ABSTRACT
Here Deacon sets out the governing structural conceit of Warreniana, that the manufacturer Warren has ‘engaged all the intellect of England in his behalf; each author furnishing a modicum of praise in the style to which he was best adapted, and receiving in return a recompense proportioned to his worth’. Engaged as editor is ‘W. G.’, William Gifford. Deacon’s ‘Introduction’ is based upon the rather moving 1 autobiographical sketch of an impoverished childhood which Gifford included in The Satires of Juvenal Translated (1802). 2 Gifford was born to an indolent Devon glazier in 1756. After his father had drunk himself to death in 1767, Gifford was first sent to sea and then, after a short but promising period at school, apprenticed as a shoemaker (Deacon jokes that this circumstance ‘peculiarly fitted’ W. G. ‘for the task’ of editing Warreniana). Eventually, Gifford was taken up by sympathetic patrons, the surgeon Cookesley and, later, Lord Grosvenor, and was able to proceed to Oxford in 1779. After graduating, he tutored Grosvenor’s son. During the 1790s, Gifford established a name as a satirist in The Baviad (1791) and The Mæviad (1795), ‘the first satires of the day’ to Byron’s mind, 3 neoclassical imitations of Persius and Horace in the manner of Pope which savagely attacked (both on poetic and political grounds) the Della Cruscan school of Robert Merry. Gifford’s reputation as a Tory satirist made him a logical choice for the editorship of the Antijacobin. It was as an editor that Gifford spent most of his later years, both as a literary journalist, editing the Quarterly, and as a scholar, producing editions of Ford, Jonson and Massinger. His critical tone is often as ferocious as his poetical satire, as the politically motivated attack on Hazlitt in the Quarterly demonstrates. 4 Throughout his career, Gifford is concerned to uphold traditional poetical proprieties and to anathematise political subversion in a campaign for ‘good morals, good order, and good taste’. 5
