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A faithful portrait of an era, of which Lord Chesterfield was a symbol, this is an oddity in the field of biography.

Kirkus Reviews

Lord Chesterfield and His World

Samuel Shellabarger

Lord Chesterfield was an immortal of his age, synonymous with the art of gracious living and representative of his world at its best in point of culture, international relations, and the social arts. Yet, today's literary world knows him through an extraordinary collection of letters to his illegitimate son―letters of admonition, encouragement and advice, often two thousand words long, revolving around the love and ambitions Chesterfield held for the boy himself as well as letters to those in the world he knew who might help him. In this biography, Shellabarger's objective was to go beyond popular perceptions of Chesterfield and the book that ensured his fame to a study of the man himself and the eighteenth century world from which he took his cues and in which he flourished.

This biography is likely to surprise you. While it is a scholarly work replete with enough notes and footnotes to impress most historians, it also reads like a historical novel. The revelation of Chesterfield's character takes the skill of a great novelist as well as a scholar and Samuel Shellabarger is inimitably successful in recreating the stage and the drama of this glittering eighteenth-century aristocrat.

Samuel Shellabarger's gift for lucid prose and his talent for making the past come alive have never been more evident than in this entertaining book about Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield.

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