William Combe

Artist Info

William CombeLondon, 1742 - 1823, London

LC name authority rec. n50035341

LC Heading:Combe, William, 1742-1823

Biography:

Combe [formerly Combes], William (1742–1823), writer and literary imitator, was born in London on 25 March 1742, the son of Robert Combes (d. 1756), a prosperous wholesale ironmonger, and his wife, Susanna Hill (d. 1748), daughter of a wealthy Quaker merchant with interests in the West Indies. William was baptized in St Alban's Church, Wood Street, London, on 16 April. He was named after his godfather William Alexander, his father's business partner.

A life of wandering

William matriculated at Eton College in 1752, four years after his mother's death. On his father's death in October 1756, William was withdrawn from Eton by William Alexander, now his guardian and executor of his father's will. Very little is known about Combes's life during the three years after Eton. It has been suggested that he attended Oxford University, but there is no record of this. On 22 February 1760 Combes was admitted as a bencher of the Inner Temple, but he left his chamber soon after Alexander's death on 23 September 1762, and never qualified to be called to the bar. As residuary heir to his father's estate of approximately £2500 and legatee of £2000 from his guardian's estate when he turned twenty-four years old, William had ample money and credit to conduct himself as a fashionable man about town when he came of age in March 1763. Rejecting his mercantile origins later in life, he changed the spelling of his last name to Combe and habitually signed himself ‘esquire’, affecting the status of a gentleman.

Like many other young men, Combe took advantage of the end of restrictions on travel at the close of the Seven Years' War to travel to France, where the tall, handsome young man's extravagant dress and behaviour earned him the nicknames Duke Combe and Count Combe. Among those he befriended during his approximately six-month visit was Laurence Sterne, whom he also visited in England the following year. Combe seems to have exhausted his funds before 1770, spending his time from the end of 1769 to mid-1773 in France, the west midlands, and Wales, outside the fashionable circles in Paris and London. According to some accounts, he may have spent part of that time serving in the British army. He may also have spent some time at Douai, where English Roman Catholics maintained a seminary. Combe's wandering ended in 1773, when Robert Berkeley offered him the job of editing A Description of Patagonia, by Berkeley's chaplain, Thomas Falkner, a former Jesuit missionary. The assignment introduced Combe to his career as a writer and to the business of producing and distributing books (he saw the book through the press in Charles Pugh's Hereford printing office).

Sentiment, comedy, and imitation

Early in spring 1775 the local newspapers reported Combe's re-entry into fashionable society in Bath and Bristol. During the summer Combe's comic afterpiece The Flattering Milliner, or, A Modern Half Hour was performed on the Bristol stage as part of a benefit for the actor John Henderson. His early friendship with Laurence Sterne also gave rise to an edition of Sterne's Letters to his Friends on Various Occasions (1775) and Letters Supposed to have been Written by Yorick and Eliza (1779), which were combinations of authentic and fabricated correspondence. The latter was a two-volume imitation of correspondence between the late Sterne and his recently deceased friend Eliza Draper (with whom Combe late in life claimed to have had an affair before she met Sterne). In these Sternian imitations (which included Original Letters of the Late Reverend Mr. Laurence Sterne, Never before Published, 1788) Combe established himself as a skilful literary imitator and prolific professional writer in various genres. He had embarked on a lifelong habit of conflating the factual and the fictional and misleading his contemporaries (as well as subsequent scholars and biographers). Although he always published anonymously, his authorship was an open secret because he frequently acknowledged it in private conversation, and in later works often included his own name on the list of subscribers.

Combe also quickly established himself as a man of feeling and taste by publishing at his own expense a collection of sentiments in prose, The Philosopher in Bristol (1775), in two separately published parts, and a topographical poem, Clifton, a Poem. In Imitation of Spenser (1775). After unsuccessfully republishing his works in London, Combe attempted to recover financially by agreeing to marry Maria Foster (d. 1814), the discarded mistress of Francis Seymour-Conway, Viscount Beauchamp, Combe's schoolmate at Eton, who was about to marry for the second time. Combe may have entered into a financial agreement with Beauchamp in order to protect the latter from embarrassment. Combe married Foster (who was also known as Miss Harley) on 16 May 1776; the notice in the Morning Post describes Combe as ‘a Gentleman who is universally known, from having distinguished himself in this, and other countries, in various shapes and characters’. Either Combe misunderstood his arrangement with Beauchamp or Beauchamp failed to pay, but by the end of the decade Combe was burdened with the expense of his wife's confinement in Stephen Casey's private madhouse in Plaistow, Essex, which may have cost him as much as £300 annually.

Early satires and other writing

The man of feeling turned satirist in revenge, producing nine verse satires in 1777 alone, with more during 1784, aimed primarily at Simon Luttrell, Baron Irnham, a notorious reprobate of the day, but also targeting Beauchamp, Beauchamp's father, Lord Hertford, his younger brother, Henry Seymour Conway, and their politically anti-ministerial circle of friends, including Charles James Fox. The first satire, The Diaboliad, a Poem. Dedicated to the Worst Man in his Majesty's Dominions, was a great success, earning Combe recognition as the best satirist since Charles Churchill and prompting the publication the same year of Additions to the Diaboliad and The Diaboliad, a Poem. Part the Second. A spate of imitations by others followed. Other poems actually written ‘By the author of the diaboliad’, such as A Poetical Epistle to Sir Joshua Reynolds, mocked various social sinners. The duchess of Devonshire was the target of several satires, among them The First of April, or, The Triumphs of Folly: a Poem. Dedicated to a Celebrated Duchess (1777), An Heroic Epistle to the Noble Author of the Duchess of Devonshire's Cow, a Poem (1777), and A Letter to her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire (1777). The Revd William Dodd, the recently executed forger, was a subject of the prose pamphlet A Dialogue in the Shades between an Unfortunate Divine, and a Welch Member of Parliament, Lately Deceased (1777).

Between 1778 and 1785 Combe turned from poetry to prose, beginning in January 1778 with the first of a series of nine volumes over the next seven years of the pro-ministerial R[oya]l Register, which purported to be King George III's observations on eminent people recorded in his private notebook. That same year Combe ghost-wrote John Hunter's A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Teeth. Combe and his publisher John Bew took advantage of the death of another Eton schoolmate, the notorious Thomas, ‘the Wicked’ Lord Lyttleton, in November 1779, to publish several volumes of Lyttleton's supposed letters and poems. Many contemporaneous reviewers, while noting the apparent spuriousness of these and other Combe publications, none the less praised his literary talents. Combe also published several sentimental epistolary novels: Letters of an Italian Nun and an English Gentleman. Translated from the French of J. J. Rousseau (1781), Letters between Two Lovers and their Friends. By the Author of Letters Supposed to have been Written by Yorick and Eliza (1781), and Original Love-Letters between a Lady of Quality and a Person of Inferior Station (1784). In addition, a verse satire on Benjamin Franklin, entitled The Traitor, and one on the prince of Wales called The Royal Dream, or, The P[rince] in a Panic. An Eclogue, with Annotations appeared, respectively, in 1781 and 1785.

Imprisonment and government patronage

But frequent and even well received publications were not enough to keep Combe solvent. He was arrested on 18 October 1785 and imprisoned in the king's bench prison the following May for a £100 debt owed to John Palmer since 1775, when Palmer had been the manager of the Bath theatre. Palmer, now the comptroller-general of the Post Office under the prime minister, William Pitt, apparently used the outstanding debt to convince Combe to become a ministerial writer. Although Combe was not formally discharged from prison until 25 May 1787, with Palmer's help he was able to obtain his physical freedom from gaol by August 1786. Combe may also have been aided by John Walter, publisher of the Daily Universal Register (renamed The Times in 1788) and the Logographic Press. Either Palmer or Walter, or both, presumably paid the 10 or 12 guineas that bought Combe the privilege of living outside the prison, ‘within the rules’ technically restricting a debtor to the area of Southwark adjacent to the prison, so that he might come to terms with his creditors. In practice, the geographical restriction was very inconsistently enforced. Palmer and Walter were motivated by the desire to use Combe's proven writing and editing talents on behalf of their own patron, Pitt. Combe was soon contributing essays on various political and social subjects to Walter's logographic newspaper.

Combe also worked on more substantial works for Walter's press until its closure in 1792, including its most ambitious publication, a new edition, in 1789, of the work commonly referred to as Adam Anderson's History of Commerce, first published in 1764. Combe researched and wrote the more than 700 pages of volume 4, which brought the History up to the present, and he dedicated the work, ‘by permission’, to William Pitt. For the first time, Combe included his own name on the subscription list. By the end of 1788 Combe was on the Treasury payroll, earning £200 per year from Pitt for such pro-ministerial writings during the Regency crisis and in the aftermath of the French Revolution as his Letter from a Country Gentleman to a Member of Parliament on the Present State of Public Affairs (1789), History of the Late Important Period; from the Beginning of his Majesty's Illness (1789), and Word in Season to the Traders and Manufacturers of Great Britain (1792).

Combe was not financially dependent solely on government patronage, however. In March 1790 he published The Devil upon Two Sticks in England, an artistically and commercially successful satiric narrative in four volumes, with two more published the following year. Sections of this episodic novel, in which the devil Asmodeus introduces his pupil, Don Cleofas, to a survey of the full range of English society, had first appeared in Walter's Daily Universal Register in 1787.

Combe the historian

Combe also capitalized on his success as a historian, receiving commissions to write, edit, translate, and ghost-write many other works, including his History of the Late Important Period (1789), John Meare's Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North West Coast of America (1791), Aeneas Anderson's A Narrative of the British Embassy to China, in the Years 1792, 1793, and 1794 (1795), Charles Grant's History of Mauritius (1802), and Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal ... to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and 1793 (1802). Combe's modern biographer Harlan Hamilton estimates that between his government stipend and his private commissions Combe must have been earning annually at least £500 during the early 1790s. By the end of 1794 he was living on Craven Hill, Paddington, near Kensington Gardens, and had a horse and servant.

A major source of Combe's income came from a commission he was given in 1792, soon after Walter closed down the Logographic Press. The artists, engravers, and art dealers John Boydell and his nephew Josiah, proprietors of the Shakspeare Gallery in Pall Mall, hired Combe to write the text to accompany the illustrations engraved from the drawings by Joseph Farington, the artist and diarist, for a projected multi-volume The Picturesque Views and Scenery of the Thames and the Severn, the Forth and the Clyd, from their Sources to the Sea, illustrated with hand-coloured aquatints. The work progressed more slowly than the publishers had promised, with the first two (and ultimately only) volumes of the work, now renamed An History of the Principal Rivers of Great Britain, appearing in 1794 and 1796. Although the volumes display painstaking and time-consuming research in archival sources, Farington was probably correct in thinking that paying Combe by the week slowed the work's production: Combe received £364 for the first volume, and £200 for the second. But Combe's progress must also have been slowed by other projects he undertook at the same time. He edited Humphry Repton's Letter to Uvedale Price (1794) and Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1795) and Miss A. E. Booth's two-volume translation of C. B. E. Naubert's German novel Alf von Deulmen, or, The History of the Emperor Philip, and his Daughters (1794), and wrote the anonymous Letter to a Retired Officer (1796).

The Boydell commission brought Combe into contact with the leading artists of the day, their patrons, and other celebrities he met at the gallery, as well as on his tours throughout Britain to choose scenes for Farington to sketch. For example, on his visit to Nuneham Park, home of George Simon, second Earl Harcourt, he met the famous actress Sarah Siddons. Farington records that Combe dined at various times with the artists Benjamin West and Maria and Richard Cosway, the latter one of Combe's oldest friends. Combe's portrait was drawn by George Dance in 1793 and painted by James Northcote in 1798. When George III learned from Farington that Combe was the author of the texts of An History of the Principal Rivers and the Diaboliad, he pronounced him ‘a clever man’.

Domestic and financial troubles

At the height of his prosperity Combe startled his friends by eloping in early 1795 with Charlotte Hadfield, Maria Cosway's sister and twenty years his junior, who had been living with the Cosways. Despite their claim to have been married on 28 January 1795, no record has been found of the marriage, which would have been illegal anyway because Combe's first wife was still alive. She died in 1814 in Casey's madhouse, and Combe paid for her burial. After living briefly in Knightsbridge, Combe and Charlotte leased a house and garden near Harrow for £40 a year. A comment Combe made later in life indicates that he and Charlotte adopted a daughter at some time before he was again imprisoned for debt four years after their elopement. Charlotte moved to Ireland shortly thereafter. Although they never again lived together, they maintained a correspondence, and always identified themselves as husband and wife. They also maintained their friendships with the Cosways, especially Maria. At Combe's death, however, the biography of Richard Cosway he promised Maria he would write was barely begun.

Combe's financial situation declined even more rapidly than it had improved. Perhaps even at its height he had been living beyond his means. But about 1796, according to Farington, Combe's government stipend stopped, at a time of great economic stress in England because of the war with France. The Boydells were unable to continue publishing Rivers because all their capital was committed to the paintings and engravings for their 1802 edition of Shakespeare. Combe scrambled to cover costs, doing hack work such as writing sermons and assisting James Colnett in producing his privately printed Voyage to the South Atlantic and Round Cape Horn into the Pacific Ocean (1799). He even proposed himself as a candidate for the position of professor of history in the Royal Academy in 1798, but he failed to be nominated. Debts owed to his tailor, harpsichord makers, the painter George Romney, the madhouse keeper Stephen Casey, and others, led to Combe's arrest on 4 May 1799 for just over £350.

Hack work for both John Debrett and John Wright enabled Combe to gain permission to live again ‘within the rules’ by February 1800 and rent an apartment from a Mrs Ryves at 12 Lambeth Road, London. There he quickly published translations of several lengthy works to exploit popular interest in Napoleon's recent military activities: History of the Campaigns of Count Alexander Suworow Rymnikski (1799, from the original by Friedrich Anthing), Memoir of the Operations of the Army of the Danube (1799, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan), Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt (1800, C. N. S. Sonnini de Manoncourt), Official Correspondence (1800, congress of Rastadt), and Report of the Commission of Arts ... on the Antiquities of Upper Egypt (1800, Louis-Medeleine Ripault).

During the same period Combe also published his Brief Observations on a Late Letter Addressed to the Right Hon. W. Pitt (1801), probably hoping to regain a political patron. When Pitt was succeeded as prime minister by Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, in March 1801, Combe quickly applied to Addington for employment as a ministerial propagandist, but was politely rejected with a payment of £100. Combe was re-hired, however, when Pitt resumed office in 1804 and remained on the government payroll at £200 per year until Pitt's death in January 1806, though he was never able to collect the last £100 owed him.

‘Old Combe’

Combe resumed his career as a periodical editor when Colonel Henry Francis Greville employed him to produce the weekly newspaper Pic Nic in January 1803, and later that year its successor, The Cabinet. Greville started the papers in response to the opposition of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, manager of the licensed Drury Lane Theatre, to private, unlicensed, theatrical performances staged by Greville's Pic Nic Society. Pic Nic and The Cabinet introduced the practice of unbiased drama reviewing. Besides editing, Combe also contributed pro-ministerial essays, a sonnet on Samuel Johnson, and more forged Sterne letters. By the time The Cabinet folded in 1803, Combe had already been hired by John Walter's son, John Walter II, as supervising editor and sometime contributor to rescue the failing Times, a position he held until 1808. Combe wrote many of the leading articles, including the pro-government series of letters signed ‘Valerius’, subsequently collected and published as The letters of Valerius, on the state of parties, the war, the volunteer system, and most of the political topics which have lately been under public discussion (1804). Among the colleagues of ‘Old Combe’, as he was now commonly known, was Henry Crabb Robinson, who joined the newspaper in 1807.

Combe's duties at The Times and his desire for society necessitated his frequent breaking of the ‘rules’ of the prison, leading inevitably to his arrest on 28 June 1808 for their violation. Until mid-1812 he was restricted by the ‘day rules’, which required him to return to the prison by nightfall each day. His income enabled him to afford one of the best private rooms in the prison's state house. To maintain appearances he continued to use his Lambeth Road quarters as his mailing address.

Throughout his varying degrees of incarceration, Combe retained his wide circle of friends, including a number of much younger women. One relationship led to the somewhat embarrassing posthumous publication in 1823 of Letters to Marianne. By William Combe, Esq., which contains a silhouette of Combe prefacing his sentimental and platonic correspondence between 1806 and 1809 with Marianne Brooke, a young seamstress.

Doctor Syntax and final years

In Combe's last years most of his income came from his relationship with Rudolph Ackermann, an art dealer and publisher whose Repository of Art, at 101 Strand, rivalled the Boydells' Shakspeare Gallery. In 1809 Ackermann hired Combe to write the letterpress to accompany the last volume of the very successful three-volume Microcosm of London. Thomas Rowlandson designed the figures, and Augustus Charles Pugin the architectural details. Working with Ackermann's staff of artists, Combe wrote the texts for illustrated histories, of varying degrees of reliability, entitled Westminster Abbey (1812), York (1813), Oxford (1814), Cambridge (1815), Colleges of Winchester, Eton, and Westminster (1816), and Madeira (1821). For other publishers he provided the letterpress for The Thames, or, Graphic Illustrations (1811), Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England (1826), and Pompeii (1827). In addition Combe wrote for Ackermann's Poetical Magazine (1809–11) and his Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics.

But most importantly, Ackermann published Combe's letterpress for Rowlandson's illustrations that resulted in the series of comic poetry for which Combe is still most famous, and which earned him his best-known nickname, Doctor Syntax: The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque and its two sequels (1812, 1820, 1821), The English Dance of Death (1815, 1816), The Dance of Life (1817), and The History of Johnny Quae Genus, the Little Foundling of the Late Doctor Syntax (1822). Combining light-hearted satire of William Gilpin's theory of the picturesque in art with a central character modelled on Cervantes' Don Quixote and Henry Fielding's Parson Adams, Combe created a lovable eccentric whose misadventures on the road structure the Tour. For over a century the many editions and numerous imitations of the Tour attested to the popularity of Combe's humorous hero.

No matter how much Combe earned from his various publications, however, he always spent more. He died, still in debt, at his Lambeth Road address on 19 June 1823. The obituary in The Times the next day stated that:

[h]e was a gentleman who, in the course of this protracted life, had suffered many fortunes, and had become known ... to so many people in every rank of society, that it hardly seems necessary to draw his character ... There was hardly a person of any note in his time, with whose history he was not in some degree acquainted.

The Sun, edited by his friend John Taylor, observed that:

The Life of Mr. Coombe [sic], if impartially written, would be pregnant with amusement and instruction; but those whose literary contributions might have provided interesting materials, are probably most of them with him in the grave; and he will hereafter be chiefly remembered as the Author of Doctor Syntax.

Less than two weeks before his death, at the request of Ackermann, Combe compiled a list of seventy-five titles of his works. The Gentleman's Magazine published the list in 1824 and 1852. Unfortunately, Combe, who always guarded his personal history, never wrote the autobiography he had repeatedly projected. An undischarged debtor, he was buried on 22 June 1823 at the church of St George the Martyr, Southwark, just south of the king's bench prison.

Vincent Carretta

Sources W. Hamilton, Doctor Syntax: silhouette of William Combe, esq. (1742–1823) (1969) · GM, 1st ser., 94/2 (1824), 643 · R. Cole, ‘William Coombe and his works’, GM, 2nd ser., 37 (1852), 467–72 · Farington, Diary · Walpole, Corr. · Diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. T. Sadler, 3 vols. (1869) · The Times (20 June 1823)

Archives BL, Add. MSS 29300; 44740, fol. 313; 30262, fols. 82, 84; 71584; 71585 · BL, notebooks compiled while in debtors' prison, deposit 9426 · Bodl. Oxf., MS Curzon b.5, fol. 182 · Bodl. Oxf., MS Montagu d.3, fols. 101–3 · CUL, Add. MS 8274 · Harvard U. · Hunt. L., MSS HM 3166, 7260, 59542–59543, Ms. JE 243 · Morgan L. · Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, Stranger autographs, vol. 3 :: Hunt. L., Ms. JE 245 · NYPL, Berg collection · TNA: PRO, 30/8/229, fol. 152 · TNA: PRO, Discharges, Pris. 7/7 · TNA: PRO, K.B. 122/518, no. 1291 · TNA: PRO, K.B. 122/790, no. 1057 · TNA: PRO, K.B. Commitment Book, no. 10 · TNA: PRO, King's Bench Commitment Book, no. 16, s.v. Combe · TNA: PRO, Plea Roll, K.B. 122/177, no. 1753 · TNA: PRO, Plea Roll, K.B. 122/723, no. 1064 · TNA: PRO, Pris. 5/1 · TNA: PRO, Pris. 10/201 · U. Newcastle, White papers, miscellaneous album

Likenesses G. Dance, pencil drawing, 1793, NPG [see illus.] · silhouette, c.1800, BM · portrait, Bodl. Oxf., MS Montagu d.3, fols. 101–3

Vincent Carretta, ‘Combe , William (1742–1823)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/6022, accessed 6 Nov 2015]