Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine.

Life and writing

Background

Addison was born in Millstone, Wiltshire, but soon after his birth his father, Lancelot Addison, was appointed Dean of Lichfield and the Addison family moved into the cathedral close. He was educated at Charterhouse School, where he first met Richard Steele, and at The Queen's College, Oxford. He excelled in classics, being specially noted for his Latin verse, and became a fellow of Magdalen College. In 1693, he addressed a poem to John Dryden, and his first major work, a book of the lives of English poets, was published in 1694. His translation of Virgil's Georgics was published in the same year. Dryden, Lord Somers and Charles Montague, 1st Earl of Halifax, took an interest in Addison's work and obtained for him a pension of £300 to enable him to travel to Europe with a view to diplomatic employment, all the time writing and studying politics. While in Switzerland in 1702, he heard of the death of William III, an event which lost him his pension, as his influential contacts, Halifax and Somers, had lost their employment with the Crown.

Joseph Addison (diplomat)

Sir Joseph Addison KCMG (1879 – 24 November 1953) was British ambassador to the Baltic States, and to Czechoslovakia during the rise of Nazi Germany.

Career

Joseph Addison, son of John Edmund Wentworth Addison, was educated in France and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He entered the Foreign Office (FO) in 1903 and was assistant secretary at the Second Hague Conference in 1907 before being posted to Peking 1908–10. He was Private Secretary to the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Thomas McKinnon Wood then Francis Dyke Acland) 1911–13. He resigned from the FO in 1913 but rejoined and served in Paris 1916–20 before being appointed Counsellor at Berlin 1920–27, serving as chargé d'affaires at various times.

Addison was appointed Minister to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in 1927 and transferred to be Minister to Czechoslovakia in 1930.The Times obituary said "For the next six years he held this important position and did much to foster good relations with the Czechoslovak government, especially after the seizure of power by the Nazis in Germany in 1933." However, a historian of the period claims that Addison "made virtually no attempt to conceal his contempt for his hosts" and was "very much responsible for cultivating a negative view of the Czechs and their country in British official circles" and that he "disliked Edvard Beneš [Czech Foreign Minister, later President] with considerable passion and took delight in embarrassing him in his reports from Prague."