Life and Works
Burgh was born and raised in Madderty, Scotland. His father was a minister of the parish Church of Scotland. Burgh was raised a Presbyterian, which strongly contributed to his fight for moral issues. He attended St. Andrews University with the intention of studying for the ministry. An illness prevented him from completing his degree and he entered the linen trade. Failure at that sent him to England in the early 1740s. For a short time he was a printer's helper and then in 1746 he became an assistant master in an academy just north of London. The next year, he became master of his own academy in Stoke Newington. In 1750, he moved his school to nearby Newington Green, and ran it there for 19 years.
In 1754, Burgh's The Dignity of Human Nature was published. This is Burgh's first major publication, and one that bears a striking resemblance to Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. In 1761, Burgh wrote The Art of Speaking, an educational book focusing on oratory. In 1766, he wrote the first volume of Crito, a collection of essays on religious toleration, contemporary politics, and educational theories. The second volume followed a year later. This is his first work that included a strong emphasis on politics.
Burgh became involved in the early 1760s with a group called the Honest Whigs, a club that met on alternate Thursday evenings in a coffeehouse in London. Other members of the group involved Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, James Boswell and others. In 1774, Burgh wrote his most popular work, Political Disquisitions. The three-volume work was intended by Burgh to be longer, but his deteriorating health caused him to stop after the third volume. Burgh died a year later in 1775.
Read more about this topic: James Burgh
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or works:
“If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.”
—Hannah More (1745–1833)