A short life of the author
George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, was one of the most influential literary patrons and political figures of eighteenth-century England — a man whose own writings, while not of the first rank, were widely admired in their time, and whose generous patronage of Henry Fielding, James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and other writers made him a central figure in the literary culture of the Augustan age. He was a politician, a moralist, a historian, and a man of taste whose country seat at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire became a gathering place for the literary and intellectual elite of Georgian England.
Hagley
George Lyttelton was born in 1709 at Hagley Hall, Worcestershire, the eldest son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and entered Parliament in 1735, beginning a political career that would see him serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Duke of Newcastle (1755–1756) and as a Privy Councillor. He was created Baron Lyttelton of Frankley in 1757.
His political career was respectable rather than brilliant — he was known more for his integrity and his literary interests than for his skill as a party manager. Samuel Johnson, who received Lyttelton’s patronage early in his career and later quarrelled with him, gave a characteristically double-edged assessment: Lyttelton was “a man who wrote well, who was a good politician, and a bad Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
The Writings
Letters from a Persian in England, to His Friend at Ispahan (1735) was Lyttelton’s first important work — an epistolary satire in the tradition of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), in which a fictional Persian visitor observed and commented on the peculiarities of English manners, politics, and religion. The device of the outsider’s perspective allowed Lyttelton to satirise English society with a lightness that made the book popular reading.
Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (1747) was Lyttelton’s most enduring work — a carefully reasoned argument that the conversion of St. Paul was genuine evidence for the truth of Christianity, since Paul’s transformation from persecutor to apostle could not be explained by fraud, delusion, or self-interest. The book was widely read as a contribution to the evidentialist tradition in Christian apologetics and was praised by Johnson as “a treatise to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer.”
Dialogues of the Dead (1760) was Lyttelton’s most literary production — a series of imagined conversations between historical figures (Pericles and Aristides, Pope and Boileau, Addison and Swift) that explored questions of morality, taste, and political philosophy in the tradition of Lucian and Fénelon. The dialogues were polished, witty, and instructive — models of the Augustan conversational essay.
The History of the Life of King Henry the Second (1767–1771) was Lyttelton’s most ambitious work — a massive historical narrative in five volumes that attempted to establish Henry II’s reign as a pivotal period in English constitutional history. The work was learned but ponderous, and Johnson — by then estranged from Lyttelton — dismissed it as tedious.
Patron of Letters
Lyttelton’s most lasting contribution was his patronage. He supported Henry Fielding financially during the years when Fielding was writing Tom Jones — Fielding dedicated the novel to Lyttelton and modelled the character of Squire Allworthy partly on him. He patronised James Thomson, who dedicated The Seasons to Lyttelton and celebrated Hagley Hall in the poem. He entertained Pope, Shenstone, and other literary figures at Hagley, which was one of the earliest examples of the English landscape garden and became a destination for literary pilgrimage.
Collecting Lyttelton
Eighteenth-century first editions are the primary collecting targets. Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (R. Dodsley, 1747) and Dialogues of the Dead (W. Sandby, 1760) are the most sought-after. The History of the Life of King Henry the Second (Dodsley, 1767–1771, five volumes) is collected for its historical ambition. Lyttelton’s correspondence is scattered among various institutional collections.