Author: VOLTAIRE
Biography:
VOLTAIRE (1694-1778: NBG)
François-Marie Arouet, who used the pen-name Voltaire (based on the letters of his surname), was born in Paris on 21 Nov. 1694, the son of a public official who ineffectually opposed his son’s precocious poetic talent. He was educated by the Jesuits but moved in free-thinking circles and as a young man was twice imprisoned in the Bastille. He spent 1726-9 in exile in England. During his incarceration in 1717-18 he wrote Oedipe, the first of many successful plays, the last of which, Irène, brought him back to Paris in triumph in 1778 shortly before his death on May 30. His anti-clerical career led the Catholic Church to deny him burial at the time, but in 1791 his remains were interred in the Pantheon. Besides plays Voltaire wrote poetry, histories (he was appointed historiographer to the court in 1744), philosophical treatises and tales such as Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759), and articles for Diderot’s Encyclopédie. After spending some years in Prussia and in Switzerland, in 1760 he settled at a large property at Ferney, on the French side of the border with Switzerland, where he had a staff of 60 and stabling for twelve horses. He did not marry but had various liaisons, notably with Madame du Châtelet at Cirey (1734-44). Of the English translators represented here, Logan Loveit, William Henry Ireland, and Charles L. S. Jones have headnotes of their own. George Edward Ayscough (c. 1746-79), son of the Dean of Bristol and nephew of George Lyttelton (q.v.), was a Guards officer who—probably to relieve financial difficulties--published in short order a collection of his late uncle’s Works (1774), his own travels (1776), and a translation of Voltaire’s Semiramis(1778). The London barrister Daniel French (1781-1848), a Roman Catholic and a polemicist whose attacks on William Cobbett (q.v.) cost him a beating from Cobbett’s sons. The authorship of the anonymous English translation of La Pucelle issued piecemeal between 1785 and 1797 and of The Henriade in 1797 is slightly controversial but some evidence supports the traditional attribution to Catharine or Catherine Maria (Dawson) Tisdall (1762-1851 [not 1815 as DIB]), who was educated in France and who, following her marriage to Charles William Bury in 1798, became the Countess of Charlemont in 1806. (NBG 46 Cols. 363-448; OCFL; DIB 4 Apr. 2025; ODNB [Ayscough] 5 Apr. 2025; ancestry.com 5 Apr. 2025; findmypast.com 5 Apr. 2025) HJ