The Missing Years in Edmund Burke's Biography

Abstract

Events in the life of Edmund Burke from his birth in Dublin in 1729, his schooldays at Ballitore, his undergraduate career at Trinity College, and his venture into pamphleteering during the Lucas controversy, have been reconstructed in much detail. That he came to London to read law and keep his terms in the Middle Temple at some time shortly before May 2, 1750—the date of his bond—is also readily inferred. And then, after a lapse of years, when he contracted with Dodsley in 1758 to publish The Annual Register; when he began to meet Garrick, Johnson, Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, and other distinguished people at about the same time; and finally when he began his political apprenticeship under William Gerard Hamilton in 1759 —Burke's life is increasingly illuminated by well-known names, until within a few years the young Irishman is a celebrity in his own right. But between these dates lies almost a decade which the historians of Burke's career, such as Bisset, MacKnight, and Prior, have passed over with vague conjecture. Lord Morley, in the best-known of all Burke's biographies, refers to these years as “enveloped in nearly complete obscurity,” while the Dictionary of National Biography observes that “we scarcely know anything of this period of his life.” Such lack of knowledge has helped to keep alive various canards which even in Burke's lifetime were circulated about this interlude of his youth—that he went to St. Omer's and became a convert to Popery, that he visited America under mysterious circumstances, and that he was the lover of Peg Woffington. Indeed, the life of such a forthright person as Edmund Burke, who once declared “that he had no secrets with regard to the public,” appears often to attract dark and mysterious legends—perhaps on the principle of lucus a non lucendo.