University of Virginia Library

II. Edward Phillips, Jr. (1754-1831)

Perhaps the only information about this man which is readily available in standard biographical resources is the following reference in the obituary columns of The Gentleman's Magazine for April 1831 (printed in the May number [CI, i, 476]): "GLOUCESTER.—In his 77th year, Mr. Edward Phillips, formerly of Melksham." No date of death is recorded, and no further details are provided, even editorially, about the life and work of one who contributed sixty-six articles, many of them substantial essays, to this periodical. He is not included in the Dictionary of National Biography, and the printed catalogues of the British Library contain no mention of his name. John and John Bowyer Nichols do not refer to him, even in passing, in the Literary Anecdotes and Illustrations, chronicles of the literary history of the eighteenth century but also a repository of countless details about those whose lives, like Phillips', extended into the nineteenth century. Perhaps he would have been included in the sequel which Bowyer Nichols appears to have planned on the literary history of the early nineteenth century.[15] As far as one can tell in the absence of personal and professional information about him, his contribution to the cultural life of his times seems to have consisted entirely of the essays he published in The Gentleman's Magazine.[16]

Since even in the magazine his work appeared not over his own name

but over the pseudonymous signatures "E. P." or "Alciphron," his obscurity is perfectly understandable. Yet the corpus of his articles in this periodical alone is a substantial body of work which circulated among a significant readership for over a decade. His "Speculations on Literary Pleasures," which appeared in seventeen installments during 1827-29, ran to some 71 pages in length. His essay "On the Mutability of National Grandeur" in 1823 covered 14 pages of the magazine. He published essays long enough to need division into two or three installments on the "Progress of Literature in Different Ages," on nineteenth-century poetry, on Thomson and Young, on Johnson and Helvetius as moralists, on "Italy and the Italians," on Gibbon and Lardner, on the "Value and Importance of History," on the "Influence of Time and Place in Developing Genius," and on the Continental historian Niebuhr. His single essays cover a diverse and interesting array of topics: "On the Pleasures of Philosophic Contemplation," "On the Subjects of Epic Poems," and many others. The writings of Edward Phillips, Jr., of Melksham are well worth the attention of anyone seeking to understand the intellectual life of the early nineteenth century.

Phillips' first contact with those who were to print and circulate his work came in a letter (now first published) "To the Editor of the Gentlemans Magazine" dated 19 February 1817. His approach to Nichols was much the same as that of others who paused at the gateway between their private worlds and the realm of public discourse:

The essays which Phillips apparently had immediately in mind were of a reflective nature in the manner of the eighteenth-century periodical essayists. The first two were published early in July[18]—one ("Essay on Greatness of Mind") in the June number of the magazine, the other ("On the Pleasures of Philosophic Contemplation") in the Supplement to Part I of the volume for 1817.[19] Another essay of this kind, "On the Appropriation of Hours of Leisure," came out in the October number. Whether he had these essays on hand when he wrote for editorial encouragement in February is not clear. In their published form, the essay in the June number is dated 2 June and

that in the October number 10 September. At any rate, beginning with his "Remarks on the Character and Genius of Johnson," which appeared in the January number for 1818, the sequence of Phillips' essays intermixed the treatment of more specifically focused subjects and the more speculative discourse with which his contributions to The Gentleman's Magazine had begun.

Phillips' essay on Johnson (LXXXVIII, i, 31-37) is a good example of his work. He obviously found the subject congenial, and he let his thoughts play out slowly and deliberately. Phillips realized that he was approaching Johnson's life and works at an interesting time, a little over three decades after Johnson's death, a quarter of a century after the decade in which so many recollections of the famous man, including Boswell's, had first been published. Phillips was thirty years old when Johnson died and presumably had read the essay on Shakespeare, the account of the journey to Scotland, and the Lives of the Poets when these works first came out. The reading public in 1818, however, included many persons of a generation after Phillips' who knew little of the Johnson canon but had read much about his personal eccentricity and frank opinions. "Casual readers," Phillips comments, "naturally recur to what, with most pleasure, is attended with least trouble; and hence, oftentimes form their estimate, and even their literary estimate, rather from these objectionable traits, which occupy a prominent feature in Johnson, than from the sterling weight and real excellence of his works." Although Phillips reviews Johnson's life to establish the consistency between his principles and actions and comments more broadly on Johnson's "fine discriminating powers and manliness of thought," much of the essay is commentary on specific works, including his lesser-known early biographies:

By and large, in his critical views about literature—his most frequent subject as an essayist—Edward Phillips showed himself to be very much a man of his generation. His tastes and principles of judgment were grounded in the literary values of the later eighteenth century. He was a Classicist attending the birth of Romanticism. This is not to say that his criticism of poetry in the early nineteenth century was a reactionary dismissal of the contemporary as viewed against a golden heritage. But he expected poets to assume a place within a tradition to which, it seemed, they necessarily belonged. He believed in the strength of this tradition. Along with his praise for Shakespeare and Milton and (less inevitably by then) for Dryden and Pope, Phillips could assert that "Collins, Gray, Armstrong, and Mason . . . Glover, Akenside,

Thomson, and Young, contributed by their labours to raise the dignity and character of metrical composition to a height not eclipsed by any other age or nation. . ." (LXXXIX [1819], ii, 400).

Phillips' long essay in 1819 "On the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century"[20] contains no mention of Shelley or Keats, and he had absolutely no use for Wordsworth and Coleridge ("littleness for which Literature has scarcely a name," "quaint conceit, splendid inanity . . . unintelligible sentiment"). Phillips was quite ready, however, to meet other writers on their own ground. He admired the poetry of Crabbe but ultimately found it limited. He shared with his contemporaries the feeling that Moore was a gifted poet, though he found the recent oriental style of this poet too mannered. Scott, he felt, had soaring creative powers, but in his view posterity would find Scott's interests too parochial. "Our poetical pretensions of equality, therefore, with several previous epochs during the long line of our literary history, may be justly a matter of question with the cool unprejudiced critick." The single great exception, Phillips felt, was Lord Byron. But he despaired for Byron even while admiring him.

It was difficult for Phillips to balance his attraction to Byron's poetry with his alienation from the poet's ideas.

On the other hand, he found Byron too often "gloomy and despondent in his views of life," a poet who "exhibits, in his intellectual speculations, a glaring licentiousness of principle, associated with the querulousness of a dark and brooding misanthrope. . . ." Such depression of mind and character led Byron often enough to "a negligence of speech, a quaintness and prettiness unworthy alike of his general style, and of an author who writes for a literary immortality." The fundamental problem for Phillips was that Byron "offers outrage to the correct principles of sober reason, while the imagination of the reader hangs with the liveliest interest and emotion on fine scenes of sentiment and of pathos. . . ."

Phillips' evident distress over this point of tension in his reading of Byron apparently led him in 1822 to write an essay, over nine thousand words in length, which he called "The Rhetoric of the Infidel School." Here, citing not only the kinds of criticism of Byron which he himself had previously made but also the noble poet's evident disdain for such arguments, Phillips ranges through the history of British letters to show how many writers, even of the

first eminence in their own times, had passed into disregard because of their intellectual and moral flaws. He compares Byron chiefly with Lord Bolingbroke, of the previous century, but refers also to the lives and works of Rochester, Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. He reviews aspects of "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" and other poems which he finds objectionable, particularly "Cain," the blasphemous character of which he distinguishes pointedly from the treatment of Satan in "Paradise Lost." He concludes:

Although Phillips' principal subject as an essayist was the literary tradition and history of his country, his work demonstrates considerable range. He wrote on Swedish and Italian literature and on the pleasures of historical research. When his subject was specifically literary, much of his attention was engrossed by moral or theological questions, by the larger cultural issues to which, he evidently believed, all learning should address itself. Given to generalization and abstract argument, he did not neglect the practical: his essays on the learned achievements of Locke (LXXXIX [1819], ii, 589-592) and the importance of Cook's exploits (XCVIII [1828], ii, 24-25) were written explicitly to lobby for the erection of public monuments. Within themselves, the essays often cover a broad spectrum of ideas and effects. His three-part discourse on Johnson and Helvetius is set as a narrative, his thoughts about these writers and the principles implicit in their work arising from his agitation of mind during a storm which he describes in rhapsodic detail. Similarly, an essay entitled "Reveries in Autumn" (XCV [1825], ii, 108-111), which begins with an account of his feelings as he observes the descent of evening on a wild rural landscape, becomes a long discussion of atmospheric phenomena based on the theories and observations of leading natural scientists.

Edward Phillips was perhaps most truly in his element in the long series he called "Speculations on Literary Pleasures." These essays form a chronicle of early nineteenth-century thought, ranging from commentary on Locke, Johnson, and Franklin to consideration of the ideas of various contemporary thinkers. Perhaps it was the summary chronicle of his own reflective life. He was free in this loosely structured discourse to allow his mind to rove along contours of thought which delighted and stimulated him. He let his mind play with the notions of writers who had captured his attention and had made him think. It is not too extravagant to claim that, in extending to Phillips the opportunity to publish, The Gentleman's Magazine allowed a man retiring from his public duties to compose and deliver his own intellectual legacy.

Within the pages of The Gentleman's Magazine, the writings of William Tooke and his son and of Edward Phillips, Jr., possess so many of the characteristics of the articles collected there that they blend seamlessly with their textual environment. In the personae which they each more or less developed, in the character and style of their discourse, in the kinds of subjects which they explored, these three writers are entirely representative of the magazine's family of contributors. We read an article by "M. M. M." or "Alciphron" and think of it as an extension of the views of "A Well-Wisher to Truth" or a correction of facts cited by "T. T." There is a linear quality to the learning spread out for us by those who contributed to The Gentleman's Magazine over the years in which Tooke and Phillips were contributors, and certainly these two participated busily in the creation of a collective text which we now look back upon as a document of cultural history.

All too easily, we may overlook the fact that Tooke and Phillips—that all of the contributors, indeed—were not members of a school, probably did not even know one another except as they read one another's work in the magazine, properly speaking were not even writers in a professional sense. They were coeval individuals, each living out a course of years with personal and professional commitments which identified them in terms distinct from those of a "literary" or "cultural" establishment. What they had in common was a private commitment to learning, an intellectual life informing and energizing the core of daily existence. They each pursued studies in which their interest never abated over the years, and they each took stock reflectively of the world in which they lived. In these qualities, too, the writers we have been considering were entirely representative. Every contributed item we find on the horizontal surface of the magazine's text is an element in a vertical process by which the learning of an individual mind has achieved its expression.

As divergent and separately constituted as were the lives of William Tooke and Edward Phillips—as different as they appear to have been personally—they each carried things worth saying into Mr. Urban's forum, an agenda of thought and opinion which derived from their own intellectual activity. As different as were the preoccupations and styles of the fascinated historian and the speculative essayist, they each had allotted places in this forum. Especially after the advent of more rigidly oriented journals in the early nineteenth century, it was a distinguishing feature of The Gentleman's Magazine that all persons who wished to write and whose writings could be conceived of as adding constructively to the discourse were provided a place on the printed page. It is not an overstatement to say that The Gentleman's Magazine in fact created many writers, for the major opportunity many men and women had to follow out their studies into publication, to complete their thoughts by carrying them into statement, was afforded by the policies and practice of this British periodical. Paralleled hundreds of times in the experiences of their fellow contributors, the personal attainments of Tooke and Phillips in their collaboration with the editors of The Gentleman's Magazine constitute a phenomenon of real significance in our cultural tradition.