James Howell - Career

Career

After graduation, he had a variety of employments, as an administrator for a glass manufacturer, and in the often combined roles of secretary and instructor to several noble families. As factory agent and negotiator he traveled widely in Europe and learned to speak several languages, apparently with great facility. He also met and befriended numerous literary figures, among them Ben Jonson and Kenelm Digby. Paramount amongst his priorities was however royal, or at least aristocratic patronage.

On the eve of the English Civil War, he finally gained a secretaryship of the Privy Council, which according to one eminent critic, was "very close to the type of appointment that he had sought for 20 years". The conflict meant that he never took up the position, and at about the same time, he wrote his first book, or "maiden Fancy", Dodona's Grove, which represented the history of England and Europe through the allegorical framework of a typology of trees. It is worth noting that he started to publish at this time of ferment although he was already well established as a writer of what we would know today as 'newsletters' but were then known as 'tracts' or 'pamphlets'.

He was the first writer to earn his living solely from writing in the English language. He was also the first writer of an epistolary novel, a novel of letters, in English ("Familiar Letters"). His "Lexicon Tetragloton" was not a dictionary in four languages, as its name would suggest, but in six; a dictionary of Latin vernacular (Romance language) proverbs. It is a highly respected work in the Portuguese and Spanish languages as well, quite apart from his native Welsh. He was a prolific writer. His "New English Grammar" is also considered, by modern historians of formal English as a work of foreign language teaching and as the first work of its kind in the English language.

He had a family tree parallel to the Herbert family of Swansea, Earl of Pembroke descendant of Nest and Hywel Dda of Wales. Gerald Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales son of Nest, was historiographer royal five hundred years before, on a journey of conquest to Ireland, the story of which, one of the finest works of literature in the Welsh language. James Howell may also have been closely linked by family, to Thomas Howell, a 16th century love poet, probably his grandfather, who was in the service of the first Earl above, in a clerical capacity. Whilst he corresponded with a certain Earl of Pembroke in his own Epistolae Ho-Elianae and was great friends with Ben Jonson, his literary 'father', he does not himself make mention of this family tie. His line of descent was from Dafydd Gam.

Thomas Howell (born about 1538), who is thought to have hailed from Dunster, Somerset, with roots in Caerfyrddyn, may have been one of the gentry encouraged to learn Latin at the time. Howell's Proverbs (1659), contains probably his most famous quote; All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.