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 documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word ἐπιστολή epistolē, meaning a letter.
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which 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 in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism, humour, and social commentary, have long earned her acclaim among critics, scholars, and popular audiences alike.
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.
Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later as Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. Born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to the musician Dr Charles Burney (1726–1814) and his first wife, Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762), she was the third of her mother's six children. She began her "scribblings" at the age of ten. In 1786–1790 she was an unusual courtier appointment as "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. Their only son Alexander was born in 1794. After a long writing career, and travels in which she was stranded in France by warfare for over ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. Of her four novels, the first, Evelina (1778), was the most successful, and remains the most highly regarded. Most of her plays remained unperformed in her lifetime. She also wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals, which have been gradually published since 1889.
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 an Anglo-Irish statesman. As British Foreign Secretary, from 1812 he was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon. He was the principal British diplomat at the Congress of Vienna. Castlereagh was also leader of the British House of Commons in the Liverpool government from 1812 until his suicide. Early in his career, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was involved in putting down the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and was instrumental in securing the passage of the Irish Act of Union of 1800.
Thomas Moore was an Irish writer, poet and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. Their 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. Married to a Protestant actress and hailed as "Anacreon Moore" after the classical Greek composer of drinking songs and erotic verse, Moore did not profess religious piety. Yet in the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation Moore was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelising Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics. Longer prose works reveal more radical sympathies. The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald depicts the United Irish leader as a martyr in the cause of democratic reform. Complementing Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Memoirs of Captain Rock is a saga, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of "Whiteboyism". Today, however, Moore is remembered almost alone either for his Irish Melodies or, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the loss of the memoirs of his friend Lord Byron.
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 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.
The Society of United Irishmen, also simply known as the United Irishmen, were a sworn society in the Kingdom of Ireland formed in the wake of the French Revolution to secure "an equal representation of all the people" in a "national government." Despairing of constitutional reform, in 1798 the Society instigated a republican insurrection in defiance of British Crown forces and of Irish sectarian division. Their suppression was a prelude to the abolition of the Protestant Ascendancy Parliament in Dublin and to Ireland's incorporation in a United Kingdom with Great Britain.
Padraic Colum was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer, playwright, children's author and collector of folklore. He was one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival.
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.
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.
— 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.
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 his 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 who 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.
Samuel Lorenzo Knapp was an American author and lawyer.
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