Burke, who was of
Munster Roman Catholic stock, was born in
Dublin to a prosperous, professional
solicitor father (Richard; d. 1761) who had converted to the
Church of Ireland. His mother Mary (c. 1702–1770), whose maiden name was Nagle, belonged to the
Roman Catholic Church and came from an impoverished but genteel
County Cork family. Burke was raised in his father's faith and would remain throughout his life a practicing
Anglican, but his political enemies would later repeatedly accuse him of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership in the Catholic church would have disqualified him from public office (
see Penal Laws in Ireland). His sister Juliana was brought up as, and remained a Roman Catholic.
As a child he sometimes spent time away from the unhealthy air of Dublin with his mother's family in the Blackwater valley. He received his early education at a
Quaker school in
Ballitore, some 30 miles from Dublin, and in 1744 he proceeded to
Trinity College, Dublin. In 1747, he set up a Debating Club, known as Edmund Burke's Club, which in 1770 merged with the Historical Club to form the
College Historical Society. The minutes of the meetings of Burke's club remain in the collection of the Historical Society. He graduated in 1748. Burke's father wished him to study for the
law, and with this object he went to
London in 1750 and entered the
Middle Temple, but soon thereafter he gave up his legal studies in order to travel in Continental
Europe. After giving up law, he attempted to earn his livelihood through writing.
Burke's first published work,
A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind, appeared in 1756 and was fraudulently attributed to Lord Bolingbroke. It was originally taken as a serious treatise on
anarchism. Years later, with a government appointment at stake, Burke, as a defender of the established order, claimed that it had been intended as a
satire. Many modern scholars consider it to be satire, but others take
Vindication as a serious defence of anarchism (an interpretation notably espoused by
Murray Rothbard.) Whether satire or not, it was the first anarchist essay, and taken seriously by later anarchists such as William Godwin. In 1757 Burke published a treatise on aesthetics,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as
Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. The following year, with
Robert Dodsley, he created the influential
Annual Register, a publication in which various authors evaluated the international political events of the previous year. In London, Burke became closely connected with many of the leading intellectuals and artists, including Samuel Johnson,
David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and
Joshua Reynolds.
On
March 12, 1757 he married Jane Mary Nugent (1734–1812), daughter of a Catholic physician who had treated him at
Bath. His son Richard was born in February 1758. Another son, Christopher, died in infancy.
At about this same time, Burke was introduced to
William Gerard Hamilton (known as "Single-speech Hamilton"). When Hamilton was appointed
Chief Secretary for Ireland, Burke accompanied him to Dublin as his private secretary, a position he maintained for three years. In 1765 Burke became private secretary to liberal Whig statesman
Charles Watson-Wentworth, the
Marquess of Rockingham, at the time Prime Minister of the England, who remained Burke's close friend and associate until his premature death in 1782.
