Author: Gifford, William
Biography:
GIFFORD, William (1756-1826: ODNB)
Born in Ashburton, Devon, on 14 Apr. 1756, the puny child of sometime sailor Edward Gifford and his wife, Elizabeth, he rose from obscurity to be buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. Orphaned in 1768, he was left to a reluctant guardian, Bartholomew Carlile (related to the radical publisher and writer Richard Carlile), who hired him out as a ploughboy, sent him to sea, and finally apprenticed him to a shoemaker. His first patron, a local surgeon, raised the funds to send him to Exeter College, Oxford, from whence he graduated an excellent classical scholar in 1782. From 1784 to 1789 he was tutor to Earl Grosvenor’s eldest son, Lord Belgrave, in 1786 toured the Continent with Belgrave, in 1789 edited The Eaton Chronicle, and in 1790 moved permanently to London. By the time he published his translation of Juvenal (1802), he was well known as the author of The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795), poetic satires of Merry, Jerningham, Cowley, Piozzi (qq.v.) and other Della Crusan poets and dramatists. Having made the acquaintance of George Canning and through Canning prime minister William Pitt (qq.v.), from Nov. 1797 to July 1798 he edited their political newspaper, the Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner and in 1799 published Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. From 1809 to 1824 he edited the Quarterly Review. As a literary advisor, he was highly valued by the publisher John Murray and by Lord Byron (q.v.), who called him a model satirist. He published a translation of Persius (1821); an edition, still consulted, of Ben Jonson (1816); and editions of Massinger (1805) and Ford (1827). He died, unmarried, at his townhouse, 6 James Street, in the shadow of Buckingham Palace, on the last day of December 1826. From Mar. 1796 to the end of his life, he enjoyed a double lottery commissionership at £600 per annum; from 1799 £329 as Clerk of the Foreign Estreats in the Exchequer; and, from Dec. 1803, £300 as paymaster to the king’s ceremonial guard, the axe-wielding Gentlemen Pensioners. He bequeathed more than £23,000, almost all of the approximately £29,000 he had earned from Murray and his sinecures. He hoarded his wealth not because he was mean but because, as he told Horace Twiss (q.v.), chronic illness prevented him from spending what he had earned. (ODNB 4 Jan. 2019; ancestry.com 29 Jan. 2025; John Murray Archive) JC, HJ
Other Names:
- Gifford