Sir John Hawkins

Sir John Hawkins wrote the first serious history of music in English and the first biography of Samuel Johnson, and was disliked for both. He began as an attorney's clerk in London, married a woman who inherited a fortune, and retired from the law to live as a magistrate and a scholar. He was a founding member of Johnson's Ivy Lane club and later of the Literary Club, from which he resigned after a quarrel with Burke. His General History of the Science and Practice of Music, five volumes published in 1776, appeared in the same year as the first volume of Charles Burney's rival history and was mocked into obscurity by Burney's supporters; it has since been recognised as the more accurate of the two, particularly on early English music, and it preserved a great deal that would otherwise be lost. He was chairman of the Middlesex quarter sessions for years and wrote on the state of the roads and on the poor law. Johnson made him an executor, and he produced a Life of Samuel Johnson in 1787, four years before Boswell's. It is a cold book and it made him enemies: he was accused of taking a watch from the deathbed room, and he publicly objected to the size of the annuity Johnson had left to Francis Barber. Boswell's success buried him. His daughter Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins wrote memoirs that are a principal source for the circle. He edited an edition of Walton's Compleat Angler that stayed in print for a century. He was knighted in 1772 for presenting a loyal address as chairman of the sessions. His history of music was reissued in the nineteenth century and is now the standard reference for a good deal of English music before Purcell.

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