England’s Populist Pindars H. J. Jackson
he British Library recognizes thirty Pindars, the most productive of them being the poet of notorious lyric complexity whose works in Greek and in translation fill Talmost fifteen columns in the latest printed catalogue, with an additional seven columns or so of secondary studies. The other Pindars, all native English speakers and virtually all pseudonymous, occupy twenty-one columns. Of these only one, Peter Pindar, with twelve columns, comes close to matching his great role model in the public record, and his name is as obscure now as the real Pindar’s is illustrious. But this Peter Pindar (whom we can think of as Peter the Great to differentiate him from the others) was the forefather of several generations of little Peters, Pauls, Pollys and Peregrines, and the Pindar phenomenon deserves further study for all sorts of historical and cultural reasons. In real life Peter the Great was John Wolcot (1738-1819), a physician with literary and artistic interests. In 1782 his Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians was an instant success; he had found his niche. For the next twenty years he kept up a steady flow of entertaining satires, mostly aimed at the King and the royal family, with digressive sorties against other well-known figures — James Boswell, Sir Joseph Banks, Tom Paine, Hannah More. The authorship of these works was an open secret. In the golden age of English caricature that we now associate with figures like Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Wolcot was a celebrity because, like them, he made comic capital of the news of the day.1 If his work is now practically lost to sight, it may be because although like theirs it was topical and immediately accessible at the time, unlike theirs it no longer appears to be worth the trouble of decoding. Political and literary history both turned against the English Pindars, who wrote on frivolous topics with suspicious fluency. In a period rocked by constitutional crises, fears of revolution, and the hardships of protracted war, the historians might ask, who would want to read the mock-heroic Lousiad, in five cantos (1785-95), which is about the turmoil caused in the palace kitchens when a louse turned up on the King’s dinner-plate? Well, the British public did. Wolcot’s poems were typically published in quarto, on good paper with large type and wide margins, and cost from one to three shillings depending on their length, which ranged from about twelve pages to about fifty.They were not cheap. Some of them came out in parts at lower prices, however, and of course the poems were quickly pirated. A ‘town eclogue’ about the competing biographers of Samuel Johnson, Bozzy and Piozzi (1786), for instance, saw ten quarto editions in two years; in the same period octavo versions were printed in Dublin. Collected editions in cheaper formats began to emerge as early as 1788 and continued to appear steadily throughout the nineties. Wolcot’s usual publisher, John Walker, issued his own solid octavo editions of the collected works in 1794-6, 1809 and 1812, and an edition in sixteenmo in 1816. There were several more after Wolcot’s death. The point is that Peter Pindar was a household name for the whole of the Romantic period. Since this article is not primarily about him but about the effect he had, I shall only briefly indicate the reasons for his contemporary appeal and show what we may have lost by ignoring him, before going on to consider some of the consequences of Wolcot’s popularity.
1 Rowlandson was a close friend of Wolcot and illustrated some of the poems.
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In the course of his career Wolcot wrote on a variety of topics and in a remarkable array of verse forms — odes, ballads, epigrams, heroic couplets, songs, verse epistles, and even mixed prose and verse. The constants — the formula that his readers could rely on — were his ready gaiety and good humour, conveyed through the persona of the irreverent Peter. He wrote, for example, A Poetical, Serious, and Possibly Impertinent, Epistle to the Pope. Also a Pair of Odes to His Holiness, on His Keeping a Disorderly House; with a pretty little Ode to Innocence. The satire is genial, not savage; the narrator is amused by folly and absurdity, not moved to orchestrate a change in the order of things. The King himself, Wolcot’s favourite target, was said to have been one of his regular readers, and the Prince of Wales was always sent proof copies.2 Wolcot’s style is fresh and demotic, as witness the first two stanzas of ‘John and Joan,A Tale’, from An Ode to the Livery of London (1797):
‘Hail, wedded Love!’ The Bard thy beauty hails; Though mix’d, at times, with cock and hen-like sparrings: But calms are very pleasant after gales, And dove-like peace much sweeter after warrings.
I’ve written (I forget the page indeed; But folks may find it, if they choose to read) That marriage is too sweet without some sour: Var iety oft recommends a flow’r.
If these lines sound like Byron it is hardly surprising, given the prominence of Peter Pindar when Byron was growing up.Wolcot attuned a mass audience to these relaxed, confiding tones. As the topics and personalities of his day faded from view,Wolcot’s poems became less readily comprehensible and so less entertaining, until eventually they lost popular support. The last collected edition of his works was published in 1856; Wolcot does not register in the academically approved literary canon today. And yet it is not quite fair to say that he has been ignored by modern scholarship. Though his contemporary reputation is not reflected now in standard literary histories and anthologies, his verses are occasionally quoted as an expression of general feeling, and surveys of the literary satire of the period acknowledge him in a paragraph or so. He is given the equivalent of a chapter in two very good specialist studies, Thomas Lockwood’s Post-Augustan Satire (Seattle, 1979) and Gary Dyer’s British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789-1832 (Cambridge, 1997). Within the last fifty years there have also been devoted to him one biography, two critical studies, one slim volume of selections, and one scholarly article in a literary journal.3 To say that the Pindars who followed have been ignored, however, is an understatement: they have been practically expunged from history. Wolcot’s literary production slowed down after 1800 as his health declined. All along there had been imitators, Polly Pindar with her Mousiad in 1787, for example; but in the last years of Wolcot’s life, when he became virtually blind, pretenders rushed to fill the gap,
2 DNB; also Tom Girtin, Doctor with Two Aunts:A Biography of Peter Pindar (London, 1959), p. 239. 3 James Sutherland writes approvingly of Wolcot’s ‘sense of humour’ in English Satire (Cambridge, 1958), p. 66, but Howard Weinbrot disparages his ‘one-note version of satire’ in contrast to the tradition of Pope, in Eighteenth-Century Satire (Cambridge, 1988), p. 198. The biography is Tom Girtin’s Doctor with Two Aunts; the critical studies are Grzegorz Sinko’s John Wolcot and His School (Wroclaw, 1962) and Robert L. Vales’s Peter Pindar (New York,1973); the selection is Paul Zall’s Peter Pindar’s Poems (Bath, 1972); and the article is Jeanne Griggs’s ‘Self-Praise and the Ironic Personal Panegyric of Peter Pindar’ in The Age of Johnson, viii (1997), pp. 223-54. Vales calls Wolcot ‘the most important satirist between Jonathan Swift and Lord Byron’ (p. [i]).
2 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars adopting his name or something very close to it, to such an extent that there is real confusion about who wrote what.4 The period of the Regency, from 1811 to 1820, provided especially strong incentives to satirists. Not only did the flagrant high living, debts, gambling, bigamy, and adulteries of the Prince Regent give them more scope than his father’s more lovable eccentricities had done, but the behaviour of nearly all the eleven adult children of George III was such as to put what we now refer to as ‘the younger generation of royals’ deep into the shade. The Duke of York was investigated for involvement in his mistress’s sale of military commissions; the Duke of Clarence, later William IV, had ten children by his mistress Dorothea Jordan; the unmarried Princess Sophia had an illegitimate child, probably by an elderly equerry; the relatively innocuous Duke of Sussex contracted a marriage which was promptly declared null and void; and the Duke of Cumberland was suspected of having murdered his valet, not to mention of having committed incest with one of his sisters.5 The nation had a constant supply of scandal from these wayward princes. Therefore it is not surprising that another ‘Peter Pindar’ almost as prolific as the first was active from 1813 to 1821. This second Peter is generally identified as C. F.Lawler, responsible for about fifty titles, for example The R---l [i.e. Royal] Runaway (1813), Bonaparte in Paris (1815), The Cork Rump (1815), More R---l Coupling (1816), The Disappointed Duke (1818). But there were also in that period ‘Peter Pindar the Elder’ and ‘The Real Peter Pindar,’either of whom might have been Wolcot or Lawler or a third party; ‘P--- P---, Poet Laureat’; ‘Peter Pindar Junior’, a pseudonym thought to have been used by both John Agg and George Daniel, and perhaps by someone else unknown; ‘Peter Pindar Minimus’; and ‘Peter Pindar the Younger’. The labours of this lively group of writers are well illustrated by a thirteen-volume set labelled ‘Pindaric Poems’ in the British Library — shelfmark C.131.d.2-14. The Library has never catalogued the collection as a collection, simply recording the existence of each of the poems it contains, but it was acquired in that form and it preserves both the general title and the manuscript tables of contents given by the original owner. Sinko made use of it in his chapter on Wolcot’s followers, whom he calls ‘The Pindaric Brood’. Its value as a collection easily outweighs the sum of the value of the poems it contains. These thirteen volumes bring together 140 poems published between 1809 and 1821, many of them anonymous (some of the later ones are by William Hone, whose name appears as publisher); fifty-one by ‘Peter Pindar’, i.e. possibly Lawler; and the rest attributed to seventeen other named authors, generally under pseudonyms, either one of the Pindar variants or something transparently false such as Syntax Sidrophel, Humphrey Hedgehog, and Zachary Zealoushead.6 They are arranged in roughly chronological order. The news and rumour of the day supplied subjects to choose from, so these come and go, with longish spells of sustained attention to a few events that attracted a lot of public attention, notably
4 The most complete record is found under ‘Pindar’ in J. R. de J. Jackson, Annals of English Verse 1770-1835 (New York,1985). Sinko (cited n. 3) discusses the problem in one chapter of his book without doing much more than revealing the limitations and errors of the bibliographies of pseudonymous literature that were available at the time. 5 These facts are in the realm of common knowledge, but for details see J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (London, 1956); Christopher Hibbert, George III:A Personal History (London, 1998); and E.A. Smith, George IV (New Haven, 1999). In a sentence that epitomizes the moral climate of the day, Smith suggests that ‘Cumberland’s confession [to the murder], if it was ever made at all, may have been the result of a mind under stress when the Queen refused to receive his bride, whom he married in 1815, on the grounds that she had broken off a former engagement to his brother Adolphus after she had become pregnant by the Prince of Solms-Braunfels’ (p. 130). 6 Two interesting exceptions are poems published under their authors’ real names: Robert Southey’s Wat Tyler (1817), an unauthorized and very embarrassing publication for the Poet Laureate; and John Baker’s serious defence of the Church, The Christian House, Built by Truth on a Rock (1820), in response to a spate of houses- that-Jack-built by the radicals.
3 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars the Jubilee of 1814 with its public festivities; royal weddings and honeymoons; and the sensational trial of Queen Caroline in the House of Lords in 1820. A few simple metaphors dominate the field, each in turn: for example, Peter Pindar Junior’s allegory of the court as a chicken farm (The R---l Brood; or, An Illustrious Hen and her Pretty Chickens, 1813) was adopted by several of his rivals, as was Hone’s parody of ‘The House that Jack Built’ (The Political House that Jack Built, 1819, with illustrations by Cruikshank). There is a run of poems about blockheads, a series of alphabets (‘A is for ...’), and a sequence about stripes, the last stemming from P--- P---’s (George Daniel’s) R---l Stripes of 1812 which had the distinction of being suppressed before publication.7 As a set, these poems give off a wonderful sense of street life: you can imagine them turning up day by day, picking up, playing with, and interpreting the news. Their features vary from publisher to publisher and over time, as the presses experimented with new marketing devices, but as a general rule the front page, which in some cases must have doubled as an advertising poster (fig. 1), has a racy title followed by a provocative subtitle or dedication, as in the case of Peter Pindar Junior’s John Bull as He Was, Is, and Ought to Be, addressed, (without permission,) to His R---- H------the P------R-----’s State Physicians, who are most earnestly recommended to refrain from Physicking and Bleeding, beyond endurance, Poor John and his Poverty-Struck Family (1817). Roger Hunter’s pseudonymous (for rogering and hunting) A Peep into the Cottage at Windsor (1820) is ‘Dedicated, with deep humility and profound respect, to all the noble and illustrious c-ck-lds in the House of Peers’. After title and subtitle there is often a sample of a couple of stanzas from the poem. John Fairburn, for a while, used shock headlines as well (‘Wooing!! and Cooing!!’ for The R---l Courtship of 1816, closely followed by ‘Wedding! and Bedding!’ for The R---l Nuptials!!): these can cause confusion when they are reported as titles because they appear first on the page (fig. 2). Once you go beyond the title page, you find that like Wolcot’s, these second- generation Pindaric Poems are various in form, employing different kinds of verse as well as parodies of dramatic and prose genres (tragedy, letters, trials, etc.); but once again the net result is a reliably agreeable combination of narrative, dialogue, and sly commentary. Here are the verses that introduce the Prince Regent as a proud rooster like Chaucer’s Chaunticleer in The R---l Brood:
The foremost of the r---l brood, Who broke his shell, and cried for food, Turn’d out a COCK of manners rare, A fav’rite with the feather’d fair.
For them, he crow’d at early morn, And cull’d the choicest grains of corn; For them, he trimm’d his glossy beak, And kept his feathers smooth and sleek.
They figur’d in his nightly dream, Their beauties were his daily theme; He strutted o’er the farm with pride, And numbers cackl’d by his side.
But, though his love was sought by all, Game, dunghill, bantam, squab, and tall, Among the whole, not one in ten, Could please him like a tough old Hen.
7 There seems no reason to doubt Daniel’s account — given in a manuscript note to Daniel’s own copy of the poem, now in the British Library, shelfmark 11641.cc.31. — of the Regent’s only half-successful attempt to suppress this poem by buying up the copyright and the printed stock. It told the story of the Regent’s horse- whipping at the hands of Lord Yarmouth. A few copies escaped and manuscript versions commanded high prices.
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Fig. 1. Advertisement for The R---l Fowls,appearing at the end of A Peep at the P*v****n (1820), both published by Effingham Wilson: C.131.d.12.(9)
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Fig. 2. Title-page of The Crown Jewels (1815), published by John Fairburn: C.131.d.5.(5)
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The fun in this comes partly from the witty transformation of the Regent’s court into a barnyard (his father had long been Farmer George, so this was not a strikingly original idea but a variation on a comfortable old joke) and partly from the reader’s complicity with the author in translating the allegory back again. The foremost chick is the eldest son — a cock (with the traditional double meaning highlighted by small caps so that the point could not be missed), therefore a womanizer: grains of corn, costly presents; glossy beak and smooth feathers, fine clothes. How far do the correspondences extend? Generally the allusions are easy to understand, but there must have been some more recondite references for readers to puzzle and talk over. Do the different kinds of hen stand for particular ladies of the court? Who is the tough old hen? The copy of The R---l Brood in the Pindaric set claims to be the fifteenth edition, and it is easy to understand the saleability of this particular poem. But it is the context established by the presence of other works of the same kind in one collection that enables us to grasp what was going on in the gutter-press branch of Regency print culture. From the scholar’s point of view this collection is potentially a rich resource for the history of publishing. Though it represents barely a decade’s work, that decade was a time of great challenge to the trade. On the one hand, the rapid expansion of the market meant that fortunes might be made; on the other, freedom of the press was contentious and the authorities fitfully cracked down with prosecutions for libel. Presses rose and fell, as the title- pages of the Pindaric Poems suggest, with fly-by-night firms contributing only a poem or two before they perished.The regularly recurring names include John Fairburn, Effingham Wilson, James Johnston, Dean and Munday,William Hone, and William Wright, some of whom we think of now as publishers and booksellers, others as print-sellers. Distinctions between one role and the other were not so clear-cut at the time. 8 ‘Peter Pindar’ published most often with Fairburn, but also with Wilson, Johnston, and Fores: what does that say about their business relationships with him, and with one another? Was ‘Peter Pindar’ an individual or a collective? The publishers’ advertisements look as though they might make it possible to sort out who was responsible for what, but the comparison has yet to be done systematically and it is mildly worrying to see The R---l Brood, which was published as by Peter Pindar Junior, included in Fairburn’s list of ‘Poems by Peter Pindar, Esq.’at the end of The Temple Knock’d Down (1814). The advertisements in the Pindaric Poems constitute in their own right an interesting record of the publisher’s business in Regency London. Fifty-one poems include pages of advertising. Most commonly they promote poems by the same author, as in the case of the list at the end of The Cork Rump, or Queen and Maids of Honour, of 1815 (fig. 3).This one includes titles that were the property of more than one press, demonstrating co-operation among the publishers. It is also noteworthy in offering the Pindars as suitable for collecting — as Wolcot had been — and thereby suggesting that although their topics were transitory, the pamphlets themselves were not regarded as ephemera. Otherwise, the advertisements list works of the same kind and/or by the same publisher. The poems were not necessarily associated only with other poems, but also with comic novels and gossip magazines. During the Queen’s trial in 1820, The Green Bag carried advertisements for an eclectic set of its publisher’s patriotic products: memoirs of the Queen, histories of the reign of George III, travel guides for London and the rest of the country,and an edition of Shakespeare. Thomas Dolby at the same time was offering a parliamentary register and verbatim transcripts of the trial. Occasionally, the advertisements disclose other business interests. The Rival Chiefs (1821)
8 Johnston, for example, is not included in either William B.Todd’s Directory of Printers and Others in Allied Trades: London and Vicinity 1800-1840 (London, 1972) or Philip A. H. Brown’s London Publishers and Printers, c. 1800- 1870 (London, 1982), but he does appear in the index of printsellers and publishers in M. Dorothy George’s Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires ... Volume 9 (London, 1978).
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Fig. 3. Publisher’s advertisement from The Cork Rump, or Queen and Maids of Honour (1815): C.131.d.4.(9)
8 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars promotes the publisher’s network for the distribution of newspapers; The Queen in the Moon (1820) recommends its owner’s (Grove’s) ‘Dramatic Repository, and Public Library’; and The Disappointed Duke (1818), printed by the Aggs and published by Johnston, advertises books on how to make ‘liquid blacking’ and ‘fulminating objects, which explode by being set on fire’. With this substantial but manageable collection some of the most significant developments in publishing in the period are clearly visible. The prices of the poems, for instance, at first seem to have been stable and consistent with the prices of the era of Peter the Great, the majority of the poems being offered (according to their title-pages) for between one and two shillings; but then readers did not get as much for their money with the octavo formats and inferior paper of the second generation of Pindars. Eventually prices came down. In 1817 Fairburn was already selling Peter Porcupine’s Pop-Gun Plot for sixpence and the anonymous My Lady’s Shag Dog; or,The Biter Bit!! for fourpence; by 1820 one shilling was the standard price. In 1819 William Hone was able to combine lower prices with the pioneering device — copied promptly by his rivals — of incorporating woodcuts in the body of the text.9 Ultimately, however, Hone’s ‘mass-circulation radical pamphlets with caricature illustrations’, as Diana Donald calls them, spelled ‘the end of the Georgian era of satire’.10 The end, therefore, as well as the beginning of this distinctive Regency genre, the verbal equivalent of the famous prints, is plain to see in the British Library collection. C.131.d.2-14 is not the only extant collection of works of this type, and though it is larger than others it is not comprehensive. What sets it apart from the others (in the British Library, G.18980-18983, 8135.bb.1-4, and 1466.h.52) is the fact that it is extensively annotated, and by a contemporary.11 Every volume, almost every poem, contains this reader’s notes, all in the same small, neat, eminently legible hand (see fig. 4 and the note ‘a True tale’ in fig. 2). Unluckily there is no ownership inscription or similar cast-iron evidence of the identity of the person who made such a significant investment of time and attention. To save circumlocution I am going to assume that it was a man and call him AA, Anonymous Annotator. AA’s constant practice was to write his notes in pencil, either directly filling in the blanks in the text like letters in a crossword puzzle or introducing footnotes with cues under or over the relevant word, or at the end of a line. At a certain point, presumably when he had decided that the collection was complete and that his notes represented his final thoughts on the subject, he started tracing over all the notes in ink; but this process extends only to the fourth volume, and even in those first four some notes — generally the filled-in names — remain in pencil. I have not read all the notes but can offer the following general description. The majority of them briefly identify characters and incidents alluded to in the poems. AA does not write as an insider with specially privileged knowledge either of current events or of the authors of the poems, merely as a regular follower of the press. And yet the information he provides could be valuable, given the topical and at the same time deliberately evasive character of the satires. In The R---l Brood, for example, he identifies the ‘ferocious cock’ involved in a midnight escapade as the Duke of Cumberland, and ‘-----’ who fell on that occasion as
9 In an outstanding study of the work of Hone and Cruikshank in the context of the popular press, Marcus Wood suggests that Hone’s technique was based on and adapted from children’s books produced in 1819 by John Harris: Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790-1822 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 222-4. 10 Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Age of George III (New Haven, 1996), pp. 142 and 21. Wood concurs:‘Within four years of the appearance of The Political House this type of illustrated pamphlet satire had virtually disappeared’ (op. cit., p. 270). 11 Be warned: although the online catalogue appears to describe some of the other copies of these poems as annotated, they are not. The error arises from a cataloguing shortcut. The older printed catalogue is more reliable.
9 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars his valet: ‘Selis was the Valet of His Royal Highness by whose blows from a drawn Sword in the Middle of the Night, His Highness was severely wounded, particularly on the Head, it was some time before His Grace recovered. In a few days after the transaction Selis destroyed himself’ (fig. 4).12 A passing reference to a ‘wond’rous match of walking’ stopped by constables, in The Crown Jewels, is explained thus:‘George Wilson, started on Blackheath to walk one thousand Miles in Twenty days; The Magistrates of Greenwich interferred [sic] and stopped him, after having accomplished 751 Miles within his time, with every prospect of succeeding.’ An incident discreditable to the Regent is obscurely hinted at by italics in The R----t’s Bomb (1816), but then convincingly elucidated by AA. This is a stanza imagining the Prince’s own words:
It can’t, — ’tis matchless bold I’ll say, Although I found the other day, My match in that curs’d brimstone rover, I dignified by riding over.
Fig. 4. Annotations at the base of C.131.d.2.(1), p. 19 AA comments, ‘Alluding to a poor Match Girl — who was run over by the Prince’s Carriage near Manchester Square — on his way to visit the Marchioness of Hertford.’13 The credibility of AA as a contemporary interpreter is enhanced, to my mind, by his occasionally confessing that he does not understand a reference. In The R----t’s Fair, for example, he is stumped by the ‘Twin Bulls’ associated with the King’s Bench prison:‘Cannot trace the allusion.’14 Or, turning to The R---l Brood again, he is unable to identify ‘the wisest’ chick:‘Is the Duke of Kent or Cambridge alluded to here? probably it is the Duke of Sussex who of late has spoken a great deal in the House of Peers’ (fig. 4).15 This last little puzzle raises another one for us. What does ‘of late’ mean, some time shortly before 1813 when
12 C.131.d.2.(1), p. 19. Selis in fact committed suicide immediately after his attack on the Duke. In a note to R---l Disaster; or, Dangers of a Q---n (1813), pp. 20-1, AA gives more details and expresses an opinion about the affair (in which the Duke was eventually exonerated): Selis ‘actually secreted himself in the Water Closet of the apartment, and in the night seized the Duke when asleep and inflicted many deep cuts in the head, but His Grace being the most powerful of the two, overcame him. ... Many scurrilous poems have been published, much to the prejudice of the Duke, but without any truth — ’. 13 C.131.d.6.(10), p. 7. 14 C.131.d.3.(2), p. 23. 15 C.131.d.2.(1), p. 19.
10 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars the poem first appeared, or a decade or more later? It quickly becomes clear that AA was aware of the transitoriness of the subjects of the poems he was annotating and that he wrote in order to slow down the process of loss. His interest, in other words, was historical. (It was also bibliographical: he takes pride in owning copies of poems that are hard to find, like the suppressed R---l Stripes.) So is it possible that these notes are in fact not contemporary, but are the work of an antiquary writing some decades after the satires were fresh? Internal evidence indicates that the notes were written between 1816 and some time after 1842, most of them probably between 1819 and 1821. Every once in a while AA dates a note. The earliest I have found thus dated are from 1816, in poems published in 1814 and 1816.16 There is a little spate of notes dated September-October 1819 in copies of poems published in 1816.17 In R---l Disaster (1813), p. 21, he glosses the name Hatfield as ‘Now in Bedlam (June 1821) for firing a Pistol at George the Third from the Pit of Drury-Lane Theatre (August) 1800.’ The latest note that I have encountered is one containing an allusion to George Daniel’s Merrie England in the Olden Time, which was not published until 1842.18 So it appears that AA was busy with his collection both while the satires were current and for many years afterward; what began as an elucidation of new literature, possibly produced for a friend less able to keep up with the rumours and concerns of the town, became an exercise in historical exegesis.19 Besides the details of current events, AA’s annotation occasionally turns to the epiphenomenon of Peter Pindar and the role of the press. When Princess Charlotte married Prince Leopold of Coburg in 1816, for instance, she released a flood of Pindaric eloquence. In The Co----gh Honey-moon, ‘The Real Peter Pindar’ felt obliged to protest against an imposter:
’Twill well conclude the ‘Wooing, Cooing,’ And eke the ‘Bedding’ of his doing, Which have received such approbation, And such support throughout the nation.
Besides, in justice to himself, (But too much trampled on, poor elf,) Must Peter sing, or honors yield; For an usurper’s in the field.
AA explains that a ‘Poem on the present subject appeared about the time, written by some unknown hand — but styled himself Peter Pindar the Elder — it was so extremely indelicate, written in such filthy language that the Author was obliged to check its circulation — a very few copies were disposed of — ’. The filthy poem was The R---l Honey-moon, of which unfortunately AA was able to secure only a copy of the revised second edition; in it he wrote,‘The Irish Edition was soon recalled — as stated in a Note in the preceding Poem [as they are bound up], as being too obscene in the diction — ’.20 The British Library does not possess a copy of the first edition but it would be interesting to compare the two editions and work out where it was that the reckless publishers of that
16 C.131.d.4.(5), pp. 9, 16; C.131.d.6.(1), p. 6. 17 E.g. C.131.d.7.(1), p. 23, and (7), p. x. 18 C.131.d.2.(4), title-page verso. 19 I have little basis for this speculation about the motives of AA so far, but at one point he does seem to address another reader, explaining a reference to Henry Hase by saying, ‘Look at a Bank Note (if you have one), 1816’: C.131.d.6.(1), p. 6. 20 C.131.d.6.(4), p. 5, and C.131.d.6.(5), title-page.
11 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars day drew the delicacy line. Though it is a small point, this note explaining the circumstances that dictated the second edition (and the fact that the first was Irish) stands for many notes in the collection that offer snippets of information not available elsewhere. As an instance of the character and merit of the Pindaric Poems we can take any title, even choosing at random. In 1814 John Fairburn brought out The Temple Knock’d Down; or, R---l Auction!! The Last Lay of the Jubilee. By Peter Pindar, Esq. Author of the R---- t’s Fleet, the R---l Runaway, R----t’s Fair, P----e’s Jubilee, Eldest Chick of the R---l Brood, &c. &c. The hype on the title page establishes the author’s credentials and indicates that the work is one of a series. Most of these poems came out in the same year; all without exception deal with the continuing saga of the royal family. The Eldest Chick is about the Prince Regent; the Runaway treats of his daughter Charlotte’s attempt to leave his house and go to her mother; the Fleet, the Fair,and the Jubilee are all concerned with a high point in the Regent’s popularity when he sponsored public festivities in the Royal Parks to celebrate naval and military victories, the coming of peace, and the centenary of Hanoverian rule (fig. 5). All these events were widely publicized: like the caricaturists, the poets found their materials ready made in the newspapers.21 What they were able to do that the newspapers and prints did not do, however, was link up events occurring over time (as opposed to reporting what happened yesterday) in a proto-historical narrative. As they did that, they also communicated to their readers an attitude that seemed to be appropriate to the story — at this stage, before Peterloo and William Hone, a sort of general indulgent amusement. The Temple Knock’d Down puts together a series of events each of which had been reported in isolation in the daily press. For the great holiday of the Jubilee, 1 August, Hyde Park and Green Park were open to everyone; for St James’s Park the entrance fee was a whopping half a guinea. A miniature naval engagement was staged on the Serpentine. In Green Park a ‘Gothic Tower’ shrouded in canvas was magically transformed into a Temple
Fig. 5. John Bull Mad with Joy! Anonymous print published by W.Holland on 1 August 1814, showing the Regent offering John Bull a ‘bill of fare’ for the Jubilee festivities. © Copyright The British Museum
21 In James Gillray:The Art of Caricature (London, 2001), Richard Godfrey and Mark Hallett observe that ‘Gillray, like the other producers of graphic satire in the Georgian period, continually responded not so much to political and social events in themselves, but to their representation in the contemporary press’ (p. 35).
12 eBLJ 2002, No. 4 England’s Populist Pindars of Concord, with illuminations and fireworks to follow (fig. 6). A fair with Punch and Judy, swings and roundabouts, a raree show, and refreshment booths mushroomed in Hyde Park and was allowed to remain for over a week. But like many parties this one had its downside. A charming Chinese Pagoda in St James’s Park burned down to its bottom storey, killing two people. A young lady broke her leg on the swings. The fair had to be dispersed by constables in the end. And the wooden Temple was at risk on the night of 12 August, the Regent’s birthday, when crowds that had gathered expecting a repeat of the illuminations and fireworks grew angry in their disappointment and tore down fences and sentry-boxes to make fires of their own. (The Times temperately remarked that ‘This was a sad conclusion to the joys of the Grand Jubilee; and might have been averted by a brief indication that the wonders would not be repeated.’)22 Finally the Temple was ignominiously put up for sale at auction after private negotiations for a sale had failed. The sequence of events terminating in the auction of the Temple (newspapers in those days did not usually pronounce on beginnings and endings) is the subject of The Temple Knock’d Down.
Fig. 6. ‘The Revolving Temple of Concord Illuminated’ by J. H. Clark, engraved by M. Dubourg: an illustration from An Historical Memento, published by Edward Orme in 1814 as a souvenir of the celebrations in the Parks: 808.m.7, facing p. 42
Peter Pindar begins the story by recapitulating the delights of the fair:
Old blankets grac’d the verdant trees, And signs of all sorts woo’d the breeze; Great monarchs, gen’rals, every sort, To gether mix’d, as if in sport,
With animals of strange formation, Such as are not in the creation; Kings’ heads — most treasonable show! Were put up there in many a row;
A Regent’s arms you might denote, Stuck fast by some old petticoat; Dukes close to hogs in armour seen, Here a blue boar, and there a queen.
Though these stanzas use juxtaposition to rehearse familiar jokes about the Regent and his brothers, there’s nothing revolutionary about them. When Pindar comes to treat of the
22 Wednesday 15 August 1814, p. 3 col. d.
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London public he is similarly satirical but not unsympathetic. He dramatizes the reactions of the stallkeepers to Lord Sid---th’s order to clear out. (AA fills in the blanks and tells us that Sidmouth was ‘Minister to the Home Department.’)
‘Lord Sid---th orders it you see:’ — ‘But what’s Lord Sid---th, pray, to me? ‘For Sidemouths I nor Widemouths care: — ‘I want mouths to drink up my beer.’
Pindar goes on to describe Princess Charlotte’s regret at missing the fair and imagines her reproach to her father for making a gaudy show of his good fortune even as her mother is driven abroad (‘The Princess of Wales had just left the Kingdom,’ says AA,‘on a tour thro Italy’). There follows a scene of John Bull and his family,seeking fireworks on the Birthday, going from one park to the other, and continuing to hope until after midnight:
‘But where is the illumination?’ Cried disappointed expectation: Said John,‘Don’t judge too fast beforehand, ‘The lights will be of gas I warrant.
‘Gas lights,you know, we never see, ‘Till bursting instantaneously ‘Upon the sight, with brilliant ray ‘They, like the P----e, turn night to day.’
When they realize that there will be no show,they resolve to have ‘fireworks of our own!’ and the poem goes into action mode for the movements of the crowd and of the soldiers who are called out to save the Temple. (The Duke of York turns down the job, preferring to stay with his mistress: ‘Of temples let the care be thine, / My temples I’ll with grapes entwine.’) Then the last half of the poem is devoted to the planning and outcome of the auction, the subject of two brief paragraphs buried in The Times.23 Peter Pindar tells the story of the Temple from start to finish; the Temple has now been saved, but to what end? Peter first voices the common opinion that the sale should never have taken place, that it was undignified to sell off the symbols of national glory; but he does it with ironic exaggeration and with an air of relish that tends to undermine indignation:
The staff, that Britain’s standard bore, For forty shillings sold, no more; May be, — it stings my very soul, Converted to a shaver’s pole!
And VESTALS with their holy oil, — It makes the very blood to boil, May lamps support, — A burning shame! In houses I forbear to name.
23 On 22 September 1814, in an article headed ‘St James’s Park’. The Times reported that the Temple was to be sold and expressed its sense of the impropriety of selling off such objects, designed to celebrate ‘national glory’; the report observes that the Temple had suffered from exposure to the weather over several weeks and quotes the same two lines from Shakespeare about ‘Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay’ that Peter Pindar later used in his poem. An item on the ‘Temple of Concord, in the Green Park’ on 12 October laments the nature and result of the auction, specifying the prices paid for various lots and ending with the fate of the ornamental vestal virgins:‘Seven beautiful vestals, with vases of sacred oil, were disposed of at thirty shillings to two guineas each; the purchasers undertaking to carry them away at their own expense.’
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The Regent bears the blame for letting the sale take place. Pindar imagines an elaborate dialogue between the Prince and his mother Queen Charlotte, who was notorious among the satirists for her stinginess. They meet at Buckingham House one morning (Regent’s time: it’s actually five in the afternoon), he ‘mumbling a tooth-pick all the while.’(AA points out that ‘The Temple could be seen from Buckingham House.’)
Quoth he,‘Yon gloomy sight to see, ‘With dismal thoughts oppresses me: — ‘It shows how all our splendors fade ‘How majesty may be decay’d;
‘The building must be quickly levell’d, ‘At sight of it I’m quite blue devil’d;— ‘I’ll orders instant give to fell it:’ ‘Poh!’ quoth the Q---n,‘you’d better sell it.’
The Prince objects that he has already tried and failed; the Queen suggests an auction.The Prince refuses, anticipating public outrage (‘Faith that would raise a pretty clamour’) and particularly the reaction of ‘that varlet, Peter Pindar’ who is liable to inflame ‘all the low plebeian tribe’ with his satire. But the Queen cites her many years of living with Pindar’s rhymes, first ‘Old WAL--T’ and now his jeering successors, and persuades him to ignore them:‘Let scribbling Pindar rhyme and dash, / But you be wise and touch the cash.’So they call in Creaton (AA confirms the obvious: ‘The auctioneer’s name’) and the Temple is knocked down in lots, at contemptible prices. Pindar concludes:
But in one general calculation, This pride and glory of the nation Produced, however mean it sounds, What think you? just TWO HUNDRED POUNDS.
AA adds some information from another source to put this sum in perspective:‘The Temple was sold by public Auction in lots; and brought no more, than Two Hundred Pounds; although it cost the Country in erecting &c — upwards of 4 Thousand Pounds.’ Perhaps I have vulgar taste but I enjoy this lively narrative and am mildly resentful that nobody told me, when I took the standard course on Romantic Poetry, that such work existed. The Pindaric Poems as a group demonstrate the astonishing popularity of verse at the time, for we see that poets were even brought in to air the news of the day. The English Pindars are accessible, as we say now,and fun to read, but they are also capable of enriching our sense of the environment that produced Shelley and Byron. They complement the work of the graphic artists since they address some of the same themes and issues.24 I mean to bring them into my own classes and to encourage my colleagues in English and History to do so too. But there remain many questions about the whole Pindar industry and I hope someone may do a thorough study of C.131.d.2-14 and answer them. (At the very least, the notes should be transcribed; some of them are already too faint to read.) The most obvious question may be the most difficult. Who was Peter Pindar, after Wolcot?25 At ‘Pindar, Peter’, the catalogues say either ‘see Wolcot, John’ (or Walcot or Wolcott)
24 Dorothy George made this point in the introduction to the volume of Personal and Political Satires covering 1811-19: ‘The relations between literary and graphic satire are exceptionally close and important. This is because of the concerted campaign against the Regent, set on foot in 1812 by his disappointed “Friends”, in newspaper lampoons and squibs and in verses, anonymous and otherwise’ (op. cit., p. xx). 25 Sinko (n. 3) makes a start on this question but his analysis is flawed by his accepting the attributions to Lawler as fact and by his identifying Fairburn as his exclusive publisher.
15 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars or ‘C. F.Lawler?’ Lawler is himself a problem, possibly a red herring. As far as I can make out, the attribution of a large number of the Pindar poems to Lawler is based on a single contemporary reference, A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland,by J. Watkins and F. Shoberl, published in London by Colburn in 1816. Under ‘Lawler, C. F.’ the authors offer no biographical information at all and only one title — Selim, or the Royal Wanderer, an oriental tale (1803). But at ‘Wolcott, John, M.D.’ they make the following claim, noting that Wolcot’s latest publication as Peter Pindar had appeared in 1813:‘Latterly the name of Peter Pindar has been unwarrantably assumed by one Lawler, a poetaster of little or no wit, merely to deceive the public and to bring some profit to the writer and his bookseller.’ If you seek further information from them about Lawler their entry (quoted above) adds a pair of initials to the name, but no particular Pindar poem is identified as his. Since the Dictionary came out in 1816, the year of Princess Charlotte’s marriage, when — as AA observed — some usurper published, initially in Ireland, a Pindar poem that went too far, prompting ‘The Real Peter Pindar’ to bring out his own Co----gh Honey-moon,I am led to wonder whether C. F.Lawler was only the guilty Peter Pindar the Elder. Some authorities claim Lawler for Ireland.26 But that takes us back to the original question,Who was Peter Pindar? Perhaps it should be reframed: who were Peter Pindar? Then, who was reading Peter Pindar during the Regency period? The Regent himself, in the imagined dialogue of The Temple Knock’d Down, assumes that his readership consists of ‘all the low plebeian tribe’; but prices starting at a shilling would have been a considerable burden for working-class readers, if that’s what ‘plebeian’ means, and with Peter turning out several titles a year, the burden would soon become intolerable. The poems can hardly have sold in many copies second-hand because of their topicality; they dated too quickly. Furthermore Peter’s habitual irony may make ‘plebeian’ suspect: if the readers of the Temple really were members of the mob that burnt the fences, they would surely resent being condescended to by the slob of a Regent who appears in the poem, but the narrator’s attitude is consistently detached and playful, not resentful. Perhaps the audience fell between the two extremes of the Regent and John Bull (or liked to think they did). There is furthermore the question of politics. The Pindars were published by the ‘radical’ press and yet histories of the working-class movement do not mention them, I suspect because they are not obviously radical themselves, or not radical enough. They make fun of the Regent and his family, but they do no harm and advocate none. They have no overt political agenda; implicitly,they accept the status quo but enjoy the venting of dissatisfaction through shared laughter. (Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are not radical either.) All that changed with Peterloo and William Hone, which is perhaps why Peter Pindar went quiet and his gentle mode of satire died out, or at least why we do not nowadays hear about him.27 In ‘England in 1819’ Shelley can reflect bitterly, from the safety of exile, upon ‘Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow / Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring,’ but scorn is not the Pindaric tone. I wonder whether it was actually a City crowd or the fashionable West End that was buying up Pindars. The fact that the poems were offered to collectors suggests a leisure class. But this matter, too, depends on a deeper analysis of internal and external evidence than is possible in a preliminary survey like mine. A final problem of identification: who was AA? His notes may be valuable both for what they tell us about the social history and attitudes of the period, and for what they reveal about the interpretative practice of a particular reader, but it would make a difference to us
26 E.g. David J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland (London, 1892-3). 27 Diana Donald points out that the caricaturists of the day are commonly assumed to have been ‘rebellious individualist[s]’ like their modern counterparts the political cartoonists but that that was not usually the case. The same could be said of the Pindars. They express common views, not personal ones, and do not urge a particular political agenda.
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Fig. 7. The hands of F.W.Fairholt and T. Crofton Croker:Add. MS. 38622, f. 53v
17 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars to know who he was. We know that the Pindaric Poems were acquired by the British Museum in 1866 as part of the bequest of a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, F.W. Fairholt, through his executor, C. Roach Smith.28 But Fairholt cannot have been AA because he was born in 1814. He did collect tracts of the period, however, and as an engraver he must have had a special interest in the graphic work of the Regency satirists.29 My guess is that AA was one of Fairholt’s and Roach Smith’s antiquarian colleagues, T. Crofton Croker (1798-1854). The best argument is Croker’s hand, as it appears in a document of 1846 in which he endorses notes by Fairholt (fig. 7).30 Croker was Irish by birth; he made his name as a collector of Irish folklore. One strike against him is that he did not go to live in England until 1818, whereas we know that some of the notes in the poems were written in 1816, but the poems were widely distributed and there is no reason that he should not have started buying them before he left home. Some of the notes display Irish lore, for example a note on the word ‘brogues’ in Stripes for Sinecurists:‘in Ireland mean Shoes; but here in England it has another Sense — Breeches — .’31 (On the other hand, Stripes first appeared in 1816; by the time the note was written AA was evidently in England. Then again we know that the work of annotation went on for many years.) There are difficulties about the attribution of the notes to Croker which need to be cleared up one way or another by closer study of the notes and by further investigation into their provenance. A full analysis of the British Library set would make a manageable dissertation topic or the basis of a book that could place these poems in context, whether that context be social history or a history of the press, a study of the attitudes of the substantial part of the reading public represented by their audience or a more complete account than we have had to date of the turbulent Regency period and the way political and economic forces tried to control the people through the publishers. England’s populist Pindars have been expunged from history. They deserve to be brought back.32
28 Information from the British Library's Archivist, John Hopson, whom I thank for encouragement as well as advice. 29 The Library holds his collection of some quite rare pamphlets of 1820-1 against Queen Caroline, 8135.ccc.29.(1-18). Apart from an explanatory inscription dated 1862, the tracts are unannotated. His collection of works on her side, 8135.bb.1-4, contains MS. tables of contents but the occasional readers’ notes are by previous owners. 30 Add. MS. 38622, f. 53v. 31 C.131.d.7.(1), p. 6. 32 Many thanks to Robin Jackson, Nikki Hessell, Dan White, and Christopher Wright, who read this paper at various stages of development and made constructive contributions to it.
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