James Wilmot - Serres Biography

Serres Biography

Wilmot's biography was written in 1813 by his niece Olivia Serres, who had lived with her bachelor uncle as a child. Serres claimed that Wilmot himself was a pseudonymous author, having written the Letters of Junius, well-known Whig political tracts which defended democratic rights and freedom of speech, whose authorship had been much debated. Serres also asserted that Samuel Johnson admired Wilmot to such a degree that he "submitted his writings to the perusal of Dr Wilmot before their going to the press", and that he was close to the poet laureate Thomas Warton, with whom he exchanged poems. Serres also said that Wilmot knew the novelist Laurence Sterne and influenced leading liberal political figures including John Wilkes and Edmund Burke.

According to Serres, Wilmot fell out with Burke over his treatment of Wilkes, and when Burke demanded that Wilmot burn all their correspondence, Wilmot scrupulously complied. Indeed Wilmot was so concerned to preserve confidences and his own anonymity that he burned all his papers just before his death, leaving no evidence of his literary and scholarly achievements. Despite this, Serres claimed to have later discovered papers written in "cyphers", which she destroyed, except for one book that contained memoranda proving "beyond contradiction" that Wilmot was Junius.

Serres did not mention any interest that Wilmot may have had in Shakespeare. Rather she asserted that Wilmot's favourite poet was John Milton and that he also admired Alexander Pope and John Dryden. Serres did state that Wilmot was a great admirer of Bacon, writing that "Lord Bacon's works were placed by our author in his niece's hands at a very early age and he desired her to read his essays very frequently. The editor has often imagined from many circumstances that her venerated uncle greatly resembled Lord Bacon in person and mind".