James Ralph
James Ralph was a British political journalist, historian, and periodical essayist. A companion of Benjamin Franklin in the 1720s, he later worked in Grub Street and was singled out by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad. His writings ranged across poetry, stage adaptations, pamphlets, cultural criticism, and large-scale history.
Ralph wrote for and edited several opposition weeklies, including The Champion, Old England, and The Remembrancer. He also reported parliamentary debates for the Universal Spectator and contributed to other London papers. Much of his journalism was undertaken with the patronage of George Bubb Dodington and, in the late 1740s, the circle of Frederick, Prince of Wales.
His books include A History of England during the Reigns of William III, Anne, and George I, the constitutional survey The Use and Abuse of Parliaments, and the anonymous The Case of Authors by Profession, an analysis of the economics of authorship. Earlier works include The Touch-Stone, a satirical survey of London entertainments; later scholarship has also attributed to him A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in and about London and Westminster.
In 1753 Ralph accepted a government pension on the understanding that he would withdraw from active pamphleteering. He returned briefly with The Case of the Late Resignation and died at Chiswick on 24 January 1762. Contemporary opinion often derided his poetry, but his histories retained readers into the nineteenth century, and modern scholars emphasize his prominence as a mid-eighteenth-century political journalist and commentator on authorship and the book trade.
Life and career
Early life and friendship with Benjamin Franklin
Ralph’s place of birth has been disputed: older reference works said Pennsylvania or New Jersey, but later research argues for London c. 1705. 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. Franklin described Ralph as “ingenious, genteel in his manners, and extremely eloquent; I think I never knew a prettier talker.” The two became close companions, sharing literary aspirations and philosophical discussions.On Guy Fawkes Day 1724, Ralph sailed to England with Franklin aboard the London Hope. Franklin later wrote that Ralph was married and had left behind a wife and child in Philadelphia. By 1732, it was reported that his wife was employed as a schoolteacher in Philadelphia.
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.During this time, Ralph relied heavily on Franklin for financial support. Franklin later estimated that he had lent Ralph nearly twenty-seven pounds. Ralph briefly worked as a schoolmaster near Reading, Berkshire, reportedly using Franklin’s name to avoid embarrassment.
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. Hoping to discourage Ralph’s poetic ambitions, Franklin also sent him an excerpt from Edward Young’s Love of Fame as a cautionary example.
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.
In financial distress, Ralph wrote to local clergymen and patrons for assistance, describing the milliner as his wife and requesting further loans. Franklin returned to America in July 1726, but Ralph remained in England and began building a literary career.
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.”
Poetry and the Pope–Ralph quarrel
Following Franklin’s departure, Ralph began publishing blank-verse poetry. Influenced by James Thomson’s Winter, he issued The Tempest in 1727, a 27-page poem dedicated to Robert Walpole, and followed with Night, a Poem in Four Books. He arranged distribution through Cornhill bookseller Robert Meadows and sought support from the dissenting minister Strickland Gough. Despite criticism of his “loose pindarick” manner, he defended blank verse for its expressive range, urging reviewers to “compare with Nature … before ’tis declared unworthy of the Muse.”Still facing financial strain, Ralph promoted Night energetically and courted patrons such as Dr Edmund Calamy and Lord Townshend; excerpts and subscription news appeared in the British Journal in June 1727.
The quarrel was personal in print: in May 1728 Alexander Pope anonymously issued the first three-book version of The Dunciad, a broad attack on Grub Street poets and critics; on 26 June Ralph—who had not been included in the 1728 poem—replied with Sawney: an Heroic Poem. Occasion’d by the Dunciad, an anonymous blank-verse satire defending Grub Street writers and lampooning Pope as “Sawney.” Pope subsequently added Ralph to Book III of the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, mocking him by name:
The skirmish cost Ralph dearly: he became the laughing-stock of Grub Street, and he later complained that he was in danger of starving when booksellers lost confidence in his capacity.
In 1729 he issued Miscellaneous Poems, by Several Hands, opening with a second edition of Night and reprinting earlier pieces such as Zeuma and Clarinda; despite advertising, it reportedly sold poorly. A prospectus promised further Spenserian pieces—Temperance, Myror, and two cantos of The Faerie Queene—but none appeared.
McKinsey argues that the weak reception of Ralph’s early poems led him to satire, and that the Dunciad quarrel “proved a roadblock to further poetic possibilities.” Okie likewise writes that Pope’s attack “seems to have destroyed” Ralph’s prospects as a poet; he then tried drama and criticism and, soon after, moved into cultural journalism.
Satire, stage, and cultural journalism
After the poor reception of Night and the backlash to Sawney, Ralph shifted from verse to topical satire—first in pamphlets and then on the stage. Helen Sand Hughes proposes that he may have travelled on the Continent, particularly in Holland. In 1728 he anonymously published The Touch-Stone, a satirical survey of London entertainments that has been credited with helping to shape Henry Fielding’s early burlesques, especially The Author’s Farce and Tom Thumb. Ralph and Fielding soon became friends: Ralph wrote the prologue to The Temple Beau, defending “Authors, like other men, who must live by Wit.”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.”
Ralph’s later stage works included The Fall of the Earl of Essex, an adaptation of John Banks’s The Unhappy Favourite, and The Cornish Squire, based on Squire Trelooby.
Concurrently with his stage work, Ralph became active in the London press. By early 1731 he was writing leaders for The Weekly Register and the The Daily Courant, and had become a principal writer at the Register. In 1734 he expanded a serialised Weekly Register series into A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in and about London and Westminster. Appearing soon after the Dunciad Variorum, the Review has been read as an effort to recover standing by courting elite endorsement through its dedication to Lord Burlington. Its combative tone, however, kept him a target for Grub-Street rivals, provoking attacks and replies in the Grub-Street Journal, the Weekly Miscellany, and the Universal Spectator.
Between 1731 and 1737, London theatres have been described 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. 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.
Political journalism and patronage
The Licensing Act 1737 curtailed Ralph's stage work and hastened his shift to full-time journalism. He filed parliamentary reports for the anti-ministerial Universal Spectator, and wrote for The Champion, launched by Henry Fielding in November 1739; when Fielding withdrew in June 1741, Ralph succeeded him as editor and remained in charge until 1743. He also contributed to the Chesterfield-backed Common Sense, using these outlets to criticise ministerial corruption and the conduct of the War of Jenkins’ Ear.By 1739 Ralph had secured the patronage of George Bubb Dodington.
In late 1741 he was probably the author of The Plain Truth: or, A Dialogue between Sir Courtly Jobber … and Tom Tell-Truth, attacking the “patriot” stance of Carteret and Pulteney and arguing against further continental commitments; on 19 January 1742 The Champion advanced the same case for conserving British resources over Austrian support. He continued pamphleteering, replying to the Duchess of Marlborough’s memoirs with The Other Side of the Question, and in 1743 issued A Critical History of the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole. Opposition tracts often summarised debates at a session’s end, and his 1743 history belongs to this mode. He has also been linked to the patriot pamphlet A Defence of the People, often attributed to Ralph and the Earl of Chesterfield, which denied the persistence of a distinct Tory interest.
With Dodington’s backing and Lord Chesterfield’s support, Ralph and William Guthrie launched the opposition weekly Old England, or the Constitutional Journal in 1743; Ralph left the paper in late 1744 after a ministerial pension was arranged. In the same year Ralph and Guthrie planned a multi-volume “Country-Whig” history of Britain, with Ralph to cover the early Hanoverian period. After Dodington entered the Broad Bottom ministry in 1744, Ralph became his private secretary on a pension of about £200 per year.
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. In the same period 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.”
In late 1747 Ralph left Dodington’s service for Prince Frederick’s Leicester House opposition, where he launched The Remembrancer as editor and principal writer, apparently forgoing the pension granted in 1744; the paper took a “patriot” line above party, urging in 1748 “a general confederacy of all parties and Factions” and repeatedly invoking Charles Davenant as “the oracle of this country.” 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. On 11 May 1749 he was detained for allegedly publishing a report of a parliamentary debate, then released without charge.
File:The Laugh - Bub's complements to Ralffo.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|alt=Satirical print showing George Bubb Dodington and James Ralph; Ralph’s speech bubble refers to The Remembrancer.|Anonymous satire, The Laugh; or, Bub’s complements to Ralffo, lampooning George Bubb Dodington and James Ralph; Ralph’s speech balloon names The Remembrancer.
After Frederick’s death in March 1751 the Leicester House opposition collapsed. 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. 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.”
By mid-1753 he re-emerged with The Protester, a short-lived Bedford-Whig weekly backed by figures around the Duke of Bedford and William Beckford. Pelham, who generally preferred to ignore hostile papers, wrote to Newcastle on 20 July 1753 that despite Ralph’s attacks “the less notice is taken of him the better.”
Throughout his career Ralph wrote for both Whig and Tory interests, but biographer Robert W. Kenny remarked that he was like “an honest politician … who when bought, stays bought.”