Public Spirit and Public Order. Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid- Eighteenth-Century Britain Ian Crowe A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Advisor: Professor Jay M. Smith Reader: Professor Christopher Browning Reader: Professor Lloyd Kramer Reader: Professor Donald Reid Reader: Professor Thomas Reinert © 2008 Ian Crowe ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Ian Crowe: Public Spirit and Public Order. Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid- Eighteenth-Century Britain (Under the direction of Dr. Jay M. Smith) This study centers upon Edmund Burke’s early literary career, and his move from Dublin to London in 1750, to explore the interplay of academic, professional, and commercial networks that comprised the mid-eighteenth-century Republic of Letters in Britain and Ireland. Burke’s experiences before his entry into politics, particularly his relationship with the bookseller Robert Dodsley, may be used both to illustrate the political and intellectual debates that infused those networks, and to deepen our understanding of the publisher-author relationship at that time. It is argued here that it was Burke’s involvement with Irish Patriot debates in his Dublin days, rather than any assumed Catholic or colonial resentment, that shaped his early publications, not least since Dodsley himself was engaged in a revision of Patriot literary discourse at his “Tully’s Head” business in the light of the legacy of his own patron Alexander Pope. Through a focus on two of Burke’s Tully’s Head projects in particular, the Vindication of Natural Society and the unfinished “Abridgment of the English History,” we are able to see how that revisionist process converged upon the problem of how to promote public spiritedness and civic engagement without jeopardizing the political and social order established in the kingdom in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. We can also trace Burke’s distinctly Irish contribution to the reconfiguration of a “Patriot” discourse within that iii segment of London literary society. What emerges is a sustained critique of the intellectual strategies employed by Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Shaftesbury, particularly their reliance upon philosophical and historical skepticism, and a fresh rhetoric of Patriot criticism built upon an alternative, allegorical and religiously syncretic understanding of the interdependence between the “natural” and “artificial” in human society. Burke’s professional and personal relationships with Dodsley and with writers such as Joseph Spence and Joseph Warton in Dodsley’s Tully’s Head “circle” provides a challenge to received opinions not only of the roots of Burke’s political thought, but also of the use of concepts such as “Patriotism,” “Nationalism,” and “Enlightenment” in understanding the role of the critic in the mid-century British Republic of Letters. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the course of my research for this dissertation, I have benefited enormously from the vital insights and guidance provided by my supervisor, Jay Smith, by my dissertation committee, and through the scholarly encouragement of John Headley and Roger Lotchin. I was grateful for the opportunity to present a shortened version of chapters one and two to a meeting of the Intellectual History Seminar at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, N.C., and was very fortunate in the patient support of the board of the Edmund Burke Society of America. I only own to myself any errors and misjudgments that may remain here in the text. I also wish to record my sincere appreciation to the following institutions for their invaluable assistance in helping me to bring this project to a successful completion: the Earhart Foundation, Ann Arbor, Michigan; the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Delaware; the Marguerite Eyre Wilbur Foundation, Santa Barbara, California; Brewton-Parker College, Mt. Vernon, Georgia. For their help in my archival researches, my thanks are also due to the staff at: the Davis Graduate Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Perkins Library, Duke University; the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Trinity College Library, Dublin. v It goes without saying, and therefore should be said all the more emphatically, that this dissertation could have been neither started nor completed without the unfailing support of my wife, Sara, to whom I am most deeply indebted. vi CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................................1 Chapter I. Getting Inside Tully’s Head Pope’s Footman ...............................................................................................27 Pope’s Legacy..................................................................................................45 Pope’s Guardian...............................................................................................74 II. Unraveling the Threads in Edmund Burke’s Vindication of Natural Society Recovering Burke’s Vindication ......................................................................83 The Lost Patriot Epic .......................................................................................94 A New Patriot Satire ......................................................................................106 III. Dodsley’s Irishman: Edmund Burke’s Ireland and the British Republic of Letters The Irish Question..........................................................................................131 An Irish Republic of Letters ..........................................................................140 Juvenilia.........................................................................................................149 Journalism......................................................................................................160 Reconstituting Patriotism...............................................................................182 Selling Irishness.............................................................................................203 IV. Burke’s History Dodsley’s Historian .......................................................................................209 vii Marketing History..........................................................................................228 Patriot History................................................................................................245 Recovering Patriotism: Redeeming Empire...................................................256 Conclusion ………………………...…………………………………………………….277 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………287 viii Introduction A little more than a year before his death, Edmund Burke published one of his most powerful works of political rhetoric. His Letter to a Noble Lord , which appeared in February 1796, was a response to attacks by the Duke of Bedford, a Whig aristocrat of radical persuasions, on Burke’s acceptance of a pension from parliament for services to his country. Those services included, primarily, Burke’s attacks on the ideology of the revolutionaries in France, and Bedford’s underlying claim was that Burke had fashioned his antirevolutionary writings to secure his financial future. “At every step of my progress in life,” Burke argued in response, “(for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to shew my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my Country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with it’s [sic] laws, and the whole system of it’s interests both abroad and at home.”1 Scholars have taken this text to illustrate Burke’s lifelong, barely repressed anger at being the eternal outsider in his adopted country. Dogged “in every step” by his Irish ethnicity (he was born in Dublin of “Old Irish” or “Anglo-Norman” stock) and his Catholic sympathies (his maternal family were Irish Catholic landowners in County Cork), his survival at the heart of the British Protestant Establishment seemed to depend, according to this reading, upon repressing his 1 Edmund Burke, A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, on the Attacks made upon him and his Pension in The House of Lords, by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale (London, 1796), 29. See also Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches , 9 vols., ed. Paul Langford et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981- ), 9:160. Future references to Burke’s collected works will be to this edition unless otherwise stated. national loyalties and religious sympathies. The price of such repression—ironic, given Burke’s later conservative credentials—was a “Jacobin flame” that ran through his rhetoric and burst out finally in this scorching attack on the ingratitude of the system he had spent his career defending. 2 There is, however, an alternative way of interpreting the language of the Letter to a Noble Lord . It is one that reads the language of the text out of, rather than into, the strategies and circumstances by which Burke established himself in the literary and political circles of mid-century London. Burke’s Letter was not the first such defense by a novus homo against the aspersions of his social superiors. As Frans De Bruyn has pointed out,