ABSTRACT
Thomas Hood and John Hamilton Reynolds’ collaborative collection of mock odes, Odes and Addresses to Great People, was published in 1825. The collection contains fifteen poems to various contemporary figures of varying degrees of fame, notoriety and importance: Graham the aeronaut, the engineer McAdam, the humanitarians Fry and Martin, the ‘Great Unknown’, Grimaldi the clown and Parry the Arctic explorer amongst them. Hood’s An Address to the Steam Washing Company’ and the related, ensuing ‘Letter of Remonstrance from Bridget Jones’ are the only poems to address something other than an individual. The first poem remonstrates with the Washing Company for stealing the crumbs from the laundress’s table and the second lets a washerwoman offer the same message for herself. Though the tone is jocular, there are socially significant humanitarian undertones here. The 1820s sees a threat to the washerwoman’s living from the establishment of commercial steam washing companies and these poems might be seen as comic anticipations of Hood’s later, more explicitly sociological Punch satire ‘Song of the Shirt’ (1842). In the ‘Letter’, Bridget is a kind of feminine Luddite, enraged by the effects of industrialisation upon her trade. In the ‘Address’, at times the puns retreat and the tone darkens: But her children come round her as victuals grow scant, And recall, with foul faces, the source of their want – When she thinks of their poor little mouths to be fed, And then thinks of her trade that is utterly dead,
