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This chapter discusses Aaron Hill's early life from 1685-1711. He has mastered the art of self-invention at an early age, publishing a lavish oriental travelogue at age 24 with a subscription list of 424 names vaunting his contacts with the rich and powerful. In 1708, Hill networked to establish a literary career for himself in London and collaborated with Nahum Tate on the Celebrated Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, promoted as rhetorical guidebook for youth, and launched the British Apollo, a question-and-answer journal modelled on John Dunton's Athenian Mercury. At age 26, as director of opera at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymaker, Hill co-wrote and staged Rinaldo, Handel's first original opera for the English stage. In the published libretto, Hill presented himself as a well-travelled musical connoisseur familiar with European operatic vogues, intent on making ‘the English OPERA more splendid than her MOTHER, the Italian’.

This chapter discusses Aaron Hill's years as an Essex man from 1738 to 1750. By the end of 1738, he had found a cheaper, rural property which he considered suitable for himself and his two younger daughters, Astrea and Minerva. Plaistow, now an unleafy London suburb, was in Hill's time a rural village, a day's coach journey to Westminster along rough and muddy roads. Hill presumably chose Plaistow through his in-laws associations with the region. He and his daughters initially relished the peace and quiet of Hyde House, but later were faced with the negative impact of the place on their health, as they were struck down with ague. The social isolation the Hills had to cope with may have been almost worse than the illness. All of Hill's relationships during the Plaistow years were overshadowed by his friendship with Richardson.

This chapter discusses Aaron Hill's interests on Voltaire and Prince Frederick from 1733 to 1738. Given the staunchly patriotic, anti-Gallic spirit of Hill's cultural pronouncements in the Prompter, there is a certain irony that he enjoyed his greatest dramatic successes as an English adapter of French plays. Zara, Alzira, and Merope, all translations of tragedies by Voltaire, secured Hill's reputation as a dramatist more effectively than any of his original plays. Hill, with his obsession with theatre reformation, found it significant that Zaire, a serious tragedy dedicated to moral issues, had taken Paris by storm and was attracting large audiences. He questioned why it is that London audiences cannot share the same love of tragedy instead of low farce. Hill looked to Frederick, Prince of Wales, to reverse the Hanoverian disdain for poetry and high drama which had characterised his father's and grandfather's reigns.

This chapter discusses Aaron Hill and his role in the London Stage from 1731 to 1736. By early 1732, Hill was so absorbed by the latest events in the London theatre world that he may scarcely have noticed the dwindling stream of letters from Twickenham. Hill encouraged Thomson and Mallet to turn their talents to playwriting. When he managed to get his Athelworld accepted for performance at the Drury Lane for December 10, 1731, it was to be his triumphal return to the London stage after an eight-year absence. Hill watched the affairs at Drury Lane with interest, as the management became unstable. He offered the Drury Lane management advise on pantomimes and new plays, and sent them a new entertainment of his own, The Maggot, a farce satirising Harlequin masques.

This chapter discusses the later years of Aaron Hill from 1743 to 1750. Hill's retirement to Plaistow revived his interest in public affairs. He became filled with a deep sense of unease at the domestic and international crises that faced Britain during the 1740s. In 1747, dismayed by the fate of the allied troops in Flanders, Hill tried to use Lord Chesterfield, the Secretary of State, as a conduit for his idea on subjects ‘sometimes commercial, sometimes military’ — including treatment of dysentery among the troops. For Hill, writing became a substitute for action. Nearly all of his original works in this decade engaged to varying degrees with national and international politics. Hill's depression on his personal affairs spilled over into gloomy pronouncements on Britain. These works tackle the dangers of faction and self-interest in government and nation, and the demise of patriotism.

This chapter discusses the breaking of the Hillarian Circle from 1723 to 1725. The relationship between Aaron Hill and Martha Fowke, with the literary name ‘Clio’, developed in 1721. Their relationship was initiated by, and conducted through, acts of letter writing. It was a real-life epistolary intimacy inspired by a semi-fictional epistolary intimacy. Hill fell in love with ‘Clio’ as a literary voice before seeing her in the flesh. Hill and Fowke maintained a passionate epistolary correspondence throughout 1721 and 1722. By the time Clio was written in October 1723, the relationship was at an end. Eliza Haywood, a hardworking professional author, dismissed Fowke as a literary dilletante who had to bribe booksellers to publish her work. Members of Hill's circle were united in their condemnation of Haywood.

One side of Aaron Hill's character — the entrepreneur, man of action, and practical improver — was left unsatisfied by the cloying intensity of the Hillarian Circle with its hidden intimacies and literary rivalries. Hill's financial fortunes became bound up with the Yorks Building Company, which was originally founded as a waterworks in 1675 on the London site now occupied by Charing Cross Station. Hill's Scottish activities in 1727-1728 absented him from London literary life at the very point that Pope chose to immortalise him as a Dunce. Though critical of the poem's ‘lowness,’ Hill shared The Dunciad's underlying vision of a nation in cultural decline. Like Pope, he too came to identify the Walpole oligarchy with the forces of dullness. Hill's intensely personal castigation of Pope's moral failings throws into focus the almost sado-masochistic nature of the relationship between the two writers.

The chapter discusses the author's interest on Aaron Hill, which began when he was a graduate student in mid-1980s, working on the relationship between patriotism and poetry in the Walpole era. Hill seemed to be an ambivalent figure, linked to Pope in his prognostications of cultural doom and national decline, yet wedded to an entirely different poetic derived from a critically marginalized tradition of enthusiasm and sublimity: a poetic associated before the middle of the 18th century with writers such as John Dennis, Isaac Watts, and James Thomson. Critical scholarship of the 1980s and beyond has challenged and reconfigured the so-called ‘Augustan’ literary canon, shedding light on neglected authors and scrutinising the processes of canon-formation which shape our perception of 18th-century writing. Brean Hammond's Professional Imaginative Writing questioned Pope's own adjudication of literary values, particularly his suspicious dismissal of professional writers such as Colley Cibber, Eliza Haywood, and Aaron Hill.

This chapter concludes the book by asking what happened to the Whig poetic tradition in the later 18th century. It offers some preliminary suggestions of some of the aspects of later literary and political culture that contributed to its decline in popularity. But it also draws attention to the ways in which its influence can be seen in later verse, and in particular, in the poetic celebration of the Hanoverian monarchs, and in the developing tradition of sublime religious verse, exemplified by the works of Aaron Hill and James Thomson. It draws attention to the legacy of the Whig sublime for later Romantic poets, and the way in which this link troubles accepted notions of a shift from neoclassical to Romantic poetics in the 18th century.