Education
After attending Reading School,where his contemporary was Thomas Noon Talfourd, Deacon studied at Street Catharine"s College, Cambridge, where his studies seem to have been desultory.
After attending Reading School,where his contemporary was Thomas Noon Talfourd, Deacon studied at Street Catharine"s College, Cambridge, where his studies seem to have been desultory.
William Frederick Deacon was the first child of six born to a fairly prosperous merchant of Tavistock Square, London. He left without a degree but while at college published a poem: "Hacho. Or the Spell of Saint Wilten", an imitation of Sir Walter Scott.Encouraged by the positive reviews of his debut work, Deacon embarked on a prolific literary career.
Unsurprisingly, this latter, rather demanding venture folded in December, and in June 1821 Gold"s was itself bought out by the rival London Magazine.
Deacon, exhausted by his literary efforts, retired for a while to a cottage in Llangadock, south Wales, from where he wrote to his mentor, Walter Scott,asking for advice on whether to continue as a writer Scott advised him to pursue a steadier career outside literature, but Deacon ignored this advice and worked up some of the parodic material published in Gold"s into his masterpiece, Warreniana, a compendious parodic survey of contemporary writing which imagines a world where the leading writers of the day become hirelings of the blacking (boot polish) manufacturer Robert Warren.
The book was generally well received and there were several positive reviews. The Monthly Review praised the "considerable vivacity and success" of the volume, whilst the London Literary Gazette labelled it a "cleverly done" jeu d"esprit.
His later books include November Nights or Tales for Winter Evenings (1826).
He spent much of the last two decades of his relatively short life as a journalist for the True Sun.
