Montgomery Puffiad Essay

— The Corvey Poets Project at the University of Nebraska —

British Poetry of the later Eighteenth and Earlier Nineteenth Centuries

Bibliographical and Contextual Apparatus

[Montgomery, Robert].

The Puffiad: A Satire. London: Maunder, 1828. Pp. viii + 128

Descriptive Essay

Robert Montgomery’s The Puffiad: A Satire (1828) takes on the popular publishers of early nineteenth century England and their use of hyperbolic advertisements, known as “puffs.” Although puffing was by no means the exclusive province of booksellers – everyone with something to sell used the periodical press to advertise – the puffing of novels and volumes of poetry seemed to strike a special nerve with many social commentators. The aesthetic preoccupation with “taste” and a lingering Augustan conservatism among many literary critics into and beyond the Romantic age contributed to a concern that the popularization of sensational novels was diluting artistic sensibilities and promoting loose morality in the masses. Denunciation of puffery was not new in 1828, either, as William Hazlitt had dealt with the phenomenon in his “Table Talk” of 1822 (“On Patronage and Puffing” 289-302). In 1824, William Frederick Deacon published a volume of poetry called Warreniana, which parodied puffs for Warren’s blacking (boot polish) with poems in the styles of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and other literary luminaries (Montgomery himself includes a brief parody of Warren puffs on the final page of the The Puffiad, “The Japan-Blacking Man”).

The Puffiad was published only in 1828, and it appears that there was a single impression. This corresponds with the general lack of attention that the volume received in the periodical press, which is somewhat surprising considering that The Puffiad was released nearly simultaneously with Montgomery’s most famous and popular work, The Omnipresence of the Deity, which went through eight editions in as many months in 1828. Nevertheless, only one major periodical reviewed The Puffiad (Westminster Review, April 1828 – review transcribed below), and a second alludes to it two years later in a review of Montgomery’s Satan, although it misstates the title of The Puffiad as “On the Art of Puffing” (Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, February 1830. 95-9). Two other reviews of 1830 – one by T.B. Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review and one more from Fraser’s – are devoted primarily to condemnations of puffing generally and puffs of Montgomery’s work specifically. An additional review in Fraser’s takes a sideswipe at Montgomery: the July 1830 review of Edward Clarkson’s Robert Montgomery and His Reviewers mentions the title of The Puffiad in its lengthy condemnation of Clarkson and Montgomery but includes no commentary on the poem, despite the obvious opportunity to ridicule Montgomery further (725). Another probable cause of The Puffiad’s relative obscurity is that Montgomery’s primary audience, Evangelical Christians, would likely have been uninterested in a poem that was neither overtly nor implicitly religious.

With The Puffiad, Montgomery devotes a book-length satirical poem to the subject of literary “puffery.” The poem is in two parts, and includes an Introductory Epistle and an appendix (“Puffiana”), which contains supposedly authentic examples of literary puffery. The Introductory Epistle, whose twenty-three page length comprises nearly 18% of the volume’s total, is a microcosm of the poem. Montgomery addresses the Epistle to an anonymous publisher, whom Montgomery charges with having “inflicted lasting injury on the literature of the country” (6). Montgomery makes clear that this is puffing’s chief crime: that the publishers (merely a synonym of “puffers” for Montgomery) have foisted upon Britain a host of coarse, unqualified, immoral authors, who can do no less than efface the historical and rightful producers of literature and thereby drag English culture into the gutter.

The poem commences in Part 1, the Argumentum for which advertises a summary of puffing practices, a discussion of the “incondite twaddle” which comprises contemporary literary production, and finally, a “polite lamentation” of the demise of English poetry (25). The title Puffiad, an epigraph by Juvenal, the initial invocation of the muse, the Augustan regularity of structure, and an opening page quotation of Pope’s The Dunciad announce Montgomery’s intention to create a sweeping mock epic:
          Of puffs defrauding, and the puffing race,
          The curse of learning, and the land’s disgrace,
           I sing. Accomplish’d Heliconian Miss,
           Descend, and aid a task divine as this!
           Diffuse sweet influence through all my brain,
           Balance the periods, keep in tune the strain;
           When low, upraise,—direct me when I fly!
           And all but smut and modern slang supply;
           Illume, refine, and regulate my song,
           Perch on my page, and puff the verse along. (27-8)
Beyond this initial invocation, however, Montgomery devotes Part 1 to a polemic against modern literature that is less a satire, parody, or mock epic than it is a straightforward harangue of righteous indignation (and frequent fury).

That The Puffiad is in verse appears to be a coincidence. Although the poem is composed of heroic couplets, and Montgomery offers an occasional play on words, Montgomery does not demonstrate much facility for satire, or even sarcasm. The poem is almost unfailingly composed of direct, undisguised vitriol that might have been more effective in prose:
           From volume-hacks to grubbers for reviews,
          Thick as the blights on wintry trees, resort,
           As to one common, all-directing court;
           Hence Ramsgate tourists, full of far renown,
           With greasy quartos stuff the stupid town!
           Hence novel-vampers, fraught with lackey lore,
           Supply St. James’s with their kitchen store;
           Hence reminiscent rubbish, picked from brains
           Addled and heavy with their rakish pairs,
           In fat octavos pester all the isle
           With slip-slop, nasty, venomous, and vile;
           Hence hungry hermits, Bow-Street blackguards, all
           Book-vamping reptiles in this earthly ball,
           In fetid volumes on the world intrude,
           Spurr’d by the vulgar wish of getting food. (55-6)
Irony is all but absent from the poem as Montgomery subjects authors, poets, publishers, puffers, and readers to the same treatment. Thus, the poem is better characterized as a versified assault than a satire.

Part 1, surprisingly, contains few mentions of puffing after the initial stanza. Rather, Montgomery concerns himself with a discussion of the declining state of English literature. Here, Montgomery has two targets: the un-Englishness of contemporary literature and, most significantly, the emergence of a mass of untaught and unrefined authors who have betrayed England’s Augustan heritage. First, for Montgomery, the sorry state of contemporary literature is partially a result of unwholesome foreign influence:
           And here, fair Muse! Applaud the rich who roam
           To sun-rouged lands,—and leave their debts at home:
           Who catch the Gallic smile—th’ Ausonian mien,
           And glossy manner of a foreign scene,
           And thence returning, kindly spread around
           The continental itch on British ground.
           So shall religion, dress, and language,—all
           That once was British, be absorb’d in Gaul;
           So shall each genuine trait of English growth
           Dwindle away in dastard vice and sloth;
           Candour shall yield unto obsequious art,
           And “John Bull” in the Gallic ape depart. (32-3)
Clearly, Montgomery sees that the “Continental” influence upon literature is a symptom of a larger shift in English culture. The effects upon literary art, however, concern him most, especially that “Plain English, undefiled, correctly pure, / Where native force and nervous sounds allure, / Now rarely greets us in the gauzy page, / Spun out to suit this puffing, piping age, / In Latin [i.e., Italian] patch-work, and in French brocade” (40-1). The un-Englishness, as Montgomery perceives it, of contemporary style and language is a thorough corruption of English literary tradition.

Most distressing for Montgomery, though, is what he sees as the leveling effect of the growth of the popular press and the startling growth in choice for consumers of literature. In other words, the formerly exclusive realm of literary production has been breached by the mob:
          FACILITY!—that dismal, dreadful curse!
          Has mangled prose, and victimised our verse;—
          Has made our lit’rature a public pool,
          To catch the brain-dregs of the hack and fool;
          Where all may go, and dabble as they will,
          And drop the crude disasters of their quill. (39)
This, for Montgomery, is the principal tragedy of the modern literary age; he perceives that the transgression – for it could only be characterized thus – of the masses into the province of the refined and high-minded artist has wrecked English literature. Montgomery compares the creative impulse of this amateurish author to a “swell’d bladder, [which] strains, and bursts abroad” (37) and likens the collective producers to “a mix’d herd of pigs” (46), evoking the contemptuous conservatism of Burke’s “swinish multitude.” With unbridled nostalgia, Montgomery yearns for a time past, “. . . a Muse ennobled time, / When Glory hover’d round the hallowed rhyme, / And poesy was deemed celestial art” (43). This perception of the state of English literature and culture confirmed, then, is the crux of Montgomery’s argument in Part 1.

In Part 2, though the novelists and poets of the age still receive the majority of his scorn, Montgomery moves more directly to a criticism of puffing and puffers. Montgomery singles out a Mr. Burlington as “the boundless master-mind” of literary puffery (69). It is unclear whether Burlington is an actual puff-writer, a pseudonym, or a fiction. It is possible that Montgomery invented Burlington to stand as a representative of all puff-writers. That Montgomery uses a full name in this case stands out among the long list of the accused since Montgomery habitually uses traditional, partially elided names to camouflage the identities of his targets. For instance, Montgomery revives the old accusation (noted by Hazlitt) that Byron wrote lottery puffs: “And B---n, too—long may his genius write / The puff-born, puff-bred mimics from our sight” (69). Montgomery, however, avoids using Byron’s full name even though Byron has been dead for four years, which speaks strongly to Montgomery’s general adherence to convention. Montgomery follows this practice unerringly for both authors and titles under attack, so the conspicuous exception of Burlington may indicate that he is a character of convenience. Added to this, the absence of a Burlington from records of contemporary booksellers suggests that Mr. Burlington is either a fiction or a façade.

If “Burlington” represents a specific person, a reasonable possibility is that Montgomery refers to the publisher Henry Colburn, who operated in New Burlington Street and published, among other things, the Literary Gazette. The Literary Gazette was well-known for its puffs, though they appeared to be puffs of a higher quality and subtler style. Using the street name for Colburn’s publishing house would be a recognizable surrogate name but vague enough to avoid direct offense or slander. On the other hand, Colburn’s Literary Gazette provided some of the early, glowing reviews of Montgomery’s The Age Reviewed and The Omnipresence of the Deity, reviews which no doubt contributed to the success of the two volumes, raising some doubt that Montgomery would attack one of his benefactors. While it was not uncommon to take digs at one’s friends in a satire like Montgomery’s, the polemic style, the especially vicious tone, and the general atmosphere of moral outrage of The Puffiad make this unlikely. Montgomery levels the full force of invective upon “Burlington” and all of the unworthy recipients of “his” puffs.

A significant implication of an unexpected attack on one’s unsolicited benefactor is the appearance that one never wanted or needed the help in the first place; Montgomery needs no puffs to secure his reputation. Instead, Montgomery stakes a claim for his own poetry as that of the higher sort: the Augustan, purely English poetry pursued for its capacity to teach and delight rather than titillate, as the popular trash was intended to do. The attack on Colburn (if, indeed, he is the target) appears to be something of a rear-guard action, in which Montgomery dismisses all puffs as mendacious, even those on his behalf; he distances himself from the periodical press and appeals for the praise of merit:
          Now mark the one whose mind commands a store
          Of all that wit or wisdom can adore:
          How nobly different wrestles HE for fame!
          He hires no trumpet to prelude his name,
          He wants no hand to drag him to the goal,
          But reaches it by energy of the soul;
          And, though some clouds of envy may o’ershroud
          His struggling light, nor let it be allow’d,
          And stars of vulgar fame may pertly frown
          Upon his dim approach to fair renown,
          Like the broad sun, he’ll brighten into day,
          Blaze on the world, and blot them all away! (107)
This is the final stanza of the poem, and it is difficult not to view it as the culmination of a long case of special pleading. Montgomery was no doubt sensitive to the fact that he was widely perceived as being the beneficiary of puffs for his earlier work, and thus, he may have seen The Puffiad as the means by which he could separate himself from the common crowd of puffed authors and lobby for the peculiar merit of his religious epics. If that is the case, then Montgomery failed from the outset. The author of the sole review of The Puffiad notes that the poem “could not come more appropriately from any pen than that of [Montgomery], who has been as much puffed for his age, and more undeservedly, than any rhymester of the last century” (Westminster Review 449).

Montgomery apparently had a rather high opinion of himself, a perception noted as early as 1830 by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review when he remarked on a portrait of Montgomery appended to one of his volumes “in which he appears to be doing his very best to look like a man of genius and sensibility” (200). Fraser’s picked up the torch from here in its review of Satan, printing a parody of the portrait in which Montgomery peers at his own image in a mirror as Satan peeks from over the top of the mirror frame (99). Montgomery’s expansive literary ambitions would not be well served by a public identification as a “puffed” author, and he may, therefore, have felt that a pre-emptive attack was necessary. Reputation – not money – appears to be a more plausible motive for his defensiveness. In the end, The Puffiad is largely a failure both as satire and as a defense against the more perceptive (and honest) critics of his work, but it sheds much light on Montgomery’s contemporary reputation and on his own ambitions as a poet.

Works Cited

Hazlitt, William. “On Patronage and Puffing.” Table Talk: or, Original Essays. 1822. Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Vol. 8. Ed. P.P. Howe. London: Dent and Sons, 1931.
[Macaulay, T.B.]. “Mr. Robert Montgomery’s Poems, and the Modern Practice of Puffing.” Edinburgh Review 51 (1830): 193-210.
[Montgomery, Robert]. The Puffiad: A Satire. London: Maunder, 1828.
“Mr. Robert Montgomery’s Poetry.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 1 (February 1830): 95-9.
“Puffing, and The Puffiad.” Westminster Review 9 (April 1828): 441-50.
“Robert Montgomery and His Critics.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 1 (July 1830): 721-6.
Strachan, John. "'The Praise of Blacking': William Frederick Deacon's Warreniana and Early Nineteenth-century Advertising-related Parody." Romanticism On the Net 15 (August 1999) [November 2004] .