ABSTRACT
JOHN BULL, a London weekly newspaper that began on December 17, 1820, and ran until 1892, was the most successful and most influential of the new Tory papers that began after Peterloo and the passage of the repressive Six Acts. Sir Walter Scott helped found it to counteract the popularity of Queen Caroline. Its first editor was Theodore Hook, a scamp and wit who had earlier been dismissed as accountant-general at Mauritius for shortages, in his accounts and was imprisoned from 1823 until 1825 for the unpaid balance. (Hook later made his greatest mark as a novelist in the late 1820’s and 1830’s.) John Bull under Hook was fierce on occasion, as when he gloated over Shelley’s death, but he knew how to exploit wounded human feelings when it suited his cause. In the two reviews included here, he (or possibly one of his colleagues, R. H. Barham or T. H. Bayley) turns attacks by Byron and Hunt on Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and Marquis of Londonderry (who had committed suicide in 1822), and on the corpulence of George IV to good advantage against the Liberal.
