Uncorking Old Sherry

It has been far too long since the Amateur Historian has paid homage to the man whose name graces the title of this blog. This particular print, drawn on March 10, 1805, is not only a witty satire against Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a playwright (he wrote the charming and wickedly witty School for Scandal of which there are very few adaptations and, alas, fewer decent ones), owner of the Drury Lane Theatre and Whig politician, but also another installment of Funny Things That Happened to Pitt the Younger.

In 1805, Pitt the Younger was in the first year of his second term as Prime Minister, after having retired for two years due to ill-health and the king's knee-jerk reactionism to Catholic Emancipation and Napoleon was gleefully conquering the Continent. He was brought back because the previous Prime Minister, Addington (in the print lying spilled on the floor; he's labeled 'medicinal wine' because he was the son of a doctor) was deeply unpopular for his incompetence in trying to get Napoleon to agree to an armistice and then sticking to it. Pitt therefore introduced a bill to change the recruiting policy for the Army, causing Sheridan to get up and gave a long and rambling speech about nothing in particular.

This very well might be one of the Amateur Historian's favorite Pitt the Younger moments, as Pitt responded by criticizing Sheridan's use of rhetoric, complimenting Sheridan on 'his extraordinary powers of imagination and of fancy' and then comparing Sheridan's oratory to 'a bottle just uncorked [which] bursts all at once into an explosion of froth and air. All that his own fancy can suggest or that he has collected from others; all that he can utter in the ebullition of the moment; all that he has slept on and studied are combined and produced for our entertainment...and out it comes altogether, whether or not it has any, even the smallest relation to the subject in debate.'

This print, of which Sheridan himself bought six copies, has Pitt, still thin from ill-health "Uncorking Old Sherry", i.e. quite literally taking the cork out of a bottle with Sheridan's face in it. The bottle spews forth invective, stolen jests, lame puns, dramatic ravings, egotism, damned fibs, groans of disappointment and the like. Behind Sheridan are all the other members of the Whig party, capped with a bonnet rogue and labeled based on their political opinions or their place of origin. For a better copy of the print and to read Pitt the Younger's scathingly witty comparison of Sheridan to an uncorked bottle (written under the print itself) click here.

Oh those idealistic authors....

Percy Blysse Shelley was not the only author was a rather too-idealistic view of how his work would be received.

Olympe de Gouges was a prolific pamphleteer, playwright and novelist during the French Revolution, who took an unusually proactive role within French society. She was widowed at 18 and, with her husband's fortune, began publishing her work. In order to get her opinions heard in public (since women could not mount the tribunal and give speeches in the National Assembly except in extraordinarily rare cases), she published her own pamphlets and posted them on walls, houses, lamp posts, trees, buildings... during the French Revolution, one of the most effective methods of disseminating information was to post pamphlets on every available stationary surface.

However, Olympe de Gouges decided to post hundreds of copies of her pamphlet "Three governments' battle to the death", in which monarchy, federalism and republicanism duke it out for the Grand Prize of France and de Gouges takes care to point out the good points of each government, including the monarchy. She chose to do this in the middle of a civil war between monarchists and republicans, in Paris, no less, the seat of the republican government.

Olympe de Gouges expected to open debate and to insert her opinion into governmental procedures, as had happened when she published a pamphlet offering to act as Louis XVI's trial lawyer.

She got arrested instead.