ABSTRACT
Sir Charles Morgan was a fashionable surgeon, and the author of primarily scientific and medical works; Lady Sydney Owenson Morgan, was an Irish woman of letters, primarily writing on French and Italian literature. The Mohawks is an indirect satire. It deploys an Horatian mode for the most part, but digresses from its rough ottava rima in ‘The Crab’s Descant’ into a more Juvenalian and vituperative use of heroic couplets in order to increase the savagery of its critique. The ‘Dedication’ to the poem announces itself as being ‘Freely Imitated from Horace, Book I, Ode XII’, and opens with a series of rhetorical questions framed in heroic couplets. John Wilkes’s North Briton, and the agitation that surrounds it, is testament to the fact that even before events in France came to dominate the political agenda in Britain, the principle of freedom of expression in print was by no means unassailable.
