His contemporary reputation rested on his pastorals and epistles, particularly the description of winter addressed by him from Copenhagen (1709) to the Earl of Dorset.
•
He worked for Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and his Pastorals opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709), which also contained the pastorals of Alexander Pope.
Jackson composed the operas The Lord of the Manor (1780, libretto by John Burgoyne) and Metamorphoses (1783), as well as several odes (Warton's Ode to Fancy, Pope's The Dying Christian to His Soul, and Lycidas) and a large number of songs, canzonets, madrigals, pastorals, hymns, anthems, sonatas for harpsichord, and church services.
Pope had urged him to undertake this task in order to ridicule the Arcadian pastorals of Ambrose Philips, who had been praised by a short-lived contemporary publication The Guardian, to the neglect of Pope's claims as the first pastoral writer of the age and the true English Theocritus.