New Light on the Composition of Ebenezer Cook's Sot-Weed Factor

EBENEZER COOK'S scurrilous Hudibrastic satire, The Sot-weed Factor, first printed in London in 1708 by B[enjamin] Bragg, at the Raven in Pater-Noster-Row. When it composed has remained, like so many details of Cook's life, a mystery. Lawrence C. Wroth, who published a foundational study of Cook in I934, found it reasonable to believe, as most readers have done, that at the time of writing its author in truth an individual of English upbringing newly come to Maryland.1 Wroth's assumption would suggest that the poem written around I695. Actually, the first record we have of Cook in Maryland is I694,? but Wroth sets I695 as the earliest possible date of composition because the Provincial Court to which the poem's narrator took his legal claim sitting at Annapolis, and government business not transferred there from St. Mary's City until February, I695.' Robert D. Arner has claimed recently, however, that The Sot-weed Factor more likely written closer to the I708 publication date than otherwise. Arner argues that Cook had no reason to wait twelve or more years to have his work published-especially since sending manuscripts to London for that purpose a well-established practice by the end of the seventeenth century and since the satire would have lost much of its punch as Maryland became -more civilized. Furthermore, Cook himself says in a footnote appearing in the Third Edition of the poem published in i73i that his description of Annapolis was given Twenty Years ago, and does not resemble its present State

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