Theory Resisting Biography
Most biographers , even those writing the first life of a subject, rarely get the opportunity to publish ‘second thoughts’. 1 Those who do are best served by revisiting their main assumptions rather than the petit facts and fictions constituting the biographical subject , the bolts and hinges rather than bricks and mortar of their scholarly edifice. I mean the figure’s fundamental pulse, the unfocused portions of the historical and sociopolitical context, and the omissions sufficiently consequential to derail the biography ’s fault lines. How to explain this bundle of energy and contradictions called John Hill and situate him during his decade of notoriety in the 1750s?
Notorious was the keyword by which I conceptualized Hill before I titled my biography. I would make four adjustments to it now, and also confirm I do not believe in ‘definitive biography’ as a valid first principle, as well as reiterate that, as I wrote,
theory never lay far from the tip of my imagination:
historical theory in the revolution then occurring in the way civil societies function (the transformations from the world imagined by Locke and Shaftesbury to Hume and Adam Smith);
social theory as it touched on developing manners and morals then being consolidated and codified by thinkers such as Addison, Steele, Shaftesbury, Johnson and Hume, as well as the main English poets and novelists;
post-Lockean psychological theory at mid-century being challenged by newer Humean and anti-Humean notions of personhood and selfhood;
scientific theory in the developing professions (medicine and other sciences) as it touched on the natural world in which Hill moved.
In Notorious , I selected a chronological structure, the one I imagined readers in search of ‘facts’ needed, but I also favour theoretical clusters in a second revaluation. One reason pertains to Hill’s type of self—not the stereotypic dunce imagined by Pope and all manner of Scriblerians a generation earlier, but the more outrageous Hill who practically went ‘viral’ at mid-century. 2 Cibber, Theobald, Bentley and Warburton displayed excessive characteristics in pedagogy or pretension, which made them natural fodder for Pope’s lampooning engine. 3 But Hill’s profile was different: part chancer, part opportunist, part tough-skinned rogue, he was also immensely able, hard-working and willing to strike out in several fields. The amalgam is difficult to assess and challenging to describe. I selected ‘notoriety’ and would again, in a second attempt, because I believed Hill sought celebrity more than anything. Yet, celebrity hurled him to the edges of polite society at mid-century. When I wrote Notorious (2009–2012), celebrity culture had not yet been constituted as an academic sub-discipline; it has swelled into a major preoccupation of diverse sorts of dix-huitièmistes in just one decade. 4
Historian Herbert Butterfield’s injunction about the Whig interpretation of history—writing history with one eye on the present—was always with me despite its perils. 5 This was one reason I said so little about Hill’s posthumous reputation: the generational interstices of 1775 (when he died) and 1800 (the new century), or 1837 (the Victorian reclamation of the prior century), were lesser markers than the 1750s abutting 2000, when past and present began to coalesce in striking ways enumerated later. I was trying to demonstrate that Hill’s value to posterity was as a filter or a lens through which posterity could view his contemporaries, rather than the newly discovered figure in his own right. 6 Hill can be reclaimed for eighteenth-century studies along lines exceeding one discipline: he is relevant to literature, science, medicine, the public sphere at mid-century. A filter , or lens, can only be perceived by historians in possession of the whole panorama—the whole eighteenth century, the broad English and European Enlightenment in all its complexity—or, as Smollett called it in 1753 referring to the form of the developing novel, by drawing a ‘large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life’ rather than a narrowly-drawn canvas with selected types. 7 Hill, properly reconstructed, reflects crucial integuments of the mid-Georgian metropolitan public sphere, in Jürgen Habermas’ famous phrase. The ‘public sphere’ is, of course, a metaphor suggesting borders and boundaries, insides and outsides. This positioning of himself—within and without—is, in part, what makes Hill such a slippery figure. No other English figure demonstrates, for example, Grub Street’s developing factions and tribalism at mid-century so well. More drastically, Christopher Smart’s excoriation of Hill in The Hilliad captured the changes that had developed between the 1720s milieu of Pope’s attacks on the dunces and Smart’s on Hill in the 1750s. One difference was privilege: Smart was no Pope but his excoriation of Hill speaks for Everyman, when viewed in Georgian contexts, in ways Pope’s aloof voice exuding the confidence of privilege never imagined.
I ought to have said more in Notorious about Hill-the-filter than I did. Where else, for instance , can puffery of Hill’s ingenious varieties be found? He published anonymously, often under aliases, then savaged his own work to puff it further; attack followed attack until the public was cajoled into thinking a furore was raging, never imagining it was manufactured by Hill. His activities in non-literary fields were also legion. The point is not that Hill was a polymath (despite displaying behaviours and knowledge that qualify him), 8 but that his activities in diverse arts and sciences shed light on how those professions were solidifying. A century earlier you could engage in both the arts and sciences without disparagement, as John Evelyn, Thomas Browne, John Locke and others did. 9 But during Hill’s maturity in the 1750s it was becoming more difficult and aroused suspicion. 10 Few mid-Georgians can compete with Hill’s diversity and ambition; hence, he belongs to the cultural and social contexts of the eighteenth century more robustly than merely to the realms of biography and literary analysis.
Further, along the lines of filter and lens I ought to have pursued Hill’s role as enabler : the ground he prepared for future development. I proceeded chronologically forwards, as most biographers do, asking how he arrived at point B from A, but rarely gazing backwards from the vantage of a generation or two afterwards, and inquiring whether he played any role in shaping the future. Contemporary celebrity studies (more or less) retain the notion that, in England, Byron was the formative figure for transforming the ‘birth of celebrity’, 11 in the company of celebrated late eighteenth-century actors, while also maintaining that, in diverse walks of life, others were enacting roles to make the Byronic phenomenon possible: Garrick and Siddons and a host of other actors on the English stage, Reynolds and Gainsborough in painting, Newton and Sir Joseph Banks in science. 12 Little wonder then that Johnson had the idea at this time to form a ‘Club ’ limited to one figure selected as the best-known representative—‘celebrity’—from each field. 13 Charles Burney, the important Georgian musicologist who was later elected a member, wrote that Johnson aimed to form a group ‘composed of the heads of every liberal and literary profession’ and ‘have somebody to refer to in our doubts and discussions , by whose Science we might be enlightened’. 14 The first club of seven members began to dine in 1764 at the Turk’s Head Inn in Gerrard Street, Soho—a short walk from Hill’s lodgings on the other side of what is now Regent Street. It is no acciden...
