Sally, like Charles,
seems to have died in infancy. Boswell ended by
marrying (November 1769) his first cousin,
Margaret Montgomerie.
During
the first few years of his marriage, Boswell was
on the whole happy, hard-working, faithful to
his wife, and confident of getting a seat in
Parliament, a good post in the government, or at
the very least a Scots judgeship. Paoli visited
him in Scotland in 1771; in 1773 he was elected
to The Club, the brilliant circle that Sir
Joshua Reynolds had formed around Dr. Johnson;
and later in the year Johnson made with him the
famous tour of the Hebrides. He ultimately had
five healthy and promising children. He was made
an examiner of the Faculty of Advocates and one
of the curators of the Advocates’ Library; he
served twice as master of the Canongate
Kilwinning Lodge of Masons and declined
nomination for the grand mastership of Scotland.
But by 1776 he began to feel strong intimations
of failure. A headlong entry into Ayrshire
politics had ranged him in opposition to Henry
Dundas, who was then emerging as a political
despot in the management of the Scottish
elections. His practice was not becoming more
notable. He began to drink heavily to replenish
his spirits, not, as formerly, to give them
vent. He returned to his old traffic with women
of the town when separated from his wife by
distance, by her pregnancy, or by her frequent
complaints. As early as 1778 it was obvious that
she was critically ill with tuberculosis.
Between
1777 and 1783 Boswell published in The London
Magazine a series of 70 essays, significantly
entitled The Hypochondriack, which deserve to be
better known, though they do not engage his full
powers. At the end of 1783, in the hope of
attracting the attention of William Pitt’s new
government, he published a pamphlet attacking
the East India Bill that had been introduced by
Charles James Fox, Pitt’s great rival. Pitt sent
a note of thanks but made no move to employ him.
Boswell succeeded to Auchinleck in 1782 and
managed his estate with attention and some
shrewdness. But he thought he could be happy
only in London and encouraged himself in the
groundless notion that he could be more
successful at the English than at the Scottish
bar.
Life of Johnson and London
Johnson died on December 13, 1784. Boswell
decided to take his time in writing the Life but
to publish his journal of the Hebridean tour as
a first installment. In the spring of 1785 he
went to London to prepare the work for the
press. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,
with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785) tops all the
others published later. It comes from the
soundest and happiest period of Boswell’s life,
the narrative of the tour is interesting in
itself, and it provides us with 101 consecutive
days with Johnson. The book was a best-seller,
but it provoked the scornful charge of personal
fatuity that has dogged Boswell’s name ever
since. His intelligence was not really in
question. But he deliberately defied the basic
literary rule that no author who wishes respect
as a man may publish his own follies without
suggesting compensatory strengths of character.
Boswell analyzed and recorded his own vanity and
weakness with the objectivity of a historian,
and in his Johnsonian scenes he ruthlessly
subordinated his own personality, reporting the
blows that Johnson occasionally gave him without
constantly reassuring the reader that he
understood the implications of what he had
written.
In 1786
Boswell was called to the English bar from the
Inner Temple and moved his family to London.
Thereafter he had almost no legal practice. His
principal business was the writing of the Life
of Johnson, which he worked at irregularly but
with anxious attention.
Though
straitened in income, Boswell gave his children
expensive educations. He visited Edinburgh only
once after his emigration and then almost
surreptitiously. His wife pined for Auchinleck
and insisted on being taken there when her
health grew desperate. Boswell felt that he had
to be in London in order to finish the Life and
to be at the call of the earl of Lonsdale, who
had given him unexpected encouragement and
caused him to be elected recorder of Carlisle.
When his wife died (June 4, 1789), he was not at
her side; and when he tried to detach himself
from Lonsdale, he was treated with shocking
brutality.
The Life
of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. was published in two
volumes on May 16, 1791. Contemporary criticism
set the pattern of acclaim for the work and
derision for its author. Boswell took intense
pleasure in his literary fame but felt himself
to be a failure. His later years were
prevailingly unhappy. His eccentricities of
manner seemed merely self-indulgent in a man of
50 or more: people were afraid to talk freely in
his presence, fearing that their talk would be
reported, and his habit of getting drunk and
noisy at other people’s tables (he was never a
solitary drinker) made him a difficult guest in
any case. His five children, however, loved him
deeply, and he never lost the solicitous
affection of a few friends, including the great
Shakespeare editor Edmund Malone, who had
encouraged him in his writing of the Life of
Johnson. Boswell saw the second edition of the
Life through the press (July 1793) and was at
work on the third when he died in 1795.
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Edward Gibbon

born May 8 [April 27, old style], 1737, Putney,
Surrey, Eng.
died Jan. 16, 1794, London
English
rationalist historian and scholar best known as
the author of The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), a continuous
narrative from the 2nd century ad to the fall of
Constantinople in 1453.
Life.
Gibbon’s grandfather, Edward, had made a
considerable fortune and his father, also
Edward, was able to live an easygoing life in
society and Parliament. He married Judith, a
daughter of James Porten, whose family had
originated in Germany. Edward, too, had
independent means throughout his life. He was
the eldest and the only survivor of seven
children, the rest dying in infancy.
Gibbon’s
own childhood was a series of illnesses and more
than once he nearly died. Neglected by his
mother, he owed his life to her sister,
Catherine Porten, whom he also called “the
mother of his mind,” and after his mother’s
death in 1747 he was almost entirely in his
aunt’s care. He early became an omnivorous
reader and could indulge his tastes the more
fully since his schooling was most irregular. He
attended a day school in Putney and, in 1746,
Kingston grammar school, where he was to note in
his Memoirs “at the expense of many tears and
some blood, [he] purchased a knowledge of Latin
syntax.” In 1749 he was admitted to Westminster
School. He was taken in 1750 to Bath and
Winchester in search of health and after an
unsuccessful attempt to return to Westminster
was placed for the next two years with tutors
from whom he learned little. His father took him
on visits to country houses where he had the run
of libraries filled with old folios. He noted
his 12th year as one of great intellectual
development and says in his Memoirs that he had
early discovered his “proper food,” history. By
his 14th year he had already covered the main
fields of his subsequent masterpiece, applying
his mind as well to difficult problems of
chronology. The keynote of these early years of
study was self-sufficiency. Apart from his
aunt’s initial guidance, Gibbon followed his
intellectual bent in solitary independence. This
characteristic remained with him throughout his
life. His great work was composed without
consulting other scholars and is impressed with
the seal of his unique personality.
In his
Memoirs Gibbon remarked that with the onset of
puberty his health suddenly improved and
remained excellent throughout his life. Never a
strong or active man, he was of diminutive
stature and very slightly built and he became
corpulent in later years. The improvement in his
health apparently accounts for his father’s
sudden decision to enter him at Magdalen
College, Oxford, on April 3, 1752, about three
weeks before his 15th birthday. He was now
privileged and independent. Any expectations of
study at Oxford were soon disappointed. The
authorities failed to look after him
intellectually or spiritually or even to note
his absences from the college. Left to himself,
Gibbon turned to theology and read himself into
the Roman Catholic faith. It was a purely
intellectual conversion. Yet he acted on it and
was received into the Roman Catholic Church by a
priest in London on June 8, 1753.
His
father, outraged because under the existing laws
his son had disqualified himself for all public
service and office, acted swiftly, and Edward
was dispatched to Lausanne and lodged with a
Calvinist minister, the Rev. Daniel Pavillard.
Though the change was complete, and Gibbon was
under strict surveillance, in great discomfort,
and with the scantiest allowance, he later spoke
of this period with gratitude. To Pavillard he
owed kindly and competent instruction and the
formation of regular habits of study. He
mastered the bulk of classical Latin literature
and studied mathematics and logic. He also
became perfectly conversant with the language
and literature of France, which exercised a
permanent influence on him. These studies made
him not only a man of considerable learning but
a stylist for life. He began his first work,
written in French, Essai sur l’étude de la
littérature (1761; An Essay on the Study of
Literature, 1764). Meanwhile, the main purpose
of his exile had not been neglected. Not without
weighty thought, Gibbon at last abjured his new
faith and was publicly readmitted to the
Protestant communion at Christmas 1754. “It was
here,” Gibbon says somewhat ambiguously, “that I
suspended my religious enquiries, acquiescing
with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries
which are adopted by the general consent of
Catholics and Protestants.”
In the
latter part of his exile Gibbon entered more
freely into Lausanne society. He attended
Voltaire’s parties. He formed an enduring
friendship with a young Swiss, Georges
Deyverdun, and also fell in love with and rashly
plighted himself to Suzanne Curchod, a pastor’s
daughter of great charm and intelligence. In
1758 his father called Gibbon home shortly
before his 21st birthday and settled an annuity
of £300 on him. On the other hand, he found that
his father and his stepmother were implacably
opposed to his engagement, and he was compelled
to break it off. (“I sighed as a lover, I obeyed
as a son.”) He never again thought seriously of
marriage. After a natural estrangement he and
Curchod became lifelong friends. She was well
known as the wife of Jacques Necker, the French
finance minister under Louis XVI. During the
next five years Gibbon read widely and
considered many possible subjects for a
historical composition. From 1760 until the end
of 1762, his studies were seriously interrupted
by his service on home defense duties with the
Hampshire militia. With the rank of captain he
did his duty conscientiously and later claimed
that his experience of men and camps had been
useful to him as a historian.
Gibbon
left England on Jan. 25, 1763, and spent some
time in Paris, making the acquaintance of
several Philosophes, Denis Diderot and Jean Le
Rond d’Alembert among others. During the autumn
and winter spent in study and gaiety at
Lausanne, he gained a valuable friend in John
Baker Holroyd (later Lord Sheffield), who was to
become his literary executor. In 1764 Gibbon
went to Rome, where he made an exhaustive study
of the antiquities and, on Oct. 15, 1764, while
musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, was
inspired to write of the decline and fall of the
city. Some time was yet to pass before he
decided on the history of the empire.
At home,
the next five years were the least satisfactory
in Gibbon’s life. He was dependent on his father
and although nearly 30 had achieved little in
life. Although bent on writing a history, he had
not settled on a definite subject. Impressed by
the supremacy of French culture in Europe, he
began in that language a history of the liberty
of the Swiss, but was dissuaded from continuing
it. He and Deyverdun published two volumes of
Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne
(1768–69). In 1770 he sought to attract some
attention by publishing Critical Observations on
the Sixth Book of the Aeneid.
His
father died intestate in 1770. After two years
of tiresome business, Gibbon was established in
Bentinck Street, London, and concentrated on his
Roman history. At the same time he entered fully
into social life. He joined the fashionable
clubs and was also becoming known among men of
letters. In 1775 he was elected to the Club, the
brilliant circle that the painter Sir Joshua
Reynolds had formed round the writer and
lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson. Although
Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, openly
detested Gibbon, and it may be inferred that
Johnson disliked him, Gibbon took an active part
in the Club and became intimate with Reynolds
and the actor David Garrick. In the previous
year he had entered Parliament and was an
assiduous, though silent, supporter of Lord
North.
The
“Decline and Fall.” The first quarto volume of
his history, published on Feb. 17, 1776,
immediately scored a success that was
resounding, if somewhat scandalous because of
the last two chapters in which he dealt with
great irony with the rise of Christianity.
Reactions to Gibbon’s treatment of Christianity
have displayed various phases. Both in his
lifetime and after, he was attacked and
personally ridiculed by those who feared that
his skepticism would shake the existing
establishment. In the 19th century he was hailed
as a champion by militant agnostics. Gibbon
himself was not militant. He did not cry with
Voltaire, “Écrasez l’Infâme!” (“Crush the
Infamy!”) because in his England and Switzerland
he saw no danger in the ecclesiastical systems.
His concern was past history. One may say,
however, with confidence, that he had no belief
in a divine revelation and little sympathy with
those who had such a belief. While he treated
the supernatural with irony, his main purpose
was to establish the principle that religions
must be treated as phenomena of human
experience. In this his successors have followed
him and added to the collateral causes of
Christianity’s growth those that he had
overlooked or could not know of, such as the
various mystery religions of the empire and
particularly the Mithraic cult. Although
Gibbon’s best known treatment of Christianity is
found mainly in the 15th and 16th chapters, no
less significant are later chapters in which he
traced the developments of theology and
ecclesiasticism in relation to the breakup of
the empire.
Gibbon
went on to prepare the next volumes. Meanwhile,
he was assailed by many pamphleteers and
subjected to much ridicule. His ugliness and
elaborate clothes made him an easy target. For
the most part he ignored his critics. The
historians David Hume and William Robertson
recognized him as their equal if not their
superior. Only to those who had accused him of
falsifying his evidence did he make a
devastating reply in A Vindication of Some
Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters
of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1779).
In the
same year he obtained a valuable sinecure as a
commissioner of trade and plantations. Shortly
after that he composed Mémoire justificatif
(1779; a French and English version, 1780), a
masterly state paper in reply to continental
criticism of the British government’s policy in
America. In 1781 he published the second and
third volumes of his history, bringing the
narrative down to the end of the empire in the
West. Gibbon paused at this point to consider
continuing his history. In 1782, however, Lord
North’s government fell, and soon Gibbon’s
commission was abolished. This was a serious
loss of income. To economize he left England and
joined Deyverdun in a house at Lausanne. There
he quietly completed his history in three more
volumes, writing the last lines of it on June
27, 1787. He soon returned to England with the
manuscript, and these volumes were published on
his 51st birthday, May 8, 1788. The completion
of this great work was acclaimed on all sides.
The
Decline and Fall is thus comprised of two
divisions, equal in bulk but inevitably
different in treatment. The first half covers a
period of about 300 years to the end of the
empire in the West, about ad 480. In the second
half nearly 1,000 years are compressed. Yet the
work is a coherent whole by virtue of its
conception of the Roman Empire as a single
entity throughout its long and diversified
course. Gibbon imposed a further unity on his
narrative by viewing it as an undeviating
decline from those ideals of political and, even
more, intellectual freedom that he had found in
classical literature. The material decay that
had inspired him in Rome was the effect and
symbol of moral decadence. However well this
attitude suited the history of the West, its
continuance constitutes the most serious defect
of the second half of Gibbon’s history and
involved him in obvious contradictions. He
asserted, for example, that the long story of
empire in the East is one of continuous decay,
yet for 1,000 years Constantinople stood as a
bulwark of eastern Europe. The fact is that
Gibbon was not only out of sympathy with
Byzantine civilization; he was less at home with
Greek sources than with Latin and had no access
to vast stores of material in other languages
that subsequent scholars have assembled.
Consequently there are serious omissions in his
narrative, as well as unsatisfactory summaries.
Nevertheless, this second half contains much of
Gibbon’s best. With all its shortcomings, it
marshals with masterly lucidity the successive
forces that eventually overthrew Constantinople.
Many of his most famous chapters occur there.
These include sections on Justinian, the
Trinitarian controversies, the rise of Islām,
and the history of Roman law. There is, in
addition, a brilliant and moving story of the
last siege and capture of Constantinople and,
finally, the epilogue of chapters describing
medieval and Renaissance Rome, which gives some
hope that the long decline is over and that
mankind has some prospect of recovering
intellectual freedom. The vindication of
intellectual freedom is a large part of Gibbon’s
purpose as a historian. When toward the end of
his work he remarks, “I have described the
triumph of barbarism and religion,” he reveals
epigrammatically his view of the causes of the
decay of the Greco-Roman world. They can hardly
be disputed. But there is the further question
of whether the changes brought about are to be
regarded as ones of progress or retrogression.
Writing as a mid-18th-century “philosopher,”
Gibbon saw the process as retrogression, and his
judgment remains of perpetual interest.
Returning to Lausanne, Gibbon turned mainly to
writing his memoirs. His happiness was broken
first by Deyverdun’s death in 1789, quickly
followed by the outbreak of the French
Revolution and the subsequent apprehension of an
invasion of Switzerland. He had now become very
fat and his health was declining. In 1793 he
suddenly returned to England on hearing of Lady
Sheffield’s death. The journey aggravated his
ailments, and he died in a house in St. James’s
Street, London. His remains were placed in Lord
Sheffield’s family vault in Fletching Church,
Sussex.
Assessment.
Modern knowledge of history, in Gibbon’s
field alone, has increased conspicuously.
Economic, social, and constitutional history
have grown up. The study of coins, inscriptions,
and archaeology generally has brought in a great
harvest. Above all, the scientific examination
of literary sources, so rigorously practiced
now, was unknown to Gibbon. Yet he often
exhibits a flair and an acumen that seem to
anticipate these systematic studies. He had
genius in large measure, as well as untiring
industry and accuracy in consulting his sources.
Though he was unsympathetic to Christianity, his
sense of fairness and probity made him
respectful of honest opinion and true devotion,
even among those with whom he disagreed. These
qualities, expressed with his command of
historical perspective and his incomparable
literary style, justify a modern historian’s
dictum that “whatever else is read Gibbon must
be read too,” or the conclusion of the great
Cambridge historian J.B. Bury:
That
Gibbon is behind date in many details and in
some departments of importance, simply signifies
that we and our fathers have not lived in an
absolutely incompetent world. But in the main
things he is still our master above and beyond
“date.”
David Morrice Low
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APPENDIX
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George Berkeley
I.
"An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision"
II.
"THREE
DIALOGUES BETWEEN HYLAS AND PHILONOUS, IN OPPOSITION TO SCEPTICS AND
ATHEISTS"

Irish philosopher
born March 12, 1685, near Dysert Castle, near Thomastown?, County
Kilkenny, Ire. died Jan. 14, 1753, Oxford
Main Anglo-Irish Anglican bishop, philosopher, and scientist, best known for
his Empiricist philosophy, which holds that everything save the
spiritual exists only insofar as it is perceived by the senses.
Early life and works.
Berkeley was the eldest son of William Berkeley, described as a
“gentleman” in George’s matriculation entry, and as a commissioned
officer, a cornet of dragoons, in the entry of a younger brother.
Brought up at Dysert Castle, Berkeley entered Kilkenny College in 1696
and Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700, where he was graduated with a B.A.
degree in 1704. While awaiting a fellowship vacancy, he made a critical
study of time, vision, and the hypothesis that there is no material
substance. The principal influences upon his thinking were Empiricism,
represented by the English philosopher John Locke, and Continental
Skepticism, represented by Nicolas Malebranche and Pierre Bayle. His
first publication, Arithmetica and Miscellanea Mathematica (published
together in 1707), was probably a fellowship thesis.
Elected fellow of Trinity College in 1707, Berkeley began to “examine
and revise” his “first arguings” in his revision notebooks. The revision
was drastic and its results revolutionary. His old principle was largely
superseded by his new principle; i.e., his original line of argument for
immaterialism, based on the subjectivity of colour, taste, and the other
sensible qualities, was replaced by a simple, profound analysis of the
meaning of “to be” or “to exist.” “To be,” said of the object, means to
be perceived; “to be,” said of the subject, means to perceive.
Berkeley called attention to the whole situation that exists when a
person perceives something, or imagines it. He argued that, when a
person imagines trees or books “and no body by to perceive them,” he is
failing to appreciate the whole situation: he is “omitting” the
perceiver, for imagined trees or books are necessarily imagined as
perceivable. The situation for him is a two-term relation of perceiver
and perceived; there is no third term; there is no “idea of ” the
object, coming between perceiver and perceived.
The revision was a gradual development. At the start Berkeley held
that nothing exists but “conscious things.” “On second thoughts,” he was
certain of the existence of bodies and knew intuitively “the existence
of other things besides ourselves.” His expressions, “in the mind” and
“without the mind,” must be understood accordingly. As he wrote in his
notebook, heat and colour (which philosophers had classed as secondary
qualities because of their supposed subjectivity) are “as much without
the mind” as figure and motion (classed as primary qualities) or as
time; for both primary and secondary qualities are so in the mind as to
be in the thing, and are so in the thing as to be in the mind. The mind
does not become red, blue, or extended when those qualities are in it;
they are not modes or attributes of mind. Colour and extension are not
mental qualities for Berkeley: colour can be seen, and extension can be
touched; they are “sensible ideas,” or sense-data, the direct objects of
percipient mind.
Berkeley accepted possible perception as well as actual perception;
i.e., he accepted the existence of what a person is not actually
perceiving but might perceive if he took the appropriate steps. The
opposite view was held by some philosophers, including Materialists, who
(in Berkeley’s words) “are by their own principles forced” to accept it.
They are forced to accept that objects actually seen and touched have
only an intermittent existence, that they come into existence when
perceived and pass into nothingness when no longer perceived. Berkeley
treated those views with respect; he denied that they are absurd; but he
did not hold them, and he explicitly denied that they follow from his
principles. In effect he said to his readers, “You may hold, if you
will, that objects of sense have only an ‘in-and-out’ existence, that
they are created and annihilated with every turn of man’s attention; but
do not father those views on me. I do not hold them.” In his notebook he
wrote, “Existence is percipi or percipere. The horse is in the stable,
the Books are in the study as before.” Horse and books, when not being
actually perceived by man, are still there, still perceivable “still
with relation to perception.” To a nonphilosophical friend Berkeley
wrote, “I question not the existence of anything that we perceive by our
senses.”
Berkeley’s immaterialism is open to “gross misinterpretation,” as he
said in his preface; rightly understood, it is common sense. Like most
people, he accepted and built on “two heads,” “two kinds entirely
distinct and heterogeneous”: (1) active mind or spirit, perceiving,
thinking, and willing; and (2) passive objects of mind, viz., sensible
ideas (sense-data) or imaginable ideas.
Period of his major works. Berkeley’s golden period of authorship followed the revision. In An
Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), he examined visual
distance, magnitude, position, and problems of sight and touch, and
concluded that “the proper (or real) objects of sight” are not without
the mind, though “the contrary be supposed true of tangible objects.” In
his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I
(1710), he brought all objects of sense, including tangibles, within the
mind; he rejected material substance, material causes, and abstract
general ideas; he affirmed spiritual substance; and he answered many
objections to his theory and drew the consequences, theological and
epistemological. His Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713),
by its attractive literary form and its avoidance of technicalities,
reinforced the main argument of the Principles; the two books speak with
one voice about immaterialism.
Berkeley was made a deacon in 1709 and ordained a priest in 1710. He
held his fellowship for 17 years, acting as librarian (1709), junior
dean (1710–11), and tutor and lecturer in divinity, Greek, and Hebrew.
In politics Berkeley was a Hanoverian Tory, and he defended the
ethics of that position in three sermons, published as Passive Obedience
(1712). Thus, with four major books in five years, the foundations of
his fame were laid; and, when he first left Ireland in 1713 on a leave
of absence, he was already a man of mark in the learned world; his books
were reviewed on the Continent, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the
wide-ranging author of the Monadology, knew of his immaterialism and
commented upon it.
Among the London wits he was an immediate success. Jonathan Swift,
dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, presented him at court. For Sir
Richard Steele, an essayist, he wrote essays in The Guardian against the
freethinkers. He was in the theatre with Joseph Addison, essayist and
poet, on the first night of Cato and has left a spirited description of
the experience. Alexander Pope credited him with “ev’ry virtue under
heav’n.” In 1713–14 he went on an embassy to Sicily as chaplain with
Charles Mordaunt, 3rd earl of Peterborough, whom Berkeley called an
“ambassador extraordinary.” In 1715 during the Jacobite rebellion (on
behalf of the exiled Stuarts) he proved his loyalty by publishing his
Advice to the Tories Who Have Taken the Oaths. He was abroad again from
1716 to 1720 in Italy, acting as tutor to George Ashe, son of the Bishop
of Clogher (later, of Derry); his four travel diaries give vivid
pictures of sightseeing in Rome and of tours in southern Italy. On his
return he published his De motu (1721), which rejected Sir Isaac
Newton’s absolute space, time, and motion, gave a veiled hint of his
immaterialism, and has recently earned him the title “precursor of Mach
and Einstein.”
Resuming his work in Dublin, he took a full part in teaching and
administration for more than three years. In 1724 he was appointed dean
of Derry, and his 24 years’ connection with Trinity College ended.
His American venture and ensuing years. The deanery and legacy from
Hester van Homrigh (Swift’s Vanessa) were seen by Berkeley as
providences, furthering his “scheme of Bermuda,” in the New World. The
frenzied speculation that preceded the bursting of the South Sea Bubble
had shaken his faith in the Old World, and he looked in hope to the New.
His Essay Towards preventing the Ruin of Great-Britain (1721) was soon
succeeded by his prophetic verses on “Westward the course of empire
takes its way.” Already by 1722 he had resolved to build a college in
Bermuda for the education of young Americans (Indians), publishing the
plan in A Proposal For the better Supplying of Churches . . . (1724).
The scheme caught the public imagination; the King granted a charter;
the Archbishop of Canterbury acted as trustee; subscriptions poured in;
and Parliament passed a contingent grant of £20,000. But there was
opposition; an alternative charity for Georgia was mooted; and the prime
minister, Sir Robert Walpole, hesitated.
In 1728 Berkeley married Anne, daughter of Chief Justice Forster, a
talented and well-educated woman, who defended her husband’s philosophy
after his death. Soon after the wedding, they sailed for America,
settling at Newport, R.I., where Berkeley bought land, built a house
(Whitehall), and waited. Berkeley preached often in Newport and its
neighbourhood, and a philosophical study group met at Whitehall.
Eventually, word came that the grant would not be paid, and Berkeley
returned to London in October 1731. Several American universities, Yale
in particular, benefitted by Berkeley’s visit; and his correspondence
with Samuel Johnson, later president of King’s College (Columbia
University), is of philosophical importance.
Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosopher (1732) was written at Newport,
and the setting of the dialogues reflects local scenes and scenery. It
is a massive defense of theism and Christianity with attacks on deists
and freethinkers and discussions of visual language and analogical
knowledge and of the functions of words in religious argument.
Upon his return to London in 1731, Berkeley’s pen, never idle for
long, became active. A writer in the Daily Post-boy commended Alciphron
but attacked the appended Essay on vision. Berkeley replied with The
Theory of Vision, or Visual Language . . . Vindicated and Explained
(1733). This fine work brought the metaphysics (theory of being) of the
Essay into line with the Principles and added his doctrine of cause,
admitting defects in the premises of the original Essay. Alciphron
provoked replies from the satirist Bernard de Mandeville; John Hervey,
Baron Hervey of Ickworth; the statesman Henry St. John, 1st Viscount
Bolingbroke; and Peter Browne, Berkeley’s former teacher and provost. To
Browne, Berkeley sent a long, private letter on analogy—first published
in Mind (July 1969)—which constitutes an important supplement to his 4th
dialogue.
In 1734 Berkeley published The Analyst; or, a Discourse Addressed to
an Infidel Mathematician, which Florian Cajori, a historian of
mathematics, has called “the most spectacular event of the century in
the history of British mathematics.” Besides being a contribution to
mathematics, it was an argument ad hominem for religion. “He who can
digest a second or third fluxion,” wrote Berkeley, “need not, methinks,
be squeamish about any point in divinity.” A long and fruitful
controversy followed. James Jurin, a Cambridge physician and scientist,
John Walton of Dublin, and Colin Maclaurin, a Scottish mathematician,
took part. Berkeley answered Jurin in his lively satire A Defence of
Free-Thinking in Mathematics (1735) and answered Walton in an appendix
to that work and again in his Reasons For Not Replying (1735).
Years as bishop of Cloyne. Berkeley was consecrated as bishop of Cloyne in Dublin in 1734. He found
Trinity College flourishing: its new library was completed, and John
Stearne’s Doric printing house was being built. To the latter, Berkeley
contributed a font of Greek type and also founded the Berkeley gold
medal for Greek. His episcopate, as such, was uneventful. He took a seat
in the Irish House of Lords in 1737 and, while in Dublin, published A
Discourse Addressed to Magistrates and Men in Authority (1738),
condemning the Blasters whose Hell-Fire Club, now in ruins, still can be
seen near Dublin.
The see-house at Cloyne was a cultured home and a social centre and,
during epidemics, a dispensary. On arrival, the family consisted of his
wife and two sons; and two more sons and two daughters were born at
Cloyne.
In 1745 Berkeley addressed open letters to his clergy and to the
Roman Catholics of his diocese about the Stuart uprising. In letters to
the press over his own name or through a friend, he expressed himself on
several public questions, political, social, and scientific. Two major
works stand out, The Querist and Siris. The Querist, published in three
parts from 1735 to 1737, deals with basic economics—credit, demand,
industry, and “the true idea of money”—and with special problems, such
as banking, currency, luxury, and the wool trade. The final query puts
the central question, “Whose fault is it if poor Ireland still continues
poor?”
Siris (1744) passed through some six editions in six months. It is at
once a treatise on the medicinal virtues of tar-water, its making and
dosage, and a philosopher’s vision of a chain of being, “a gradual
evolution or ascent” from the world of sense to “the mind, her acts and
faculties” and, thence, to the supernatural and God, the three in one.
In August 1752, Berkeley commissioned his brother, Dr. Robert
Berkeley, as vicar-general and arranged with the bishop of Cork as to
his episcopal duties and, with his wife and his children George and
Julia, went to Oxford and took a house in Holywell Street, where he
resided until his death. He was buried in Christ Church Chapel.
Additional Reading The definitive edition of the philosopher’s writings is The Works of
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 9 vol. (1948–57, reprinted in 3 vol.,
1979). An informative bibliography is provided in A.A. Luce, The Life of
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1949, reprinted 1968). Other
biographical studies include J.M. Hone and M.M. Rossi, Bishop Berkeley:
His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (1931); John Wild, George Berkeley: A
Study of His Life and Philosophy (1936, reissued 1962); and Edwin S.
Gaustad, George Berkeley in America (1979). For broad analyses of
Berkeley’s philosophy, see Jonathan Dancy, Berkeley, an Introduction
(1987); G.A. Johnston, The Development of Berkeley’s Philosophy (1923,
reprinted 1988); A.A. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the
Origins of Berkeley’s Thought (1934, reprinted 1988); Kenneth P.
Winkler, Berkeley: An Interpretation (1989); Warren E. Steinkraus (ed.),
New Studies in Berkeley’s Philosophy (1966, reprinted 1981); George
Pitcher, Berkeley (1977, reprinted 1984); and C.B. Martin and D.M.
Armstrong, Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays (1988). Special
studies focusing on particular theories and arguments include D.M.
Armstrong, Berkeley’s Theory of Vision (1960, reprinted 1988); I.C.
Tipton, Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism (1974, reprinted
1988); Harry M. Bracken, The Early Reception of Berkeley’s
Immaterialism, 1710–1733, rev. ed. (1965); A.A. Luce, Berkeley’s
Immaterialism (1945, reprinted 1968), and The Dialectic of Immaterialism
(1963); A.C. Grayling, Berkeley, the Central Arguments (1986); Stephen
R.L. Clark (ed.), Money, Obedience, and Affection: Essays on Berkeley’s
Moral and Political Thought (1989); and Willis Doney, Berkeley on
Abstraction and Abstract Ideas (1989).
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Samuel Clarke

English theologian and philosopher
born Oct. 11, 1675, Norwich, Norfolk, Eng. died May 17, 1729, Leicestershire
Main theologian, philosopher, and exponent of Newtonian physics,
remembered for his influence on 18th-century English
theology and philosophy.
In 1698 Clarke became a chaplain to the bishop of Norwich
and in 1706 to Queen Anne. In 1704–05 he gave two sets of
lectures, published as A Demonstration of the Being and
Attributes of God (1705) and A Discourse Concerning the
Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706). In the
first set he attempted to prove the existence of God by a
method “as near to Mathematical, as the nature of such a
Discourse would allow.” In the second he argued that the
principles of morality are as certain as the propositions of
mathematics and thus can be known by reason unassisted by
faith, an approach sometimes called ethical rationalism. The
criticism of religion by David Hume resulted in part from
his dissatisfaction with Clarke’s effort to prove the
existence of God. Clarke also spurred a vehement and
prolonged controversy with his Scripture Doctrine of the
Trinity (1712), which led many of his opponents to accuse
him of Arianism, the belief that Christ is neither fully man
nor fully God.
Clarke was a friend and disciple of Isaac Newton at the
University of Cambridge and helped to spread Newton’s views.
In 1697 he made a Latin translation of the physicist Jacques
Rohault’s Traité de physique (1671; “Treatise on Physics”),
adding numerous footnotes explaining Newton’s improvements
on Rohault’s work. In 1706 he published a Latin translation
of Newton’s Opticks. A correspondence of 1715–16 between
Clarke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, important for its
defense of the reality of space and time, was published in
1717 and in several later editions. Clarke’s collected works
were issued in four volumes in 1738–42.
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