Philip Dormer Stanhope

(1694 - 1773)

Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, entered Parliament in 1715, became ambassador to Holland in 1728, and sired his illegitimate son in 1732. Starting when the boy was five years old and ending within four weeks of his son’s death at the age of thirty-six, Stanhope wrote 448 letters to him, generally on the topic of “the necessary arts of the world.” After Stanhope’s death, Samuel Johnson complained that the posthumously published letters taught “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master.”