Charles Gildon

Charles Gildon (c. 1665 – 1 January 1724), was an English hack writer who was, by turns, a translator, biographer, essayist, playwright, poet, author of fictional letters, fabulist, short story author, and critic. He provided the source for many lives of Restoration figures, although he appears to have propagated or invented numerous errors with them. He is remembered best as a target of Alexander Pope's in both Dunciad and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and an enemy of Jonathan Swift's. Gildon's biographies are, in many cases, the only biographies available, but they have nearly without exception been shown to have wholesale invention in them. Because of Pope's caricature of Gildon, but also because of the sheer volume and rapidity of his writings, Gildon has come to stand as the epitome of the hired pen and the literary opportunist.

Gildon was born in Gillingham, Dorset to a Roman Catholic family that had been active in support of the Royalist side during the English Civil War. While one of Charles's cousins, Joseph, would become a Catholic priest, Charles's parents fled to France, and Charles was educated at Douai. He left college without ordination and moved to England in 1684, at the age of 19. Two years later, he moved to London, where he immediately spent or lost his patrimony. Two years after that, in 1688, he married a woman without money. He almost immediately turned to writing as a method of getting money.

His first known literary employer was John Dunton, who used Gildon for the Athenian Mercury (see Restoration literature for a discussion of this periodical) and to write The History of the Athenian Society in 1692. In the same year, Gildon wrote a biography of Aphra Behn, claiming to have been a close friend of hers. Inasmuch as he and Behn were both probably from Dorset and royalists (although only Gildon's family had been active during the Interregnum, whereas Behn was probably a Cavalier spy), it is possible that Gildon did know and seek out Behn, but his account of her life has many demonstrable errors in it (including a wholly credulous reading of Oroonoko). At the time, however, he was a social correspondent with John Dryden and William Wycherley, as well as Behn, and he lived a courtly lifestyle. He was a Deist around 1693 - 1698, and Daniel Defoe attacked him as a rake who had six well-fed whores and a starving wife. Gildon edited the Works of Charles Blount in 1693 and added his own Deist tract, Oracles of Reason, to the edition. In 1695, he produced a Life of Blount that made his subject heroic. At the same time, he wrote a defense of Dryden's modernism against Thomas Rymer in 1694.

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