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A guide to early editions of Chesterfield is S. L. Gulick, ‘A Chesterfield Bibliography to 1800’, Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, 29 (1935); Gulick’s ‘The Publication of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son’, Publications of the Modern language Association, 51 (1936), is an invaluable account of the first edition’s complicated history.
Under the tide of The Art of Pleasing, fourteen of Chesterfield’s letters to his godson and heir appeared, before those to his son, in the Edinburgh Magazine, 1–2 (1774). letters to his Son Philip Stanhope came out in 2 vols. in 1774, both in London and Dublin, and in 4 vols. later the same year. The most important early edition is Miscellaneous Works, ed. J. O. Justamond, 2 vols. (1777), and 3 vols. (Dublin, 1777), with intermittent notes and a memoir of Chesterfield by Matthew Maty, together with Chesterfield’s pieces for the World on Johnson’s Dictionary. This edition was enlarged in 1778 to include sixteen ‘Characters of great personages’ and the letters to George Faulkner, which in 1777 had been published separately as part of a collection of letters to some of his Irish acquaintance. A further Miscellaneous Works (3 vols.) appeared in 1778, including political tracts and poems, edited by B. Way. Important editions since then include letters, ed. Lord Mahon, 5 vols. (1845–53); letters to his Godson and Successor, ed. the Earl of Carnarvon (1890), which includes 44 letters to his godson’s father, Arthur Stanhope, letters to his Son, ed. Charles Strachey and Annette Calthrop, 2 vols. (1901), reissued in i vol (1932); Letters to Lord Huntingdon, ed. A. F. Steuart (1923); letters to his Son and Others, ed. R. K. Root for the Everyman library (1929, last reprinted in 1986); and the present selection by Phyllis M. Jones (Oxford, 1929). Chesterfield’s correspondence with the Duke of Newcastle was edited by R. Lodge for the Camden Society in 1930. By far the most comprehensive edition is that of Bonamy Dobrée, 6 vols. (1932), which also contains a detailed survey of Chesterfield life. To Dobrée’s 2629 letters S. L. Gulick, Unpublished letters of Lord Chesterfield (Berkeley, Calif., 1937), added 26 more; a further five appear in C. Price’s ‘Five Unpublished Letters’, Life and Letters, 59 (1948). The most recent additions to the field are a selection by J. Harding (1973) and a Bantam edition, Dear Boy (1989), introduced by Catherine Cookson, which prints snippets of Chesterfield’s worldly wisdom in the best eighteenth-century manner. Of Chesterfield’s other works, extracts from his speech against the Theatre Licensing Act may be found in Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788. Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History, ed. David Thomas (Cambridge, 1989). Alan T. Mackenzie has edited Chesterfield’s Characters (Los Angeles, 1990), and the French correspondence is available in an edition prepared by Rex A. Barrell (Ottawa, 1980).
Among biographies of Chesterfield, Willard Connely’s The True Chesterfield (1939) is the most detailed but also the most diffuse; Samuel Shellabarger’s Lord Chesterfield and his World (Boston, 1951) is crisp but lacking in treatment of the godson; W H. Craig’s Life of Chesterfield (1907) is strong on political matters. Biographical articles include F. C. Nelick, ‘Lord Chesterfield’s Adoption of Philip Stanhope’, Philological Quarterly, 38 (1959); Benjamin Boyce, ‘Johnson and Chesterfield Once More’, Philological Quarterly, 32 (1953); and Willard Connely’s ‘Chesterfield’s Sons and Grandsons’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 (Nov. 1939). Stanhope’s education is examined in S. M. Brewer, Design for a Gentleman (1963) and A. P. Cappon, ‘The Earl of Chesterfield as Educator’, University Review, 31 (1965).
Useful accounts of the reception of Chesterfield’s letters are Roger Coxon’s Chesterfield and his Critics (1925), S. L. Gulick’s The Publication and Reception of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (Berkeley, Calif., 1933), and R. W. Nelson’s ‘The Reputation of Lord Chesterfield in Great Britain and America, 1730–1936’ (Northwestern University Dissertation, 1938). His thought on various matters is helpfully discussed by V. Heltzel, Chesterfield and the Tradition of the Ideal Gentleman (1925) and ‘Chesterfield and the Anti-Laughter Tradition’, Modern Philology, 26 (1928); F. L. Lucas, in Search for Good Sense (1958); Melvyn R. Watson, ‘Chesterfield and Decorum’, Modern Language Notes, 62 (1947); J. Churton Collins, in Essays and Studies (1895); and J. H. Neumann, ‘Chesterfield and the Standard of Usage in English’, Modern Language Quarterly, 7 (1946). Recent discussion includes J. R. Woodhouse, From Castiglione to Chesterfield: the decline in the courtier’s manual (Oxford, 1991); Alan T. Mackenzie, ‘History, Genre and Insight in the “Characters” of Lord Chesterfield’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 21 (1992), 159–76; and Georges Lamoine contributes an essay on Chesterfield to The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct Book in Britain 1600–1900, ed. Jacques Carré (Amsterdam, 1994).
Among recent work on eighteenth-century society and politics, the following are especially useful in understanding and appreciating Chesterfield: Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (Oxford, 1989) and The Excise Crisis (Oxford, 1975); John Cannon, Aristocratic Century (Cambridge, 1984); Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (Beckenham, 1985); and Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982). Chesterfield’s viceroyalty in Ireland is viewed harshly by Bruce P. Lenman, ‘Scotland and Ireland 1742–1789’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789 (Basingstoke, 1990).