ABSTRACT
Just as the pre-publication publicity for Peter Bell spawned Reynolds’s Peter Bell. A Lyrical Ballad, so the announcement of Wordsworth’s Benjamin the Waggoner in the Literary Gazette on May 22 1819 prompted an anonymous parodist into composition (Wordsworth’s poem, of course, appeared as solely The Waggoner). Benjamin the Waggoner, a Ryghte merrie and conceitede Tale in Verse. A Fragment 1 appeared in late June, shortly after the publication of The Waggoner. Like Reynolds, the Benjamin-poet writes without reading the work which prompted his or her title and the poem is, in fact, a Peter Bell parody. As the August 1819 review in the Gentleman’s Magazine notes, ‘this jeu d’esprit is not (as may probably be expected) a parody of [The Waggoner] which it resembles in nothing but the title-page. On the contrary, it was in fact written before the publication of “The Waggoner of W. W.” and might with propriety have been called a Continuation of the Adventures of Peter Bell . . . and of the severest ridicule on its worthy Author’. 2 Authorship of the parody has not been satisfactorily established. Benjamin the Waggoner has several echoes of Peter Bell. A Lyrical Ballad and the poem has often been attributed to Reynolds himself. However, Leonidas M. Jones, Reynolds’s formidably painstaking biographer, finds no evidence to support this idea. 3 Jack Benoit Gohn has suggested that John Gibson Lockhart of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was responsible for the parody. 4 However, the liberal politics of Benjamin’s ‘Introduction’ place significant doubts upon the attribution to the ultra-Tory Lockhart.
