William Frederick Deacon

William Frederick Deacon (1799–1844), English author and journalist, was the first child of six born to a fairly prosperous London merchant. After Reading School, Deacon studied at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. However, his studies at Cambridge seem to have been desultory and he left the university without a degree but with a poem written during his time at college: 'Hacho; or the Spell of St. Wilten', an imitation of Sir Walter Scott's romantic and mediaevalist poetry. It was published in his first collection, Hacho; or the Spell of Saint Wilten, and other Poems (1819). The imitative nature of the volume is summed up well in the Gentleman's Magazine's one-line review: 'Pleasing Verses in the manner of Scott and Lord Byron'. Deacon's new career as a man of letters had begun. In 1820 and 1821 he was publishing extensively in Gold and Northhouse's London Magazine and Monthly Critical and Dramatic Review and between 21 October and 15 December 1820, he also edited and wrote almost all of a lively and highly eccentric daily paper, The Déjeuné, or Companion for the Breakfast Table. Unsurprisingly, this latter, rather demanding venture soon folded, and in 1821 Gold's London itself was bought out by Robert Baldwin of the rival London Magazine. However, some of the parodic material published in Gold's was worked up as part of Deacon's masterpiece, Warreniana, a compendious parodic survey of contemporary writing which imagines a world where the leading writers of the day become hirelings of the blacking (boot polish) manufacturer Robert Warren. The book was generally well-received and there were several positive reviews. The Monthly Review praised the 'considerable vivacity and success' of the volume, whilst the London Literary Gazette labelled it a 'cleverly done' jeu d'esprit. His later books include November Nights or Tales for Winter Evenings (1826). He spent much of the last two decades of his relatively short life as a journalist for the True Sun.

References

* W. F. Deacon, Annette. With a memoir of the author, by Sir T.N. Talfourd (London, 1852)

* W. F. Deacon, Warreniana, vol. 4 of Parodies of the Romantic age, edited by Graeme Stones and John Strachan (5, vols, London, 1999).