William Gifford

William Gifford (April 1756 – 31 December 1826) was an English critic, editor and poet, famous as a satirist and controversialist.

His father, a glazier and house painter, had run away as a youth with vagabond Bampfylde Moore Carew, and he remained a carouser throughout his life.

In course of time he produced his first poem, The Baviad (1791), a satire directed against the Della Cruscans, a group of sentimental and to Gifford's conservative mentality dangerously radical poets.

The earlier satirical writings had established Gifford as a keen, even ferocious critic, and he was appointed in 1797 editor of the Anti-Jacobin, which Canning and his friends had just started, and later of the Quarterly Review (1809–24).

By the turn of the century, Gifford's efforts as a poet were all but over, and he spent the rest of his career as an editor, scholar, and occasional critic.

Contributors to the review included Charles Lamb, Walter Scott, and Robert Southey; the last had been among the poets satirised in the previous decade by the Anti-Jacobin.

Gifford gave up the editorship of the Quarterly in 1824, only two years before his own death; he was succeeded in that position by John Taylor Coleridge.

In this work, which led to the more or less complete eclipse of the Della Cruscans, his lifelong tendency to unmoderated invective was restrained (though not completely) to produce a work that effectively satirised the Della Cruscan's sentimentality and tendency to absurd mutual compliment.

As a critic he had acuteness; but he was one-sided, prejudiced, and savagely bitter, and much more influenced in his judgments by the political opinions than by the literary merits of his victims.

These were traits he shared with his querulous and factional time; however, Gifford was among the most virulent practitioners of the art of partisan review.

Kathryn Sutherland, professor of the Faculty of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, has studied the manuscript of a discarded chapter of Jane Austen's Persuasion and has conjectured that much of Austen's polished style is probably the result of editorial tidying by Gifford, who worked for the publisher John Murray.