ABSTRACT
Few parodists have used a range of models as wide as those employed by the radical journalist, editor and poet William Hone (1780–1842). Newspapers, advertisements, children’s verse, religious catechism, bestiaries, millennarian prophecy, Laureate verse; all were grist to Hone’s reformist mill. 1 Three of Hone’s 1817 catechical parodies, The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurist’s Creed, led to his celebrated trials on charges of blasphemous and seditious libel. Hone was acquitted after mounting a defence which relied, in part, upon ‘a creative exegesis of the history of religious parody since the sixteenth century’ 2 and which is recorded in The Three Trials of William Hone, for Publishing Three Parodies 3 (1818). In the five years after his acquittal, Hone launched into a remarkable series of radical parodic works which include The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder (1820), a defence of Queen Caroline issued complete with free toy ladder, A Slap at Slop and the Bridge Street Gang (1821), a newspaper parody (of Stoddart’s New Times) and The Political Showman – at Home! Exhibiting his Cabinet of Curiosities and Creatures – All Alive! (1821), which portrays a freakshow collection of monstrous reactionary beasts. Hone also engaged in variant forms of more conventional literary parody, most notably in A New Vision, By Robert Southey, Esq.! LL.D!!’, published in A Slap at Slop (and Don Juan, Canto the Third! (1819) is probably Hone’s). Many of the works of this period are the fruits of Hone’s remarkable collaboration with the satirical artist George Cruikshank (1792–1878), himself an accomplished parodist and The Political House that Jack Built, A Slap at Slop and The Political Showman are the duumvirate’s greatest achievements.
