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”).