George Daniel (writer)

After receiving an education at Thomas Hogg's boarding school in Paddington Green, he became clerk to a stockbroker in Tokenhouse Yard, and was engaged in commerce for the greater part of his life.

Daniel died suddenly of apoplexy, at his son's house at Stoke Newington, on 30 March 1864 and was buried in the dissenters section of the western side of Highgate Cemetery.

On this incident Daniel wrote a squib in verse, which he called "R—y—l Stripes; or a Kick from Yar—th to Wa—s; with the particulars of an Expedition to Oat—ds and the Sprained Ancle: a poem, by P—— P——, Poet Laureat".

Effingham Wilson of Cornhill printed the poem and advertised its publication; but it was suppressed and bought up, before it was published, in January 1812, by order of the Prince Regent, and through the instrumentality of Lord Yarmouth and Colonel McMahon, a large sum being given to the author for the copyright.

Daniel next turned his attention to the poetasters and petty journalists of the day, and these he satirised in The Modern Dunciad, a satire, with notes biographical and critical, 1814, 2nd edit.

In 1835 he collected and revised a few poems, The Modern Dunciad, Virgil in London, which had originally appeared in 1814, The Times, and some short pieces.

For each of the plays of this edition, which numbered nearly three hundred, and included nearly all Shakespeare's works, and the whole eighteenth-century drama, Daniel, under the initial 'D———G,' wrote a preface.

A prose novel in three volumes called Dick Distich, which Daniel says he wrote when he was eighteen, was printed anonymously in 1812; it is a story of the struggles of a Grub Street author.

In 1819 he and James Robinson Planché produced 'More Broad Grins, or Mirth versus Melancholy,' and in 1821 Daniel edited 'Chef d'Œuvres from French Authors, from Marot to Delille,' in two volumes.

He contributed to Bentley's Miscellany a long series of gossipy papers on old books and customs, which he issued in two volumes in 1842, under the title of 'Merrie England in the Olden Time,' with illustrations by John Leech and George Cruikshank.

This was followed by a religious poem, 'The Missionary,' in 1847, and by 'Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Goodfellow, to which are added Notes Festivous and the Stranger Guest,' in 1852.

On 22 August 1835 he bought at Charles Mathews's sale, for forty-seven guineas, the cassolette, or carved casket made out of the mulberry-tree of Shakespeare's garden, and presented to David Garrick with the freedom of the borough of Stratford-on-Avon in 1769.