Edmund Burke, the British statesman and political philosopher, was born in Ireland to a family of modest means. His mother's family was Catholic, his father's Protestant. He was raised a Protestant and educated at a Quaker school and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took the equivalent of a first-class honors degree in classics. He went to London to read law but was never called to the bar. He devoted most of his time to authorship and literary journalism. Robert Dodsley, a leading London bookseller of the time, loyally backed him; by 1757, Dodsley had published two books by Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), had given him employment as editor of The Annual Register, and had contracted to pay him £300 for an Abridgement of the History of England.

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