Parodies of the Romantic Age:
The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin and Other Parodic Writings
Editors: Graeme Stones and John Strachan
978 1 85196 475 8: 234x156mm: £450.00/$795.00
In this reset collection, Stones and Strachan bring together a wealth of material ranging from verse parodies originally published in pamphlet form, circulated in manuscript, or published in periodicals, to longer works such as P.G. Patmore's prose parodies of the works of Byron, Lamb and Hazlitt. Much of this material has long been neglected. The edition also includes William Frederick Deacon's Warreniana, a delightful sequence of parodies of major Romantic writers, as yet virtually unknown.
Romanticism's annus mirabilis of 1798 saw the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the same year The Anti-Jacobin's critique of Romantic sentiments fully emerged. Founded by George Canning and friends, with the approval of William Pitt, the periodical had immediate political concerns, but the effect of its poetry goes far beyond these. The anti-Jacobin's parodies were endlessly inventive, witty, and partisan. Just as the Lyrical Ballads shaped early Romantic writing, so The Anti-Jacobin influenced a generation of parodic counterings. These embody and celebrate creativity, while reflecting on writing strategies, covert motivations, dogmas, delusions and deceit. They have much to say about the workings of the imagination and the nature of Romanticism itself.
Contents
Volume 1
The Anti-Jacobin (1797-8) Scattered examples of the poetry of The Anti-Jacobin have become famous, but there has been no adequately annotated edition, nor one which includes the complementary parodies in prose. 'It would be endless to chase the coy Muse of Jacobinism through all her characters', wrote Canning, but in thirty-six issues he and his fellow contributors captured an astonishing and entertaining variety of her poses. Vitally involved with the political and literary issues of the day, the periodical is unusually reliant on context for a full appreciation. This edition makes that context available, and re-evaluates the significance of The Anti-Jacobin as a shaping force in Romantic parody.
Volume 2
Collected Verse Parody: gathers together examples of parody to explore diversities in form, intent and effect. Collected Verse Parody includes: poems which have never been seen, such as Robert Rose's American revisions of Wordsworth; poems, like Beckford's 'The Forficula-Auricularis', previously unrecognized as parody; familiar examples (Catherine Maria Fanshawe's 'Fragment', James Hogg's 'Isabelle'), revalued in the light of recent theory of parody; others, such as the Peter Bell series, which influenced the reception of major writers; and parodic poetry from the canonical writers themselves. The emphasis throughout is on textual conversations and creative engagement: the parodic sympathies which led Hogg, for example, to join Wordsworth in meditating on "....subterraneous magazines of bones, The faint reflections of infinitude,The moon and the unvoyageable sky, And all the high observances of things."
Volume 3
Collected Prose Parody: This ground-breaking volume is the first collection to be devoted to Romantic period prose parody, a compelling area of Romantic writing yet one which has been mysteriously neglected. Many established authors of the period delighted in parodic prose: Austen, Beckford, Carlyle, Coleridge, De Quincey, Hogg, Lamb, Lewis, Peacock, Scott. Together with others less well known (Hone, Jerden, Maginn, the brothers Smith, Henry Taylor), these and more are represented. Here, canonical authors in parodic mode rub shoulders with anonymous parodists and obscure magazine contributors whose work has never been republished. All are working in a period when parodic prose is an important part of the spirit of the age. The collection includes rarely-seen material, such as Blackwood's notorious and suppressed Chaldee manuscript, and the Miller Correspondence from Fraser's Magazine. Throughout, the volume is concerned with gathering those examples which most encourage imaginative revision in the reader.
Volume 4
W F Deacon, Warreniana (1824) Warreniana, William Frederick Deacon's compendious parodic survey of Romantic period literature, imagines a world where the leading writers of the day are hired to eulogize the London manufacturer of 'blacking', i.e. boot polish, Robert Warren, who ran the most visible commercial advertising campaigns of the early nineteenth century and whose 'puffs' often employed jocular doggerel verse. Coleridge, Hunt, Moore, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, and - the biters bit - Byron and Hogg are all portrayed as paid purveyors of advertising copy. The work of a precocious twenty-four year old London journalist, Warreniana offers a series of agile and vivacious parodies of the manner of a wide range of contemporary writing: poetry, essays, literary and political journalism, historiography, sermons, parliamentary reports and scholarship. Appreciation of Warreniana has hitherto been hampered by its comic dependence upon a knowledge of a series of now forgotten advertisements. This edition sets Deacon's unjustly neglected masterpiece in its proper contexts (early nineteenth century commercial advertising, literary parody and advertising parody) and provides the extensive annotation appropriate to its highly allusive manner, enabling the modern reader to appreciate the full significance of Deacon's achievement. This is the first publication of the book since 1851.
Volume 5
P G Patmore, Rejected Articles (1826): Echoing on the title of James and Horace Smith's enormously successful Rejected Addresses (1812), P G Patmore's Rejected Articles masquerades as a collection of contributions discarded from the most notable periodicals of the day (Blackwood's, the Edinburgh Review, the New Monthly, Cobbett's Register), thus enabling him to imitate the style of some of the most notable contributing essayists: Cobbett, Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, Jeffrey and Wilson amongst them. The author's own 1854 description of his work captures its manner well: `A jeu-d'esprit of mine, which aimed at being, to the prose literature of the day, something like what the Rejected Addresses was to the poetry, - with this marked difference, however, that my imitations [sought] to re-produce ... rather than to ridicule, the respective qualities and styles of the writers imitated; merely ... pushing their peculiarities to the verge of what the truth permitted'. This imitative methodology, which appears to have more in common with eighteenth century techniques than much Romantic parody, is acknowledged in the title Patmore uses from his third edition (1834) onwards: Imitations of Celebrated Authors. Here however 'imitations' have much to say about their 'originals'. Patmore's imitations, especially those of his friends Lamb and Hazlitt, are subtle, well-achieved and critically illuminating. Not republished since 1844, this is the first scholarly edition of Patmore's valuable collection.
Reviews
‘I am sure [these volumes] will be enthusiastically welcomed by armchair readers and research scholars alike.’
- Gregory Dart, British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin
'This set is a must-have for any serious student of the Romantic period. That Graeme Stones and John Strachan should have compiled such a discriminating collection of parodies of the Romantic period is remarkable enough given the absence of any comprehensive bibliography to the material they have edited; that they have subjected it to such thorough-going scholarly scrutiny is a triumph.'
- Duncan Wu, Charles Lamb Bulletin