Anti-Jacobin

[
James Gillray's caricature "The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder" (1797) publicized the "Anti-Jacobin".]

"The Anti-Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner" was a newspaper founded by George Canning in 1797. William Gifford was its editor. Its first issue was published on 20 November and during the parliamentary session of 1797-98 it was issued every Monday. [Wendy Hinde, "George Canning" (Purnell Books Services, 1973), p. 59.]

Canning founded it, in his words, "to be full of sound reasoning, good principles, and good jokes and to set the mind of the people right upon every subject." [Hinde, p. 58.] One of Canning's biographers described its purpose as to "deride and refute the ideas of the Jacobins, present the government's point of view on the issues of the day and expose the misinformation and misinterpretation which filled the opposition newspapers." [Hinde, p. 58.] In its first issue Canning said he and his friends:

"...avow ourselves to be "partial" to the COUNTRY "in which we live", notwithstanding the daily panegyrics which we read and hear on the superior virtues and endowments of its rival and hostile neighbours. We are "prejudiced" in favour of "her" Establishments, civil and religious; though without claiming for either that ideal perfection, which modern philosophy professes to discover in the more luminous systems which are arising on all sides of us." [Hinde, p. 60.]

Canning's "most serious, vehement and effective onslaught in verse" on the values of the French Revolution was set out in a long poem, 'New Morality', published in the last issue of the "Anti-Jacobin" (No. 36, 9 July, 1798). Canning considered these values as "French philanthropy" which professed a love of all mankind whilst eradicating every patriotic impulse. He described those in Britain who held these values as a "pedant prig" who "disowns a Briton's part, And plucks the name of England from his heart":

No – through th'extended globe his feelings run
As broad and general as th'unbounded sun!
No narrow bigot "he"; – his reason'd view
Thy interests, England, ranks with thine, Peru!
France at our doors, "he" sees no danger nigh,
But heaves for Turkey's woes the impartial sigh;
A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country – but his own. [Hinde, p. 61.]

In order to publicise the "Anti-Jacobin" Canning paid the cartoonist James Gillray to publish plates themed on the "Anti-Jacobin"'s principles and it has been claimed that twenty Gillray plates were the fruit of this arrangement. [Hinde, p. 60. Draper Hill, "Gillray" (1965), p. 68.]

William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister, also contributed to the newspaper. [Hinde, p. 63.]

The "Anti-Jacobin" estimated its total readership to be 50,000: the regular weekly sale of 2,500 was multiplied by seven (arriving at 17,500) because that was the average size of a family; to this was added 32,500 on the claim that many readers lent their copies to their poorer neighbours. [Hinde, p. 65.]

Notes

Further reading

*Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, "The Anti-Jacobins, 1798–1800: The Early Contributors to the Anti-Jacobin Review" (Palgrave Macmillan, 1987).