Background
William Combe was born at Bristol in 1741. The circumstances of his birth and parentage are somewhat doubtful, and it is questioned whether his father was a rich Bristol merchant, or a certain William Alexander, a London alderman, who died in 1762.
Education
William Combe was educated at Eton, where he was contemporary with Charles James Fox, the 2nd Baron Lyttelton and William Beckford.
Career
In 1776 William Combe made his first success in London with The Diaboliad, a satire full of bitter personalities.
His spurious Letters of the Late Lord Lyttelton1 (1780) imposed on many of his contemporaries, and a writer in the Quarterly Review, so late as 1851, regarded these letters as authentic, basing upon them a claim that Lyttelton was " Junius. "
Six volumes of a Devil on Two Sticks in England won for him the title of " the English le Sage "; in 1794-1796 he wrote the text for Boydell's History of the River Thames-, in 1803 he began to write for The Times.
In 1809-1811 he wrote for Ackermann's Political Magazine the famous Tour of Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque (descriptive and moralizing verse of a somewhat doggerel type), which, owing greatly to Thomas Rowlandson's designs, had an Immense success.
Then came Six Poems in illustration of drawings by Princess Elizabeth (1813), The English Dance of Death (1815 - 1816), The Dance of Life (1816- 1817), The Adventures of Johnny Quae Genus (1822)-all written for Rowlandson's caricatures; together with Histories of Oxford and Cambridge, and of Westminster Abbey for Ackermann; Picturesque Tours along the Rhine and other rivers, Histories of Madeira, Antiquities of York, texts for Turner's Southern Coast Views, and contributions innumerable to the Literary Repository.
In his later years, notwithstanding a by no means unsullied character, Combe was courted for the sake of his charming conversation and inexhaustible stock of anecdote.
Brief obituary memoirs of Combe appeared in Ackermann's Literary Repository and in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1823; and in May 1859 a list of his works, drawn up by his own hand, was printed in the latter periodical.