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James Ralph

English political writer and historian From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is about the eighteenth-century English writer. For the cricketer, see James Ralph (cricketer).

James Ralph (c. 1705 – 24 January 1762) was a British political writer, historian, and periodical essayist. He appears prominently in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and was satirized by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad.

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Ralph’s major works include A History of England (1744–46), a two-volume historical survey, and The Case of Authors by Profession (1758), an early analysis of authorship and literary economics. His writing spanned poetry, political pamphlets, plays, and journalism, often addressing themes of patronage, liberty, and the challenges of literary professionalism in eighteenth-century Britain.[1][2]

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Life and career

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Early life and friendship with Franklin

James Ralph's place of birth is unknown. Historians have traditionally asserted that he was born in Pennsylvania, although more recent scholarship suggests he was born in London in 1705. He likely arrived in Philadelphia as a teenage apprentice, probably by 1720.[3] By 1723 he was working as a clerk and had joined a small intellectual group that met at Jonathan Read’s coffee house, including printer Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Watson, and Charles Osborne.[4][5] Franklin described Ralph as “ingenious, genteel in his manners, and extremely eloquent; I think I never knew a prettier talker.”[6] The two became close companions, sharing literary aspirations and philosophical discussions.[7]

On Guy Fawkes Day (5 November) 1724, Ralph sailed to England with Franklin aboard the London Hope.[8] Franklin later wrote that Ralph was married and had left behind a wife and child in Philadelphia.[6] By 1732, it was reported that his wife was employed as a schoolteacher in Philadelphia.[9]

With Franklin in London

After arriving in London in December 1724, Franklin found work at Samuel Palmer’s printing house, while Ralph pursued literary and theatrical opportunities. He sought admission to Drury Lane under Robert Wilks, proposed a weekly modeled on The Spectator to the publisher James Roberts, and applied to legal offices in the Temple for clerical work—all without success.[5]

During this time, Ralph relied heavily on Franklin for financial support. Franklin later estimated that he had lent Ralph nearly twenty-seven pounds.[10][11] Ralph briefly worked as a schoolmaster near Reading, Berkshire, reportedly using Franklin’s name to avoid embarrassment.[12][13]

Around this period, Franklin printed his early philosophical tract, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, dedicating it to “J. R.”, likely Ralph.[14] Hoping to discourage Ralph’s poetic ambitions, Franklin also sent him an excerpt from Edward Young’s Love of Fame as a cautionary example.[15]

Ralph developed a relationship with a young milliner, who followed him to Newbury. Franklin’s interactions with her caused tension, eventually ending their friendship. Ralph refused to repay the money borrowed from Franklin, who later expressed regret over the entire arrangement.[16][17][18]

In financial distress, Ralph wrote to local clergymen and patrons for assistance, describing the milliner as his wife and requesting further loans.[19][13] Franklin returned to America in July 1726, but Ralph remained in England and began building a literary career.[15]

Reflecting on their time in London together, Franklin wrote:

“I lov’d him, notwithstanding, for he had many amiable qualities. I had by no means improv’d my fortune; but I had picked up some very ingenious acquaintance, whose conversation was of great advantage to me.”[6]

Independent literary beginnings

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Title page of James Ralph’s Night (1728), photo by Chris Garrigues from his personal copy.

Following Franklin’s departure, Ralph began publishing blank-verse poetry. Influenced by James Thomson’s Winter, he released The Tempest in 1727, a 27-page poem dedicated to Robert Walpole. He followed this with Night, a Poem in Four Books (1728).[20][21]

Ralph arranged for distribution through Cornhill bookseller Robert Meadows and sought support from dissenting minister Strickland Gough.[21] Despite critical dismissal of his “loose pindarick” style, Ralph defended blank verse for its expressive range, urging reviewers to “compare [it] with Nature … before ’tis declared unworthy of the Muse.”[20]

Still facing financial hardship, Ralph produced promotional materials for Night and sought patrons including Dr Edmund Calamy and Lord Townshend. Excerpts from the poem and news of the subscription appeared in the British Journal in June 1727.[22]

In May 1728 Alexander Pope anonymously issued the first three-book version of The Dunciad, ridiculing a host of Grub-Street writers. On 26 June 1728 Ralph struck back with Sawney: an Heroic Poem. Occasion’d by the Dunciad, an anonymous blank-verse satire that defended Grub-Street authors and satirised Pope as “Sawney.”[23][24]

Pope responded in Book III of the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, mocking Ralph by name:

“Silence, ye wolves! while Ralph to Cynthia howls,
And makes Night hideous—answer him, ye owls.”

— Alexander Pope (1729), [25]

Ralph later said the episode made him “the laughing-stock of Grub Street” and ruined his standing with booksellers, although other Dunciad targets such as James Moore Smythe, Edward Cooke, and Leonard Welsted continued to publish.[7]

In 1729 Ralph issued a composite volume titled Miscellaneous Poems, by Several Hands, which opened with a second edition of Night and reprinted earlier pieces such as Zeuma and Clarinda. Despite advertising, the volume reportedly remained largely unsold. A prospectus had promised additional Spenserian pieces—Temperance, Myror, and two cantos of The Faerie Queene—but none appeared.[26]

Literary historian Helen S. Hughes has suggested that Ralph may have travelled in Holland between 1726 and 1729. His later satirical writing, including scenes in The Touch-Stone, reflects interest in Dutch and Continental popular culture.[27]

Stage Work and Collaboration with Fielding

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Title page of The Touch-Stone (1729 edition), an anonymously published satirical pamphlet attributed to James Ralph.

Following the poor reception of Night and the backlash provoked by Sawney, Ralph turned to topical satire, first in pamphlet form and then on the stage.[13][7] In 1728 he anonymously published The Touch-Stone, a satirical survey of London’s entertainments that criticized the dominance of foreign opera and urged dramatists to focus on English folk subjects such as Tom Thumb and Robin Hood.[28][29]

The pamphlet influenced the early dramatic work of Henry Fielding, including The Author's Farce and Tom Thumb (both 1730). Ralph and Fielding soon became friends. Ralph wrote the prologue to Fielding’s The Temple Beau, performed on 2 February 1730, defending “Authors, like other men, who must live by Wit.”[30][31] He also acquired a share in Fielding’s Little Theatre and helped with its management.[32]

In April 1730, Ralph’s ballad opera The Fashionable Lady premiered at Goodman’s Fields. It ran for nine nights and was revived during the summer. Styled after The Beggar’s Opera, it satirized the English stage, its managers, and the popularity of Italian opera. According to historian John Genest, the play was “not badly written.”[33] The play saw moderate success.[34]

Ralph’s later stage works included The Fall of the Earl of Essex (1731), an adaptation of John Banks’s The Unhappy Favourite, and The Cornish Squire (1734), based on Squire Tralooby.[35][34]

Between 1731 and 1737, London theatres functioned as partisan forums. Playwrights such as Ralph and Fielding—excluded from Sir Robert Walpole’s patronage—used burlesque and satire to criticise the ministry; prologues and epilogues often served as party broadsides, and managers viewed the major playhouses as venues for shaping public opinion.[36][37] Ralph’s The Fall of the Earl of Essex was read as an allusion to Walpole, while Fielding’s The Author’s Farce, Tom Thumb, and Pasquin carried the attack further.[38][39]

Ralph also contributed to Fielding’s periodical The Prompter during this period. Their collaboration continued through the 1730s, although some scholars suggest they later diverged politically.[29]

Political journalism and patronage

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Title page of A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in and about London and Westminster (1783 edition), attributed to James Ralph.

The 1737 Licensing Act curtailed Ralph’s stage work and pushed him into full-time journalism. He wrote leaders for The Weekly Register and The Daily Courant, filed parliamentary reports for the anti-ministerial Universal Spectator, and co-edited The Champion with Henry Fielding.[40] He also contributed to the Chesterfield-backed Common Sense (c. 1738–43), using these outlets to criticise ministerial corruption and the handling of the War of Jenkins’ Ear.[41][13]

By 1739 Ralph had secured the patronage of George Bubb Dodington. With Dodington’s funds and Lord Chesterfield’s support, he and William Guthrie launched the opposition weekly Old England.[40] Ralph continued pamphleteering, replying to the Duchess of Marlborough’s memoirs with The Other Side of the Question (1742)[42] and publishing The Critical History of the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (1743).[40]

That year he and William Guthrie planned a multi-volume “Country-Whig” history of Britain, with Ralph to cover the early Hanoverian period.[43] After Dodington entered the Broad-Bottom ministry in 1744, Ralph became his private secretary on a pension of about £200 per year.[44]

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Title Page of James Ralph's History of England, Part I

Between 1744 and 1746 Ralph issued his two-volume History of England during the Reigns of William III, Anne, and George I, his largest historical project.[45] In the same year he published The Use and Abuse of Parliaments, expanding an essay by Algernon Sidney into a two-volume constitutional survey that echoed Bolingbroke’s warning against ministries acting “by means repugnant to the constitution.”[46][47][2]

In late 1747 Ralph left Dodington’s service for Prince Frederick’s Leicester House opposition, where he launched The Remembrancer and served as principal writer.[44]

Over the winter of 1747–48 he acted as intermediary to align Dodington with the Leicester House opposition; under the informal understandings that followed, Dodington expected a secretaryship of state in a future Frederick administration, with Ralph to serve as his secretary.[48][44]

On 11 May 1749 he was detained for allegedly publishing a report of a parliamentary debate, then released without charge.[49]

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Anonymous satire, The Laugh; or, Bub’s complements to Ralffo (c. 1751), lampooning George Bubb Dodington and James Ralph; Ralph’s speech balloon names The Remembrancer.[48]

After Frederick’s death in March 1751, the Leicester House opposition collapsed.[44] Dodington soon reconciled with the Pelhams and, after a short interval, was readmitted to the outer councils of government, while Henry Pelham declined any accommodation for Ralph.[50] Ralph wrote that he had forfeited part of his pension on entering the prince’s service, had lost £100 to a bankrupt bookseller, and that the prince died owing him £65: “My brain, such as it is, is my whole estate.” He hoped friends would assist him “till I could again be useful.”[50]

By mid-1753 he re-emerged with The Protester, a short-lived Bedford-Whig weekly (issued under the pseudonym “Issacher Barebone”) backed by figures around the Duke of Bedford and William Beckford.[51][44][52]

Throughout his career Ralph wrote for both Whig and Tory interests, but contemporary observers, including biographer Robert W. Kenny, remarked that he was like “an honest politician … who when bought, stays bought.”[53]

Pensions, criticism, and retreat from politics

In 1753 the Treasury awarded Ralph a pension of £300 per year—£200 paid immediately—with a similar grant to his collaborator William Guthrie, on condition that both men cease pamphleteering.[54] Sources differ on who arranged the payment: McKinsey attributes it to the Duke of Newcastle,[55] while Kenny names Lord Harrington.[56] Thereafter, Ralph restricted his public writing to unsigned reviews of political and historical works in The Monthly Review, avoiding current controversies.[57] Privately, however, he remained engaged in political affairs; in 1756 he advised the Duke of Newcastle on extending stamp duties to the American colonies.[53]

Ralph’s principal late work, published anonymously in 1758, was The Case of Authors by Profession. The tract argued that commercial publishers and booksellers had decisive control over what authors produced.[58]

After the accession of George III in 1760, Ralph received a further pension from the administration of Lord Bute.[59] He returned briefly to political pamphleteering with The Case of the Late Resignation (1761), a critique of William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham’s resignation from office, but chronic gout soon ended his writing career.[60]

Final illness, death and aftermath

Ralph never returned to America, but he renewed contact with Benjamin Franklin in July 1757 when Franklin arrived in London as Pennsylvania’s agent carrying a letter from Ralph’s daughter, Mary Ralph Garrigues. Franklin asked her to delay further correspondence, noting that Ralph wished to keep his English household unaware of his American family.[59][61] The two men exchanged letters sporadically thereafter.

Ralph’s English wife, Ann (née Curtis), died at Chiswick on 27 January 1760.[1] In December 1761 their daughter Helen wrote to Franklin that her father was “out of Danger; but… remains very Low, and weak.”[62] Ralph died on 24 January 1762, reportedly while planning a new pro-Bute newspaper, a project halted by gout.[44]

Ralph’s library, about 350 lots, was auctioned in York Street, Covent Garden, on 5–6 April 1762; Franklin attended the sale and bought books amounting to £6 5s,[63] reportedly to benefit “Ralph’s daughter.” McKinsey suggests this referred to Mary Garrigues and her eleven children in Philadelphia,[13] as his English daughter, Helen, had died a few weeks after he did.[1] Later that year, Mary’s eldest son, Isaac, travelled to London and asked Franklin for details of his grandfather’s death and any potential estate.[11]

The 1765 will of Ann Curtis, Ralph’s mother-in-law, instructed her executor to pay “all the just debts of my late son-in-law James Ralph Esquire,” indicating that he left no significant property.[64]

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Works

Poetry

  • The Tempest; or, the Terrors of Death (1727) – Miltonic blank-verse meditation on mortality.[65]
  • Night, a Poem in Four Books (1728) – Ralph’s best-known verse, indebted to James Thomson’s Winter.[66]
  • Sawney, an Heroic Poem Occasion’d by the Dunciad (1728) – Satirical riposte to Pope; prompted Pope’s pointed rejoinder in the 1732 Dunciad Variorum.[67]
  • The Muses’ Address to the King (1728) – brief panegyric later reprinted in Miscellaneous Poems.[68]
  • Zeuma; or, The Love of Liberty (1729) – blank‑verse heroic poem set in a mythic South‑American kingdom ruled by King Zeuma; fuses Miltonic cadence with Whig “ancient liberty” politics and offers one of Ralph’s earliest Americanised liberty myths.[69]
  • Clarinda; or, The Fair Libertine (1729).
  • Miscellaneous Poems, by Several Hands (1729) – anthology “publish’d by Mr Ralph,” containing mostly his own verse.[21]
  • Ballad to the Tune of Chevy Chase (1749).

Drama and stage adaptations

Political and historical prose

Periodical editorships and journalism

  • Contributor, The Prompter (1734–1736) – contributed essays to the theatrical journal associated with Aaron Hill and William Popple.[29][83][84]
  • Reporter, Universal Spectator (1737–1739) – anti‑ministerial coverage of Parliament.[40]
  • Co-editor (with Henry Fielding), The Champion (1737–1744).[85]
  • Contributor, Common Sense (1739) – opposition weekly patronised by the Earl of Chesterfield.[40]
  • Editor, Old England (1743) – opposition weekly backed by George Bubb Dodington and Lord Chesterfield.[40]
  • Editor, The Remembrancer (1747–Nov 1749) – chief writer for the Prince of Wales’s opposition circle; persuaded Dodington to re‑join the faction.[44]
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Reception and legacy

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Contemporary opinion was mixed. After Alexander Pope singled Ralph out in the Dunciad,[67] the Grub-Street Journal mocked “everything Ralph wrote,” and Horace Walpole called him “a dull author.”[88] Paul Whitehead’s State Dunces (1733) likewise derided the “tiny witling … / Full fam’d for tuneless Rhimes and short-lived Plays.”[24]

Ralph defended professional writing in his anonymous tract The Case of Authors by Profession (1758), arguing that authorship for pay was no more mercenary than other paid callings:

A Man may plead for Money, prescribe for or quack for Money, preach and pray for Money, marry for Money, fight for Money, do anything within the Law for Money, provided the Expedient answers, without the least Imputation. But if he writes…for Money…he is branded as a Mercenary.[89]

Although his poetry was generally dismissed, Ralph’s political and historical prose attracted sustained notice. A History of England (1744–46) retained readers into the nineteenth century and drew praise from historians such as Henry Hallam.[90]

Twentieth-century scholarship broadened the view of Ralph’s work. Helen Sand Hughes linked his satire to Henry Fielding’s early burlesques;[91] Kenny highlighted his skill as an opposition journalist;[92] and Laird Okie saw A History of England as a break with providential historiography, attentive to social and economic change.[93] Elizabeth R. McKinsey interpreted Ralph’s writings as a sustained argument for literary, economic and constitutional liberty.[94]

In 2015 William Thomas Mari revisited The Case of Authors as an early claim to occupational respectability for political journalists.[58]

Questions of authorship have also shaped Ralph’s legacy. In the 1960s, bibliographer John B. Shipley confirmed Ralph’s authorship of The Touch-Stone (1728), a satirical survey of London entertainments long published anonymously.[95] He also attributed the similarly anonymous 1734 architectural pamphlet A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in and about London and Westminster to Ralph’s writing.[96][97] Both attributions have since been accepted in Ralph scholarship.[13]

Skepticism about these attributions partly stemmed from the technical knowledge the texts display. The Touch-Stone includes a history of opera in England that Irving Lowens described as “notable... for accuracy and for breadth of knowledge,” and as offering a serious defence of Italian opera. Because Ralph was closely associated with the English stage and had no known enthusiasm for opera, Lowens questioned whether he could have written it.[98] Similarly, the Critical Review pamphlet was attributed by some Victorian cataloguers to a namesake surveyor, based on its architectural detail and citations of Acts of Parliament.[99] Later analysis noted that Ralph’s humour was often “so subdued, or intertwined with seriousness” that critics failed to recognize its satirical intent.[100]

A further tentative attribution is the manuscript adaptation Anna Bullen (Huntington Library, HM 973), which J. M. Bastian assigns to Ralph and dates to about 1735. He notes the eighteenth-century hand and paper, identifies Banks’s independent prose source, and rejects the earlier view that the MS predated Banks.[101] Bastian builds the case on stylistic and technical parallels with Ralph’s Fall of the Earl of Essex: asides replaced by tête-à-têtes, regularised Augustan verse with more “rational” motivation, recurring diction and imagery (deserts/brutes; sea-storm/shipwreck; the phrase “give a loose”), and worked end-of-act similes.[102] He also notes that the line “She’s Piercy’s now, and Piercy is all hers” matches a correction first introduced in the 1735 edition of Banks’s play, supporting (though not proving) a mid-1730s date.[103] Bastian judges the play “unstageworthy”—subdued and dignified beside Banks—yet attractive to read for its pathos, especially the Anna–Piercy scenes, with occasional Miltonic colouring.[104]

Ralph’s place of birth was also subject to confusion. Early biographical sources—including Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography[105] and the Dictionary of American Biography (1935)[106]—described him as American-born, likely due to his early presence in Philadelphia and association with Franklin.[15][1] Shipley’s 1964 archival study corrected the record, documenting Ralph’s birth in London around 1705.[3]

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