The Rolliad

When I was researching my doctoral dissertation, I sometimes varied my diet of Victorian pop history with a dose of late eighteenth-century political satire. Sometimes, this proved to be a diversion for wholly unexpected reasons--like the time when the British Library delivered an elephant folio of broadsides to the desk, leaving me staring in some bemusement at a book nearly as tall as I was. Needless to say, there was a certain comedy involved in returning the folio, seeing as how I was unable to move it.

After I finished my degree, I bought myself an 1812 edition of the Rolliad as a memento (mori?) of sorts. Strictly speaking, the Rolliad is the umbrella title for several volumes of prose and verse satire on William Pitt the Younger and his ministry, with some hits at contemporary poets and critics (the Wartons, for example) also percolating through the mix. The Rolliad proper consists of two mock-scholarly commentaries on an equally mock-epic poem; eventually, the authors added Political Eclogues, Probationary Odes for the Laureateship and Political Miscellanies. One immediately notices two things about the satires. The first is that eighteenth-century political rhetoric tends to hit below the belt a bit more frequently than ours. Figuratively speaking, as it were. There's just not that much double entendre in contemporary political commentary. The other thing one notices about the Rolliad is that it is now completely and utterly unreadable, except possibly by academics who specialize in late eighteenth-century political history. A complete stranger to the eighteenth century could probably guess what's being satirized, as in this ode "by" the notoriously foul-mouthed Lord Chancellor Thurlow:

D-mn Fox, and d-mn North;
D-mn Portland's mild worth;
D-mn Devon the good,
Double d-mn all his name;
D-mn Fitzwilliam's blood,
Heir of Rockingham's fame;
D-mn Sheridan's wit,
The terror of Pitt;
D-mn Loughb'rough, my plague--wou'd his bagpipe were split!

However, Pepper Arden and Charles Jenkinson are no longer names to conjure with (although Pepper Arden certainly has one of the best names in the Hanoverian political scene!), let alone Rolle.

In the the late Victorian period, The Review of Reviews suggested that the world needed an annotated edition, although nobody took them up on it. It's probably a good idea--parts of it have been reprinted in scholarly editions, but not the whole thing--although I suspect that the results would look uncomfortably like Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, with the footnotes occupying almost the entire page save for one lonely line of verse at the top.

Personally, I'm fondest of the last entry in the parody of Thomas Warton, "Table of Instructions" (on writing odes):

7thly, and finally, That it may not be amiss to be a little intelligible.

Perhaps I should post that one on my office door.