Edmund Burke's first book was a satire so convincing that readers missed the joke
In 1756 a young Irish writer imitated the late Lord Bolingbroke so perfectly that Lord Chesterfield and others assumed the essay was Bolingbroke's own. Burke had to add a preface explaining it was satire. The same writer went on to sit in Parliament for nearly three decades and is now called the founder of conservatism.
Burke was born in Dublin in 1729 to a Catholic mother from County Cork, a cousin of the educator Nano Nagle, and a solicitor father in the Church of Ireland. He stayed Anglican all his life, while his sister Juliana was raised Catholic. Enemies later claimed he had been schooled by Jesuits at St Omer and secretly favoured Rome, a serious charge when Catholics were barred from office; Burke retorted that he had never even passed through the town. He studied at a Quaker school in Ballitore and entered Trinity College Dublin in 1744, where in 1747 he founded a debating club that later became part of the College Historical Society, described as the oldest undergraduate society in the world.
His father steered him toward law at London's Middle Temple in 1750, but Burke soon dropped it to travel and write. A Vindication of Natural Society mimicked Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion to show they would equally demolish all civil institutions. Richard Hurd complained the imitation was too faithful to work as irony, and a few scholars suspect Burke meant it seriously. In 1757 came his only purely philosophical book, an enquiry into the sublime and the beautiful that caught the eye of Diderot and Kant.
Elected to the Commons as a Whig, serving from 1766 to 1794 and representing Bristol from 1774, he criticised British taxation of the American colonies and defended their right to resist, while opposing independence. He championed Catholic emancipation and led the attempt to impeach Warren Hastings of the East India Company.
His Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, attacked the upheaval as a wrecking of traditional institutions and condemned the persecution of the Church, splitting the Whigs into his Old Whigs and Charles James Fox's pro-revolution New Whigs. Friend to Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds, he died in 1797. Praised by liberals and conservatives alike in the nineteenth century, he came in the twentieth to be seen, with Joseph de Maistre, as conservatism's philosophical founder.
Source: Edmund Burke
