ABSTRACT
William Gifford, best known as the editor of the Quarterly Review from 1809 until his death in 1826, is perhaps a surprising inclusion in an anthology of labouring-class poetry. Gifford's autobiographical memoir, written in 1801, begins with an account of his dissolute father, who absconded from grammar school to wander, and later to work as a plumber and glazier, in South Devon, where he married Gifford's mother, the daughter of a carpenter. Gifford began reciting topical and satirical poems in the taverns of Ashburton to supplement his small income and to fund his purchases of paper and books of algebra. The Epistle to Peter Pindar is discussed because the matter of Clifford's labouring-class origins was at the heart of the dispute between the poet and Wolcot which occasioned, and followed, the poem.
