After Thomas Lawrence, Pra, 1769 - 1830 Portrait of the Right Honourable George Canning (1770–1827), Mp

After Thomas Lawrence, PRA, 1769 - 1830

Portrait of The Right Honourable George Canning (1770–1827), MP

oil on canvas

12 x 10 in. (31 x 26 cm.)

Literature

Mezzotint, Charles Turner, 1827

Notes

George Canning, (1770–1827), prime minister and parodist, was born in Marylebone, Middlesex, on 11 April 1770, the son of George Canning (1736–1771) and his wife, Mary Ann Costello (1747?–1827). His parents were both Irish; he described himself as ‘an Irishman born in London’ (Temperley, Life, 16) and identified himself with the Irish demand for Catholic emancipation, but he visited Ireland only once, in 1824. His father was the eldest son of Stratford Canning (1703–1775), a cantankerous protestant gentleman with a modest estate at Garvagh in co. Londonderry and a house in Dublin. George senior took his BA at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1754, but was sent by his father to London in 1757 to prevent him making an unacceptable marriage. There, on an allowance of £150 p.a., he read for the bar and was called at the Middle Temple in 1764. But ‘it would appear that [he] was a lover of literature and pleasure, and excessively averse to the dull study of the profession to which his life was doomed to be devoted’ (Rede, 8 n.). His circle included journalists, actors, and politicians, and he was a friend and supporter of Wilkes. He published at least one political pamphlet and some verses, including a translation (1766) of five books of Polignac's Anti-Lucretius, which he dedicated to Queen Charlotte as ‘a poem, calculated to promote the cause of religion, and virtue, by overturning the pillars of immorality, and atheism’. He ran up large debts, which his father paid off in return for his renouncing his right to inherit the family estates. His wife, whom he married in Marylebone parish church on 21 May 1768, was beautiful, spirited, and on her mother's side from a good family—her guardian and maternal grandfather was Colonel Guydickens of Wigmore Street, formerly known as Guy Dickens, who had been British envoy in Berlin (1740–41), Stockholm (1742–8), and St Petersburg (1749–55), and whose son Gustavus was a gentleman usher in the queen's household—but she had no money of her own.

Childhood and education

George was the second of their three children and the only one to reach adulthood. On the boy's first birthday George senior died. Stratford's allowance to his son lapsed, and he would allow Mary Ann only £40 p.a., which was given for the children and on condition that she stayed in England. Her resources were so inadequate that she decided to try to make a living as an actress. Garrick, perhaps at the request of the queen, gave her a chance at Drury Lane in November 1773, but she did not succeed there. She then turned to provincial theatres, where she had better luck. By becoming an actress she excluded herself from respectable society, and she soon made matters worse by becoming the mistress of the dissolute actor Samuel Reddish. The couple had five children and she called herself Mrs Reddish. Canning's early years were spent touring provincial theatres with his mother and Reddish, and he later reminisced about a humble school at which he had within a month ‘got through … by far the greater part of a gingerbread alphabet’ (The Microcosm, 1, 1786, 434).

In 1778, however, the Canning family came dramatically to the boy's rescue. They provided money to pay for his maintenance and education, and his uncle Stratford, well established as a merchant banker in the City, became his guardian and took him into his home in Clement's Lane. He was sent to his first respectable school, Hyde Abbey, Winchester, in 1778 and to Eton College in 1782. On the death of his paternal grandmother in 1786 he ‘came into possession of the fortune left me by my grandfather, about 400l. per annum’ (Raven, 51). His uncle, the younger Stratford, died