Letters to His Son

Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, was a high-ranking diplomat and politician during the reigns of George I and George II in eighteenth-century England. Today, Lord Chesterfield is best known for the four hundred or so letters to his son collected and published without his prior knowledge or approval as Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman. Because he had been mostly neglected as a young man, Lord Chesterfield wanted to be present for his son Philip. However, because Philip was illegitimate – the son of Chesterfield and a Dutch governess – his father’s attention came in the form of letters. Beginning in 1737 when Philip was five years old and ending after Philip’s unexpected death at the age of thirty-six, the letters offer honest and often funny advice on everything: art, literature, politics, manners, and how to get ahead in the world. Through these private letters, Lord Chesterfield was grooming his son to overcome the stigma of illegitimacy to rise to a suitably high station.

However, Philip was a headstrong disappointment to his father’s ambitions. Instead of obeying Lord Chesterfield’s advice about marrying well (and up), Philip secretly married Eugenia Stanhope, a lowborn woman with whom he had two sons. When Philip died, Lord Chesterfield mostly cut Eugenia and the children out of the will, so, in 1774, Eugenia sold the letters against the family’s wishes for about 1500 pounds to support herself. The letters proved both wildly popular and scandalous because of their honest portrayal of how to rise and maneuver in society. Some saw them as a complete, gimlet-eyed manual for educating a young gentleman. However, the writer Samuel Johnson famously decried the letters as advocating “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master.”

The first letters, written to the prepubescent Philip, urge him to study well and to pay attention to his seventy-year-old tutor, Maittaire, who was teaching him geography, history, Latin, and Greek. Lord Chesterfield tries to cajole the boy into becoming “not only the best scholar but the best-bred boy in England of your age” by offering to give him “very pretty things” as a reward. But these early letters aren’t only admonishments – Lord Chesterfield also asks Philip to describe his hobbies, wanting to get to know his son in a warm and loving way.



As Philip ages, the letters start to cover more ground. As befitting a man who counted the famed satirists Pope, Addison, and Swift among his good friends, the letters are witty and elegant, written in several different languages (including Latin and French) – often revealing the depths of Lord Chesterfield’s cynicism about politics. The letters attempt to explain to Philip that to understand the real world, it’s necessary to get practical experience rather than relying on book knowledge; no matter how talented or goodhearted a person is, no one will care unless that person also knows how to present themselves well and pleasingly.

Lord Chesterfield writes at length about the necessity of displaying good demeanor, good breeding, and good manners. Etiquette isn’t frivolous, but instead is a part of the “art of pleasing” – a key skill in getting people to do what you want. Proper manners, Lord Chesterfield advises his son, include putting effort into outward appearance, since “If your air and address are vulgar, awkward, and gauche, you may be esteemed indeed, if you have great intrinsic merit; but you will never please; and without pleasing you will rise but heavily.”

Manners aren’t static but change depending on the surrounding people. Therefore, to learn what manners are appropriate to the circumstances, Lord Chesterfield tells Philip, “When you go into good company — by good company is meant the people of the first fashion of the place — observe carefully their turn, their manners, their address; and conform your own to them.” When you’ve figured out what the outward behaviors of a given set of people mean, you can then use that information to understand people on a deeper, more useful level: “go deeper still; observe their characters, and pry into both their hearts and their heads. Seek for their particular merit, their predominant passion, or their prevailing weakness; and you will then know what to bait your hook with to catch them.”



The letters point out that understanding both the outward actions and the inner driving forces of people is the way to get ahead in the worlds of politics and society. To this end, Lord Chesterfield tells Philip that he must always keep in mind that appearing to listen to people and to take them seriously always “flatters every man's little vanity,” while betraying contempt for the inanity of the stupid or the boring or the otherwise unpleasant instead “never fails to excite his resentment, or at least his ill will.” Pretending to be charmed by the charmless, in other words, is the way to grease the wheels of social climbing.