Charles Churchill

Churchill, Charles

Churchill, Charles (1732–64), curate at St John's, Westminster, was oppressed by poverty until the publication of The Rosciad and The Apology (both 1761), which brought him fame and fortune. He increasingly abandoned the church, leading a worldly and dissipated life, and by 1762 was a close friend of Wilkes, writing for his paper the North Briton and attacking his opponents in satiric verse. The Prophecy of Famine (1763) is a mock-pastoral and a powerful satiric attack on Bute, J. Home, and other Scots. Gotham (1764) describes Churchill as Patriot King (see Bolingbroke) of an ideal state. Its heroic couplets mark the transition to the softer usages of the later 18th cent. (Gotham, a village near Nottingham, was traditionally famed for the simplicity of its inhabitants.) Churchill died young at Boulogne on his way to visit Wilkes in France.

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MARGARET DRABBLE and JENNY STRINGER. "Churchill, Charles." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. 30 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

MARGARET DRABBLE and JENNY STRINGER. "Churchill, Charles." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. 2003. Encyclopedia.com. (May 30, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O54-ChurchillCharles.html

MARGARET DRABBLE and JENNY STRINGER. "Churchill, Charles." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. 2003. Retrieved May 30, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O54-ChurchillCharles.html

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