While certain problems Burke responded to as an eighteenth-century practicing politician are past history--the American Revolution, British control of India, the French Revolution, the penal laws in Ireland--certain aspects of these issues are as vital today as they were during Burke's lifetime. And so it is that one rarely leaves off reading Burke with a feeling of indifference; a reader is more likely to quarrel with him, to heartily agree with him, or to be of both minds at once. That is the interesting thing about Burke: he is as controversial today as he was in the eighteenth century.
Born in Dublin on 12 January in 1729 or 1730, Edmund Burke was the second son of four surviving children of Richard Burke, attorney of His Majesty's Court of Exchequer, and Mary Nagle Burke. When the young Edmund showed signs of lung trouble, his parents sent him to live with his Catholic relatives, the Nagles, on their farm in the south of Ireland. Those years in County Cork and in a happy, religious family had a lifelong effect on Burke. There he acquired a love of the land and farming. He also studied Latin with a well-intentioned but slightly inept schoolmaster by the name of O'Halloran and Irish lore and legends with his Nagle cousins.
