LETTERS TO HIS SON, 1749

Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, was a high-ranking diplomat and politician during the reigns of George I and George II in eighteenth-century England. Today, Lord Chesterfield is best known for the four hundred or so letters to his son collected and published without his prior knowledge or approval as Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman. Because he had been mostly neglected as a young man, Lord Chesterfield wanted to be present for his son Philip. However, because Philip was illegitimate – the son of Chesterfield and a Dutch governess – his father’s attention came in the form of letters. Beginning in 1737 when Philip was five years old and ending after Philip’s unexpected death at the age of thirty-six, the letters offer honest and often funny advice on everything: art, literature, politics, manners, and how to get ahead in the world. Through these private letters, Lord Chesterfield was grooming his son to overcome the stigma of illegitimacy to rise to a suitably high station.