Anti-Jacobin

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Anti-Jacobin. A weekly journal which ran from November 1797 until July 1798 under the editorship of William Gifford. Its prospectus declared its prejudices in favour of the established institutions of church and state, and its satire was directed against British radicals—Paine, Godwin, Holcroft, Thelwall—and their Whig allies, with side-swipes at the Noble Savage, sensibility, and Gothick. The contributors included Canning, George Ellis, John Hookham Frere, and the cartoonist James Gillray. On its demise it was succeeded by a monthly periodical review of the same name. Among its more savage and memorable items is the denunciation of the Whig as ‘the friend of every country but his own’, and Canning's celebrated ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-Grinder’, in which the latter's supine contentment provokes the Friend to ‘kick the Knife-Grinder, overturn his wheel, and exit in a transport of republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy’.

J. A. Cannon