8vo. P. , title, verso blank; pp. [1]-81, text; p. [82], blank.
Copy: YU.
Second, Third, and Fourth Editions, Becket, 1785.
Assigned to Tickell by a MS. note on the title-page of a copy of the Fourth Edition in the New York Public Library. It is characteristically Tickell’s in substance and style. Intended as an attack on a proposed reduction of the tea-duty, it enlarges into a satire on Pitt’s administration, especially the ascendancy of the East India Company interest therein. While the Company continues its corrupt sway, Pitt directs the energies of Parliament to “Edicts against the Waste of Wafers in Public Offices, and Registrations of the Nett Consumption of Quills; together with Sworn Meters of Sand, and a Comptroller-General of Blotting-Paper.”
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Contributions to The Rolliad.
The work known as The Rolliad is only for the sake of convenience so styled. The name serves as a collective title for a group of many works, differently titled and separately published, ranging from squibs a quatrain long to extended mock-heroic poems. These collaborative Whig satires began to appear in Henry Bate’s Morning Herald late in 1784; and the inclusive editions, issued from 1795 on under the title of The Rolliad, contain Criticisms on The Rolliad, Political Eclogues, Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, and Political Miscellanies. Many ancillary pieces by the same group of authors appeared in newspapers and fugitive miscellanies but were never reprinted.
A good deal has been written in appreciation of the literary and political satire of the Rolliad pieces, but no thorough study of their history and bibliography has been attempted. So complex is their bibliography that it is impossible to give a satisfactory account of any single author’s share. The principal information on authorship will be found in several contributions to Notes and Queries, 1st ser., II, 1850, and III, 1851, from copies of The Rolliad annotated by the authors or by those who knew them, as follows: French Laurence’s notes, II, 373, and III, 129-131; George Ellis’ notes, II, 114-115; Alexander Chalmers’ notes, II, 242; Sir James Mackintosh’s notes, III, 131. To these should be added Sheridan’s notes in a copy used by Walter Sichel; see his Sheridan, II, 87ff. There is much other scattered information, of which full use has not yet been made, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century memoirs and journals.
According to French Laurence, who acted as editor, “the piece first published, and the origin of all that followed,” was the “Short Account of the Family of the Rollos, now Rolles,” written principally by Tickell and purporting to be a genealogy of the family of John Rolle, M.P. for Devon, the unlucky hero of the projected mock epic. Tickell designed the absurd family tree that served as frontispiece for Criticisms on The Rolliad (information from Sheridan, in Lord Broughton [John Cam Hobhouse], Recollections of a Long Life, ed. Lady Dorchester, 1909-11, I, 202). He had also a leading hand in the next project of the group, the Probationary Odes, for which he provided the editorial preliminaries, the first of the trial odes, supposed to be by Sir Cecil Wray, and the ninth, supposed to be by Nathaniel Wraxall and one of the best in the series. (According to Mackintosh, the ninth ode was “sketched by Canning, the Eton boy, finished by Tickell.”) The most successful of the Political Eclogues, a satire on Lord Lansdowne called Jekyll, was the collaborative work of Tickell and Lord John Townshend; it first appeared as a quarto poem published by J. Debrett, 1788. For the smaller contributions of Tickell, which are numerous, the lists in Notes and Queries may be consulted.