ABSTRACT
Though its title echoes the Lyrical Ballads’ ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar, a Description’, ‘Old Cumberland Pedlar’ is a blank verse parody of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), notably of the poem’s first book, though it includes a cast of rural characters drawn from Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) and textual echoes of the Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes (1807) and other books. In ‘Book First’ of The Excursion, the ‘Author’ ‘gives an account’ of his ‘revered Friend’ the ‘Wanderer’, a rather metaphysically inclined quondam pedlar. In Deacon’s parody, the Wordsworthian persona offers an account of his own pedlar, a retired agent for Warren’s blacking. This personage is named ‘Peter Bell’ after that much-parodied poem of 1819. Though retired, Peter Bell still proselytises for his former employer in lapidary tribute for, like the Wordsworth of ‘To Joanna’, the pedlar is given to chiselling out mottoes on lake country rocks: Beauteous it was and lonesome, and while I Leaped up for joy to think that earth was good And lusty in her boyhood, I beheld Graven on the tawny rock these magic words, “buy warren’s blacking;”
