William Frederick Deacon was the first child of six born to a fairly prosperous merchant of Tavistock Square, London.
In October 1820 he added to his already taxing work load by editing, and almost wholly writing, a lively daily paper, The Déjeuné, or Companion for the Breakfast Table, extracts from which were frequently featured in Gold's.
Deacon, exhausted by his literary efforts, retired for a while to a cottage in Llangadock, south Wales, from where he wrote to his mentor, Walter Scott, asking for advice on whether to continue as a writer.
Scott advised him to pursue a steadier career outside literature, but Deacon ignored this advice and worked up some of the parodic material published in Gold's into his masterpiece, Warreniana, a compendious parodic survey of contemporary writing which imagines a world where the leading writers of the day become hirelings of the blacking (boot polish) manufacturer Robert Warren.
The Monthly Review praised the 'considerable vivacity and success' of the volume, whilst the London Literary Gazette labelled it a 'cleverly done' jeu d'esprit.