ABSTRACT
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth century certain poems are parodied and imitated time and time again: Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast or The Power of Music’ in the earlier eighteenth century; Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ and Cowper’s ‘The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk’ from the later 1700s onwards. Very often these poems provide a vehicle rather than a target for satire. The ‘Verses supposed to be written by the Editor of the Examiner, whilst in prison’ exemplify such an imitative methodology. The poem has been attributed to the accomplished Tory satirist Theodore Hook (1788–1841). 1 Hook was for many years the editor of the scandalous ultra-Tory weekly newspaper John Bull 2 and provided many of the mordantly amusing satirical squibs which define the journal’s house style. The ‘Queenite’ Whig devotees of Queen Caroline, the radical publishers Cobbett and Carlile, the ‘Cockneys’ Hazlitt (Hook led the charge against the essayist in the Liber Amoris scandal of 1823) and ‘Mr. Examiner Hunt’ all faced Hook’s aspersive satirical onslaught.
