William Kenrick (writer)

William Kenrick (c. 1725 – 10 June 1779) was an English novelist, playwright, translator and satirist, who spent much of his career libelling and lampooning his fellow writers.

One of his first targets was the vulnerable Christopher Smart whose poem "Night Piece" he attacked in the London monthly journal The Kapelion; or Poetical Ordinary, consisting of Great Variety of Dishes in Prose and Verse, recommended to all who have a Good Taste or Keen Appetite in 1750 under the nom de plume Whimsey Banter.

In 1752 Kenrick publicly mocked Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett in his entertainment Fun: a Parodi-tragi-comical Satire, a parody of Macbeth in which the weird sisters circle about their cauldron, throwing in contemporary novels, periodicals and pamphlets.

The play was banned by the Lord Mayor, however, "as it was to have been perform’d at the Castle-Tavern, Pater-noster-Row, on Thursday, February 13, 1752, but Suppressed, by a Special Order from the Lord-Mayor and Court of Aldermen."

"[1]Kenrick's most successful work, reprinted in over 20 editions, was a courtesy book published in 1753 under the title The Whole Duty of a Woman; or, A Guide to the Female Sex, from the Age of Sixteen to Sixty, &c., but the author was simply listed as "A Lady."

His vilification was so unjustified that Ralph Griffiths (the publisher) made an indirect apology for his successor by a favourable though brief review (in June, 1762) of "The Citizen of the World".

In 1765 Kenrick published A Review of Dr Johnson's new edition of Shakspeare: in which the Ignorance, or Inattention, of that Editor is exposed, and the Poet defended from the Persecution of his Commentators.

Kenrick complained: One species of our predecessor's merit, however, I presume myself at least entitled to, that of perseverance; it being now fifteen years since I first engaged in this undertaking, which I have since pursued with almost unremitted assiduity, and that not only at considerable waste of time and expense, but under the constant mortification of hearing it equally ridiculed by those who do know, and by those who do not know, anything of the matter.In 1772, he published Love in the Suds, a town eclogue: being the lamentation of Roscius for the loss of his Nyky, a direct and scurrilous attack on David Garrick, making explicit charges of homosexuality with Isaac Bickerstaffe against the great actor.

According to the General Biographical Dictionary of 1815 in Kenrick's later years he drank very heavily, a habit which probably caused his relatively early death: In his latter days, his constitution was so much injured by inebriety, that he generally wrote with a bottle of brandy by his elbow, which at length terminated his career June 10, 1779, less lamented than perhaps any person known in the literary world, yet possessed of talents which, under a steady and virtuous direction, might have procured him an honourable place among the authors of his time.Indeed, Kenrick wrote revealingly of himself that he drank spirits (aqua vitae), to pen acid (aqua fortis): The Wits, who drink water and suck sugar-candy, Impute the strong spirit of Kenrick to brandy.