Hesketh Pearson

Edward Hesketh Gibbons Pearson was born on 20 February 1887 in Hawford, Claines, Worcestershire, the son of Thomas Henry Gibbons Pearson, a farmer, and Amy Mary Constance Biggs. He was a great-great nephew of the statistician and polymath Francis Galton. After the family relocated to Bedford in 1896, Pearson attended Orkney House Preparatory School for five years before moving on to Bedford School, where he was an indifferent student. He resisted his father's wish that he pursue a classical education in preparation for Holy Orders, and upon leaving school entered commerce. When he inherited £1,000 from a deceased aunt and was dismissed from his position as a troublemaker, he used the funds to travel extensively before joining his brother's car business on his return.

His entry into the theatre came when his brother's business faced bankruptcy. Pearson applied for a position with Herbert Beerbohm Tree and began acting with Tree's company in 1911. The following year he married Gladys Gardner, an actress in the same company. A passionate reader of Shakespeare and a frequent theatregoer, Pearson brought genuine literary enthusiasm to his stage work. He went on to appear on Broadway in 1930 in the play The Matriarch.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Pearson enlisted in the British Army but was soon invalided out after a diagnosis of tuberculosis. He was subsequently commissioned into the Army Service Corps and posted to Mesopotamia, where the climate aided his recovery from tuberculosis, though he contracted septic sores, dysentery, and malaria and came close to death on three occasions. He received a severe head wound from shrapnel and was awarded the Military Cross for his conduct under fire.

Returning to the stage after the war, Pearson met Hugh Kingsmill in 1921, a friendship that proved transformative. He began writing journalism and published short stories and essays. In 1926, the anonymously published The Whispering Gallery, presented as diary entries from prominent political figures, led to his prosecution for attempted fraud; he won the case. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Pearson became the most commercially successful biographer in Britain. His subjects included Erasmus Darwin, the Reverend Sydney Smith, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Thomas Paine, William Hazlitt, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Walter Scott. Johnson and Boswell, published in 1958, was among the last works he produced at the height of his powers. He also collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on several books and later with Malcolm Muggeridge.

With his first wife, Gladys, Pearson had one son, who died in 1939. Gladys died in 1951, and later that year Pearson married Dorothy Joyce Ryder. He wrote two autobiographies: Thinking it Over, published in 1938, and Hesketh Pearson by Himself, which appeared posthumously in 1965. Pearson died on 9 April 1964 at his home at 14 Priory Road, West Hampstead, London.