Ebenezer Cooke (1665–1732), author of "The Sot-Weed Factor" (1708), was among the first American colonialists to write literary satire. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) and others followed, using satire to shape an emerging nation's culture through its sense of the ridiculous. Continuing the tradition of Swiftian journalistic satire, Sidney Godolphin Osborne (1808-1889) was the most prominent writer of scathing "Letters to the Editor" of the London Times. Famous in his day, he is now all but forgotten. His maternal grandfather William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland was considered to be a possible candidate for the authorship of the Junius letters. If this were true, we can read Osborne as following in his grandfather's satiric "Letters to the Editor" path. Osborne's satire was so bitter and biting that at one point he received a public censure from Parliament's then Home Secretary Sir James Graham. Osborne wrote mostly in the Juvenalian mode over a wide range of topics mostly centered on British government's and landlords' mistreatment of poor farm workers and field laborers. He bitterly opposed the New Poor Laws and was passionate on the subject of Great Britain 's botched response to the  Irish Famine and its mistreatment of soldiers during the Crimean War. Later in the nineteenth century, in the United States, Mark Twain (1835–1910) grew to become American's greatest satirist: his novel Huckleberry Finn (1884) is set in the antebellum South, where the moral values Twain wishes to promote are completely turned on their heads. His hero, Huck, is a rather simple but goodhearted lad who is ashamed of the "sinful temptation" that leads him to help a runaway slave. In fact his conscience, warped by the distorted moral world he has grown up in, often bothers him most when he is at his best. He is prepared to do good, believing it to be wrong.
Ebenezer Cooke (1665–1732), author of "The Sot-Weed Factor" (1708), was among the first colonists in Colonial America to write literary satire. Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) and others followed, using satire to shape an emerging nation's culture through its sense of the ridiculous. Continuing the tradition of Swiftian journalistic satire, Sidney Godolphin Osborne (1808-1889) was the most prominent writer of scathing "Letters to the Editor" of the London Times. Famous in his day, he is now all but forgotten. His maternal grandfather William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland was considered to be a possible candidate for the authorship of the Junius letters. If this were true, we can read Osborne as following in his grandfather's satiric "Letters to the Editor" path. Osborne's satire was so bitter and biting that at one point he received a public censure from Parliament's then Home Secretary Sir James Graham. Osborne wrote mostly in the Juvenalian mode over a wide range of topics mostly centered on British government's and landlords' mistreatment of poor farm workers and field laborers. He bitterly opposed the New Poor Laws and was passionate on the subject of the British government 's botched response to the Great Irish Famine and the mistreatment of British soldiers during the Crimean War. Later in the nineteenth century, in the United States, Mark Twain (1835–1910) grew to become American's greatest satirist: his novel Huckleberry Finn (1884) is set in the antebellum South, where the moral values Twain wishes to promote are completely turned on their heads. His hero, Huck, is a rather simple but goodhearted lad who is ashamed of the "sinful temptation" that leads him to help a fugitive slave. In fact his conscience, warped by the distorted moral world he has grown up in, often bothers him most when he is at his best. He is prepared to do good, believing it to be wrong.
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American colonialists
colonists in Colonial America
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Great Britain
the British government
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Great
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its mistreatment of
the mistreatment of British
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runaway
fugitive