Sir John Hill (1714-1775) and London Life in the 1750s

Sir John Hill (1714–1775) was one of Georgian England’s most vilified men despite having contributed prolifically to its medicine, science and literature. Born into a humble Northamptonshire family, the son of an impecunious God-fearing Anglican minister, he started out as an apothecary, went on to collect natural objects for the great Whig lords and became a botanist of distinction. But his scandalous behaviour prevented his election to the Royal Society and entry to all other professions for which he was qualified. Today, we can understand his actions as the result of a personality disorder; then he was understood entirely in moral terms. When he saw the die cast he turned to journalism and publication, and strove maniacally to succeed without patronage. As a writer he was also cut down in ferocious ‘paper wars’. Yet by the time he died, he had been knighted by the Swedish monarch and become a household name among scientists and writers throughout Britain and Europe. His life was a series of paradoxes without coherence, perhaps because he was above all a provocateur. In time he became a filter for the century in which he lived: its personalities—great and small—as well as the broad canvas of its culture. More than anything his life illuminates the anxieties and paradoxes of Georgian urban life in the 1750s, especially its metropolitan pleasures and rivalries.

The Centre for Life-Writing Research, in collaboration with the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s, is holding a day of talks by expert scholars to explore the colourful life of Sir John Hill and the complex world he moved in. Included in the programme will be Professor George Rousseau whose biography, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Age of Celebrity, offers an erudite, readable, compelling and original study of this fascinating man and his era.