Robert Lowth (1710–1787)
Prof. dr. Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
Emeritus hoogleraar Sociohistorische Taalkunde van het Engels (LUCL)
December 2023
Lowth in London
Robert Lowth (1710–1787), Bishop of London from 1777 until his death ten years later, was not a Londoner, but with one exception all his major publications were published there. The exception is his De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum (1753), a series of lectures he had given as Professor of Poetry in Oxford between 1741 and 1751. His Life of William of Wykeham (1758), A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) and Isaiah, A New Translation (1778) were all published by the London publishers Robert and James Dodsley and their colleagues Andrew Millar and Thomas Cadell, as were several of his sermons. Robert Dodsley was one of London’s most important publishers at the time, and among linguists he is of particular interest as the one who initiated (and published) Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Dodsley was also instrumental in the publication of Lowth’s grammar, which had originally been written for Lowth’s son Thomas Henry when he was a little boy, but which was revised and adapted upon Dodsley’s instigation when requests came in for copies. The grammar was regularly reprinted, and each “new edition” was well advertised. In a letter to John Nourse, “Bookseller in the Strand/ London,” as the address panel informs us, Lowth mentioned that the distribution of his De Sacra Poesi Hebræorum was in the hands of “Mr. Daniel Prince at Mr. Clements’s Bookseller in Oxford” and that “for ye. home-sale,” by which he meant the sale of the book in England rather than abroad (where Nourse had important connections), he was “engaged to Mr. Dodsley & Mr. Millar.” Nourse had been recommended to Lowth by his brother William, who was Vicar of Lewisham, a place situated South of the River Thames and nowadays part of London. The letter, which is dated 15 May 1753, therefore shows that Lowth’s connection with Robert Dodsley already dates back to the early 1750s. When Robert died in 1764, his brother James took over, who continued to publish and promote Lowth’s grammar until it was pushed off the market during the mid-1790s by a conger of booksellers involved with the publication of Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1795). For all that, Lowth’s grammar continued to be reprinted several times, even after his death; New College Library, Oxford, has recently come into possession of copies of the grammar from 1804 and 1811.
Lowth’s grammar was published anonymously, and it is the absence of his name on the title-page, coupled with the imprint of his regular London publishers on the title-page, that allows us to distinguish between original, i.e. authorised, and pirated editions; such editions were regularly published both in Ireland and, somewhat later, in America, and their very existence testifies to the grammar’s popularity. In a biographical account Lowth made up a few years before he died, he noted that by that time around 34,000 copies of the grammar had been sold. This was an unusual amount for a grammar at the time, and appears to have surprised Lowth himself, too, because the fact that he had published it anonymously as well as that he had sold its copyright to the publishers—at £100—suggests that he thought the grammar the least important of his publications. None of his other books were published anonymously. Lowth’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) reads that he gave “the copyright in his lectures on Hebrew poetry to the University of Oxford,” but he held on to that of The Life of William of Wykeham until 1777, when he presented it to New College, Oxford (William of Wykeham was the founder of New College, as well as of Winchester College, which Lowth had attended as a boy). The occasion appears to have been his promotion to Bishop of London that year, upon which his formal connection with his alma mater, his college and his episcopal see—he had been Bishop of Oxford since 1766—came to an end. In this new capacity, Lowth had to secure alliance with a network of important people, and it is with this purpose in mind that he widely distributed copies of his translation of Isaiah, which came out in 1778, a year after his transferral to London. Two lists of names have come down to us for “presents,” as he called them in his letters, amounting to nearly 240 copies altogether; calculating the cost of this attempt at coalition building suggests a considerable financial investment. The lists are of interest in that they show what kind of coalition network he intended to build; apart from clergymen and scholars, it consisted of members of the aristocracy (e.g. the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl of Ailesbury, the Countess of Hillsborough) and other people in important positions, political and otherwise, like Sir Joshua Reynolds (at that time President of the Royal Academy) and the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Mayor of London and the Speaker of the House of Commons.
No such lists have come down to us for his other publications. When lists of presentation copies were mentioned in Lowth’s letters, they would not have survived because they were used and subsequently discarded by the publisher, as in the case of a sermon Lowth had “preached at St. Nicholas’s church in Newcastle, before the governors of the Infirmary for the Counties of Durham, Newcastle, and Northumberland. On Thursday, June 23. 1757.” James Tierney, the editor of Robert Dodsley’s letters, notes that the list which followed Lowth’s P.S. was “possibly torn off for RD’s convenience” (288). Occasionally, letters have survived in which Lowth asked his publishers (or his London booksellers) to send additional copies of a book or sermon to friends or acquaintances. Of his grammar he freely handed round copies to friends and acquaintances himself, as when he thought they might benefit the education of their children (such as Harriet Knatchbull, the wife of a recently deceased fellow clergyman at Durham who had young children) or when he thought it would help them in their efforts to learn English (as with the young Dutch student of Arabic, Hendrik Albert Schultens, who came to Oxford to try and obtain a Master’s degree). He also presented copies to fellow scholars like Thomas Sheridan, who would later publish a pronouncing dictionary, and the American Samuel Johnson, the author of a dual Hebrew-English grammar published in 1767. Johnson thought highly of Lowth’s grammar, but did not use it for the second edition of his grammar published four years later, very likely because doing so would have required considerable revision. He was, moreover, already an old man at the time.
Lowth’s letters contain many references to London, even from before 1777, when he was appointed bishop there. The references relate to his publishing activities—letters addressed to Robert Dodsley and to John Nourse—but they also have to do with his ecclesiastical activities. In 1755, he accompanied the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (Lord Hartington) as his chaplain to Dublin, a journey which he recorded in great detail in his letters to his wife. Preparations for this visit required his presence in London and, before returning home again, he had to attend to business in London as well. This business included his prospects at ecclesiastical preferment, and he notes for instance that “[t]he Durham affair is in negotiation”: instead of immediately obtaining a bishopric as he had been promised, he was appointed prebendary of Durham (holder of an ecclesiastical estate and recipient of income from it) and rector of Sedgefield upon his return from Ireland. Patronage played an important role in the relevant negotiations, and this required paying visits to the people who were responsible for his ecclesiastical career. “Ld. Hartington has order’d me to wait upon ye. Duke of Newcastle, to thank him,” he wrote to his wife after coming back from Dublin. Such required visits forced him to stay in London rather than go home immediately, even though his son was seriously ill at the time. And while in London, he visited his old patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire who “came to Town last night.” A few years earlier, before being married, he had accompanied their sons, George and Frederic Cavendish, on a Grand Tour of Europe. Lowth had become acquainted with the Cavendish family through an earlier patron of his, Henry Bilson-Legge, whom he had accompanied as his chaplain on a diplomatic visit to Berlin during the late 1740s. Lowth, it appears, knew all the right people, and he continued to cherish these contacts throughout his life, as his lists of presentation copies for Isaiah demonstrate. Bilson-Legge, moreover, had been instrumental in the publication of Lowth’s grammar: asking for a copy of it for his own new-born son when he heard about it, Lowth could only comply by having it printed, turning to Dodsley for the purpose.
Lowth finally obtained a bishopric in 1766, first of St. David’s in Wales, though later that year he was transferred to Oxford, where he remained in office for a little over ten years. Bishops, it appears from his correspondence, were expected to have a “House in Town,” where they could stay while in London for business, ecclesiastical or otherwise, but it would take a while before he found a place to settle in. As Lord Bishop of Oxford, Lowth joined the Lords Spiritual, and consequently obtained a seat in the House of Lords; in his letters, he occasionally refers to attending a meeting there, but otherwise does not provide any details about his parliamentary activities. Reading his letters, allows us to follow him around London at times. His first residence was in Argyle Street, nowadays about a thirty-minute walk from St. Paul’s Cathedral, or less if he went there by carriage. In one letter he suggests meeting a friend “at St. Paul’s Coffee house,” near the Cathedral, and on one occasion he refers to “having undertaken a Sermon for ye. London Hospital,” situated in the East End of London (the sermon appears not to have been printed). Of other sermons, published by Peter Hall in 1834, we learn that he preached them in St. James’s Church and St. Martin’s-in-the-Field. In 1764, a few years before Lowth became a bishop, in which capacity he would have had a London residence, he asked James Dodsley to hire lodgings for himself and his family in a part of town which he appears to have considered appropriate for someone of his standing: “any where in Your Neighbourhood, between St. James's Street & the lower part of the Haymarket, the busier or in either of them; or Pall Mall, Berry Street, Duke Street, Kings Street, or the better part of Jermyn Street.” The detailed request allows us to get an idea of the make-up of his family, servants included: “I shall want a Dining Room, Bed-Chamber for my Wife & Me, another for a Maid Servant & a little Girl, & a Camp Bed in either of them for my little Boy; & a Bed for two Men Servants.” The family outing, which included only his two eldest children, was to last three weeks.
From 1777 onwards, many of his letters were written from “London House,” situated on St. James’s Square, or from Fulham Palace, the official residences of the bishops of London. Fulham is also where he died on 3 November 1787, “probably following a stroke,” as Lowth’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography informs us. The stroke followed upon a long illness, as we are able to read in his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine. There are several references in his letters to complaints he suffered from, caused by “Gravel, or perhaps Stone,” as he informed his German colleague Johann David Michaelis in 1782. It was his infirm state of health that forced him to refuse the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the highest position within the Church of England, which would be offered to him the next year. Lowth was buried nine days after his death in the family tomb in All Saints Church cemetery (Fulham), where most of his children who had died before him were buried as well. He left an elaborate will, and the obituary ends with a note saying that “[h]is fortune is estimated at 40,000 pounds,” the equivalent of nearly three and a half million pounds today.
Lowth not only died a very rich man—his legacy among linguists and literary scholars is considerable, though not uncontroversial, as we are able to read in his entry in ODNB. Its author, Scott Mandelbrote, mentions Lowth’s quarrel with William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, which largely revolved about the dating of the Book of Job but which was also about ecclesiastical rivalry, according to Lowth’s biographer, Brian Hepworth. The correspondence between the two men, called Letter to the Right Reverend Author of The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, was published in 1765 by Andrew Millar and James Dodsley. Mandelbrote mentions a critical reception of some of Lowth’s sermons as well. Lowth’s reputation as a Hebrew scholar was widely recognised, both among scholars in Oxford and on the Continent, particularly in Germany. There, we find translations into German of his grammar and of Isaiah, while Johann David Michaelis published an annotated edition of De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, which resulted in a lengthy correspondence between the two scholars (first in Latin, later in English). Among literary scholars Lowth has become best known for analysing the language of the New Testament as poetry, while among linguists it is his grammar of English that set a standard for many years to come. One of its innovations was to criticise established literary authors for their grammatical mistakes. This approach made the grammar at once extremely popular but it also turned it into another controversial publication, particularly from the present-day linguistic perspective that a grammar should be based on a description of the language rather than that it should supply pre- or proscriptive rules of usage. One interesting but tenacious idea, popular among linguists and non-linguists alike, moreover, is that the grammar, first published in 1762, was “written by Bishop Lowth”—a fallacy that may be due to the ODNB labeling him as “biblical critic and bishop of London.” It was not, however, as a bishop that Lowth wrote his grammar nor because he was a clergyman, but in an attempt to give his eldest son a headstart in life for when he would be old enough to go to school and start learning Latin.
The above account of “Lowth in London” primarily focused on his publishing activities. These largely took place in London (and we may visualise them through Robert Dodsley’s eyes, who printed a map of London in 1761), though not only while Lowth was actually a resident there. It was only when he was appointed a bishop, first of St. David’s and Oxford and eleven years later of London, that he acquired a “House in Town,” though before that time he regularly visited London on business-related activities and got to know the city quite well in the process. Reading his letters from the period as well as tracing the locations of the sermons he delivered in London we are able to follow some of his movements around town. There is as yet no edition of his collected letters, many of which are held in the Bodleian Library, in Oxford. A substantial addition to the collection of the letters made to enable the study of his own language use for The Bishop’s Grammar, was, moreover, recently acquired by New College Library, Oxford. In these letters we get a glimpse of how the ecclesiastical patronage system worked, not, however, to achieve any kind of major rise within the Church hierarchy, detailed evidence of which we find in Lowth’s correspondence with his wife and which eventually resulted in his obtaining the third highest position in the Church of England; in this recently surfaced batch of letters we see the patronage system at work that enabled members of the lower clergy to achieve positions as local clergymen, and they illustrate Lowth’s efforts to that effect, personal and otherwise.
There are, finally, several portraits of Lowth, all of them showing him in his position as a bishop, and all of them based on the famous life-sized portrait hanging in the main hall of New College, Oxford (and reproduced in Wikipedia). But there is one other portrait of Lowth, as well as one of his wife: it hangs in the reception room of the Old Deanery in London, where the offices of the current Bishop of London are located. The portrait presents a man who felt secure in his position as a bishop and as a scholar of repuration, in the field of Hebrew studies but also in that of an early form of linguistics. On first seeing the portrait, it felt like meeting an old friend and his wife again, twenty years on.
References and background reading:
Fitzmaurice, Susan. 2007. The world of the periodical essay: Social networks and discourse communities in eighteenth-century London. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 7.
Hall, Peter. 1834. Sermons, and Other Remains, of Robert Lowth, D.D. some time Lord Bishop of London. London: for J.G.F. Rivington.
Hepworth, Brian. 1978. Robert Lowth. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Percy, Carol. 1997. Paradigms lost: Bishop Lowth and the “poetic dialect” in his English grammar. Neophilologus 81. 129-44.
Reddick, Allen. 1996. The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary 1746–1773 [rev. ed.]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid. 2011. The Bishop’s Grammar. Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (2022). The other Samuel Johnson’s English grammar. New College Notes 18.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid and Christopher Skelton-Foord (forthcoming). Robert Lowth in New College, Oxford.
Tierney, James E. (1988). The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley 1733–1764. Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgement:
Thanks to Carol Percy and Joan Beal for their most helpful comments on an earlier version of the above article.