William Combe (1741 - 1823) was a miscellaneous writer. His early life was that of an adventurer, his later was passed chiefly within the "rules" of the King's Bench prison. He is chiefly remembered as the author of The Three Tours of Dr. Syntax, a comic poem (?). His cleverest piece of work was a series of imaginary letters, supposed to have been written by the second, or "wicked" Lord Lyttelton. Of a similar kind were his letters between Swift and "Stella". He also wrote the letterpress for various illustrated books, and was a general hack. // Events April 10 – Austrian army attack troops of Frederick the Great at Mollwitz December 19 – Vitus Bering dies in his expedition east of Siberia December 25 – Anders Celsius develops his own thermometer scale Celsius William Browning invents mineral water Elizabeth of Russia became czarina. ... 1823 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 – October 19, 1745) was an Anglo-Irish writer who is famous for works like Gullivers Travels and A Tale of a Tub. ... A hack writer is a writer for hire, paid to express others thoughts or opinions in felicitous verbiage, often in the form of political pamphlets. ...

The circumstances of his birth in Bristol in 1741, and parentage are somewhat doubtful, and it is questioned whether his father was a rich Bristol merchant, or a certain William Alexander, a London alderman, who died in 1762. He was educated at Eton, where he was contemporary with Charles James Fox, the 2nd Baron Lyttelton and William Beckford. Alexander bequeathed him some £2000--a little fortune that soon disappeared in a course of splendid extravagance, which gained him the nickname of Count Combe; and after a chequered career as private soldier, cook and waiter, he finally settled in London (about 1771), as a law student and bookseller's hack. In 1776 he made his first success in London with The Diaboliad, a satire full of bitter personalities. Four years afterwards (1780) his debts brought him into the King's Bench; and much of his subsequent life was spent in prison. His spurious Letters of the Late Lord Lyttelton1 (1780) imposed on many of his contemporaries, and a writer in the Quarterly Review, so late as 1851, regarded these letters as authentic, basing upon them a claim that Lyttelton was "Junius." An early acquaintance with Lawrence Sterne resulted in his Letters supposed to have been written by Yorick and Eliza (1779). Periodical literature of all sorts--pamphlets, satires, burlesques, "two thousand columns for the papers," "two hundred biographies"--filled up the next years, and about 1789 Combe was receiving £200 yearly from Pitt, as a pamphleteer. Six volumes of a Devil on Two Sticks in England won for him the title of "the English le Sage"; in 1794-1796 he wrote the text for Boydell's History of the River Thames; in 1803 he began to write for The Times. In 1809-1811 he wrote for Ackermann's Political Magazine the famous Tour of Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque (descriptive and moralizing verse of a somewhat doggerel type), which, owing greatly to Thomas Rowlandson's designs, had an immense success. It was published separately in 1812 and was followed by two similar Tours, "in search of Consolation," and "in search of a Wife," the first Mrs Syntax having died at the end of the first Tour. Then came Six Poems in illustration of drawings by Princess Elizabeth (1813), The English Dance of Death (1815-1816), The Dance of Life (1816-1817), The Adventures of Johnny Quae Genus (1822)--all written for Rowlandson's caricatures; together with Histories of Oxford and Cambridge, and of Westminster Abbey for Ackermann; Picturesque Tours along the Rhine and other rivers, Histories of Madeira, Antiquities of York, texts for Turner's Southern Coast Views, and contributions innumerable to the Literary Repository. In his later years, notwithstanding a by no means unsullied character, Combe was courted for the sake of his charming conversation and inexhaustible stock of anecdote. He died in London on the 19th of June 1823. Bristol is an English city and county and one of the two administrative centres of South West England (the other being Plymouth). ... The Kings College of Our Lady of Eton beside Windsor, commonly known as Eton College or just Eton, is a public school (that is, an independent, fee-charging secondary school) for boys. ... The Right Honourable Charles James Fox (13 January 1749–13 September 1806) was a British Whig politician. ... Laurence Sterne Laurence Sterne (November 24, 1713 - March 18, 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman. ... The Times is a national newspaper published daily in the United Kingdom. ... Thomas Rowlandson (July 1756 - April 22, 1827) was an English caricaturist. ... Oxford is a city and local government district in Oxfordshire, England, with a population of 134,248 (2001 census). ... The city of Cambridge is an old English university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire. ... Westminster Abbeys western facade The Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, which is almost always referred to as Westminster Abbey, is a mainly Gothic church, on the scale of a cathedral, in Westminster, London, just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. ...

This article incorporates text from: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J.M. Dent & sons; New York, E.P. Dutton. This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, which is in the public domain. A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature is a collection of biographies of writers by John W. Cousin, published around 1910. ... Supporters contend that the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) represents the sum of human knowledge at the beginning of the 20th century; indeed, it was advertised as such. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...