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John Stoddart

Salisbury 1773-02-06 – 1856-02-16 London English, French, German Main: London Other: Malta , Oxford editor journalist jurist linguist translator writer John Stoddart, 1773-1856 (viaf) Stoddart, John (cerl) John Stoddart (wikidata)

Contributions

  1. The Five Men, or a Review of the Proceedings and Principles of the Executive Directory of France, together with the Lives of the present Members: Translated from the French of Joseph Despaze. By John Stoddart translation has paratext translator
  2. The Five Men, or a Review of the Proceedings and Principles of the Executive Directory of France, together with the Lives of the present Members: Translated from the French of Joseph Despaze. By John Stoddart paratext author

Knows

Notes

Stoddart is described as "One of Godwin’s most eager disciples" (letter from Marshall to Hazlitt, 21 July 1821), quoted in W Clark Durant’s edition of Godwin, 'Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft'. On 14 January 1796, Godwin wrote to Stodart (Stoddart), having just met him, telling him that there had been a "meeting of minds" between them, and hoping that they would meet again soon. There was frequent contact between 1796 and 1798, with a complete break from 1803–07 when Stoddart was out of the country in his role as the King's and Admiralty advocate in Malta.

Stoddart was the editor of the Times from 1814–1816.

From Stoddart's ONDB entry (GC. Boase, rev. Nilanjana Banerji):

"In the following year [1796], having come under the influence of William Godwin's writings, he took a radical turn… embraced republicanism and revolutionary France, looked forward to a Napoleonic military victory, and adopted the cropped hairstyle of the sans-culottes. He read for the bar at Gray's Inn, and lodged with Basil Montagu, at whose chambers he became an associate of radicals and literary figures including William Hazlitt and Wordsworth. He took to writing as a source of income, translating from the French of Joseph Despaze, 'The five men' (1797), and from the German… two of Schiller's plays, Fiesco (1796) and Don Carlos (1798).

By the end of the century Stoddart's republican enthusiasm had waned, and he mixed with nobility on his tour of Scotland, which was the basis for his 'Remarks on the Local Scenery and Manners of Scotland' (1801). In the autumn of 1800, on his return from Scotland, he stayed in the Lake District with Coleridge and Wordsworth, who drew upon passages from Stoddart's book in 'The Prelude'. Stoddart reviewed 'Lyrical Ballads' in the British Critic in 1801… In 1803 he was appointed the king's and the Admiralty advocate in Malta, where he remained until 1807…

Following their return to Britain, Stoddart's sister married William Hazlitt in May 1808. Concerned about Hazlitt's uncertain finances, Stoddart did not favour the union, and drew up the marriage settlement in terms that limited the annual amount his brother-in-law could draw upon from Sarah's own property. His relationship with Hazlitt, already uneasy, worsened after he became a leader writer on The Times in October 1812, having made occasional contributions since 1810, including a series of letters on American affairs published in December 1811. Following the death of the proprietor, John Walter the first, his influence on the paper grew and the tone of his articles became increasingly violent. In January 1814 he wrote an angry denunciation of Hazlitt's articles in the Morning Chronicle sympathetic to Napoleon, whom Stoddart denounced as a tyrant. Hazlitt retaliated with a personal attack on his brother-in-law, whom he regarded as a renegade from republicanism. The exchanges became sharper as Stoddart rejected the possibility of peace with Napoleon, and embraced the cause of French ultra-royalists.

Crabb Robinson complained of 'the Doctor's outrageous Bourbon zeal' (History of The Times, 159), and Stoddart's extreme French policy alarmed the paper's proprietor, John Walter the second, who brought in Thomas Barnes to tone down Stoddart's articles, but Stoddart resisted curbs on his independence. Hazlitt launched a further sustained attack on Stoddart's writings in The Times in December 1816, and at the end of that month Stoddart was dismissed. He launched a periodical, The Correspondent, to counter subversion on both sides of the English channel, with Chateaubriand as a contributor, which lasted for three issues in 1817."