Thomas Edwards

Edwards was born in 1699. His father and grandfather had both been barristers, and he is generally believed to have been privately educated before entering Lincoln's Inn, although according to an article in the Gentleman's Magazine he was educated at Eton and at King's College Cambridge, and later served in the army. He did little work as a lawyer, discouraged by what some accounts describe as "a considerable hesitation in his speech", turning instead to literature His father died when Edwards was still quite young, and a sonnet "upon a family picture" indicates that his brother and sisters all predeceased him. He inherited an estate at Pitshanger, Middlesex where he lived until buying, in 1739, another at Turrick, Ellesborough, Buckinghamshire, where he spent the rest of his life. He was elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries 20 October 1745. He died on 3 January 1757 while visiting Samuel Richardson at Parson's Green, and was buried in Ellesborough churchyard, with a lengthy epitaph, which describes him as "in his Poetry simple, elegant, pathetic; in his Criticism exact, acute, temperate".

Edwards' first published work, a pamphlet entitled A Letter to the Author of a late Epistolary Dedication addressed to Mr. Warburton (1744), was an attack on William Warburton, a priest and literary scholar, later to be ordained bishop of Gloucester. In 1747, Warburton published a new edition of Shakespeare. In his preface he hinted that he had originally intended to include a set of canons for literary criticism, but now referred his readers to the occasional comments on the subject he made in the course of his annotations. In response, Edwards published a "Supplement", in which he satirically remedied the omission by providing an intentionally absurd code of criticism, illustrated with examples from Warburton's notes. Warburton retorted by appending a note referring to Edwards to a line in a new edition of Alexander Pope's Dunciad, referring to him as "a gentleman, as he is pleased to call himself, of Lincoln's Inn; but, in reality, a gentleman only of the Dunciad", who "with the wit and learning of his ancestor Tom Thimble in The Rehearsal, and with the air of good-nature and politeness of Caliban in The Tempest, hath now happily finished the Dunce's progress, in personal abuse". Edwards replied indignantly in a preface to later editions of the Supplement. Warburton denied having attacked Edwards's breeding, but in offensive terms. Other opponents of Warburton sympathised with Edwards, and Mark Akenside addressed an ode to him upon the occasion. The Supplement reached a third edition in 1748, under the title of The Canons of Criticism, and a Glossary, being a Supplement to Mr. Warburton's edition of Shakspear, collected from the Notes in that celebrated work and proper to be bound up with it. By the other Gentleman of Lincoln's Inn, the first "Gentleman of Lincoln's Inn" being Philip Carteret Webb, who published a pamphlet under that name in 1742. Samuel Johnson thought that Edwards made some good hits, but compares him to a fly stinging a horse; Thomas Warton thought Edwards's assault judicious.