Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet

Sir Brooke Boothby, 6th Baronet (3 June 1744 – 23 January 1824) was a British linguist, translator, poet and landowner, based in Derbyshire, England. He was part of the intellectual and literary circle of Lichfield, which included Anna Seward and Erasmus Darwin. In 1766, he welcomed the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Ashbourne circles, after Rousseau's short stay in London with Hume. Ten years later, in 1776, Boothby visited Rousseau in Paris, and he was given the manuscript of the first part of Rousseau's three-part autobiographic Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques. Boothby published it in Lichfield in 1780 after the author's death and donated the document to the British Museum in 1781. It is now in the British Library (Add MS 4925).

The well-known portrait of Boothby by Joseph Wright of Derby, from 1781, shows him reclining in a wooded glade with a book carrying on its cover simply the name Rousseau, indicating Boothby's admiration and promotion of the writer and his work generally.

Several portraits were also made of Boothby's daughter, Penelope—by Henry Fuseli and Joshua Reynolds and in sculpture by Thomas Banks. She died young and was the subject of a book of poetry by her grieving father.