Sir John Hawkins has had the misfortune to be remembered for his unsociability, exemplified in the rudeness to Edmund Burke that led to his withdrawal from Samuel Johnson's best-known club. But Hawkins deserved better of posterity. As a magistrate he presided with integrity and devotion over the Middlesex part of London in the days when the justices of the peace in Quarter Sessions were its only unified local government. His history of music was the first to be completed in England, and his edition of Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, for which he wrote a life of Walton and, later, a life of Charles Cotton, became the standard for the next century. His biography of Johnson, for whom he was one of the executors, was a full-length work that preceded Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791) by four years.

Born of a Welsh mother, Elizabeth Gwatkin Hawkins, and a City of...