The Late John Wilkes's Catechism of a Ministerial Member
The Late John Wilkes's Catechism was one of four liturgical parodies Hone composed and published in very early 1817. Together with and The Sinecurist's Creed and The Political Litany, the Catechism was one of the works singled out for prosecution by the Attorney General. The fourth parody, The Bullet Te Deum, was ignored by the authorities, perhaps because a well-publicized prosecution would likely have served only to increase the pamphlet's public visibility. It appears, given the MS available in the British Library and reprinted as an appendix to Marcus Wood's Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), that the title of the piece is accurate. Hone worked from an unpublished manuscript parody by Wilkes, updating the topical references to the immediate circumstances of post-Waterloo Regency London.
These links lead to the materials making up this short, hypertext edition:
- Facsimile title page from Hone's 1817 edition
- Full text of the parody
