Author: ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques
Biography:
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques (1712-78: OCFL)
Enormously influential as a thinker, essayist, and novelist, Rousseau was not a poet. But his name was well known in Britain and he had recently spent a year (1776-7) in England with the support of the philosopher David Hume. His short prose monologue Pigmalion (1772), staged in a private theatre at Bolney in Sussex, inspired an anonymous member of the audience to turn it into English verse with the French printed at the bottom of the page, and to dedicate it enthusiastically to “Miss Hodges,” who played the part of Galatea. (She was presumably the actress so named in the press, but properly Mrs. Hedges [fl 1780, d 1811] as identified by Highfill.) Rousseau was born in 1712 in Geneva, Switzerland, and raised as a Protestant; he eventually settled on a form of Deism. His mother died in childbirth; his father, a watchmaker, left for France when Rousseau was ten. He was apprenticed to an engraver but left his master at the age of 15 and spent most of the rest of his life moving from place to place and from protector to protector, working as a servant, a tutor, a clerk, a music copyist, or a secretary. From a liaison beginning about 1744 in Paris with a servant, Thérèse Levasseur, he had five children whom they sent to a foundling hospital. A prize-winning discourse for the Academy of Dijon (1750) led to other major works, notably on the subjects of social inequality (1755) and the social contract (1762). He provided articles for the Encyclopédie and wrote a history of music. His novels Julie (1761) and Emile (1762), immediately translated into most European languages, made him a hero of sensibility. He was however controversial, notably for his advocacy of “natural” education and natural religion. He fled to Switzerland from the French authorities and to England from the Swiss. In 1778 he accepted from the marquis of Girardin a small house at Ermenonville near Senlis, where he died in the same year. His Confessions and Rêveries du promeneur solitaire were published posthumously in the 1780s. (OCFL; dedication and “advertisement,” Pygmalion [1779]; Highfill) HJ
Other Names:
- J. J. Rousseau