ABSTRACT
Inasmuch as Sir George Pretyman-Tomline (1750-1827)1 has received any kind of press at all, it has been a generally unfavourable one. He has never attracted a biographer, and was not even the subject of the sort of two-or three-volume life, stitched together from relatively innocuous passages of correspondence and designed to give a general impression of worthiness, that was characteristic of the Victorian period. No member of his family and no beneficiary of his extensive patronage (categories which frequently overlapped) produced a literary monument of devotional loyalty. Nor was a complete edition of his works, which could have offered a flattering prefatory memoir, ever undertaken. For his career it is necessary to turn instead to the important but necessarily brief entries in the obvious works of reference, and to general accounts of the bishops of the two dioceses which he served. Recourse must also be had to biographies of William Pitt the Younger, to whom Tomline acted as tutor, secretary, adviser, and memorialist, and under whose shadow he remains. 2
I am grateful to Mrs. M. Bence-Jones and the East Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, for permission to consult and quote from the Pretyman papers, and to Dr. Nigel Aston and Dr. Bill Gibson for valuable advice in the preparation of the chapter.
