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5559 Pindar Article No.4 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. 1 eBLJ 2002,Article 4 England’s Populist Pindars 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’.
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