Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain New Edition book cover

Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain New Edition

Author(s): Ian Crowe (Author)

Publisher: Stanford University Press
Publication Date: 22 Aug. 2012
Edition: New
Language: English
Print length: 304 pages
ISBN-10: 0804781273
ISBN-13: 9780804781275

Book Description

Patriotism and Public Spirit is an innovative study of the formative influences shaping the early writings of the Irish-English statesman Edmund Burke and an early case-study of the relationship between the business of bookselling and the politics of criticism and persuasion. Through a radical reassessment of the impact of Burke's "Irishness" and of his relationship with the London-based publisher Robert Dodsley, the book argues that Burke saw Patriotism as the best way to combine public spirit with the reinforcement of civil order and to combat the use of coded partisan thinking to achieve the dominance of one section of the population over another.

No other study has drawn so extensively on the literary and commercial network through which Burke's first writings were published to help explain them. By linking contemporary reinterpretations of the work of Patriot sympathizers and writers such as Alexander Pope and Lord Bolingbroke with generally neglected trends in religious and literary criticism in the Republic of Letters, this book provides new ways of understanding Burke's early publications. The results call into question fundamental assumptions about the course of "Enlightenment" thought and challenge currently dominant post-colonialist and Irish nationalist interpretations of the early Burke.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The book under review is a pioneering study of the political philosopher Edmund Burke. The reader is provided with a scholarly advancement of existing knowledge regarding Burke and the intellectual milieu that was so important to his development as a thinker. The author breaks new scholarly ground and concentrates on the understudied and often misinterpreted early philosophical and literary influences on Burke and his unfledged publishing efforts . . . Patriotism and Public Spirit is much more than an introduction to Burke as a man of letters or the 'literary Burke.' Instead, Crowe has composed a ground-breaking study of Burke's early career that demonstrates the great thinker's sophisticated and profound understanding of politics. He permanently refutes generations of scholars who have dismissed the 'pre-political' Burke as unimportant for an understanding of his subsequent life as a statesman and political philosopher. In the accomplishment of this feat, Patriotism and Public Spirit fills a critical lacuna in British intellectual history, Burke scholarship, and political thought."-H. Lee Cheek, Perspectives on Political Science "Ian Crowe's Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain New Edition is a specialized study of Burke and his time which not only fills important niches but offers insights valuable to a broader understanding of Burke and of the political philosophical thought of the eighteenth century. . . [A]n insightful and welcome contribution to our understanding of Burke and of eighteenth century British thought."-William F. Byrne, The University Bookman "If 'Enlightenment' means anything, it describes a single (if eventually predominant) trend in a wider 'Republic of Letters': so argues Ian Crowe in the introduction to Patriotism and Public Spirit. Crowe's promising idea is to place the younger Burke within that Republic of Letters, and specifically the world of Burke's well-connected publisher Robert Dodsley . . . Crowe has hit on a valuable approach of some importance, simply by taking seriously the vibrant intellectual culture of mid-century London."-Daniel Hitchens, Times Literary Supplement "This book is sure to be important reading for academics specializing in Burke studies and in the history of eighteenth-century political thought, for literary scholars of the early and mid eighteenth-century, and for eighteenth-century historians in general. Every page abounds with new and valuable insights."-Jonathan Clark, Kansas University "Ian Crowe's Patriotism and Public Spirit is a high achievement of dedicated scholarship. No other study has dealt so searchingly with the literary milieu of Burke's early years. By its impressive command of detail, the book compels us to recognize that the controversies of the 1750s made a lasting impression on Burke's political thought."-David Bromwich, Yale University

About the Author

Ian Crowe is an associate professor of history at Brewton-Parker College in Mount Vernon, Georgia. He is director of the Edmund Burke Society of America.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PATRIOTISM and PUBLIC SPIRIT

Name: Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain New Edition
Author: Ian Crowe (Author)
ISBN: 9780804781275

Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century BritainBy Ian Crowe

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................xiIntroduction..................................................................................................11. Getting inside Tully's Head................................................................................212. Unraveling the Threads in Burke's Vindication of Natural society...........................................733. Dodsley's Irishman: Burke's Ireland and the British Republic of Letters....................................1084. Patriot Criticism: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime in Burke's Philosophical Enquiry.....................1485. Burke's History............................................................................................174Conclusion....................................................................................................219Appendix: Tully's Head Publishing Lists, 1754–57........................................................227Notes.........................................................................................................237Index.........................................................................................................281

Chapter One

Getting inside tully's Head

1: POPE'S FOOTMAN

Robert Dodsley's bookselling business opened in Pall Mall, London, in April 1735, under the sign of "Tully's Head." By 1750, Dodsley, son of a dissenting schoolteacher from Mansfield and a former household servant, had established himself as one of the most successful and innovative of London publishers, with a network of business, literary, and political contacts that extended from Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds to the Earl of Chesterfield and George Lyttelton, the Lord of the Treasury. That was also the year when an unknown, aspiring Irish immigrant, Edmund Burke, arrived in London from his home city of Dublin to pursue legal training at the Middle Temple, and, more enthusiastically, to attempt to forge a living for himself in the world of journalism and literature. Coming within a few years to the attention of Robert Dodsley, he was to emerge by the end of the decade as a successful public critic and citizen of the Republic of Letters. It was not Dublin's theaters and coffee houses, or the Inns of Court, nor, later, the Marquis of Rockingham's offices, but Tully's Head that made him, financially, intellectually, and professionally. It is within Robert Dodsley's publishing network that we should look to uncover the most lasting, formative influences on the mind and career of Edmund Burke.

While we do not know the actual circumstances, or even the precise year, in which Burke first met Dodsley, it is clear that the ambitious Irish immigrant had been received into Dodsley's circle of writers by 1756, when Dodsley accepted for publication his first full-length manuscript, A Vindication of Natural society: or, A View of the miseries and Evils arising to mankind from every species of Artificial society. In quick succession, Burke was to place two further works with Dodsley, the highly successful Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and Beautiful (1757), for which Dodsley paid treble the fee he had for the Vindication, and, in collaboration with his friend William Burke, An Account of the European settlements in America (1757). That same year, Dodsley also commissioned his new star to write a history of England. When he offered Burke the editorship of the Annual Register the following year, the terms, though not beyond expectation, were generous, and they marked Burke out as an example of a relatively new phenomenon in the self-styled Republic of Letters—the professional writer with his own, low-born, bookseller patron.

By the time he engaged Burke, Dodsley had built up extraordinary financial and literary leverage through the success of a number of highly respected publishing enterprises, including two serial anthologies—A Select Collection of Old Plays (1744–46) and A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748–58)—and an innovative, two-volume educational textbook, The Preceptor (1748). He had also achieved success in the journal market with the Museum, or, Literary and Historical Register (1746–47), and the popular monthly the World (1753–56), and he owned an interest in the Adventurer and the London Evening Post. A successful playwright and respected poet, he counted Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, William Shenstone, David Garrick, Sir George Lyttelton, and Joseph Spence among his closer acquaintances, and with these connections he presided over an influential, collaborative literary operation astutely positioned, physically and figuratively, between the palaces of Westminster and St. James.

The central claim of this study is that any firm understanding of Edmund Burke's professional and political career must incorporate an appreciation of the variety of ways in which Burke's thought and professional art were shaped by the role that he found within that section of the operational network of the British Republic of Letters that was Tully's Head. It is a perspective that has been very largely passed over to date. In this chapter, we will take time to chart some of those ways, through an examination of several critical themes that marked the appearance and success of Tully's Head: the influence of Alexander Pope on Robert Dodsley; the themes that Dodsley developed in his publishing lists in the wake of Pope's death, and how he negotiated the various facets of Pope's legacy; Dodsley's own associations with the Patriot movement of the 1730s and 1740s; the ways in which the term Patriotism was reviewed and revised within the circles of Tully's Head as the reading market developed; the role of figures such as Bolingbroke, Warburton, and Spence on that process of revision; and, finally, the ways in which Dodsley's own literary aspirations as a citizen of the Republic of Letters reflect those commercial and personal developments.

Dodsley's historical profile has risen deservedly in recent years, with the publication of his surviving correspondence in 1988, the appearance of a new biography in 1996 (the first for eighty-six years), and extended treatment of his business projects pursued in line with the growth of subsidiary disciplinary research into the history of books, of reading, and of publishing. The standard of scholarship on Dodsley's literary and bookselling career represented in these works is excellent, and the extent of my debt to it should be evident in the pages that follow. Despite such labors, however, Burke scholars are still some way from integrating fully into their work the dynamics of the processes by which practical publishing concerns, shortterm market preoccupations, and professional relationships, centered upon Tully's Head, impacted Burke's early publications as those of just one more aspiring author. Preparatory to considering those dynamics in closer detail when we focus on the contexts within which Burke's Vindication of Natural Society was shaped and packaged for publication, we should consider why this aspect of Burke's formative years has been so thinly served to date, and the...

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Patriotism and Public Spirit: Edmund Burke and the Role of the Critic in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain New Edition