William Gifford

Editor and critic, born in Ashburton, Devon, SW England, UK. Orphaned at 12, he secured education at Oxford through patronage. His early works, the Baviad (1794), and the Maeviad (1796), were satirical attacks against writers who had had an easier start in life. Gifford's editorship of the Anti-Jacobin (1797–8) gained him favour with Tory magnates, and he was the first editor of the Quarterly Review (1809–24). He possessed much satirical acerbity, but little merit as a poet, and as a critic was unduly biased.

William Gifford (April, 1756 - December 31, 1826), critic, editor and poet, was born of humble parentage at Ashburton, Devonshire, and after being for a short time at sea, was apprenticed to a cobbler.

By 1779 he had made progress enough to enter Exeter College, Oxford as a bible clerk, matriculating on 16 February 1779 and graduating B.A. Becoming known to Lord Grosvenor, he was patronised by him, and in course of time produced his first poem, The Baviad (1791), a satire directed against the Della Cruscans, a clique of sentimental and to Gifford's conservative mentality dangerously radical poets, which at once quenched their tapers. Both literature and literary taste have become corrupt, and for him as for Gifford, poetic corruption mirrors political corruption: the decline in modern poetry reflects the decline of modern morals.

The Baviad was followed by another satire, The Maeviad (1795), against some minor dramatists. His last effort in this line was his Epistle to Peter Pindar (Dr. John Wolcot) (1800), inspired by personal enmity, which evoked a reply, A Cut at a Cobbler and a public letter in which Wolcot threatened to horse-whip Gifford. Gifford and Wolcot met in Wright’s bookshop in Piccadilly on 18 August 1800. According to most contemporary accounts, Wolcot attempted to cudgel Gifford;

The earlier satirical writings had established the reputation of Gifford as a keen, and even ferocious critic, and he was appointed in 1797 editor of the Anti-Jacobin, which Canning and his friends had just started, and of the Quarterly Review (1809-24). As editor of the Anti-Jacobin, Gifford published the great pro-Tory satires and parodies of Canning, John HookhamFrere, and George Eliis. Gifford edited The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin in 1799.

Gifford was popularly supposed to have penned the attack on Keats's Endymion, actually by John Wilson Croker, which Shelley and Byron erroneously blamed for bringing about the death of the poet, 'snuffed out', in Byron's phrase, 'by an article'.

His satirical poems are included in volume 4 of British Satire 1785-1840, 5 vols (2003), ed. Everyman publish Gifford's Juvenal.

This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910).