The following is a very — extremely! — incomplete list of works by and about John Horne Tooke, the Radical political botherer, also a very interesting philologist and, I think it is fair to say, in view of his Diversions of Purley, philosopher, or at least moralist. I have included very little of what he wrote so far. I shall get to it eventually.
Updated 14 January 2026.
The Development of the Diversions
of Purley
Coleridge (Specimens of the Table-Talk, 7 May 1830), says that Horne Tooke ‘had that clearness which is founded on shallowness. … His mind had no progression or developement. All that is worth any thing … in the Diversions of Purley is contained in a short pamphlet-letter which he addressed to Mr. Dunning; then it was enlarged to an octavo … at last, a quarto volume, I believe, came out; and yet … there was no addition to the argument of the pamphlet.’ Coleridge’s judgment of the Diversions is unjust; though given that it is an untimely sort of work the force of whose insights is more easily registered after the intervening two centuries of moral and psychological criticism, the blunder is forgivable.
