Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet

Infobox Person
name = Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet


image_size = 150px
caption = by John Raphael Smith after Sir Joshua Reynolds
birth_name =
birth_date = 3 June 1744George Edward Cokayne, editor, [http://www.thepeerage.com/p3582.htm#i35816 The Complete Baronetage] , 5 volumes (no date (c. 1900); reprint, Gloucester, U.K.: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1983), volume III, page 83.]
birth_place = Ashbourne, Derbyshire [baptised here] , England
death_date = 23 January 1824
death_place = Boulogne, Paris, France
death_cause =
resting_place = Ashbourne, Derbyshire, England
resting_place_coordinates =
residence = Ashbourne Hall [ [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6OIIAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA370&lpg=RA1-PA370&dq=sir+brooke+boothby&source=web&ots=5MMqQ_x-9S&sig=srq1HIIOgQOV10_6EGs0m3FlatM&hl=en Gentlemans Magazine] , 1824]
nationality =English
other_names =
known_for =
education = Christ Church, Oxford
employer =
occupation = landowner and poet
title = 6th Boothby Baronet of Broadlow Ash
term =
predecessor = Sir Brooke Boothby, 5th Baronet (1710-1789)
successor = His brother, Sir William Boothby, 7th Baronet (1746-1824)
party =
boards =
religion =
spouse = Susanna Bristoe
children = Penelope
parents = Sir Brooke Boothby, 5th Bt. and Phoebe Hollins
relatives =


website =
footnotes =

Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet was an English linguist, translator, minor poet and landowner in Derbyshire. He was part of the intellectual and literary circle of Lichfield which included Anna Seward and Erasmus Darwin. He welcomed Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Ashbourne circles in 1766 when the philosopher fled London after a short stay there where hospitality was provided by Hume. Boothby visited Rousseau in Paris in 1776 and was given the manuscript of the first part of Rousseau's three part Confessions which was his autobiography. Boothby translated the manuscript and published in Lichfield in 1780 after the author's death and donated the document to the British Library in 1781. Boothby's unusual portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby from 1781, one of the favourites of English 18th. century painting, shows him reclining in a wooded glade with a book carrying on its cover simply the name Rousseau, indicating his interest in the writer and his work generally rather than it referring to one of Rousseau's works in particular. The portrait is a metaphor for Boothby's admiration of Rousseau and his efforts to promote him with the English intelligentsia. [ [http://arts.guardian.co.uk/portrait/story/0,,744542,00.html Sir Brooke Boothby, Joseph Wright of Derby (1781)] , Jonathan Jones, 28 April 2001, The Guardian, accessed 25 May 2008] His daughter was painted by Henry Fuseli [ [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t-urxqszi2sC&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=penelope+boothby+fuseli&source=web&ots=8KEGk15lbe&sig=DGQqDnGWpzI0rLI8pBltIT8UKOo&hl=en Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland, 1750-1930] , p 195, By Fintan Cullen, Published 1997, Cork University Press, accessed 30 May 2008] and Joshua Reynolds [ [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19009 Sir Joshua Reynolds by Estelle M. Hurll] ] and sculpted by Thomas Banks [ [http://www.derbyshireuk.net/ashbourne_church.html Ashbourne Church at Deryshireuk.net] ] , as well as being the subject of a book of poetry by her grieving father.

Biography

Boothby was born in 1744. He inherited his unusual forname from Hill Brooke, the second wife of the fourth Boothby Baronet of Broadlow Ash, William Boothby. Brooke Boothby is sometimes referred to as the seventh baronet as there was some confusion over the appointment of the first baronet. ['General history: Baronets', Magna Britannia: volume 5: Derbyshire (1817), pp. LXIII-LXXV. [http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=50705. url:] Date accessed: 29 May 2008.]

Boothby was active in local intellectual life as an associate of the scientific group, the Lunar Society which was interested in the application of the sciences to modern life and its development, and the Lichfield Botanical Society. He, members of the Lunar Society and the intellectual circle of Lichfield, met the free-thinking Jean-Jacques Rousseau who fled from France in 1766-7 and was staying at Wootton, near Boothby's home, Ashbourne Hall.

Boothby later visited Rousseau in Paris and promised him that he would publish his Confessions, an autobiographical work to which Boothby gave the title "Dialogues ou Rousseau, Juge de Jean-Jacques". The book was published in Lichfield by Boothby in the French language. This achievement is immortalised in Joseph Wright of Derby's painting. The portrait shows Boothby reclining by a stream in a wooded glade once known as the Twenty Oaks where he and Rousseau met for discussion and where Rousseau went to write in peace and solitude. He is holding a leather bound book with the name Rousseau on the spine rather than a specific title, thus referencing Boothby's interest in the philosopher's entire oeuvre. The landscape setting can be interpretted as referring to the Rousseauian idea that all of man's troubles and unhappiness derive from his self-removal from the natural world. The plants in the setting refer to Boothby's interest in botany and the botanical aspect of the painting was made the subject of a study by Andrew Graciano of the university of South Carolina. [Andrew Graciano, “Shedding New Botanical Light on Joseph Wright’s Portrait of Brooke Boothby: Rousseauian Pleasure versus Medicinal Utility” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (3:2004), 365-380.] Both Boothby and Rousseau were interested in botany and Rousseau studied local flora when he lived at Wootton Hall.

Boothby married Susanna Bristoe, daughter of Robert Bristoe and Susanna Philipson, in 1784 and in that year he leased Asbourne Hall from his father whose extravagance had forced him to live elsewhere whilst renting out the family seat. [http://back.csulb.edu:8080/asecs/FMPro?-db=reviews.fp3&-format=as.review.show.html&-lay=web&-sortfield=rv_date_completed&-sortorder=descend&-recid=32861&-findall= Eighteenth Century Book Reviews: Jacques Zonneveld. Sir Brooke Boothby: Rousseau's Roving Baronet Friend. Review by JoLynn Edwards] accessed 29 May 2008] He began the restoration of Ashbourne Hall using his wife's dowry to renovate the structure, remodel the parkland, purchase rare plants and obtain works of art. Boothby, like his father before him, was extravagant in the extreme. That weakness and his emotion self-indulgence were to be his nemesis. In the following April, his only daughter, Penelope, was born. Sir Joshua Reynold's portrait of Penelope, often called "the Mob Cap" is one of the most famous of English child portraits. Reynolds had painted portraits of boothby and his younger half sister Anne. His full sister, maria, was portrayed by Wright a decade before he painted the famous portrait of Brooke Boothby himself. On 19 March 1791, disaster struck when Boothby's young daughter, Penelope, died aged five. This sad event permanently affected Boothby and he published a book of poetry, Sorrows Sacred to the Memory of Penelope subsequent to the event. Penelope had a remarkable tomb constructed for her which included a life size statue of her sleeping. The tomb is in St Oswald's church in Ashbourne along with many other Boothby memorials and graves.

Boothby's life went into decline after his daughter's death. He commissioned the sculpture illustrated and the painting by Henry Fuseli. His wife Susanna returned after Penelope's funeral to her parent's home in Hampshire and settled in Dover. Her death was recorded under her own family name, Bristoe.

Boothby was involved with the substantial purchase of sixteenth century stained glass for Lichfield Cathedral in 1801, which he purchased from the Abbey of Herkenrode which had been dissolved in the Napoleonic wars. He sold the glass to the cathedral on a non-profit basis. [ [http://lichfield-cathedral.org/herckenrode-glass.html Lichfield Cathedral] retrieved 29 May 2008]

As a result of his extravagance Boothby met with economic disaster which completely altered the course of his life. Ashbourne Hall was leased in 1814 (parish records show that in 1817 Sir Richard Arkwright's grandson, also Richard, was living there) and he settled in diminished circumstances in Boulogne in 1815 and died there in 1824. He was buried in St. Oswald's with his parents and his sister Maria Elizabeth and other Boothby family members.

"Sonnet XII" by Boothby

Well has thy classick chisel, Banks, express'dThe graceful lineaments of that fine form,Which late with conscious, living beauty warm,Now here beneath does in dread silence rest.And, oh, while life shall agitate my breast,Recorded there exists her every charm,In vivid colours, safe from change or harm,Till my last sigh unalter'd love attest.That form, as fair as ever fancy drew,The marble cold, inanimate, retains;But of the radiant smile that round her threwJoys, that beguiled my soul of mortal pains,And each divine expression's varying hue,A little senseless dust alone remains [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sonnet_XII_%28Boothby%29 Sorrows. Sacred to the Memory of Penelope (1796)] ]

Major works

*"Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke", 1790
*" [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZGkBAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22brooke+boothby%22&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0 Observations on the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs] ", 1792,
*"Sorrows. Sacred to the Memory of Penelope", 1796
*"Venality", 1793 and 1802
* translation of Jean Racine’s "Britannicus", 1803
*"Fables and Satires", 1809, Edinburgh
* translation of Molière’s "Le Misanthrope", 1819)
*"The Fudger Fudged", 1819).

ee also

*Boothby Baronets
* [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.jpgHenry Fuseli's "The Nightmare" which was bought by Boothby]
* Andrew Graciano, “‘The Book of Nature is Open to All Men’: Geology, Mining and History in Joseph Wright’s Derbyshire Landscapes” "The Huntington Library Quarterly" (68: 4, 2005), 583-600.
*Andrew Graciano, ed., "Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries", Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

References

External links

*Jacques Zonneveld. "Sir Brooke Boothby: Rousseau's Roving Baronet Friend". De Nieuwe Haagsche: Uitgeverij, 2003. Pp. 542.
* [http://www.sonnets.org/boothb.htm Boothby at Sonnets.org] accessed 25 May 2008