Chesterfield, PHILIP DORMER STANHOPE, EARL OF, was the eldest son of the third Earl of Chesterfield, and was born in London, September 22, 1694. He studied at Cambridge, made the grand tour, and sat in the House of Commons as member for St Germain in Cornwall from 1716 to 1726, when he became Earl of Chesterfield. In 1730 he was made Lord Steward of the Household. Until then Chesterfield, who was a Whig, had supported Walpole; but being ousted from his office because he had objected to an excise bill introduced by that minister, he went over to the opposition, and proved himself one of Walpole's bitterest antagonists. He joined the ministry formed by the Pelhams in 1744, and was in 1746 one of the principal secretaries of state. In 1748 he was compelled by ill-health and deafness to retire from public life. He was at one time on terms of intimacy with Swift, Pope, and Bolingbroke. Later in life, by obtruding on Samuel Johnson the patronage which he had withheld till the publication of the Dictionary, he drew from the lexicographer the indignant letter which will keep his name in remembrance while English literature is read. Besides writing the well-known Letters to his Son, Chesterfield contributed several papers on subjects of the hour to The Craftsman and The World. He died on March 24, 1773. The object of the Letters was to form his natural son, Philip, into an accomplished man of the world. They contain a good deal of shrewd and solid observation, but their teaching is not of an elevating nature. To shine in the world, to conform to the minute code of etiquette which then ruled society, are the ends on which the writer sets most store. The expression is occasionally coarse, but the worst feature of the book is the manner in which Chesterfield handles the topic of gallantry.
His letters were edited by Lord Mahon (1845-53), Lord Carnarvon (1890), and J. Bradshaw (1892). See his Wisdom by W. E. Browning and the Memoirs of him by W. Ernst (1893), the Essay by Sainte-Beuve (trans. 1870), and Churton Collins's Essays and Studies (1895).