Manuscript, in a contemporary hand, of an English satirical poem entitled 'Boney's Bridge', based on 'The House that Jack Built', concerning an incident during the Battle of Leipzig.

Author: 
[Napoleon Bonaparte; Battle of Leipzig, 1813; English Georgian satire]
Publication details: 
[England, 1813.]
£95.00
SKU: 8694

4to (22.5 x 19), 2 pp. Text complete in forty-three lines. On aged and stained paper, with wear and closed tears to extremities. The first three lines are 'This is the Bridge that was blown into air. | These are the Miners who had the care | Of mining the Bridge that was blown into air'. Three corrections in the same hand. The poem was printed in the Morning Chronicle, 24 November 1813, under the title 'Buonaparte's Bridge', and reprinted in 'The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1813', that version containing a couple of minor variations [authorial?] from the present text. A. M. Broadley, in his 'Napoleon in Caricature', describes how in the same year the poem was published by Thomas Tegg with an anonymous caricature in eight sections, again under the title 'Buonaparte's Bridge'. It is also reproduced in John Ashton's 'English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I'.