Skip to main content

Author: Jerdan, William

Biography:

JERDAN, William (1782-1869: ODNB)

Born in Kelso, Roxburghshire, on 16 Apr. 1782, he was the third boy of the seven children of small landowners John Jerdan, a baron, and Agnes Stuart. He was privately educated. Having set his sights on journalism at a young age, he emigrated to London in 1806, first to work at the Morning Post, later for a succession of other newspapers. A man of anti-jacobin convictions, he successfully insinuated himself into government circles; he was, he wrote, “in constant and familiar communication with the Treasury and Secretary of State’s departments.” In 1814 he dedicated his translation of a French work, A Voyage to the Isle of Elba, to Charles Long, an influential Pittite politician. Stockdale published his 588-line encomium, The Jubilee, a Poem on the Fiftieth Anniversary of His Majesty’s Accession to the Throne (1810). In it, he describes Britain as “an impregnable castle … where all is bliss and security”; “On you the Heavens benignant smile, / Blest natives of the sea-girt Isle:”. In 1818, he became editor of Henry Colburn’s conservative journal, the Literary Gazette, a task he undertook until 1850. In a sometimes rocky partnership, he and John Taylor (q.v.) controlled two conservative newspapers, The Morning Post and The Sun. The steep legal fees he incurred in 1817 in his successful contest with Taylor over the ownership and management of The Sun caused him to seek financial help from the statesman George Canning (q.v.), who directed the editor of John Murray’s conservative journal the QR, William Gifford (q.v.), to employ him as a researcher, sub-editor, and writer. He contributed light articles as well to the Foreign Literary Gazette, to Notes and Queries, the ER, and to Fraser’s, Tait’s, and Bentley’s magazines. A co-founder of the Zoological Society and of the Royal Geographical Society, he was a member of the Camden and Percy societies. He advanced the interests of poets Mary Anne Browne, Elizabeth Cook, Robert Montgomery, John Galt, and Hannah More (qq.v.). Jerdan promoted the poetry of Letitia Landon (q.v.) with whom he sustained an intimate relationship. He and Landon had three children out of wedlock. His four-volume Autobiography (1852-53), and his Men I Have Known (1866), preserve details of literary life in the long eighteenth century. He died in Bushey Heath, 11 Jul. 1869. (ODNB 3 Mar. 2023; R. H. Stoddard, ed., Personal Reminiscences by Moore and Jerdan [1875]; D. Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders [1988]) JC

 

Books written (1):