Frenetic Walks in Too Many Parks, or, What Valerian Couldn’t Cure: The Chronic Careers of “Sir” John Hill

Those many writers, artists, and philosophers who regarded the durable sun as an insignia of an unending Enlightenment forgot that this reliable orb never stops changing its position. Enlightenment science advanced its quest for the eternal laws of nature through a commitment to unremitting change, whether change in the form of inflowing data streams or change expressed in a publishing industry that kept its presses rolling by filling periodicals with news of amazing discoveries. And so with Sir John Hill, a nervously restless seeker after eternal fame who lived out the paradoxes implicit in the eighteenth-century hope for merit-based upward mobility within a right, good, presumably permanent order. Hill surely qualifies as the most ardent job-changer in history. Hitting only the high spots of Rousseau’s biography, we find Hill serving as an arborist (16); scrambling after a post in the British Museum (180); penning pseudonymous works after losing Bolingbroke’s favor (196); toiling for Bute as a horticulturalist (206–10); promoting honey- and valerian-based patent medicines (242–47); and, always, pushing his productive pen, producing saleable book after book, column after column, and polemical blast after polemical blast. Hill played the role of the ideal virtuoso by studying, doing, and perhaps understanding everything, yet he kept stumbling, seldom doing anything for long. Finding “Sir” John amidst his countless quantum states, many of which were realized at the same time, is the challenge that George Rousseau sometimes surmounts.

To deal with a character who aspired to universal competence in an inveterately particular way—who routinely interrupted his encyclopedic projects in order to compose second-rate plays and bottom-feeding satires—Rousseau must find a governing conception befitting ambitious miscellaneousness. The long hunt for this elusive idea sends Rousseau thrashing down several warm but not very hot trails. On the average, we meet a new version of Hill every two dozen pages. Hill is first conjugated under the heading of “notorious” (xxx), then appears as the victim of an “aborted” childhood (13); as a well-meaning congenial nuisance or “puppy” (24–25); as an embittered loser in the contest to join the Royal Society (51); as a “whistle-blower” (74); as a successful periodical writer and wit in the tradition of Addison and Steele (110–20); as a highly productive writer whose later neglect elicits puzzlement (221); as a vain crackpot who cooks up a scheme to start his own Royal Society with himself as perpetual “conductor” (289); and as a pre-existentialist case study who expended gigantic reserves of energy in search of a purpose (323). The easiest characterization of Hill might be that of the eighty-fifth percentile man: the clever bloke with his own star in his eye whose voluminous labors could never quite vault him into the empyrean. Now and then Rousseau touches on the pathos imprinted in the story of England’s most original derivative author—of a clever copycat and popinjay strutting about in costly clothes while attempting to impress booby aristocrats with his superior wit. Unfortunately, the pathetic version of Hill conflicts with Rousseau’s hope that Hill might qualify as “notorious.” Although the prolific but puppyish Hill never quite lives up to that “notorious” epithet, Rousseau works overtime to fit the man to the tag.

Most notable if not notorious persons limit their acquaintance to the circle where they hope to succeed. Hill’s life rather resembles an anthology of human social possibility, a crazy kaleidoscope in which people from all walks and strata of life constantly come and go. Rousseau is at his best when he organizes Hill’s various contacts into sub-stories or collateral biographies. Rousseau’s capsule treatment of Jewish mineralogist, embezzler, and man of letters Emanuel da Costa (36–43) delivers a rich, textured picture of the countercultures within Britain’s learned establishment. Unlike more timid biographers, Rousseau never hesitates to interpret the motives...