George Walker (December 24, 1772 – February 8, 1847) was an English

gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

novelist and publisher.

Life

Grave of George Walker in Highgate Cemetery

He was born in Falcon Square,

Cripplegate Cripplegate was a gate in the London Wall which once enclosed the City of London. The gate gave its name to the Cripplegate ward of the City which straddles the line of the former wall and gate, a line which continues to divide the ward into tw ...

, London, England. He worked as a bookseller and music publisher, into which business his son George (1803–1879) also entered. His writings were anti-reform, reacting to writers such as

William Godwin William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for ...

and

Thomas Holcroft Thomas Holcroft (10 December 174523 March 1809) was an English dramatist, miscellanist, poet and translator. He was sympathetic to the early ideas of the French Revolution and helped Thomas Paine to publish the first part of ''The Rights of Man ...

. He died on the 8th February 1847 and was buried on the western side of

Highgate Cemetery Highgate Cemetery is a place of burial in north London, England. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves across the West and East Cemeteries. Highgate Cemetery is notable both for some of the people buried there as ...

''The Vagabond'' (1799)

Walker's anti-

Jacobin , logo = JacobinVignette03.jpg , logo_size = 180px , logo_caption = Seal of the Jacobin Club (1792–1794) , motto = "Live free or die"(french: Vivre libre ou mourir) , successor = Pa ...

novel ''The Vagabond: A Novel'' (1799) anachronistically sets the

Gordon Riots The Gordon Riots of 1780 were several days of rioting in London motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment. They began with a large and orderly protest against the Papists Act 1778, which was intended to reduce official discrimination against British ...

of 1780 amidst the political events of the late 1790s. After attending a lecture by "Citizen Ego", a character based on

John Thelwall John Thelwall (27 July 1764 – 17 February 1834) was a radical British orator, writer, political reformer, journalist, poet, elocutionist and speech therapist.

, its narrator unwittingly becomes a prominent figure in the riots. Inverting radical accounts of the significance of the riots, ''The Vagabond'' presents them as solely destructive and acquisitive. Later, the hero's mentor Stupeo, based on

, attempts to establish a

pantisocratic Pantisocracy (from the Greek πᾶν and ἰσοκρατία meaning "equal or level government by/for all") was a utopian scheme devised in 1794 by, among others, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey for an egalitarian community. ...

community in the American wilderness, but is captured and burned at the stake by Native Americans. In the novel's dedication, Walker describes the novel as "an attempt to parry the Enemy with their own weapons" and to undermine radicalism's ''political romance''". The literary critic Ian Haywood reads ''The Vagabond'' as evidence that the Gordon Riots "still exerted a powerful hold on popular memory" at the time of its publication.

Books

* ''The Romance of the Cavern'', 1792 * ''The Haunted Castle'', 1794 * ''The House of Tinian'', 1795 * ''Theodore Cyphon, or The Benevolent Jew'', 1796 * ''Cynthelia, or a Woman of Ten Thousand'', 1797 * ''The Vagabond'', 1799 * ''The Three Spaniards'', 1800 * ''Poems on Various Subjects'', 1801 * ''Don Raphael'', 1803 * ''Two Girls of Eighteen'', 1806 * ''The Travels of Sylvester Tramper in Africa'', 1813 * ''The Adventures of Timothy Thoughtless'', 1813 (for children) * ''The Battle of Waterloo, A Poem'', 1815

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Walker, George 1772 births 1847 deaths Burials at Highgate Cemetery 18th-century English novelists 19th-century English novelists English male novelists 19th-century English male writers 18th-century English male writers