“Dear Dicky,” “Dear Dick,” “Dear Friend,” “Dear Shackleton”

This article examines the relationship between Edmund Burke (1729/30–97) and his friend Richard Shackleton (1726–92) based on the evidence of Burke’s letters and poems written to Shackleton from the spring of 1744 to the summer of 1757. The letters to Shackleton provide a remarkable record of Burke’s early intellectual and emotional development, but this essay focuses on how Burke expresses his love for Shackleton, a passionate love that is silenced by Shackleton’s marriage in 1749. Over sixty letters survive addressed to “Dear Dicky,” “Dear Dick,” or “Dear Friend,” written during Burke’s four years at Trinity College in Dublin. We have just nine letters written between Burke’s departure from Trinity in 1748 and his reappearance in London as a published author in 1759. Five of these nine letters are written to Shackle-ton during Burke’s “darkest period,” “the missing years,” when Burke dropped out of his studies at the Middle Temple to spend his time traveling, writing, and living with Will Burke.1 Burke was to describe Will as a man he “tenderly loved, highly valued, and continually lived with, in an union not to be expressed, quite since our boyish years.”2 The lifelong partnership between these two men deserves a study of its own; that curious phrase “an union not to be expressed” is of course redolent of “that crime not to be named among Christians.” The euphemistic parsing of the “Love that dare not speak its name” has a long pedigree in English culture.3 We can be thankful that the record of Burke’s earlier love for Dick was preserved almost intact by Shackleton’s descendents; it seems there are just a handful of letters miss-ing.4 However, none of Shackleton’s letters to Burke during this period has survived.Burke had loved his time at the school of Abraham Shackle-ton (1696–1771), a Quaker. The school was located at Ballitore In Kildare some thirty miles from Dublin. Throughout his life Ned Burke always remained grateful for the care and education that he received there. Ned formed an intense friendship with Abra-ham’s son Richard who assisted his father at the school. Being a Quaker, Richard was barred from attending university at Trinity College, but Burke resolved to keep him informed on what he was learning, to supply him with the relevant books, and to discuss the ideas and topics of the university syllabus. This intellectual partnership was a central impulse in the correspondence: the two wrote poetry and criticized each other’s work, corresponded on learned topics suggested by each, and discussed the business of a debating club, the Academy of Belles Lettres, that they formed with five others which met for “speaching reading writing and arguing, in morality, History, Criticism, Politics, and all the useFul branches of Philosophy.”5Burke was keen to conduct a correspondence that would be a shared testament to his and Dick’s vivid engagement with ideas and literature as much as with each other’s emotions. We can see the young Ned adopt a variety of writing styles and postures in the sheer exuberance of writing and in his often uncertain positioning of himself as Dick’s correspondent and friend. Trying to find a register for his voice through imitation and ventriloquism, he parodies romance epics, oriental tales, legalese, or gushes of sentimental writing, frequently peppering his text with Latin tags, with Greek aphorisms, with allusions to a range of English and Latin poetry, or with exemplums from The Spectator. The desire to share in a vigorous engagement with texts and passionate identification with study is reminiscent of George Rousseau’s concept of “homopla-tonism,” a term that describes the “licit and illicit relations” aris-ing from “same-sex discipleship and tutelage.”6 Homoplatonism, Rousseau argues, “acknowledges the vital presence of discursive subjectivity (letters, diaries, poetry, Gothic fictions . . . and so on). A plenitude of languages taught and learned; languages found in books and the quasi-secret code-dialects used among those who had formed charged, emotional attachments. If homoplatonism taps into anything vital, it suggests that historical same-sex col