Pierce Egan

When the Victorians wanted to attack an author, they would invariably draw comparisons with the Regency writer Pierce Egan. John Forster, for instance, in a damning Examiner review of W.H. Ainsworth’s criminal romance Jack Sheppard in 1839, suggested that public decency had not been so threatened since “the time of Tom and Jerry.” Critics such as the formidable J. Hain Friswell were still keeping this tradition up as late as the 1860s. Nowadays these names are synonymous with the ultra-violent MGM cat and mouse cartoons of the late-1930s, but to a nineteenth-century ear, whether Regency or Victorian, they belonged to the rakish Corinthian Tom and his cousin from the country Jerry Hawthorne who, along with the