Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son: A Critical Edition

FAIN: FT-53328-05

Christopher L. Mayo
Macalester College (St. Paul, MN 55105-1899)

An NEH Summer Stipend will allow me to complete research at four British archives that house hundreds of previously unknown, unpublished letters by and about Lord Chesterfield. Such research will enable me to produce the first scholarly critical edition of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, one of the most popular books of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and perhaps the defining text on eighteenth-century manners. The edition, which is currently 70 percent complete, has received three positive readers' reports and four positive informal advices; it has just been forwarded to the Cambridge University Press Syndicate with the recommendation that it be awarded a contract.