author
George Augustus Selwyn
1719–1791
An English wit, gambler, and longtime Member of Parliament, he became famous less for speeches than for his sharp conversation and unforgettable eccentricity. His letters and anecdotes preserve a vivid picture of elite social life in eighteenth-century Britain.
1 Audiobook
George Selwyn : His letters and his life
by George Augustus Selwyn
About the author
Born on 11 August 1719, George Augustus Selwyn was an English politician and man about town from Matson in Gloucestershire. He studied at Eton and then at Hart Hall, Oxford, and later sat in Parliament for decades, representing Ludgershall and Gloucester, though he was known for hardly ever speaking in the House.
Selwyn was much better known in society than in politics. Friends and contemporaries remembered him as a brilliant wit, a devoted letter writer, and a strikingly eccentric figure with a fascination for the macabre. Those traits helped make him one of the most memorable personalities of Georgian London, and his surviving correspondence remains a rich source for the manners, gossip, and friendships of the period.
He died on 25 January 1791. Although his formal political career was quiet, his reputation lived on through memoirs, letters, and later biographies that treat him as one of the great social characters of the eighteenth century.