5559 Pindar Article No.4

1 eBLJ 2002,Article 4

England’s Populist PindarsH. J. Jackson

The British Library recognizes thirty Pindars, the most productive of them being thepoet of notorious lyric complexity whose works in Greek and in translation fillalmost fifteen columns in the latest printed catalogue, with an additional seven

columns or so of secondary studies. The other Pindars, all native English speakers andvirtually 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 theforefather of several generations of little Peters, Pauls, Pollys and Peregrines, and the Pindarphenomenon 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 andartistic interests. In 1782 his Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians was an instant success; hehad found his niche. For the next twenty years he kept up a steady flow of entertainingsatires, mostly aimed at the King and the royal family, with digressive sorties against otherwell-known figures — James Boswell, Sir Joseph Banks, Tom Paine, Hannah More. Theauthorship of these works was an open secret. In the golden age of English caricature thatwe now associate with figures like Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank, Wolcot was acelebrity because, like them, he made comic capital of the news of the day.1 If his work isnow practically lost to sight, it may be because although like theirs it was topical andimmediately accessible at the time, unlike theirs it no longer appears to be worth the troubleof decoding. Political and literary history both turned against the English Pindars, whowrote on frivolous topics with suspicious fluency. In a period rocked by constitutionalcrises, fears of revolution, and the hardships of protracted war, the historians might ask, whowould want to read the mock-heroic Lousiad, in five cantos (1785-95), which is about theturmoil 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 goodpaper with large type and wide margins, and cost from one to three shillings depending ontheir 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 werequickly 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 sameperiod octavo versions were printed in Dublin. Collected editions in cheaper formats beganto 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 collectedworks in 1794-6, 1809 and 1812, and an edition in sixteenmo in 1816. There were severalmore after Wolcot’s death. The point is that Peter Pindar was a household name for thewhole of the Romantic period. Since this article is not primarily about him but about theeffect he had, I shall only briefly indicate the reasons for his contemporary appeal and showwhat we may have lost by ignoring him, before going on to consider some of theconsequences of Wolcot’s popularity.

1 Rowlandson was a close friend of Wolcot and illustrated some of the poems.

England’s Populist Pindars


In the course of his career Wolcot wrote on a variety of topics and in a remarkable arrayof verse forms — odes, ballads, epigrams, heroic couplets, songs, verse epistles, and evenmixed prose and verse. The constants — the formula that his readers could rely on — werehis 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 aPair of Odes to His Holiness, on His Keeping a Disorderly House; with a pretty little Ode toInnocence. The satire is genial, not savage; the narrator is amused by folly and absurdity, notmoved to orchestrate a change in the order of things. The King himself, Wolcot’s favouritetarget, was said to have been one of his regular readers, and the Prince of Wales was alwayssent 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:Variety oft recommends a flow’r.

If these lines sound like Byron it is hardly surprising, given the prominence of Peter Pindarwhen Byron was growing up.Wolcot attuned a mass audience to these relaxed, confidingtones.

As the topics and personalities of his day faded from view,Wolcot’s poems became lessreadily 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 inthe academically approved literary canon today. And yet it is not quite fair to say that hehas been ignored by modern scholarship. Though his contemporary reputation is notreflected now in standard literary histories and anthologies, his verses are occasionallyquoted as an expression of general feeling, and surveys of the literary satire of the periodacknowledge him in a paragraph or so. He is given the equivalent of a chapter in two verygood specialist studies, Thomas Lockwood’s Post-Augustan Satire (Seattle, 1979) and GaryDyer’s British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789-1832 (Cambridge, 1997). Within the lastfifty years there have also been devoted to him one biography, two critical studies, one slimvolume of selections, and one scholarly article in a literary journal.3 To say that the Pindarswho followed have been ignored, however, is an understatement: they have been practicallyexpunged from history.

Wolcot’s literary production slowed down after 1800 as his health declined. All alongthere had been imitators, Polly Pindar with her Mousiad in 1787, for example; but in the lastyears 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, inEighteenth-Century Satire (Cambridge, 1988), p. 198. The biography is Tom Girtin’s Doctor with Two Aunts; thecritical studies are Grzegorz Sinko’s John Wolcot and His School (Wroclaw, 1962) and Robert L. Vales’s PeterPindar (New York, 1973); the selection is Paul Zall’s Peter Pindar’s Poems (Bath, 1972); and the article is JeanneGriggs’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]).

eBLJ 2002,Article 43


adopting his name or something very close to it, to such an extent that there is realconfusion 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 hisfather’s more lovable eccentricities had done, but the behaviour of nearly all the eleven adultchildren of George III was such as to put what we now refer to as ‘the younger generationof royals’ deep into the shade. The Duke of York was investigated for involvement in hismistress’s sale of military commissions; the Duke of Clarence, later William IV, had tenchildren by his mistress Dorothea Jordan; the unmarried Princess Sophia had an illegitimatechild, probably by an elderly equerry; the relatively innocuous Duke of Sussex contracted amarriage which was promptly declared null and void; and the Duke of Cumberland wassuspected of having murdered his valet, not to mention of having committed incest withone 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 wasactive 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 inthat period ‘Peter Pindar the Elder’ and ‘The Real Peter Pindar,’ either of whom might havebeen Wolcot or Lawler or a third party; ‘P--- P---, Poet Laureat’; ‘Peter Pindar Junior’, apseudonym thought to have been used by both John Agg and George Daniel, and perhapsby someone else unknown; ‘Peter Pindar Minimus’; and ‘Peter Pindar the Younger’. Thelabours 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 nevercatalogued the collection as a collection, simply recording the existence of each of thepoems it contains, but it was acquired in that form and it preserves both the general titleand the manuscript tables of contents given by the original owner. Sinko made use of it inhis chapter on Wolcot’s followers, whom he calls ‘The Pindaric Brood’. Its value as acollection 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 nameappears as publisher); fifty-one by ‘Peter Pindar’, i.e. possibly Lawler; and the rest attributedto seventeen other named authors, generally under pseudonyms, either one of the Pindarvariants or something transparently false such as Syntax Sidrophel, Humphrey Hedgehog,and Zachary Zealoushead.6 They are arranged in roughly chronological order. The newsand rumour of the day supplied subjects to choose from, so these come and go, with longishspells 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 muchmore than revealing the limitations and errors of the bibliographies of pseudonymous literature that wereavailable 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 understress when the Queen refused to receive his bride, whom he married in 1815, on the grounds that she hadbroken off a former engagement to his brother Adolphus after she had become pregnant by the Prince ofSolms-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 seriousdefence 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.

the Jubilee of 1814 with its public festivities; royal weddings and honeymoons; and thesensational trial of Queen Caroline in the House of Lords in 1820.A few simple metaphorsdominate the field, each in turn: for example, Peter Pindar Junior’s allegory of the court asa chicken farm (The R---l Brood; or, An Illustrious Hen and her Pretty Chickens, 1813) wasadopted by several of his rivals, as was Hone’s parody of ‘The House that Jack Built’ (ThePolitical House that Jack Built, 1819, with illustrations by Cruikshank). There is a run ofpoems 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 thedistinction of being suppressed before publication.7

As a set, these poems give off a wonderful sense of street life: you can imagine themturning up day by day, picking up, playing with, and interpreting the news. Their featuresvary from publisher to publisher and over time, as the presses experimented with newmarketing devices, but as a general rule the front page, which in some cases must havedoubled as an advertising poster (fig. 1), has a racy title followed by a provocative subtitle ordedication, 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, whoare most earnestly recommended to refrain from Physicking and Bleeding, beyond endurance, Poor Johnand his Poverty-Struck Family (1817). Roger Hunter’s pseudonymous (for rogering andhunting) A Peep into the Cottage at Windsor (1820) is ‘Dedicated, with deep humility andprofound 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. JohnFairburn, for a while, used shock headlines as well (‘Wooing!! and Cooing!!’ for The R---lCourtship 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 thepage (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 wellas parodies of dramatic and prose genres (tragedy, letters, trials, etc.); but once again the netresult is a reliably agreeable combination of narrative, dialogue, and sly commentary. Hereare the verses that introduce the Prince Regent as a proud rooster like Chaucer’sChaunticleer 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 thepoem, now in the British Library, shelfmark 11641.cc.31. — of the Regent’s only half-successful attempt tosuppress 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.



Fig. 1. Advertisement for The R---l Fowls, appearing at the end of A Peep at theP*v****n (1820), both published by Effingham Wilson: C.131.d.12.(9)



Fig. 2. Title-page of The Crown Jewels (1815), published by John Fairburn: C.131.d.5.(5)

The fun in this comes partly from the witty transformation of the Regent’s court into abarnyard (his father had long been Farmer George, so this was not a strikingly original ideabut a variation on a comfortable old joke) and partly from the reader’s complicity with theauthor 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 notbe missed), therefore a womanizer: grains of corn, costly presents; glossy beak and smoothfeathers, fine clothes. How far do the correspondences extend? Generally the allusions areeasy to understand, but there must have been some more recondite references for readers topuzzle and talk over. Do the different kinds of hen stand for particular ladies of the court?Who is the tough old hen? The copy ofThe R---l Brood in the Pindaric set claims to be thefifteenth edition, and it is easy to understand the saleability of this particular poem. But it isthe context established by the presence of other works of the same kind in one collectionthat enables us to grasp what was going on in the gutter-press branch of Regency printculture.

From the scholar’s point of view this collection is potentially a rich resource for thehistory of publishing. Though it represents barely a decade’s work, that decade was a timeof great challenge to the trade. On the one hand, the rapid expansion of the market meantthat fortunes might be made; on the other, freedom of the press was contentious and theauthorities 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 ortwo before they perished.The regularly recurring names include John Fairburn, EffinghamWilson, James Johnston, Dean and Munday, William Hone, and William Wright, some ofwhom we think of now as publishers and booksellers, others as print-sellers. Distinctionsbetween one role and the other were not so clear-cut at the time. 8 ‘Peter Pindar’ publishedmost often with Fairburn, but also with Wilson, Johnston, and Fores: what does that sayabout their business relationships with him, and with one another? Was ‘Peter Pindar’ anindividual or a collective? The publishers’ advertisements look as though they might makeit possible to sort out who was responsible for what, but the comparison has yet to be donesystematically and it is mildly worrying to see The R---l Brood, which was published as byPeter Pindar Junior, included in Fairburn’s list of ‘Poems by Peter Pindar, Esq.’ at the end ofThe Temple Knock’d Down (1814).

The advertisements in the Pindaric Poems constitute in their own right an interestingrecord of the publisher’s business in Regency London. Fifty-one poems include pages ofadvertising. Most commonly they promote poems by the same author, as in the case of thelist at the end of The Cork Rump, or Queen and Maids of Honour, of 1815 (fig. 3).This oneincludes titles that were the property of more than one press, demonstrating co-operationamong 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 listworks of the same kind and/or by the same publisher. The poems were not necessarilyassociated only with other poems, but also with comic novels and gossip magazines. Duringthe Queen’s trial in 1820, The Green Bag carried advertisements for an eclectic set of itspublisher’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. ThomasDolby at the same time was offering a parliamentary register and verbatim transcripts of thetrial. 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’sCatalogue of Political and Personal Satires ... Volume 9 (London, 1978).



Fig. 3. Publisher’s advertisement from The Cork Rump, or Queen and Maids of Honour (1815):C.131.d.4.(9)

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’; andThe Disappointed Duke (1818), printed by the Aggs and published by Johnston, advertisesbooks on how to make ‘liquid blacking’ and ‘fulminating objects, which explode by beingset on fire’.

With this substantial but manageable collection some of the most significantdevelopments in publishing in the period are clearly visible.The prices of the poems, forinstance, at first seem to have been stable and consistent with the prices of the era of Peterthe Great, the majority of the poems being offered (according to their title-pages) forbetween one and two shillings; but then readers did not get as much for their money withthe octavo formats and inferior paper of the second generation of Pindars. Eventually pricescame down. In 1817 Fairburn was already selling Peter Porcupine’s Pop-Gun Plot forsixpence and the anonymous My Lady’s Shag Dog; or,The Biter Bit!! for fourpence; by 1820one shilling was the standard price. In 1819 William Hone was able to combine lowerprices with the pioneering device — copied promptly by his rivals — of incorporatingwoodcuts in the body of the text.9 Ultimately, however, Hone’s ‘mass-circulation radicalpamphlets with caricature illustrations’, as Diana Donald calls them, spelled ‘the end of theGeorgian era of satire’.10 The end, therefore, as well as the beginning of this distinctiveRegency genre, the verbal equivalent of the famous prints, is plain to see in the BritishLibrary collection.

C.131.d.2-14 is not the only extant collection of works of this type, and though it islarger than others it is not comprehensive. What sets it apart from the others (in the BritishLibrary, G.18980-18983, 8135.bb.1-4, and 1466.h.52) is the fact that it is extensivelyannotated, and by a contemporary.11 Every volume, almost every poem, contains thisreader’s notes, all in the same small, neat, eminently legible hand (see fig. 4 and the note ‘aTrue tale’ in fig. 2). Unluckily there is no ownership inscription or similar cast-ironevidence of the identity of the person who made such a significant investment of time andattention. 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, eitherdirectly filling in the blanks in the text like letters in a crossword puzzle or introducingfootnotes with cues under or over the relevant word, or at the end of a line. At a certainpoint, presumably when he had decided that the collection was complete and that his notesrepresented his final thoughts on the subject, he started tracing over all the notes in ink; butthis 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 majorityof them briefly identify characters and incidents alluded to in the poems. AA does not writeas an insider with specially privileged knowledge either of current events or of the authorsof the poems, merely as a regular follower of the press. And yet the information he providescould be valuable, given the topical and at the same time deliberately evasive character ofthe satires. In The R---l Brood, for example, he identifies the ‘ferocious cock’ involved in amidnight 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, MarcusWood suggests that Hone’s technique was based on and adapted from children’s books produced in 1819 byJohn 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 and21. Wood concurs:‘Within four years of the appearance of The Political House this type of illustrated pamphletsatire 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 asannotated, they are not. The error arises from a cataloguing shortcut.The older printed catalogue is more reliable.

his valet: ‘Selis was the Valet of His Royal Highness by whose blows from a drawn Swordin 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 Selisdestroyed himself ’ (fig. 4).12 A passing reference to a ‘wond’rous match of walking’ stoppedby constables, in The Crown Jewels, is explained thus: ‘George Wilson, started on Blackheathto 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 prospectof succeeding.’ An incident discreditable to the Regent is obscurely hinted at by italics inThe R----t’s Bomb (1816), but then convincingly elucidated by AA. This is a stanzaimagining 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.

AA comments, ‘Alluding to a poor Match Girl — who was run over by the Prince’sCarriage 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 hisoccasionally confessing that he does not understand a reference. In The R----t’s Fair, forexample, he is stumped by the ‘Twin Bulls’ associated with the King’s Bench prison:‘Cannottrace 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 Sussexwho of late has spoken a great deal in the House of Peers’ (fig. 4).15 This last little puzzleraises another one for us. What does ‘of late’ mean, some time shortly before 1813 when



Fig. 4. Annotations at the base of C.131.d.2.(1), p. 19

12 C.131.d.2.(1), p. 19. Selis in fact committed suicide immediately after his attack on the Duke. In a note toR---l Disaster; or, Dangers of a Q---n (1813), pp. 20-1, AA gives more details and expresses an opinion aboutthe affair (in which the Duke was eventually exonerated): Selis ‘actually secreted himself in the Water Closetof 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 beenpublished, 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.

the poem first appeared, or a decade or more later? It quickly becomes clear that AA wasaware of the transitoriness of the subjects of the poems he was annotating and that he wrotein order to slow down the process of loss. His interest, in other words, was historical. (Itwas also bibliographical: he takes pride in owning copies of poems that are hard to find, likethe 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 timeafter 1842, most of them probably between 1819 and 1821. Every once in a while AA datesa note. The earliest I have found thus dated are from 1816, in poems published in 1814 and1816.16 There is a little spate of notes dated September-October 1819 in copies of poemspublished in 1816.17 In R---l Disaster (1813), p. 21, he glosses the name Hatfield as ‘Now inBedlam (June 1821) for firing a Pistol at George the Third from the Pit of Drury-LaneTheatre (August) 1800.’ The latest note that I have encountered is one containing anallusion to George Daniel’s Merrie England in the Olden Time, which was not published until1842.18 So it appears that AA was busy with his collection both while the satires werecurrent 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 thetown, became an exercise in historical exegesis.19

Besides the details of current events, AA’s annotation occasionally turns to theepiphenomenon of Peter Pindar and the role of the press. When Princess Charlotte marriedPrince 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 animposter:

’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 someunknown hand — but styled himself Peter Pindar the Elder — it was so extremelyindelicate, written in such filthy language that the Author was obliged to check itscirculation — a very few copies were disposed of — ’. The filthy poem was The R---lHoney-moon, of which unfortunately AA was able to secure only a copy of the revisedsecond edition; in it he wrote, ‘The Irish Edition was soon recalled — as stated in a Notein 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 interestingto 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.

day drew the delicacy line. Though it is a small point, this note explaining the circumstancesthat dictated the second edition (and the fact that the first was Irish) stands for many notesin 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. Thehype on the title page establishes the author’s credentials and indicates that the work is oneof a series. Most of these poems came out in the same year; all without exception deal withthe continuing saga of the royal family. The Eldest Chick is about the Prince Regent; theRunaway 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’spopularity when he sponsored public festivities in the Royal Parks to celebrate naval andmilitary victories, the coming of peace, and the centenary of Hanoverian rule (fig. 5). Allthese events were widely publicized: like the caricaturists, the poets found their materialsready made in the newspapers.21 What they were able to do that the newspapers and printsdid not do, however, was link up events occurring over time (as opposed to reporting whathappened yesterday) in a proto-historical narrative. As they did that, they alsocommunicated to their readers an attitude that seemed to be appropriate to the story — atthis 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 beenreported in isolation in the daily press. For the great holiday of the Jubilee, 1 August, HydePark and Green Park were open to everyone; for St James’s Park the entrance fee was awhopping half a guinea. A miniature naval engagement was staged on the Serpentine. InGreen Park a ‘Gothic Tower’ shrouded in canvas was magically transformed into a Temple


12 eBLJ 2002, No. 4

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 topolitical and social events in themselves, but to their representation in the contemporary press’ (p. 35).

Fig. 5. John Bull Mad with Joy! Anonymous print published by W. Holland on 1 August 1814, showing theRegent offering John Bull a ‘bill of fare’ for the Jubilee festivities. © Copyright The British Museum

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 Parkand 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, killingtwo people. A young lady broke her leg on the swings. The fair had to be dispersed byconstables in the end. And the wooden Temple was at risk on the night of 12 August, theRegent’s birthday, when crowds that had gathered expecting a repeat of the illuminationsand fireworks grew angry in their disappointment and tore down fences and sentry-boxesto make fires of their own. (The Times temperately remarked that ‘This was a sad conclusionto the joys of the Grand Jubilee; and might have been averted by a brief indication that thewonders would not be repeated.’)22 Finally the Temple was ignominiously put up for saleat auction after private negotiations for a sale had failed. The sequence of eventsterminating in the auction of the Temple (newspapers in those days did not usuallypronounce on beginnings and endings) is the subject of The Temple Knock’d Down.

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,Together 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 hisbrothers, there’s nothing revolutionary about them. When Pindar comes to treat of the



Fig. 6. ‘The Revolving Temple of Concord Illuminated’ by J. H. Clark, engraved by M. Dubourg: anillustration from An Historical Memento, published by Edward Orme in 1814 as a souvenir of the celebrationsin the Parks: 808.m.7, facing p. 42

22 Wednesday 15 August 1814, p. 3 col. d.

London public he is similarly satirical but not unsympathetic. He dramatizes the reactionsof the stallkeepers to Lord Sid---th’s order to clear out. (AA fills in the blanks and tells usthat 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 herreproach to her father for making a gaudy show of his good fortune even as her mother isdriven abroad (‘The Princess of Wales had just left the Kingdom,’ says AA, ‘on a tour throItaly’). 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!’ andthe poem goes into action mode for the movements of the crowd and of the soldiers whoare called out to save the Temple. (The Duke of York turns down the job, preferring tostay with his mistress: ‘Of temples let the care be thine, / My temples I’ll with grapesentwine.’) Then the last half of the poem is devoted to the planning and outcome of theauction, the subject of two brief paragraphs buried in The Times.23 Peter Pindar tells thestory 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, thatit was undignified to sell off the symbols of national glory; but he does it with ironicexaggeration 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 besold and expressed its sense of the impropriety of selling off such objects, designed to celebrate ‘nationalglory’; the report observes that the Temple had suffered from exposure to the weather over several weeks andquotes the same two lines from Shakespeare about ‘Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay’ that Peter Pindarlater used in his poem. An item on the ‘Temple of Concord, in the Green Park’ on 12 October laments thenature and result of the auction, specifying the prices paid for various lots and ending with the fate of theornamental vestal virgins: ‘Seven beautiful vestals, with vases of sacred oil, were disposed of at thirty shillingsto two guineas each; the purchasers undertaking to carry them away at their own expense.’

The Regent bears the blame for letting the sale take place. Pindar imagines an elaboratedialogue between the Prince and his mother Queen Charlotte, who was notorious amongthe satirists for her stinginess. They meet at Buckingham House one morning (Regent’stime: it’s actually five in the afternoon), he ‘mumbling a tooth-pick all the while.’ (AA pointsout 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.ThePrince refuses, anticipating public outrage (‘Faith that would raise a pretty clamour’) andparticularly the reaction of ‘that varlet, Peter Pindar’ who is liable to inflame ‘all the lowplebeian tribe’ with his satire. But the Queen cites her many years of living with Pindar’srhymes, first ‘Old WAL--T’ and now his jeering successors, and persuades him to ignorethem:‘Let scribbling Pindar rhyme and dash, / But you be wise and touch the cash.’ So theycall in Creaton (AA confirms the obvious: ‘The auctioneer’s name’) and the Temple isknocked down in lots, at contemptible prices. Pindar concludes:

But in one general calculation,This pride and glory of the nationProduced, 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 Templewas 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 thatnobody told me, when I took the standard course on Romantic Poetry, that such workexisted. The Pindaric Poems as a group demonstrate the astonishing popularity of verse atthe time, for we see that poets were even brought in to air the news of the day. The EnglishPindars are accessible, as we say now, and fun to read, but they are also capable of enrichingour sense of the environment that produced Shelley and Byron. They complement thework of the graphic artists since they address some of the same themes and issues.24 I meanto bring them into my own classes and to encourage my colleagues in English and Historyto do so too. But there remain many questions about the whole Pindar industry and I hopesomeone may do a thorough study of C.131.d.2-14 and answer them. (At the very least, thenotes 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, afterWolcot?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 covering1811-19: ‘The relations between literary and graphic satire are exceptionally close and important. This isbecause of the concerted campaign against the Regent, set on foot in 1812 by his disappointed “Friends”, innewspaper 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 Lawleras fact and by his identifying Fairburn as his exclusive publisher.

or ‘C. F. Lawler?’ Lawler is himself a problem, possibly a red herring. As far as I can makeout, the attribution of a large number of the Pindar poems to Lawler is based on a singlecontemporary reference, A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain andIreland, 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 makethe following claim, noting that Wolcot’s latest publication as Peter Pindar had appeared in1813: ‘Latterly the name of Peter Pindar has been unwarrantably assumed by one Lawler, apoetaster of little or no wit, merely to deceive the public and to bring some profit to thewriter and his bookseller.’ If you seek further information from them about Lawler theirentry (quoted above) adds a pair of initials to the name, but no particular Pindar poem isidentified as his. Since the Dictionary came out in 1816, the year of Princess Charlotte’smarriage, when — as AA observed — some usurper published, initially in Ireland, a Pindarpoem that went too far, prompting ‘The Real Peter Pindar’ to bring out his own Co----ghHoney-moon, I am led to wonder whether C. F. Lawler was only the guilty Peter Pindar theElder. Some authorities claim Lawler for Ireland.26 But that takes us back to the originalquestion,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 consistsof ‘all the low plebeian tribe’; but prices starting at a shilling would have been a considerableburden for working-class readers, if that’s what ‘plebeian’ means, and with Peter turning outseveral titles a year, the burden would soon become intolerable. The poems can hardly havesold 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 Templereally were members of the mob that burnt the fences, they would surely resent beingcondescended to by the slob of a Regent who appears in the poem, but the narrator’sattitude is consistently detached and playful, not resentful. Perhaps the audience fell betweenthe two extremes of the Regent and John Bull (or liked to think they did). There isfurthermore the question of politics. The Pindars were published by the ‘radical’ press andyet histories of the working-class movement do not mention them, I suspect because theyare not obviously radical themselves, or not radical enough. They make fun of the Regentand his family, but they do no harm and advocate none. They have no overt politicalagenda; implicitly, they accept the status quo but enjoy the venting of dissatisfaction throughshared laughter. (Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are not radical either.) All that changedwith Peterloo and William Hone, which is perhaps why Peter Pindar went quiet and hisgentle 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, thedregs 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 thefashionable West End that was buying up Pindars. The fact that the poems were offered tocollectors suggests a leisure class. But this matter, too, depends on a deeper analysis ofinternal 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 whatthey tell us about the social history and attitudes of the period, and for what they revealabout 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 aparticular political agenda.



Fig. 7. The hands of F. W. Fairholt and T. Crofton Croker:Add. MS. 38622, f. 53v

to know who he was. We know that the Pindaric Poems were acquired by the BritishMuseum 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 AAbecause he was born in 1814. He did collect tracts of the period, however, and as anengraver 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 adocument of 1846 in which he endorses notes by Fairholt (fig. 7).30 Croker was Irish bybirth; he made his name as a collector of Irish folklore. One strike against him is that hedid not go to live in England until 1818, whereas we know that some of the notes in thepoems were written in 1816, but the poems were widely distributed and there is no reasonthat he should not have started buying them before he left home. Some of the notes displayIrish lore, for example a note on the word ‘brogues’ in Stripes for Sinecurists:‘in Ireland meanShoes; 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 inEngland. Then again we know that the work of annotation went on for many years.) Thereare difficulties about the attribution of the notes to Croker which need to be cleared upone way or another by closer study of the notes and by further investigation into theirprovenance.

A full analysis of the British Library set would make a manageable dissertation topic orthe basis of a book that could place these poems in context, whether that context be socialhistory or a history of the press, a study of the attitudes of the substantial part of the readingpublic represented by their audience or a more complete account than we have had to dateof the turbulent Regency period and the way political and economic forces tried to controlthe people through the publishers. England’s populist Pindars have been expunged fromhistory. They deserve to be brought back.32



28 Information from the British Library's Archivist, John Hopson, whom I thank for encouragement as well asadvice.

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. Hiscollection of works on her side, 8135.bb.1-4, contains MS. tables of contents but the occasional readers’ notesare 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.

5559 Pindar Article No.4

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Transcript of 5559 Pindar Article No.4