Rejected Addresses was an 1812 book of parodies by the brothers James and Horace Smith. In the line of 18th-century pastiches focussed on a single subject in the style of poets of the time, it contained twenty-one good-natured pastiches of contemporary authors. The book's popular success set the fashion for a number of later works of the same kind.
Although parody is a long-standing literary genre, the mock heroic of Augustan times began to share its territory with parody, using the deflationary inversion of values - comparing small things with great - as a satirical tool in the deconstruction of the epic style. [1] A later humorous tactic, in place of a connected narrative in the mock-epic manner, was to apply poems in the style of varied authors to a single deflationary subject. The ultimate forerunner of this approach has been identified with Isaac Brown's small work, A Pipe of Tobacco, in Imitation of Six Several Authors, first published in 1736. [2] In that case the poets Colley Cibber, Ambrose Philips, James Thomson, Edward Young, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were used as the focus for its series of good-natured parodic variations. [3] The popularity of these was attested by many subsequent editions and by their reproduction in the poetical miscellanies of after decades.
A new direction was given to this departure by employing parody as a weapon in the political conflicts of the 1790s. This was particularly identified with the Anti-Jacobin , where the works of poets identified with liberal tendencies were treated with satirical humour. An anthology of such parodies, The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, followed in 1800 and its popularity guaranteed frequent editions over the following decades. [4] Although the name of their targets are generally not mentioned, a clue is usually given by way of preface or notes, sometimes quoting the opening lines. Robert Southey was a particular victim in early numbers of the weekly, in which his lofty sentiments were downgraded to ridiculous bathos. For his "Inscription for the apartment in Chepstow Castle, where Henry Martin the regicide was imprisoned thirty years" was substituted the Newgate Prison cell of a drunken "Elizabeth Brownrigg the Prentice-cide" (I). And Southey's humanitarian themes clothed in experimental metres were rewritten as "The friend of humanity and the knife-grinder" (II) [5] and the subversive "The Soldier’s Friend" (V).
Later numbers took as their target speculative philosophical and scientific works aiming at popular acceptance by being clothed in verse. Richard Payne Knight’s The Progress of Civil Society (1796) became the satirical "The Progress of Man" (XV, XVI, XXI). This was later ascribed to the fictitious "Mr Higgins of St Mary Axe", author as well of "The Loves of the Triangles" (XXIII, XXIV, XXVI, a parody of Erasmus Darwin’s verse treatise The Loves of the Plants (1791) mingled with gallophile propaganda. He also reappears as author of "The Rovers" (XXX – XXXI), an imitation seemingly based on contemporary translations of popular German melodramas.
The widened parodic focus from poetry to drama in the Anti-Jacobin was taken even further in the Rejected Addresses of 1812, in which works in prose were made additional targets. The occasion given for its publication was a public competition advertised in the press for an address to be spoken at the reopening of the Drury Lane Theatre, which had been destroyed by fire. As none of the actual entries were considered adequate in the end, Lord Byron was commissioned to write one specially. But when the brothers James and Horace Smith heard of the result of the competition, they planned a volume of parodies of writers of the day, to be published as supposed failed entries and issued to coincide with the theatre’s opening. [6]
Titled Rejected Addresses: Or, The New Theatrum Poetarum, the book’s contents were as follows:
| No. | Title | Pretended Author | Written by |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | Loyal Effusion | W. T. F. (William Thomas Fitzgerald) | Horace Smith |
| II | The Baby’s Debut | W. W. (William Wordsworth) | James Smith |
| III | An Address Without a Phœnix | S. T. P. : a genuine rejected address by - | Horace Smith |
| IV | Cui Bono? | Lord B. (Lord Byron) | James and Horace |
| V | Hampshire Farmer’s Address | W. C. (William Cobbett) | James |
| VI | The Living Lustres | T. M. (Thomas Moore) | Horace |
| VII | The Rebuilding | R. S. (Robert Southey) | James |
| VIII | Drury’s Dirge | Laura Matilda, a Della Cruscan poet [7] | Horace |
| IX | A Tale of Drury Lane | W. S. (Walter Scott) | Horace |
| X | Johnson’s Ghost | Samuel Johnson | Horace |
| XI | The Beautiful Incendiary | Hon. W. S. (William Robert Spencer) | Horace |
| XII | Fire and Ale | M. G. L. (Matthew Gregory Lewis) | Horace |
| XIII | Playhouse Musings | S. T. C. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) | James |
| XIV | Drury Lane Hustings | "A new halfpenny ballad by a Pic-Nic Poet" | James |
| XV | Architectural Atoms | "Translated by Dr. B." (Thomas Busby) | Horace |
| XVI | Theatrical Alarm-Bell | "By the Editor of the M. P." (Morning Post) | James |
| XVII | The Theatre | Rev. G. C. (George Crabbe) | James |
| XVIII | Macbeth Travestie | Momus Medlar (William Shakespeare) | James |
| XIX | Stranger Travestie | Momus Medlar (August von Kotzebue) | James |
| XX | George Barnwell Travestie | Momus Medlar (George Lillo) | James |
| XXI | Punch’s Apotheosis | T. H. (Theodore Hook) | Horace |
The work was an immediate success. When Byron became acquainted with the travesty of his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in "Cui Bono?" he asked his publisher to pass on the message, "Tell the author I forgive him, were he twenty times our satirist, and think his imitations not at all inferior to the famous ones of Hawkins Browne". [8] Francis Jeffrey, writing later in The Edinburgh Review , recognised another strand in the work's ancestry: "We have seen nothing comparable to it since the publication of The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin". [9]
Byron's sympathy is understandable, since only three years before he had pilloried some of the same targets as the Smiths in his own satire of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers". [10] Apostrophised in its opening lines, in the same position as in the Rejected Addresses, appears Fitzgerald, "one of the foremost loyalist versifiers of his day": [11]
Still must I hear? -shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl
His creaking couplets in a tavern hall?
Also deplored are the "too profuse" heroic narrative of Robert Southey and the "stale romance" of Walter Scott, the latter deflated in the Rejected Addresses by the mock-heroic trick of substituting the plebeian names of Clutterbuck, Muggins and Higginbottom for the protagonists. The joint authors of the Lyrical Ballads are also dismissed: Wordsworth for his "childish verse", parodied by James Smith in "The Baby’s Debut"; and Coleridge, ridiculed by Byron for his address "To a Young Ass" as "the laureate of the long-eared kind", who passes from the same subject to his "Playhouse Musings" in the Rejected Addresses. Another common target is "spectre-mongering Lewis". Byron, however, thought more highly of Crabbe than did James Smith of his pedestrian "truth to nature".
Profiting from the delighted discussion caused by the parodies, an enterprising publisher went ahead and published a selection of the genuine failed entries, [12] prefaced by Lord Byron's specially commissioned address from the actual occasion of the opening. Included in the new work's "mawkish mélange of decasyllabic dullness", the Monthly Review identified victims already parodied by the Smith brothers such as Fitzgerald and Dr Busby, and heartily seconded the committee's original decision to reject them. [13]
Further imitations of the work of the Smiths quickly followed in A Sequel to the "Rejected Addresses" Or, the Theatrum Poetarum Minorum (1813). [14] This too hid its targets under their initials and was similarly aimed at literary enthusiasms of the time: a labouring class effusion by Robert Bloomfield, followed by a defence of "Plebeian Talent" by Capell Lofft, the champion of such work (pp.6-26); a poem for children by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (p.61); a prose poem by the much imitated Ossian (pp. 75-9); a sequence of sonnets of sensibility by William Lisle Bowles (pp. 80-82). The Monthly Review obligingly identified the victims in its dismissive critique. [15]
In the same year, William Stanley's farce, The Rejected Addresses: Or, The Triumph of the Ale-king, was published, professing in the preface that it "owes its existence to The Theatrum Poetarum". [16] In it various stereotypical poets throng the streets outside the theatre, clamouring for their competition entries to be heard. Among the farcical targets are the opening lines of Fitzgerald's entry in the original Rejected Addresses, and Nancy Drew's nursery narrative, with Wordsworth's supposed authorship disguised under the name of Mr Winandermere.
At the other end of the century, the scholarly Notes and Queries published a list of other literary parodies, [17] among which two further successors to the Rejected Addresses are noted. Peter George Patmore's Rejected Articles (1826) is a prose equivalent, imitating the style of articles in magazines of the day, among which feature the two Smith brothers themselves and William Cobbett, the target of their earlier work. [18] The other successor is William Frederick Deacon's Warreniana (1824), a mixture of prose and verse with, as a common focus, the advertisement of a commercial blacking product. Among the poetical works featured are "Old Cumberland Pedlar" by W. W., "Carmen Triumphale" by R. S., "The Childe's Pilgrimage" by Lord B., "The Dream: a psychological curiosity" by S. T. C. and "The Battle of Brentford Green" by Sir W. S. [19]
Robert Southey was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a radical but became steadily more conservative as he gained respect for Britain and its institutions. Other romantics such as Byron accused him of siding with the establishment for money and status. He is remembered especially for the poem "After Blenheim" and the original version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
HoraceSmith was an English poet and novelist. In 1818, he participated in a sonnet-writing competition with Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was of Smith that Shelley said: "Is it not odd that the only truly generous person I ever knew who had money enough to be generous with should be a stockbroker? He writes poetry and pastoral dramas and yet knows how to make money, and does make it, and is still generous."
William Gifford was an English critic, editor and poet, famous as a satirist and controversialist.
Caroline Anne Southey was an English poet and painter. She became the second wife of the poet Robert Southey, a prominent writer at the time.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a long narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. The poem was published between 1812 and 1818. Dedicated to "Ianthe", it describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man, who is disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.
John Murray was a Scottish publisher and member of the John Murray publishing house. He published works by authors such as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Jane Austen and Maria Rundell.
James Smith was an English writer. He is best known as co-author of the Rejected Addresses, with his younger brother Horace.
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is an 1809 satirical poem written by Lord Byron, and published by James Cawthorn in London.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
— words chiselled onto the tombstone of John Keats, at his request
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Mary Oxlie or Oxley was a 17th-century Scottish or Northumbrian poet, known for one published verse.
The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner was an English newspaper founded by George Canning in 1797 and devoted to opposing the radicalism of the French Revolution. It lasted only a year, but was considered highly influential, and is not to be confused with the Anti-Jacobin Review, a publication which sprang up on its demise. The Revolution polarized British political opinion in the 1790s, with conservatives outraged at the killing of the king Louis XVI of France, the expulsion of the nobles, and the Reign of Terror. Great Britain went to war against Revolutionary France. Conservatives castigated every radical opinion in Great Britain as "Jacobin", warning that radicalism threatened an upheaval of British society. The Anti-Jacobin sentiment was expressed in print. William Gifford was its editor. Its first issue was published on 20 November 1797 and during the parliamentary session of 1797–98 it was issued every Monday.
William Thomas Fitzgerald was an Irish/British poet.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."
The Vision of Judgment (1822) is a satirical poem in ottava rima by Lord Byron, which depicts a dispute in Heaven over the fate of George III's soul. It was written in response to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey's A Vision of Judgement (1821), which had imagined the soul of king George triumphantly entering Heaven to receive his due. Byron was provoked by the High Tory point of view from which the poem was written, and he took personally Southey's preface which had attacked those "Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations" who had set up a "Satanic school" of poetry, "characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety". He responded in the preface to his own Vision of Judgment with an attack on "The gross flattery, the dull impudence, the renegado intolerance, and impious cant, of the poem", and mischievously referred to Southey as "the author of Wat Tyler", an anti-royalist work from Southey's firebrand revolutionary youth. His parody of A Vision of Judgement was so lastingly successful that, as the critic Geoffrey Carnall wrote, "Southey's reputation has never recovered from Byron's ridicule."
George Daniel (1789–1864) was an English writer of miscellaneous works and book collector.
Henry William Weber (1783–1818) was an English editor of plays and romances and literary assistant of Sir Walter Scott.
Robert Baron was an English poet and dramatist. He was a very successful plagiarist, his thefts passing unrecognised for more than a century after his death.