John Shebbeare
John Shebbeare was an 18th-century English writer and satirist, born in 1709 in Bideford, Devonshire. Initially trained in surgical medicine, he transitioned to a career in writing around the age of 40, largely motivated by his discontent with the Whig government's Marriage Act of 1753. This legislation, which centralized marriage authority in civil hands, inspired Shebbeare's first novel, *The Marriage Act: A Novel*, where he humorously critiqued the repercussions of the act through the lives of two sisters. He followed this with *Lydia: Or, Filial Piety*, a sentimental tale reflecting on morality, love, and societal corruption.
As his literary career progressed, Shebbeare became increasingly critical of the political landscape in England, expressing his views through a series of letters that condemned the Whig government and its failures. His outspoken nature eventually led to his arrest on charges of libel in 1758, marking a decline in his literary output. Despite this, he continued to write, later aligning himself with the Tory government after receiving a pension from Parliament in 1764. John Shebbeare lived until 1788, but by the time of his death, his earlier works had faded from prominence, overshadowed by the literary achievements of his contemporaries.
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John Shebbeare
Writer
- Born: 1709?
- Birthplace: Bideford, Devonshire, England
- Died: August 1, 1788
- Place of death:
Biography
John Shebbeare was born in 1709 (the date is uncertain) in the tiny port town of Bideford along the northern coast of what is now Devonshire in southwestern England. His father was an attorney, and Shebbeare was apprenticed in his teens into surgical medicine in nearby Exeter. In 1733, he married a woman well below his economic station, and although the marriage lasted more than forty years, it was by all accounts loveless and unfulfilling. In 1736, Shebbeare moved his family to Bristol and worked as a druggist until 1752, when he went to Paris to complete a medical degree, although its authenticity has been questioned by Shebbeare’s later biographers.
Shebbeare was past forty when he turned to writing in 1753, angered over the Whig government’s Marriage Act. The act placed authority for marriage into civil hands, which Shebbeare viewed as encouraging promiscuity, divorce, brokered engagements, and long, loveless marriages. Modeled on Henry Fielding’s popular works, Shebbeare wrote The Marriage Act: A Novel, in which he satirized the new law by tracing, with scandalous forthrightness, the lives of two sisters, one of whom ends up in a convent with her marriage in ruins, the other who, after many complications, manages to claim the promise of a fulfilling marriage by following her heart.
His reputation established, Shebbeare quickly completed Lydia: Or, Filial Piety, a Novel, an ambitious, sentimental, and often melodramatic novel about the coming-of-age of a comely, virtuous heroine. The novel is a comic tale of seduction, betrayal, and star-crossed love laced with essay-like asides that voiced Shebbeare’s own caustic take on his era’s woeful morality, religious hypocrisy, and political corruption. That public voice dominates Shebbeare’s Letters on the English Nation: By Batista Angeloni, a Jesuit, Who Resided Many Years in London, in which a fictitious Jesuit priest visiting England writes letters decrying England’s moral state.
Shebbeare dropped the fictional element entirely and began a series of letters to the people of England, each devoted to critiquing not only the corrupt state of the country under the Whigs but also the government’s woeful inability to affect any change. So vehement was Shebbeare’s indictment that in 1758 he faced arrest and imprisonment on trumped-up charges of libel. His three-year imprisonment essentially marked the end of his literary productivity. However, he did complete a forgettable panegyric allegory, tediously long and heavy-handed, that both celebrated the ascension of George III to the throne in 1760 (and the consequent ouster of the entrenched and hated Whigs) and vented his frustration and rage over the suppression of his own satiric works.
In 1764, Parliament approved a generous pension for Shebbeare, thus making him part of the very British government he had so long burlesqued. In turn, Shebbeare devoted much of his remaining years to pamphleteering, essentially generating propaganda for King George III and the new Tory government. He lived to be nearly ninety, but by the time he died on August 1, 1788, much of his best fiction was considered a lesser imitation of the great novels of the sentimental era, and his vitriolic essays were forgotten, as the controversies that had generated them had long passed.