Anti-Jacobin
The Revolution polarized British political opinion in the 1790s, with conservatives outraged at the killing of the king Louis XVI of France, the expulsion of the nobles, and the Reign of Terror.
"[3] One of Canning's biographers described its purpose as to "...deride and refute the ideas of the Jacobins, present the government's point of view on the issues of the day and expose the misinformation and misinterpretation which filled the opposition newspapers.
"[3] In its first issue Canning said he and his friends: ...avow ourselves to be partial to the COUNTRY in which we live, notwithstanding the daily panegyrics which we read and hear on the superior virtues and endowments of its rival and hostile neighbours.
We are prejudiced in favour of her Establishments, civil and religious; though without claiming for either that ideal perfection, which modern philosophy professes to discover in the more luminous systems which are arising on all sides of us.
[4]Canning set out his "most serious, vehement and effective onslaught in verse" on the values of the French Revolution in a long poem, New Morality, published in the last issue of the Anti-Jacobin (No.
He described anyone in Great Britain who held these values as a "pedant prig" who "...disowns a Briton's part, And plucks the name of England from his heart...": No – through th'extended globe his feelings run As broad and general as th'unbounded sun!
France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh, But heaves for Turkey's woes the impartial sigh; A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country – but his own.
They multiplied the regular weekly sale of 2,500 by seven (arriving at 17,500) because that was the average size of a family—and added 32,500 based on the assumption that many readers lent their copies to their poorer neighbours.
This letter contained Canning's proposal to write a periodical that was to include humour, good principles, and frank reasoning that would influence the public to side with the anti-Jacobins.
[12] William Gifford, the editor of the periodical, had established his style by writing poems like the Baviad (1794) and Maeviad (1795), which satirized Robert Merry, a Jacobin writer, and the Della Cruscans.
The following works were satirized by the Anti Jacobin: The Botanic Garden (1792) written by Erasmus Darwin, The Progress of Civil Society, a Didactic Poem in Six Books (1796) by Richard Payne Knight.
Higgins, poet and dramatist, supposedly writes some of the major parodies of the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin: (The Progress of Man, The Loves of the Triangles, The Rovers).
Canning wrote “For the Door of the Cell in Newgate, where Mrs. Brownrigg, the Prentice-cide, was confined previous to her Execution”—a response to Southey's lines from “For the Apartment in Chepstow Castle where Henry Marten the Regicide was imprisoned for thirty years”.
Often have these wallsEchoed his footsteps, as with even treadHe pac’d around his prison: not to himDid Nature’s fair varieties exist;He never saw the sun’s delightful beams;Save when through you high bars he pour’d a sadAnd broken splendour.
Dost thou ask his crime?He had rebelled against a King, and satIn judgment on him: for his ardent mindShap’d goodliest plans of happiness on earth,And peace and liberty.
[21]Through parodies such as “For the Door of the Cell in Newgate, where Mrs. Brownrigg, the Prentice-cide, was confined previous to her Execution,” Canning and other contributors felt that they were exposing the French revolutionaries' principles and motifs.
According to Dorothy Marshall, Erasmus Darwin's “Love of the Vegetables” and Payne Knight's “Progress of Civil Society” would probably have been lost to history if the Anti-Jacobin's witty satire had not been written.
Alexander Watson's The Anti-Jacobin, a Hudibrastic Poem in Twenty-one Cantos (1794) had a similar motif and also contained stanzas filled with heavy sarcasm and rhymed couplets.
