'The Praise of Blacking': William Frederick Deacon's Warreniana and Early Nineteenth-century Advertising-related Parody

February 1824 saw the anonymous publication, by the London publishers Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, of Warreniana; with Notes, Critical and Explanatory, by the Editor of a Quarterly Review. The book purported to contain ringing endorsements of the well-known manufacturer of blacking (i.e. boot polish), Robert Warren, by many of the leading literary figures (Byron, Coleridge, Scott and Wordsworth amongst them) and journals (Blackwood's, John Bull, the New Monthly) of the day. It was the work of the precocious twenty-four year old London journalist William Frederick Deacon. The book offers a series of agile and vivacious parodies of a wide range of Romantic period writing: poetry, essays, literary and political journalism, historiography, sermons, parliamentary reports and scholarship and yet, for reasons which I shall discuss below, it has been neglected, ignored even by historians of Romantic parody. My recent edition for Pickering and Chatto sees the first publication of the book since 1851 and is the first scholarly and annotated edition. Warreniana is an enormously engaging and enjoyable collection. This essay offers an account of the work and sets it in its contexts of early nineteenth-century advertising and post-Napoleonic advertising- and advertising-related parody and satire. It concludes with a consideration of the importance of Warreniana and a discussion of the book's parodic methodology and social resonance. William Frederick Deacon (1799-1845) was the first child of six born to a fairly prosperous London merchant. After Reading School, Deacon studied at St Catharine Hall, Cambridge. However, his studies at Cambridge seem to have been desultory and he left the university without a degree but with a poem written during his time at college: 'Hacho; or the Spell of St. Wilten', an imitation of Sir Walter Scott's romantic and medievalist poetry. It was published in his first collection, Hacho; or the Spell of Saint Wilten, and other Poems (1819). The imitative nature of the volume is summed up well in the Gentleman's Magazine's one-line review: 'Pleasing Verses in the manner of Scott and Byron'. Deacon's new career as a man of letters had begun. In 1820 and 1821 he was publishing extensively in Gold and Northhouse's London Magazine and Monthly Critical and Dramatic Review and between 21 October and 15 December 1820, he also edited and wrote almost all of a lively and highly eccentric daily paper, The Déjeuné, or Companion for the Breakfast Table. Unsurprisingly, this latter, rather demanding venture soon folded, and in 1821 Gold's London itself was bought out by Robert Baldwin of the rival London Magazine. However, some of the parodic material published in Gold's was worked up as part of Deacon's masterpiece, Warreniana. Deacon was the son of a merchant, a voracious reader and reviewer of contemporary literature, and, from a comparatively young age, a literary journalist and newspaper man. All of these biographical facts inform Warreniana, a compendious parodic survey of contemporary writing which imagines a world where the leading writers of the day become hirelings of Robert Warren. The book was generally well-received and there were several positive reviews. 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 and quoted admiringly from the Coleridge and the Byron parodies. Though it lamented, entirely predictably, the acerbic handling of Gifford, the British Critic published a long and eulogistic notice, commending the 'excellence' of the Moore, Scott and John Bull parodies and quoting at some length from the Coleridge. Warreniana has received little attention in more recent criticism. One of the tiny number …