ABSTRACT
Prigson – an habitué of Will's coffee house – is one the ‘Beau's’, the ‘finish'd Fops, the Men of Wig and Snuff, / Knights of the Famous Oyster-Barrel Muff’. He is included amongst the many corrupt gentlemen in Defoe's satire Reformation of Manners (1702); a poem satirising those ostensible guardians of the culture of moral reform sweeping London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But Prigson is a failure in a particular way: Prigson from Nurse and Hanging-sleeves got free, A little smatch of Modern Blasphemy; A powder'd Wig, a Sword, a Page, a Chair, Learns to take Snuff, drink Chocolate, and swear: Nature seems thus far to ha’ led him on, And no Man thinks he was a Fop too soon; But ’twas the Devil surely drew him in, Against the Light of Nature thus to sin. 1
