With the publication on 15 December 1741 of The Opposition. A Vision, Fielding signalled a controversial sea change in his politics the consequences of which biographers and critics have continued to debate into the twenty-first century. That the pamphlet is in some sense a ‘satire on the pposition’ cannot be gainsaid even by those who would seek to play down the seriousness of Fielding's apostasy. Thus Cross describes the pamphlet as ‘a good-natured rebuke of the leaders of his party’, while Coley interprets it as evidence not of Fielding's disillusionment with the opposition tout court, but only with certain Opposition leaders such as Pulteney, Carteret, and Argyll – a disillusionment he allegedly shared with the politicians to whom he was closest. Similarly, Cleary maintains that The Opposition ‘does not really imply that Fielding was rewarded by Walpole’. ‘It is chiefly a vision of the future’, he argues, rather than an indication of a ‘change of party’ on Fielding's part.

In 1960, on the other hand, Battestin argued with prescience in ‘Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews’ that both The Opposition and certain passages in the first version of Joseph Andrews indicated that Fielding had been paid to change sides and support the government. Patently subscribing to this interpretation of Fielding's conduct in the section of Walpole and the Wits entitled ‘Fielding's Defection’, Goldgar concluded that: ‘There is, in short, no escaping the fact that Fielding withdrew from opposition journalism and wrote a pamphlet that could easily have been published in the Gazetteer, so similar is it to the usual mode of proministerial propaganda’. Fortunately, it is no longer necessary to rely on inference and innuendo. The documentary evidence recently presented by Ribble supports the arguments of Battestin and Goldgar, and removes any lingering doubt that Fielding finally sold out to Walpole in 1741.