Introduction

February 1824 saw the anonymous publication, by the London publishers Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, of Warreniana; with Notes, Critical and Explanatory, by the Editor of a Quarterly Review. The book purported to contain ringing endorsements of the well-known manufacturer of blacking (i.e. boot polish), Robert Warren, by many of the leading literary figures (Byron, Coleridge, Scott and Wordsworth amongst them) and journals (Blackwood’s, John Bull, the New Monthly) of the day. It was the work of the precocious twenty-four year old London journalist William Frederick Deacon. The book offers a series of agile and vivacious parodies of a wide range of Romantic period writing: poetry, essays, literary and political journalism, historiography, sermons, parliamentary reports and scholarship and yet, for reasons which I shall discuss below, it has been neglected, ignored even by historians of Romantic parody. The present edition is the first publication of the book since 1851 ¹ and the first scholarly and annotated edition. Warreniana is an enormously engaging and enjoyable collection. This introduction begins by offering an account of the various contexts in which it is best understood: Deacon’s life and writings, early nineteenth-century advertising with particular reference to the famous promotional campaigns for Warren’s blacking, and post-Napoleonic advertising-related parody and satire. It concludes with a consideration of the importance of Warreniana and a discussion of the book’s parodic methodology and social resonance.