John Wilson Croker

John Wilson Croker ( born December 20 1780 in Galway; † August 10, 1857 in Hampton, London ) was an English parliament speaker, poet and journalist.

John Croker studied law at Trinity College in Dublin, then practiced there and in 1807 elected to the Parliament of the Irish county of Down. As the first Secretary of the Admiralty, he won influence over the management of naval affairs, but put his body down in 1830 and fought in the 1830-32 Parliament as a Tory and a staunch opponent of progress against the Reform Bill, and against Catholic Emancipation.

In his Familiar epistles (1804 ), he castigated the Irish stage, and in An intercepted letter from China ( 1805), he described with merciless satire customs of Dublin. Great applause met his poem The battles of Talavera (1809 ) as no less his Stories from the history of England, W. Scott served as a model for his Tales of a grandfather. Want to earn the Songs of Talavera (1806 ) and the letters A sketch of Ireland, past and present (1807 ) mention. With Scott and Canning he founded in 1809 the Quarterly Review, for which he wrote many sometimes very remarkable essays; also he edited Boswell's Johnson (1831, 5 volumes, most recently 1874). See Correspondence and diaries of the RH John C. Wilson ( ed. Jennings, London 1884).