Charles Churchill

Charles Churchill , 1731-64, English poet and satirist. Upon his family's insistence he took religious orders in 1756, but life as a London dandy suited him more, and he resigned his curacy. His first poem and perhaps his best work, The Rosciad (1761), a satire on the leading actresses and actors of the day, was an immediate success. His other works include The Prophecy of Famine (1763), a highly topical political satire, and An Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), attacking Hogarth for his heartless portrait of John Wilkes .

Bibliography: See his works (ed. by D. Grant, 1956); study by W. C. Brown (1953).

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.