The Fudge Family in Paris is an 1818 verse satire by Thomas Moore. It was intended to be a comedic critique of the post-war settlement of Europe following the Congress of Vienna and of the large number of British and Irish families who flocked to France for tourism. Written after a brief trip to Paris, its popular success inspired several more parodies and replies.
The Fudge Family in Paris was written following Thomas Moore's visit to Paris in company with Samuel Rogers in 1817. Such was its popularity after its appearance on 10 April 1818 from the Longman partnership that five editions were published in its first fortnight, [1] with a further four editions that year as well as American editions from New York and Philadelphia. On its title page the work's editorship was attributed to Thomas Brown the Younger (alluding to the satirist of a century before), under which name Moore had published earlier epistolary political satires under the title of Intercepted Letters (1813). However, the true authorship of the Fudge correspondence was soon identified. [2]
Ostensibly the work is a collection of letters that depict the visit to Paris of the Fudge family in the wake of the Bourbon Restoration. The party is made up of four characters who record their very different impressions. The father, Phil Fudge, is researching a book which he intends to be propaganda on behalf of his patron, Lord Castlereagh, whose parliamentary speeches he parrots. His son Bob is a dandy and glutton, while his daughter Biddy is in search of romance and falls in love with a commoner whom she believes to be royalty in disguise. Their tutor, Phelim Connor, on the other hand, is an Irish revolutionary and Bonapartist opposed to everything that his employer (and distant relative) stands for. [3] Each character is further differentiated by the poetic form of their letters: Phelim declaims in decasyllables, Phil trips in lighter octosyllables, while Bob and Biddy chatter colloquially in anapaestic measure.
As well as a comic social satire, the poem is also an attack on the tyrannical politics of the Holy Alliance and English policy in Ireland, identified with the British Tory party and particularly the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh. It was the political themes that William Hazlitt preferred in his contemporary review of The Fudge Family in Paris, soon collected in his Political Essays (1819), [4] making of it an opportunity to bludgeon such Lake Poet turncoats as Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge. [5] Another critic allowed that the work was for its time "a happy blending of the political squib and the social burlesque", yet over the decades "it is the natural fate of ephemeral satire to perish with the events which gave rise to it". [6]
Literary historians in the following century saw in Moore's poem a successful and influential imitation of Christopher Anstey's The New Bath Guide [7] and in the line of the "anapaestic travel narratives" that Anstey had inspired. [8] There has, however, been uncertainty over defining its literary genre. The work has been described as a "satirical travelogue", [9] a "verse satire in epistolary form", [10] and even as a precursor of the Victorian "verse novel". [11]
In the same year that The Fudge Family in Paris was launched, it was followed by the imitative Replies to the Letters of the Fudge Family in Paris, using the same epistolary form and anapaestic measure and pretending to be "edited by Thomas Brown Esq." Moore was quick to disavow the work that many were taking for his as a "catchpenny" derivative and "an impudent thing". [12] It was not long, either, before Moore came under attack from the satirised Tory side in The Fudger Fudged (London 1819). [13]
Moore's work was followed by several other imitations in the next few years. They included The Fudge Family in Edinburgh in a series of Poetical Epistles, ascribed to a pseudonymous Nehemiah Nettlebottom (Edinburgh 1820). [14] This centred on the Caledonian tour of Bob Fudge and had a complicated plot recounted over 19 letters and involving seven characters. The contemporary The Fudge Family in Washington, supposed to have been "edited by Harry Nimrod" (Baltimore 1820), [15] introduced a Fudge family relative from Virginia on a trip to the American capital. This included both political satire and comedy, as represented by the contrasting prudish and permissive social attitudes of two female visitors. [16] Two years later came Fudge in Ireland (London 1822), a hybrid work that has been ascribed to William Russell Macdonald (1787-1854) and describing itself as "a collection of letters, poems and legends, concerning the castle, the courts, the college, the corporation and the country at large". [17]
Longman had originally proposed the writing of a sequel, The Fudge Family in London, but before Moore got round to it the subject was taken up in part by another imitator. In two sections of this, The Fudge Family in England (London 1823), another new character is introduced in the shape of a French Fudge who describes his stay in the English capital to his English relative in Paris. [18] While Moore was living in financial exile abroad at this period, he had begun writing instead The Fudge Family in Italy but had to abandon the project. [19] It was not until 1835 that he finally wrote his own variation on the theme, The Fudges in England , set in a spa-town reminiscent of the scene of Anstey's New Bath Guide.
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of letters between the fictional characters of a narrative. The term is often extended to cover novels that intersperse documents of other kinds with the letters, most commonly diary entries and newspaper clippings, and sometimes considered to include novels composed of documents even if they do not include letters at all. More recently, epistolaries may include electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blog posts, and e-mails. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word epistolē, meaning a letter . This type of fiction is also sometimes known by the German term Briefroman or more generally as epistolary fiction.
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are an implicit critique of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her deft use of social commentary, realism and biting irony have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). Most of her stage plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889, forty-nine years after her death.
Robert Stewart, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry,, usually known as Lord Castlereagh, derived from the courtesy title Viscount Castlereagh by which he was styled from 1796 to 1821, was a British statesman and politician. As secretary to the Viceroy in Ireland, he worked to suppress the Rebellion of 1798 and to secure passage in 1800 of the Irish Act of Union. As the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 1812, he was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon, and was British plenipotentiary at the Congress of Vienna. In the post-war government of Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh was seen to support harsh measures against agitation for reform, and he ended his life an isolated and unpopular figure.
Thomas Moore, also known as Tom Moore, was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. His setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.
James Henry Leigh Hunt, best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist and poet.
Christopher Anstey was an English poet who also wrote in Latin. After a period managing his family's estates, he moved permanently to Bath and died after a long public life there. His poem, The New Bath Guide, brought him to fame and began an easy satirical fashion that was influential throughout the second half of the 18th century. Later he wrote An Electoral Ball, another burlesque of Bath society that allowed him to develop and update certain themes in his earlier work. Among his Latin writing were translations and summaries based on both these poems; he was also joint author of one of the earliest Latin translations of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which went through several editions both in England and abroad.
Thomas Rowlandson was an English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era, noted for his political satire and social observation. A prolific artist and printmaker, Rowlandson produced both individual social and political satires, as well as a large number of illustrations for novels, humorous books, and topographical works. Like other caricaturists of his age such as James Gillray, his caricatures are often robust or bawdy. Rowlandson also produced highly explicit erotica for a private clientele; this was never published publicly at the time and is now only found in a small number of collections. His caricatures included those of people in power such as the Duchess of Devonshire, William Pitt the Younger and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson was a British poet, writer, editor, critic, exhibition curator, anthologist and naturalist. In the 1930s he was editor of the influential magazine New Verse, and went on to produce 13 collections of his own poetry, as well as compiling numerous anthologies, among many published works on subjects including art, travel and the countryside. Grigson exhibited in the London International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries in 1936, and in 1946 co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Grigson's autobiography The Crest on the Silver was published in 1950. At various times he was involved in teaching, journalism and broadcasting. Fiercely combative, he made many literary enemies.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt 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 young man disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looking 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.
An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, or simply Shamela, as it is more commonly known, is a satirical burlesque novella by English writer Henry Fielding. It was first published in April 1741 under the name of Mr. Conny Keyber. Fielding never admitted to writing the work, but it is widely considered to be his. It is a direct attack on the then-popular novel Pamela (1740) by Fielding's contemporary and rival Samuel Richardson and is composed, like Pamela, in epistolary form.
Ellis Cornelia Knight was an English gentlewoman, traveller, landscape artist, and writer of novels, verse, journals, and history. She had the acquaintance of many prominent figures in her lifetime, from members of the circle of Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds in her girlhood; Cardinal de Bernis, Sir William and Lady Emma Hamilton, and Lord Horatio Nelson during her Italian sojourn; and members of the British Royal Family during her service to Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales. She corresponded with or met other writers of her time including Frances Burney, Germaine de Staël, Lady Charlotte Bury, and Jane Porter.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
General Henry Lawes Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton PC was an Anglo-Irish politician and soldier, who both in public and private life attracted scandal. He was spurned by colleagues in the British House of Commons who believed that in the election of 1769 he had played an underhand role in denying his seat to the popular choice, the reformer John Wilkes. In 1788 he was publicly accused in Dublin of raping a twelve-year-old girl. Ten years later, his command in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798 was criticised by fellow officers for its savagery, and not least against women. His last years in Parliament were marked by his opposition to Catholic Emancipation, and to parliamentary reform.
— 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.
Events from the year 1817 in the United Kingdom.
Robert Treat Paine Jr. was an American poet and editor. He was the second son of Robert Treat Paine, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Born Thomas Paine, he changed his name to that of his recently deceased older brother in 1801, in part as a tribute to his father and in part to avoid confusion with the more famous Thomas Paine, the revolutionary pamphleteer, who was unpopular at that time. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard University, for whose commencement ceremonies he wrote a number of pieces.
The Fudges in England is an 1835 sequel to Thomas Moore's 1818 work The Fudge Family in Paris, which had depicted the visit of the fictional British Fudge Family to Paris, where the daughter Biddy had fallen in love with a young man whom she had taken to be the King of Prussia but was in fact a draper. The original work was extremely popular and Moore had received requests to write a follow-up. He began working on The Fudge Family In Italy, but abandoned it and it wasn't until seventeen years after the original that the sequel was released.
Frances Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry, was an English aristocrat and mistress of a large landed and politically connected household in late Georgian Ireland. From her husband's mansion at Mount Stewart, County Down, in the 1790s her circle of friends and acquaintances extended to figures engaged in the democratic politics of the United Irishmen. Correspondence with her stepson, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, and with the English peer and politician John Petty, record major political and social developments of her era.
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