The Correspondence of John Locke

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Cultures of Knowledge, with Oxford Scholarly Editions Online and Oxford University Press


John Locke, by Godfrey Kneller. 1697. (The Hermitage, St. Petersburg; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

John Locke (1632–1704)

Having been born into minor gentry in Somerset, the young John Locke had the good fortune that his father’s commanding officer during the first civil war, Alexander Popham, recommended him to Westminster School. Under the auspices of that school’s erudite headmaster Richard Busby he found himself there among other future luminaries of his age, including Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, and John Dryden. In 1652, already recognized as a young man of prodigious talent, Locke was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford. Despite his dislike of scholastic elements of the curriculum, he was successfully appointed to a series of teaching posts during the following years, eventually being made tutor of the college in 1661. The previous year, Locke had become acquainted with the natural philosopher Robert Boyle and developed an interest in medicine he would retain for much of his life.

During the summer of 1666, Locke met and subsequently befriended Anthony Ashley Cooper, the future first earl of Shaftesbury, who became his patron. By the following spring Locke was living in Ashley’s London residence and was soon able to pursue his scientific interests further through acquaintance with the physician Thomas Sydenham. In 1668, he was elected to the Royal Society, having been proposed by Sir Paul Neile, although he remained largely inactive in that institution. Through meetings with political friends of Ashley, Locke became increasingly preoccupied with questions of politics and justice and began writing An Essay on Toleration, in which he argued for the toleration of all purely speculative opinions. His appointment to the Council for Trade and Plantations saw him involved in colonial administration and he helped draft laws of the recently founded colony of Carolina. Between 1673 and 1674 he served as secretary of the Council.

In 1675, Locke returned to Oxford, where he took the degree of bachelor of medicine, but by the end of the year he had moved to France and would stay there until April 1679. During this period abroad, he began to engage seriously with the philosophical thought of Descartes and his followers, as well as with the atomism of Gassendi, and he began writing drafts of what would become the Essay concerning human understanding. Of the friendships he developed in France among the most notable is that with the Huguenot librarian and savant Henri Justel.

England was in the grip of the Popish Plot when Locke again set foot on its shores, and in the charged political atmosphere that followed, he found himself increasingly in danger. Ashley, an outspoken supporter of the Exclusion Bill, was implicated in the Rye House Plot, and fled to the Netherlands in 1682, soon to be followed by his protégé. Among the friends Locke made there was Philippus van Limborch, theologian at the remonstrant seminary in Amsterdam, and his colleague Jean le Clerc, editor of the Bibliothèque universelle et historique, in which Locke’s first publications appeared. In exile, Locke continued to devote himself to political themes such as the limits of sovereign power and the principles of civil society, from which deliberations his Two Treatises of Government would later emerge. Meanwhile, suspicions of Locke being the author of libellous pamphlets and support for the Duke of Monmouth’s expedition necessitated his going into hiding, from late 1684 to the early summer of 1686, mainly in Amsterdam, but also for a time across the border in Cleves. During this time, he resumed work on the Essay and the work reached its definitive state by the end of that year.

Locke’s Letter concerning toleration, in which he advocated the complete separation of church and state, was published anonymously in Latin in Gouda in 1689 and later the same year in English translation in London. His book Two Treatises of Government was published anonymously in London in 1690, as was his Essay concerning human understanding, although Locke did sign the epistle dedicated to Thomas Herbert, eighth earl of Pembroke and President of the Royal Society.

From the summer of 1690 until the end of his life, Locke lived as paying guest at Oates, a small manor house near High Laver in Essex belonging to Sir Francis Masham. Masham’s wife, Damaris, was daughter of Ralph Cudworth, and had been a close friend of Locke’s since before his Dutch exile. She was a formidable philosopher in her own right and through her correspondence with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz served as an intermediary between the two men. Locke continued to work on questions of economics and his country life was only interrupted by short visits to London necessitated by government work, in particular his lucrative membership of the Board of Trade, building on his earlier work for the Council.

In his later years, Locke became embroiled in a debate with the theologian and bishop of Worcester, Benjamin Stillingfleet, who saw the theory of substance set out in the Essay as entailing rational theology, and consequently sought to shore up the orthodox Anglican position on the Trinity. Along with his friend James Tyrell, Locke had taken an interest in Stillingfleet’s writings since the early 1680s, when he had for a time lived in the household of the influential Whig political thinker and writer.

Locke died peacefully at Oates on 28 October 1704 and was buried in the churchyard of All Saints’ in High Laver. Outside the south wall of the nave a brick altar tomb dedicated to his memory was later erected.

At a time when few scholars abroad could read English, the reception of Locke’s Essay was aided by its early translation into Latin by Ezekiel Burridge in 1701. Even more significant, however, was the publication of a French translation the previous year in Amsterdam, for it was that version that Leibniz studied and to which he wrote his Nouveaux Essais in response. The translator, Pierre Coste, also spent much of his life in exile: he had fled to England from France following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and became acquainted with Locke while serving as tutor to Damaris Masham’s son Francis at Oates. Fittingly, Coste later also translated the second English edition of Newton’s Opticks, for the work of Locke and Newton was always seen as being complementary by contemporaries: the non-metaphysical account of the human mind in the Essay on the one side and the mechanically contrived physical universe in the Principia on the other side.


Partners and Additional Contributors

This listing of Locke’s correspondence was collated from the E. S. de Beer edition published by Oxford University Press and available now online via a subscribing institution on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. Thanks are due to former EMLO Digital Fellow, Dr Alex Hitchman, for his work to prepare the metadata for upload to EMLO, and to Dr Philip Beeley for his contribution of this introductory text. This work was made possible by funding granted to the Cultures of Knowledge research project from the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford.

 


Key Bibliographic Source(s)

The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976-1989) and available via subscribing institutions on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online.


Further resources

Bibliography and Sources

The standard edition of Locke is the Clarendon Edition of his works, published successively by Oxford University Press since 1975, now under the general editor John R. Milton. The eighteen volumes published to date include the following:

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–1989).
An Essay concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–1683, ed. J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

A previous edition of Locke’s works was published in the nineteenth century:
The Works of John Locke, 10 vols (London, 1823).

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Locke.
The National Archives, Shaftesbury Papers.
Philip Long, A Summary Catalogue of the Lovelace Collection of the Papers of John Locke in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1959).

John Lough, ed., Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679: As related in his journals, correspondence and other papers (Cambridge, 1953).

Selected secondary literature

Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics & Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ, 1986).
Maurice Cranston, John Locke: a biography (London, 1957).
Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632–1704), physician and philosopher: a medical biography, with an edition of the medical notes in his journals (London, 1963).
John Harrison, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1965).
Jean Le Clerc, An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. John Locke, (London, 2nd edn, 1713).
Diego Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity (Cambridge, 2021).
John Marshall, John Locke, toleration and early enlightenment culture (Cambridge, 2006).
John R, Milton, ‘Locke at Oxford’, in G. A. J. Rogers, ed., Locke’s Philosophy: Context and Content (Oxford, 1994), pp. 2947.
Jean S. Yolton, John Locke: a descriptive bibliography (Bristol, 1998).

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