Abel Boyer
Encyclopedia
Abel Boyer was a French-English lexicographer, journalist and miscellaneous writer.
, in Upper Languedoc
. His father, Pierre Boyer, one of the two consuls or chief magistrates of Castres, had been suspended and fined for his Protestantism. Boyer's education at the academy of Puylaurens
was interrupted by the religious disturbances, and leaving France with his maternal uncle Pierre Campdomerc, a noted Huguenot
preacher, he finished his studies at Franeker
in Friesland
, after a brief episode, it is said, of military service in Holland. Proceeding to England in 1689 he fell into great poverty, and is represented as transcribing and preparing for the press Dr. Thomas Smith
's edition of William Camden
's Latin correspondence (London, 1691). A good classical scholar, Boyer became in 1692 tutor to Allen Bathurst
, afterwards first Earl Bathurst, whose father Sir Benjamin was treasurer of the household of the princess, afterwards Queen Anne
. Probably through this connection he was appointed French teacher to her son Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, for whose use he prepared and to whom he dedicated The Complete French Master, published in 1694. Disappointed of advancement on account of his zeal for Whig
principles, he abandoned tuition for authorship. In December 1699 he produced on the London stage, with indifferent success, a modified translation in blank verse of Jean Racine
's Iphigénie
, which was published in 1700 as Achilles or Iphigenia in Aulis, a tragedy written by Mr. Boyer. A second edition of it appeared in 1714 as The Victim, or Achilles and Iphigenia in Aulis, in an "advertisement" prefixed to which Boyer stated that in its first form it had "passed the correction and approbation" of John Dryden
. In 1702 appeared at the Hague the work which has made Boyer's a familiar name, his Dictionnaire Royal Français et Anglais, divisé en deux parties, ostensibly composed for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, then dead. It was much superior to every previous work of the kind, and has been the basis of very many subsequent French-English dictionaries; the last English unabridged edition is that of 1816; the edition published at Paris in 1860 is stated to be the 41st. For the English-French section Boyer claimed the merit of containing a more complete English dictionary than any previous one, the English words and idioms in it being defined and explained as well as accompanied by their French equivalents. In the French preface to the whole work Boyer said that 1,000 English words not in any other English dictionary had been added to his by Richard Savage
, whom he spoke of as his friend, and who assisted him in several of his French manuals and miscellaneous compilations and translations published subsequently. Among the English versions of French works executed in whole or in part by Boyer was a popular translation of Fénelon's Télémaque, of which a twelfth edition appeared in 1728.
In 1702 Boyer published a History of William III
, which included one of James II
, and in 1703 he began to issue The History of the Reign of Queen Anne digested into annals, a yearly register of political and miscellaneous occurrences, containing several plans and maps illustrating the military operations of the war of the Spanish succession
. Before the last volume, the eleventh, of this work appeared in 1713, he had started publishing a similar monthly periodical, The Political State of Great Britain, being an impartial account of the most material occurrences, ecclesiastical, civil, and military, in a monthly letter to a friend in Holland (38 volumes, 1711–29). Its contents, which were those of a monthly newspaper, included abstracts of the chief political pamphlets published on both sides, and, like the Annals, is, both from its form and matter, very useful for reference. The Political State is, moreover, particularly noticeable as being the first periodical, issued at brief intervals, which contained a parliamentary chronicle, and in which parliamentary debates were reported with comparative regularity and with some approximation to accuracy. In the case of the House of Lords' reports various devices, such as giving only the initials of the names of the speakers, were resorted to in order to escape punishment, but in the case of the House of Commons the entire names were frequently given. According to Boyer's own account (preface to his folio History of Queen Anne, and to vol. xxxvii. of the Political State) he had been furnished by members of both houses of parliament (among whom he mentioned Lord Stanhope
) with reports of their speeches, and he had even succeeded in becoming an occasional 'ear-witness' of the debates themselves. When he was threatened at the beginning of 1729 with arrest by the printers of the votes, whose monopoly they accused him of infringing, he asserted that for thirty years in his History of King William, his Annals, and in his Political State, he had given reports of parliamentary debates without being molested. The threat induced him to discontinue the publication of the debates. He intended to resume the work, but failed to carry out his intention. He died in a house which he had built for himself at Chelsea
.
Besides conducting the periodicals mentioned, Boyer began in 1705 to edit the Post-boy,a thrice-a-week London news-sheet. His connection with it ended in August 1709, through a quarrel with the proprietor, when Boyer started on his own account a True Post-boy, which seems to have been short-lived. A Case which he printed in vindication of his right to use the name of Post-boy for his new venture gives some curious particulars of the way in which the news-sheets of the time were manufactured. Boyer was also the author of pamphlets, in one of which, An Account of the State and Progress of the present Negotiations of Peace, he attacked Jonathan Swift
, who writes in the Journal to Stella (16 Oct. 1711), after dining with Bolingbroke:
Boyer was discharged from custody through the intervention, he says, of Harley
, to whom he boasts of having rendered services. Though he professed a strict political impartiality in the conduct of his principal periodicals, Boyer was a zealous whig. For this reason doubtless Alexander Pope
gave him a niche in The Dunciad
(book ii. 413), where, under the soporific influence of Dulness, "Boyer the state, and Law the stage gave o'er" his crime, according to Pope's explanatory note, being that he was "a voluminous compiler of annals, political collections, &c."
's 1880 catalogue used nearly four folio pages of print to list his works.
Biography
Abel Boyer was probably born on 24 June 1667 at CastresCastres
Castres is a commune, and arrondissement capital in the Tarn department and Midi-Pyrénées region in southern France. It lies in the former French province of Languedoc....
, in Upper Languedoc
Languedoc
Languedoc is a former province of France, now continued in the modern-day régions of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées in the south of France, and whose capital city was Toulouse, now in Midi-Pyrénées. It had an area of approximately 42,700 km² .-Geographical Extent:The traditional...
. His father, Pierre Boyer, one of the two consuls or chief magistrates of Castres, had been suspended and fined for his Protestantism. Boyer's education at the academy of Puylaurens
Puylaurens
Puylaurens is a commune in the Tarn department in southern France.-References:*...
was interrupted by the religious disturbances, and leaving France with his maternal uncle Pierre Campdomerc, a noted Huguenot
Huguenot
The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the 17th century, people who formerly would have been called Huguenots have instead simply been called French Protestants, a title suggested by their German co-religionists, the...
preacher, he finished his studies at Franeker
Franeker
Franeker is one of the eleven historical cities of Friesland and capital of the municipality of Franekeradeel. It is located about 20 km west of Leeuwarden on the Van Harinxma Canal. As of 1 January 2006, it had 12,996 inhabitants. The city is famous for the Eisinga Planetarium from around...
in Friesland
Friesland
Friesland is a province in the north of the Netherlands and part of the ancient region of Frisia.Until the end of 1996, the province bore Friesland as its official name. In 1997 this Dutch name lost its official status to the Frisian Fryslân...
, after a brief episode, it is said, of military service in Holland. Proceeding to England in 1689 he fell into great poverty, and is represented as transcribing and preparing for the press Dr. Thomas Smith
Thomas Smith
-Politics:*Sir Thomas Smith , English scholar and diplomat*Thomas Smith , governor of Carolina*Thomas Smith , governor of Newfoundland and Labrador...
's edition of William Camden
William Camden
William Camden was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and officer of arms. He wrote the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland and the first detailed historical account of the reign of Elizabeth I of England.- Early years :Camden was born in London...
's Latin correspondence (London, 1691). A good classical scholar, Boyer became in 1692 tutor to Allen Bathurst
Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl Bathurst
Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl Bathurst PC , known as the Lord Bathurst from 1712 to 1772, was a British politician....
, afterwards first Earl Bathurst, whose father Sir Benjamin was treasurer of the household of the princess, afterwards Queen Anne
Anne of Great Britain
Anne ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, under the Act of Union, two of her realms, England and Scotland, were united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain.Anne's Catholic father, James II and VII, was deposed during the...
. Probably through this connection he was appointed French teacher to her son Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, for whose use he prepared and to whom he dedicated The Complete French Master, published in 1694. Disappointed of advancement on account of his zeal for Whig
British Whig Party
The Whigs were a party in the Parliament of England, Parliament of Great Britain, and Parliament of the United Kingdom, who contested power with the rival Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. The Whigs' origin lay in constitutional monarchism and opposition to absolute rule...
principles, he abandoned tuition for authorship. In December 1699 he produced on the London stage, with indifferent success, a modified translation in blank verse of Jean Racine
Jean Racine
Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
's Iphigénie
Iphigénie
Iphigénie is a dramatic tragedy in five acts written in alexandrine verse by the French playwright Jean Racine. It was first performed in the Orangerie in Versailles on August 18th 1674 as part of the fifth of the royal Divertissements de Versailles of Louis XIV to celebrate the conquest of...
, which was published in 1700 as Achilles or Iphigenia in Aulis, a tragedy written by Mr. Boyer. A second edition of it appeared in 1714 as The Victim, or Achilles and Iphigenia in Aulis, in an "advertisement" prefixed to which Boyer stated that in its first form it had "passed the correction and approbation" of John Dryden
John Dryden
John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He was made Poet...
. In 1702 appeared at the Hague the work which has made Boyer's a familiar name, his Dictionnaire Royal Français et Anglais, divisé en deux parties, ostensibly composed for the use of the Duke of Gloucester, then dead. It was much superior to every previous work of the kind, and has been the basis of very many subsequent French-English dictionaries; the last English unabridged edition is that of 1816; the edition published at Paris in 1860 is stated to be the 41st. For the English-French section Boyer claimed the merit of containing a more complete English dictionary than any previous one, the English words and idioms in it being defined and explained as well as accompanied by their French equivalents. In the French preface to the whole work Boyer said that 1,000 English words not in any other English dictionary had been added to his by Richard Savage
Richard Savage
Richard Savage was an English poet. He is best known as the subject of Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage , on which is based one of the most elaborate of Johnson's Lives of the English Poets....
, whom he spoke of as his friend, and who assisted him in several of his French manuals and miscellaneous compilations and translations published subsequently. Among the English versions of French works executed in whole or in part by Boyer was a popular translation of Fénelon's Télémaque, of which a twelfth edition appeared in 1728.
In 1702 Boyer published a History of William III
William III of England
William III & II was a sovereign Prince of Orange of the House of Orange-Nassau by birth. From 1672 he governed as Stadtholder William III of Orange over Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel of the Dutch Republic. From 1689 he reigned as William III over England and Ireland...
, which included one of James II
James II of England
James II & VII was King of England and King of Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from 6 February 1685. He was the last Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland...
, and in 1703 he began to issue The History of the Reign of Queen Anne digested into annals, a yearly register of political and miscellaneous occurrences, containing several plans and maps illustrating the military operations of the war of the Spanish succession
War of the Spanish Succession
The War of the Spanish Succession was fought among several European powers, including a divided Spain, over the possible unification of the Kingdoms of Spain and France under one Bourbon monarch. As France and Spain were among the most powerful states of Europe, such a unification would have...
. Before the last volume, the eleventh, of this work appeared in 1713, he had started publishing a similar monthly periodical, The Political State of Great Britain, being an impartial account of the most material occurrences, ecclesiastical, civil, and military, in a monthly letter to a friend in Holland (38 volumes, 1711–29). Its contents, which were those of a monthly newspaper, included abstracts of the chief political pamphlets published on both sides, and, like the Annals, is, both from its form and matter, very useful for reference. The Political State is, moreover, particularly noticeable as being the first periodical, issued at brief intervals, which contained a parliamentary chronicle, and in which parliamentary debates were reported with comparative regularity and with some approximation to accuracy. In the case of the House of Lords' reports various devices, such as giving only the initials of the names of the speakers, were resorted to in order to escape punishment, but in the case of the House of Commons the entire names were frequently given. According to Boyer's own account (preface to his folio History of Queen Anne, and to vol. xxxvii. of the Political State) he had been furnished by members of both houses of parliament (among whom he mentioned Lord Stanhope
James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope
James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope PC was a British statesman and soldier who effectively served as Chief Minister between 1717 and 1721. He is probably best remembered for his service during War of the Spanish Succession...
) with reports of their speeches, and he had even succeeded in becoming an occasional 'ear-witness' of the debates themselves. When he was threatened at the beginning of 1729 with arrest by the printers of the votes, whose monopoly they accused him of infringing, he asserted that for thirty years in his History of King William, his Annals, and in his Political State, he had given reports of parliamentary debates without being molested. The threat induced him to discontinue the publication of the debates. He intended to resume the work, but failed to carry out his intention. He died in a house which he had built for himself at Chelsea
Chelsea, London
Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above...
.
Besides conducting the periodicals mentioned, Boyer began in 1705 to edit the Post-boy,a thrice-a-week London news-sheet. His connection with it ended in August 1709, through a quarrel with the proprietor, when Boyer started on his own account a True Post-boy, which seems to have been short-lived. A Case which he printed in vindication of his right to use the name of Post-boy for his new venture gives some curious particulars of the way in which the news-sheets of the time were manufactured. Boyer was also the author of pamphlets, in one of which, An Account of the State and Progress of the present Negotiations of Peace, he attacked Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
, who writes in the Journal to Stella (16 Oct. 1711), after dining with Bolingbroke:
Boyer was discharged from custody through the intervention, he says, of Harley
Harley
-Fictional characters:* Harley Quinn, a fictional character in DC Comics Batman franchise* Harley Cooper, a fictional character on the popular CBS daytime soap opera, Guiding Light...
, to whom he boasts of having rendered services. Though he professed a strict political impartiality in the conduct of his principal periodicals, Boyer was a zealous whig. For this reason doubtless Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
gave him a niche in The Dunciad
The Dunciad
The Dunciad is a landmark literary satire by Alexander Pope published in three different versions at different times. The first version was published in 1728 anonymously. The second version, the Dunciad Variorum was published anonymously in 1729. The New Dunciad, in four books and with a...
(book ii. 413), where, under the soporific influence of Dulness, "Boyer the state, and Law the stage gave o'er" his crime, according to Pope's explanatory note, being that he was "a voluminous compiler of annals, political collections, &c."
Works
Boyer was a prolific author: the list of his works in the British LibraryBritish Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
's 1880 catalogue used nearly four folio pages of print to list his works.
- The compleat French master for ladies and gentlemen: being a new method, to learn with ease and delight the French tongue, 1694
- Character of the Virtues and Views of the Age, 1695
- A Geographical and Historical Description of those Parts of Europe which are the Seat of War, 1696
- Royal Dictionary, 1699
- Achilles, or, Iphigenia in Aulis a tragedy as it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-lane , 1700
- The Wise and Ingenious Companion, French and English, 1700
- The Draughts of the most Remarkable Fortified Towns of Europe, 1701
- The History of King William the Third, 3 vols, 1702-3
- Theory and Practice of Architecture, 1703
- The History of the Reign of Queen Anne Digested into Annals, 1703–13
- An Account of the State and Progress of the Present Negotiation of Peace, 1711
- Les soupirs de l'Europe etc., or, The groans of Europe at the prospect of the present posture of affairs, 1713, tr. from Jean Dumont
- A Philological Essay, or, Reflections on the Death of Free-Thinkers, 1713, tr. from André-François DeslandesAndré-François DeslandesAndré-François Boureau-Deslandes was a French philosopher.Deslandes has been viewed as an important precursor of the Encylopédistes...
- Memoirs of the Life and Negotiations of Sir William Temple, 1714
- Compleat and Impartial History of the Impeachments of the Last Ministry, 1716
- The Interest of Great Britain, 1716
- (Anon.) Animadversions and Observations, 1718
- History of Queen Anne, 1722, second edition 1735, with maps and plans illustrating MarlboroughJohn Churchill, 1st Duke of MarlboroughJohn Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, Prince of Mindelheim, KG, PC , was an English soldier and statesman whose career spanned the reigns of five monarchs through the late 17th and early 18th centuries...
's campaigns, and "a regular series of all the medals that were struck to commemorate the great events of this reign" - (Anon.) Memoirs of the Life and Negotiations of Sir William Temple, Bart., containing the most important occurrences and the most secret springs of affairs in Christendom from the year 1655 to the year 1681; with an account of Sir W. Temple's writings, 1714, second edition 1715
- (with J. Innes) Le Grand Theatre de 1'Honneur, French and English, 1729, containing a dictionary of heraldic terms and a treatise on heraldry, with engravings of the arms of the sovereign princes and states of Europe. Published by subscription and dedicated to Frederick, Prince of WalesFrederick, Prince of WalesFrederick, Prince of Wales was a member of the House of Hanover and therefore of the Hanoverian and later British Royal Family, the eldest son of George II and father of George III, as well as the great-grandfather of Queen Victoria...
.