Roberts David - Lord Chesterfields Letters

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

LORD CHESTERFIELDS LETTERS

PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was born in 1694, the grandson of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax. Brought up to be bilingual in English and French, he spent a year at Cambridge before travelling in the Low Countries. In 1715 he was made gentleman of the bedchamber to George, Prince of Wales, and became an under-age MP for St Germans, Cornwall, moving to Paris later the same year. After his return he became acquainted with Pope, Addison, and Arbuthnot, and sat in Parliament as the member for Lostwithiel, moving to the Lords on his fathers death in 1726. From this time he was active in opposition. He accepted the embassy at The Hague in 1728, where he met Elizabeth du Bouchet, the mother of his son, Philip Stanhope, born in 1732. In 1737 he began the thirty-year correspondence with Stanhope on which his fame now rests. He became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland and ambassador extraordinary to The Hague in 1744, and Secretary of State in 1746. It was during this period in high office that Johnson approached him with the plan for his Dictionary, Chesterfields neglect of which became notorious. His resignation in 1748 marked the end of his political career except as an occasional orator and mediator. Deafness made his long retirement increasingly solitary. Polite in the face of death in March 1773, with his last words he offered a chair to his friend Dayrolles. He was succeeded by his godson, another pupil by correspondence, and a year after his death his letters began to be published.

PHYLLIS M. JONES edited the 1929 Worlds Classics selection of Chesterfields letters.

DAVID ROBERTS is Senior Lecturer in English and Drama at University College Worcester. He has published extensively on literature from the Renaissance to the Eighteenth Century, including, for Oxford University Press, The Ladies (1989) and the introduction to Defoes A Journal of the Plague Year for Oxford Worlds Classics.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

LORD CHESTERFIELD

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID ROBERTS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1992
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of, 16941773.
[Correspondence]
Lord Chesterfields letters/ edited with an introduction by David Roberts.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of, 16941773
Correspondence. 2. StatesmenGreat BritainCorrespondence.
3. Authors, English18th centuryCorrespondence.. I. Roberts,
David, 1960 II. Title. III. Series.
DA501.C5A4 1992 941.070092dc20 927195
ISBN 019283715X

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

THE apparatus of this edition needs some apology, since it is both extensive and limited. The learning Chesterfield displays in his letters is extraordinarily wide and sometimes out of focus, and I hope the present edition goes further than its predecessors in making his obscurities accessible to modern readers. There have, regrettably, been occasions when calculated guesses or mere blanks were all that the most intensive enquiries could turn upthese things of darkness I acknowledge mine. Chesterfield had his own cheerfully acerbic view of new editions and their compilers: the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads, for they may profit of the former. Although I have profited particularly from Bonamy Dobres heroic six-volume edition of the letters, my chief debts are to the friends, relations, and correspondents whose generous assistance has on more occasions than I wish to count saved me from blockheadedness. Those who have supplied or helped me to find information are Dr Peter Davidson, Ms Annemiek Scholten, Dr Albert van der Heide, and members of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, University of Leiden; Professor Roy Foster of Hertford College, Oxford; Dr Tom Bartlett of University College, Galway; Ms Petra Hesse of the Leipzig University Archive; Mr Horst Flechsig of the Leipzig Theaterhochschule; Dr Bernd Neumann of Kyoto University; Mr Simon Rees; Mrs Elizabeth Roberts; Mr Michael Walling; and Mr Stephen Wood, Keeper of the Department of Armed Forces History, National Museum of Scotland. None of these kind people is responsible for any errors which remain. Simon Rees also saved me from the sort of dbcle which can only befall a certified computer blockhead. My greatest debt is to my wife, who assisted with proofreading and surrendered to Chesterfield and his son much of the time I should have been spending with ours.