Letters to His Son by Lord Chesterfield

First published: 1774

Type of work: Epistolary literature

The Work:

On the periphery of literature exists a valuable and fascinating genre, the personal letter. Like the private diary, the personal letter reveals an individual and an age far more intimately than any other form of writing. Probably no era practiced the epistolary art more widely than the eighteenth century and no person more skillfully than the fourth earl of Chesterfield. Although the earl had served his country unimpeachably as a member of Parliament, lord lieutenant of Ireland, and ambassador to Holland, it is generally conceded that Lord Chesterfield would have remained an inconspicuous figure in the eighteenth century historical scene had it not been for the unintended publication of some four hundred letters he wrote to his illegitimate son, Philip Stanhope. No doubt the very fact that these letters were private, intended to develop the education and manners of a young man who was expected to take a significant place in government and cultivated society, endows them with a frankness and honesty that betrays the cultivated self-seeking and hypocritical morality of the upper-class society of the time. Eugenia Stanhope, whose secret marriage with young Philip was only one of the many disappointments Lord Chesterfield suffered at the hands of his intractable son, was so incensed at being excluded from the earl’s will that, against the family’s wishes, she sold the letters for a little more than fifteen hundred pounds, thus infuriating English society and securing for Lord Chesterfield minor but recognized importance in the history of English prose.

The early letters are charmingly didactic essays addressed to a preadolescent boy whom the writer hoped would become “not only the best scholar but the best bred boy in England of your age.” “Dear boy,” they all begin, and then proceed to shape little lessons on language, literature, geography, history, and good manners. They conclude with admonitions to obey his seventy-year-old tutor, Maittaire, and with promises of “very pretty things” to reward him for industrious study. There is irony in Lord Chesterfield’s explanation of irony—“Suppose that I were to commend you for your great attention to your book, and for your retaining and remembering what you have once learned; would you not plainly perceive the irony, and see that I laughed at you?” Reasons for such laughter were to come, but it was never bitter or audible (“there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred as audible laughter”). Lord Chesterfield’s optimism and faith in rationalism may have diminished somewhat, but it was never extinguished completely. After his failure in making an outstanding figure of young Philip, he began the whole process over again in 1761 with his godson, to whom he wrote almost three hundred letters in one decade, published posthumously as Letters to His Godson (1890).

It was not the early letters to his son but the later ones—addressed to “My Dear Friend”—that aroused controversy after the letters were published. A strong believer in John Locke’s educational theory that a mind is wax to be molded into shape by environmental influences, Lord Chesterfield sent his son at the age of fourteen not to a university but on the Grand Tour, accompanied by a new tutor, the Reverend Walter Harte. The boy was supplied with letters of introduction into the highest social circles of great European cities, and he was spied upon by the earl’s agents and pursued by the affectionate but earnest epistles of an anxious father. How earnest they were can be gauged from this excerpt written to Lausanne in 1746: “I do not so much as hint to you how absolutely dependent you are on me; and that, as I have no womanish weakness for your person, your merit must and will be the only measure of my kindness.” It would nevertheless be unfair to charge that even if the father had never displayed warmth, love, or understanding, his kindness far exceeded the boy’s merit.

The controversy concerned Lord Chesterfield’s realistic observations on those aspects of life that he constantly urges his son to explore:

Search, therefore, with the greatest care, into the characters of those whom you converse with; endeavor to discover their predominant passions, their prevailing weaknesses, their vanities, their follies, and their humours, with all the right and wrong, wise and silly springs of human actions, which make such inconsistent and whimsical beings of us rational creatures. . . . This is the true knowledge of the world; and the world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it oneself to be acquainted with it.

Having traveled that country well himself, Lord Chesterfield could advise his son with cynical sophistication. A man who never knew love and who married for a dowry to repair his fortunes, he wrote:

Women are merely children of a larger growth. . . . A man of sense only trifles with them. . . . They will greedily swallow the highest [flattery], and gratefully accept the lowest . . . [but] They have, from the weakness of men, more or less influence in all courts. It is therefore necessary to manage, please and flatter them.

It is this worldly self-interest that constitutes the dominant tone of the letters; as Lord Chesterfield declares, “Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.” There is no trace of mysticism or sentimentality about him: “Religion must still be allowed to be a collateral security, at least, to Virtue.” Yet virtue, apparently, is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a means to worldly success—a dependable means, if Lord Chesterfield’s own career based on honesty and integrity is any measure. Worldly success is the goal, and though “learning, honour, and virtue are absolutely necessary to gain you the esteem and admiration of mankind, politeness and good breeding are equally necessary to make you welcome and agreeable in conversation and common life.” Elsewhere, Lord Chesterfield urges his son to be neat and clean, to avoid obesity, to care for his teeth, and never under any circumstances to stick his finger into his nose. The ultimate purpose was that young Stanhope should become—at the very least—a successful diplomat; but the principal objective of that occupation was “to get into the secrets of the court at which he resides” through any means, including flattery or intimacy with a king’s or minister’s mistresses.

On the Continent, publication of Letters to His Son was met with acclaim, the greatest admirer probably being Lord Chesterfield’s old friend Voltaire, who stated, “I am not certain that it is not the best book on education which has ever been written.” In England, however, the reaction was sternly condemnatory, even virulent. One periodical declared that, as a man, Lord Chesterfield was “certainly solely actuated by pride, vanity, and ambition,” and in her own letters Mary Wortley Montagu expressed her belief that “tho’ many admired, no one ever esteem’d Lord Chesterfield.”

Bibliography

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. Edited by David Roberts. 1992. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Provides an informative introduction to the correspondence between Lord Chesterfield and his son, and reprints the letters with helpful annotations.

Franklin, Colin. Lord Chesterfield: His Character and Characters. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1993. Presents Lord Chesterfield’s other writings, pieces on contemporary people and events, which were never published or meant to be published. Includes commentary and annotations.

Shellabarger, Samuel. Lord Chesterfield and His World. 2d ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Biography emphasizes the intimate connection between Lord Chesterfield’s conduct and teaching and the rationalism of his time. Offers an enjoyable and illuminating picture of the life of a man whose primary motivation was worldly ambition.