Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749–1814)

Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749–1814)

Pratt was a minor British writer characteristic of the “age of sentiment.” At the end of his life, Pratt was eulogized in early nineteenth‐century periodicals, according to Josephine Grieder, as a “philanthropist, patriot, and zealous friend of the unfortunate, as well as author,” (Grieder, “The Elusive Samuel Jackson Pratt”, 479). Later in the nineteenth century, however, a history of English literature—one of the first to make a case for a distinct “Victorian period” in literature—singled out Pratt as exemplifying a “style of singularly mawkish sentimentality and empty affectation” during a time already marked by an unprecedented “ascendency” of a “labored, tortuous, and essentially unnatural and untrue style” that “has subsisted among us . . . in every era of our poetry” (Craik, History of English Literature, 2: 415, 402; and see Cope, “An Early Analysis of ‘The Victorian Age’ in Literature”).