ABSTRACT
After the early and only partially successful Juvenalianism of his classical satires Corruption and Intolerance (1801) and The Sceptic: A Philosophical Satire (1809), Thomas Moore found his mature satirical voice with Intercepted Letters; or the Two Penny Postbag (1813) and, more particularly, The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), the story, told in their own words, of the continental sojourn of the oleaginous Tory Phil. Fudge (who pens a series of sycophantic letters to Castlereagh), his children (the vivacious but frivolous Biddy and the gluttonous Bob) and their tutor, the Irish patriot Phelim Connor. The poem takes epistolary, Horatian social satire in the tradition of Christopher Anstey’s much-imitated New Bath Guide (1766) and fuses it with liberal politics. The work’s satiric targets are grand ones: Legitimacy, the Holy Alliance, the injustices of Erin and the Tory government. The poem was highly successful, running into at least nine editions.
