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Author: Canning, George

Biography:

CANNING, George (1770-1827: ODNB)

Statesman and satirist. He was born in London but his father died on the son's first birthday. To make ends meet, his mother became an actress in provincial theatres and eventually married a fellow performer. (After 1778, when the Canning family stepped in to provide for the boy, he seldom saw her, though they corresponded and he supported her.) He was a brilliant student at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he won the Chancellor's Prize for his Latin poem The Pilgrimage to Mecca. He read law at Lincoln's Inn but was not called to the bar; instead, he entered Parliament in 1793 as a Pittite. In 1796 he became an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. He presided over the pro-government Anti-Jacobin (1797-8), to which he contributed satirical verse. His marriage to Joan Scott in 1800 made him financially independent; his wife and three of their children survived him. After a spell out of office, he was named Foreign Secretary in 1807. In 1808, he joined Walter Scott and George Ellis in founding the Tory Quarterly Review to counteract the Edinburgh. He became Prime Minister in 1827 but died after only four months in office. (ODNB 16 Feb. 2018)

 

Other Names:

  • Canning
 

Books written (18):

2nd edn. London: J. Wright and W. Bulmer and Co., 1800
4th edn. London: J. Wright, 1801
London: J. Hatchard, 1806
2nd edn. London: Hatchard, 1806
London/ Glasgow/ Dublin: Thomas Tegg/ R. Griffin and Co./ J. Cumming, [1827]
London: Jones and Co., 1827
Paris: Baudry, and Bobee and Hingray, 1828
[Warwick]: [printed by E. Heathcote], 1829
New York: Charles P. Fessenden, 1831