Jonathan Odell | Biography

A physician, Church of England clergyman, poet, and wit, Jonathan Odell of New Jersey emerged as one of the Tories' most trenchant satirists during the American War of Independence. When on 14 June 1776 he composed an ode to the king's birthday for a group of captured English officers, he provoked a series of reactions that culminated in his fleeing to New York and eventually becoming a Loyalist refugee in the newly created province of New Brunswick in British North America (Canada).

Odell's reaction to the war was a natural result of his social and educational background. Born on 25 September 1737 in Newark, New Jersey, of Massachusetts Bay stock (the son of John and Temperance Dickinson Odell), he received his M.A. from the College of New Jersey (Princeton), where his grandfather had been the first president. After a sojourn in the West Indies as a British Army surgeon, Odell entered Anglican orders in England in 1767 and returned to Burlington, New Jersey, as an S.P.G. (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) missionary. Even before insurrection broke out in 1775, Odell's poetry, published under the pseudonyms "Veridicus" and "Yorick," warned of religious and political ideologies in America that would breed anarchy. In spite of yearning for peace and order, Odell found himself increasingly the target of Tory hunters. By the end of 1776 he was obliged to leave his wife, Ann, and three children and become a refugee. Taking refuge in New York, Odell served at various times as chaplain to the Loyalist forces, superintendent of the printing presses and periodical publications, intermediary in the Benedict Arnold conspiracy, and translator and secretary to Guy Carleton, commander in chief of the British forces. With his property in New Jersey confiscated, Odell proceeded to London at war's end in 1783 to seek preferment. He was appointed provincial secretary, registrar of records, and clerk of the council in the new province of New Brunswick and settled in Fredericton, the capital, in 1784.

Throughout the 1777-1783 period Odell's public and private verse had grown increasingly caustic about the morality of the rebel cause. The American Times (1780) is typical of Odell's major literary statements on "foul Sedition's" destruction of the country. Opening the three-part poem with an image of social disorder ("The awl, the needle, and the shuttle drops; / Tools change to swords, and camps succeed to shops"), Odell denounces political corruption and irresponsibility ("The state is rotten, rotten to the core, / 'Tis all one bruize, one putrefying sore"). The poet's role in the midst of this chaos is "to stigmatize the fraud," first by castigating the revolution's leaders and then by exposing democracy as the false harlot she really is. The result is an acidic and impassioned poem, which ends with a vision of order returning to the land only when British authority is reestablished.

The disciplined couplets and vigorous rhymes of The American Times made this and other political poems by Odell powerful weapons in the Loyalist cause. However, after his move to New Brunswick, Odell turned to satire again only during the War of 1812, preferring instead to write on the domestic and patriotic issues that were pertinent to his life as a colonial official.

The geographical dispersal of literary Loyalists in their new country militated against their having any unified literary influence, but the precedent set by Odell is often quoted in discussions of the literary flowering of Fredericton (as exemplified by Charles G. D. Roberts and Bliss Carman) in the 1880s. Odell died in Fredericton in 1818 and is buried under an inscription describing him as "religious," "loyal," and "charitable." However, at the height of his writing career, the latter quality never distracted Odell from denouncing the Revolution as the hypocrisy and outrage he always felt it to be.