author
William Augustus Miles
d. 1817
An English political writer and government agent, he moved through the tense world of late eighteenth-century Britain and revolutionary France. His surviving letters and pamphlets capture a sharp, often partisan view of politics at a moment of upheaval.
1 Audiobook
The Letters of Gracchus on the East India Question
by William Augustus Miles
About the author
Born around 1753, William Augustus Miles was an English political writer whose career mixed journalism, pamphleteering, and government work. Sources on his early life are not fully consistent, but he is generally described as the son of Jefferson Miles, a proof-master general, and as someone who entered public employment while also developing a reputation as a political author.
Miles is best known for his involvement in the politics of the French Revolutionary era. He acted as a British agent in the years around the Revolution and wrote extensively on public affairs, producing political works and correspondence that later drew historical interest. His letters were important enough to be collected and published after his death in The Correspondence of William Augustus Miles on the French Revolution, 1789–1817.
He died in 1817. Although he is a fairly obscure figure today, Miles remains of interest to readers of eighteenth-century history because his writings sit close to the machinery of government, diplomacy, and propaganda in a turbulent age.