Lord Chesterfield

Book excerpt: This enjoyable narrative weaves together a new examination of one of the eighteenth century's leading figures with some of Chesterfield's finest and most entertaining prose which has been either out of print or never before published. It includes a scandalous essay of which only a fragment has appeared before on the mistresses and sexual tastes of George II. Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, is generally remembered (or forgotten) for letters to his illegitimate son, indiscreetly published in the year after his death. In much of this book, Colin Franklin is more concerned with a series of Characters - the modern word is Profiles - which Chesterfield wrote privately about those eminent contemporaries he had known intimately, from the King and Queen to such figures as Walpole, Newcastle, Pitt, Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot and Pope. The publishing history of Chesterfield's letters and dramatic survival of the Characters (which were intended for oblivion) is traced and told. The author also takes a new look at the character of Lord Chesterfield, finding him more vulnerable and deserving of sympathy than the conventionally accepted verdict.