When Henry Fielding enlarged his one-act afterpiece, The Welsh Opera (1731), he named the new version The Grub-Street Opera to point to the extensive travesty it contains. The title also makes a target of hack-writers of the day and implies a connection with The Grub-Street Journal, whose authors maintained a policy of non-partisan satire on hack-writing. The amount of imitation it contains makes it resemble the literary travesty of The Author's Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730), likewise written by Scriblerus Secundus, Fielding's pseudonym which alluded to the “Scriblerus” of his illustrious contemporaries, most obviously to Pope in the Dunciad notes and “Peri Bathous” (1728). The Grub-Street Opera has remained a puzzle to scholars of Fielding's plays, perhaps because its relationship to contemporary drama, politics, and journalism has been neglected.