The Fudge Family in Paris

It was intended to be a comedic critique of the post-war settlement of Europe following the Congress of Vienna and of the large number of British and Irish families who flocked to France for tourism.

The father, Phil Fudge, is researching a book which he intends to be propaganda on behalf of his patron, Lord Castlereagh, whose parliamentary speeches he parrots.

[3] Each character is further differentiated by the poetic form of their letters: Phelim declaims in decasyllables, Phil trips in lighter octosyllables, while Bob and Biddy chatter colloquially in anapaestic measure.

As well as a comic social satire, the poem is also an attack on the tyrannical politics of the Holy Alliance and English policy in Ireland, identified with the British Tory party and particularly the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh.

[5] Another critic allowed that the work was for its time "a happy blending of the political squib and the social burlesque", yet over the decades "it is the natural fate of ephemeral satire to perish with the events which gave rise to it".

[16] Two years later came Fudge in Ireland (London 1822), a hybrid work that has been ascribed to William Russell Macdonald (1787-1854) and describing itself as "a collection of letters, poems and legends, concerning the castle, the courts, the college, the corporation and the country at large".