William Combe

For other people named William Combe, see William Combe (disambiguation).
Dr Syntax, losing his way. Combe wrote verses to accompany Thomas Rowlandson's comic caricatures.
Dr Syntax in Danger, print after a drawing by Thomas Rowlandson.

William Combe (25 March 1742 – 19 June 1823) was a British miscellaneous writer. His early life was that of an adventurer, his later was passed chiefly within the "rules" of the King's Bench Prison. He is chiefly remembered as the author of The Three Tours of Doctor Syntax, a comic poem, illustrated by artist Thomas Rowlandson's color plates, that satirised William Gilpin. Combe also wrote a series of imaginary letters, supposed to have been written by the second, or "wicked" Lord Lyttelton. Of a similar kind were his letters between Swift and "Stella". He also wrote the letterpress for various illustrated books, and was a general hack.

Early life

Combe's father was a rich Bristol merchant, who died in early in 1756. He was educated at Eton, where he was contemporary with Charles James Fox, the 2nd Baron Lyttelton and William Beckford. Later on he lived in London with his godfather William Alexander, a London alderman, who died in 1762. Alexander bequeathed him (in 1766) some £2000—a little fortune that soon disappeared in a course of splendid extravagance, which gained him the nickname of Count Combe; and after a chequered career as private soldier, cook and waiter, he finally settled in London (about 1771) as a writer and bookseller's hack.

Works

A Derby Porcelain figure of Dr Syntax in Derby Museum

In 1776 he made his first success in London with The Diaboliad, a satire full of bitter personalities. Four years afterwards (1780) his debts brought him into the King's Bench Prison, and much of his subsequent life was spent in prison. His spurious Letters of the Late Lord Lyttelton (1780) imposed on many of his contemporaries, and as late as 1851, a writer in the Quarterly Review regarded these letters as authentic, basing upon them a claim that Lyttelton was "Junius." An early acquaintance with Laurence Sterne resulted in Combe's anonymous Letters supposed to have been written by Yorick and Eliza (1779), the named characters being from Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Periodical literature of all sorts—pamphlets, satires, burlesques, "two thousand columns for the papers," "two hundred biographies"[1]—filled up the next years, and about 1789 Combe was receiving £200 yearly from the Pitt government as a pamphleteer.

In 1790 and 91, the six volumes of a Devil on Two Sticks in England won for Combe the title of "the English le Sage". In 1794–1796 he wrote the text for Boydell's History of the River Thames, and in 1803 he began to write for The Times. From 1809 to 1811 he wrote for Ackermann's The Poetical Magazine the serialized comic poem The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, descriptive and moralizing verse illustrated by artist Thomas Rowlandson's color plates.[2] It satirised William Gilpin, who toured Britain to describe his theory of the Picturesque.[3] It was collected in book form in 1812, and was followed by two similar Tours, "...in search of Consolation" (1819) and "...in search of a Wife,"[2] the first Mrs Syntax having died at the end of the first Tour. The second Tour was collected as an 1820 book, and the third tour as an 1821 book. Some reprint editions over the next several decades rendered Rowlandson's color plates in black and white.[2]

Then came Six Poems in illustration of drawings by Princess Elizabeth (1813), The English Dance of Death (1815–1816), The Dance of Life (1816–1817), The Adventures of Johnny Quae Genus (1822)—all written for Rowlandson's caricatures; together with histories of Oxford and Cambridge, and of Westminster Abbey for Ackermann; Picturesque Tours along the Rhine and other rivers, Histories of Madeira, Antiquities of York, texts for Turner's Southern Coast Views, and contributions innumerable to the Literary Repository.

Combe died in London on 19 June 1823.

Bibliography

Translations

Notes

  1. ↑ Hotten (1895), p. XLVIII
  2. 1 2 3 The Tours of Dr. Syntax" at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived from the original on May 5, 2016.
  3. ↑ Whysall, Andy (September 2003). "Sense of Place: The Life and Death of Dr Syntax". BBC. Retrieved 26 May 2014.

References

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