ABSTRACT
’A Letter to the Editor of Warreniana’ is the fourth journal parody in Warreniana. Here Deacon adopts the manner of the fearsome ultra-Tory weekly newspaper the John Bull (1820–92). Employing vitriolic ad hominem tactics, the John Bull vigorously defended church and king. All methods, the more acrid the better, were acceptable in the anti-Whig crusade: scandal-sheet gossip; political lampoons; vituperative personal abuse and coarse but often amusing satirical verse. The youthful Charlotte Brontë captured the paper’s ethos well in 1829: ‘We see the John Bull:; it is a high Tory, very violent. Mr. Driver lends it us, as likewise Blackwood’s Magazine, the most able periodical there is’. 1 Like Blackwood’s, John Bull had a taste for character assassination. As Donald J. Gray has written, ‘The most obviously scandalous feature of John Bull. . . was [its] publication of gossip and abusive remarks about the personal lives, characters, and appearances of well-known persons’. 2 The paper was founded by loyalists of George IV who were alarmed at attacks on the king over his treatment of Queen Caroline. It set about lambasting the queen’s partisans, the likes of Brougham and Hume, and indulging in personal slanders on Caroline’s women friends which landed it with a successful prosecution for libel in 1821.
