ABSTRACT
Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1765–1834) published little in her lifetime beyond a few poems in Joanna Baillie’s Collection of Poems (1823) and her ‘Fragment in imitation of Wordsworth’ was first published posthumously in the Rev. William Harness’s privately printed edition of the Memorials of Miss Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1865). The ‘Fragment’, in irregular stanzas, simultaneously mocks Wordsworth and catches the poet’s most elevated manner outside of his blank verse. Fanshawe simultaneously genuflects to Wordsworth and, to borrow a phrase from the poem, wags her head in mockery of him. The numinous (as in the third stanza) is followed by the clonkingly over-precise; the parody, both emulative and probing, deftly blends the imitative with the aversive. Like many of the finest examples of critical parody, Fanshawe’s poem is an imaginative re-creation of its source. The poem offers the finest moment in Wordsworthian parody, perhaps in Romantic period parody. Indeed, George Kitchin goes so far as to call it ‘the best parody in the English tongue’. 1 The ‘Fragment’ offers acute criticism of Wordsworth and is worth a hundred hobnail-booted parodic treatments of Wordsworth’s simplicities after the manner of the brothers Smith’s ‘The Baby’s Debut’.
