Swift was one of the most prolific pamphleteers and journalists of his lifetime. One of Swift’s great strengths as a pamphleteer was his keen awareness of what might be described as his target readership. Appreciating that it is easier to confirm rather than alter readers’ opinions, Swift played on the prejudices of his readership. This chapter untangles the numerous and varied polemical strategies that Swift harnessed in his political writing, including ‘parallel history’, hyperbole, and character assassination. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of A Modest Proposal (1729), suggesting that here Swift employed many of the same polemical devices that he had used during his years as a pamphleteer.

In Gulliver’s Travels Swift tacitly drew his first readers’ attention to two forms of popular fiction: imaginary voyages in the manner of Lucian’s True History, and the pseudo-autobiographical fictitious travellers’ tales made familiar by The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ‘Written by Himself’. Contemporaries recognised the rhetorical similarities between the True History and Swift’s ironic manner, and there are clear plot resemblances. There is also evidence that contemporaries associated Gulliver’s Travels with the pseudo-autobiographical narratives made popular by Defoe, perhaps because Swift included the same sort of circumstantial autobiographical detail. Whether this makes Gulliver’s Travels a ‘parodying novel’ is an interesting question. It was routinely included in lists of novels in the century following its initial publication, which suggests that eighteenth-century readers had no difficulty appreciating that, if Gulliver’s Travels was not a novel, it was unquestionably working within a recognisable popular literary tradition.

While the author has been represented as emerging from dependence on aristocratic patronage owing to a change in author/publisher relations at the turn of the eighteenth century, the difficulties faced by those who sought to make a living by the pen must be taken into consideration. After printing at his own risk and publishing by subscription, Defoe reached a financial agreement with the bookseller, John Baker, to be paid two guineas for every five hundred pamphlets sold. He also received £100 a quarter from the government for his services during the reign of Queen Anne. Patently, Defoe did try to make money from his writings, but in terms of income from sales he does not appear to have been particularly successful, despite the popularity of works like The True-Born Englishman. In the absence of information, it is difficult to judge whether this changed after the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719.

Fielding failed to articulate any straightforward statement of his political beliefs in propria persona. Perhaps the nearest he came to doing so was in pamphlets such as A Serious Address To the People of Great Britain in which he explained how the doctrine of ‘an indefeasible Right to the Crown hath been justly exploded’ because ‘the Legislature of the Kingdom have unanimously declared against any such Principle’. ‘The Reverse of it is Law’, he went on, ‘a Law as firmly established as any other in this Kingdom; nay, it is the Foundation, the Corner-Stone of all our Laws, and of this Constitution itself; nor is the Declaration and Confirmation of this great Right of the People one of the least of those Blessings, which we owe to the Revolution’. This not only appears to make his sentiments on the subject of parliamentary sovereignty perfectly clear – supreme power lies in ‘the people’ as represented in Parliament – it also strongly suggests that he firmly adhered to the range of ‘Revolution Principles’ upon which the Hanoverian Succession was established because, as he painstakingly explained, whatever ‘tends to the Shaking of this fundamental Right, doth of itself introduce an opposite System of Government, and changes not only the King, but the Constitution’. When in Tom Jones, therefore, he describes Tom as ‘a hearty Well-wisher to the glorious Cause of Liberty, and of the Protestant Religion’, we would be justified in assuming that these predilections were shared by Fielding himself.

In Fielding's lifetime, those who subscribed to Revolution Principles were usually called Whigs. However, existing accounts of Fielding's politics are insufficiently aware, it seems to me, not only of the structure of British politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, but of the ways in which the various strands of Whig political ideology developed during the sixty years following the Revolution of 1688.

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.

On 27 November 1731 Read's Weekly Journal mentioned ‘three new Plays now on the Stocks … which are to be acted one after the other with all Speed’ at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane: ‘a Tragedy by Mr. Aaron Hill; a Comedy of Captain Bodens; and another by Mr. Fielding, the Author of Tom Thumb’. Whether the ‘Comedy … by Mr. Fielding’ thus anticipated was The Lottery. A Farce, a one-act ballad opera premièred on 1 January 1732 as an afterpiece to Addison's Cato, or, as Battestin has suggested, The Modern Husband, staged in February, Fielding had managed to find a venue for his plays. As in the case of his move from Drury Lane to Goodman's Fields and thence to the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, previous commentators have speculated about the kind of constraints on form and subject-matter to which he would have had to agree in order to have his plays produced by the King's Company. If he was not forced to turn from politics – a ‘retreat’ which, according to Cleary, ‘was near-total, conscious, and obvious’ – then at any rate ‘he was made to give up, or at least modify his satiric experiments’. Some critics have gone further to argue that ‘in the move to Drury Lane, the dedication to The Modern Husband, and the epilogue to The Modish Couple Fielding unmistakably and publicly aligned himself with the Walpole camp’. Indeed, Battestin, while quite rightly referring to Fielding's ‘triumphant’ return to Drury Lane, goes on to suggest that in these months ‘he openly declared himself to be Walpole's man’.

In analyses such as these, insufficient weight tends to be given to the pragmatic element in Fielding's career, especially in the early 1730s. As I explained at the end of the previous chapter, the Little Theatre in the Haymarket had effectively been closed off to him. While the theatres in Lincoln's Inn Fields and Goodman's Fields provided other options, Drury Lane was the most prestigious theatre in London.

The publication of Tom Jones was not the only circumstance of profound importance in Fielding's life to take place in the winter of 1748–9. ‘My brother and his family are come to Town for the winter’, his sister, Ursula, wrote on 25 October 1748, ‘and have taken a house in Brownlow Street, near Drury Lane where he intends to administer Justice’. He was hearing cases as Justice of the Peace for the City and Liberty of Westminster a week later, and they quickly began to be reported in the newspapers. In the meantime, Fielding changed his lodgings from Brownlow Street to Meard's Court, Wardour Street, in Soho before taking up residence at Bow Street on 9 December. By the end of 1748, then, he was launched on his brief career as a reforming magistrate in the metropolis.

The process had been far from straightforward. Apparently the Earl of Chesterfield had mistakenly recommended that Fielding be entered in the commission of the peace for Middlesex as early as June 1747 although, unfortunately, he was then unable to fulfil the property qualification which required J.P.s to hold property valued at £100 per annum. The matter is explained clearly in a letter from Fielding to the Duke of Bedford dated 13 December 1748:

In the summer of 1745, while the King was enjoying his annual visit to Hanover, Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, raised his standard in Scotland, entering an undefended Edinburgh on 17 September. Although he was unaware of this latest development, Pelham wrote to the Duke of Devonshire, the Lord Steward, about the progress of the rebellion on the same day:

Late in August George II had finally been persuaded to return to England, but he was proving difficult to deal with even in the teeth of an armed rebellion. On the same day, 17 September, he actually went so far as to suggest to Lord Harrington that he become ‘sole minister … make his own Treasury and Secretaries of State’, and that Pelham and his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of State, be dismissed. Although Harrington turned down the King's offer, the reverberations caused by the ill-considered proposal were felt throughout the government.

Having been thrown out of Paradise Hall, Tom Jones falls in with a company of soldiers. The Serjeant informs him ‘that they were marching against the Rebels, and expected to be commanded by the glorious Duke of Cumberland’. It is at this relatively late point in The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (Book VII, Chapter xii) that Fielding decides to inform ‘the Reader’ of ‘a Circumstance which we have not thought necessary to communicate before’, namely ‘that this was the very Time when the late Rebellion was at the highest; and indeed the Banditti were now marched into England, intending, as it was thought, to fight the King's Forces, and to attempt pushing forward to the Metropolis’. That Fielding chose to set the main action of his narrative right in the midst of the Forty-Five has not passed unnoticed by critics. J. Paul Hunter has drawn attention to ‘the intrusive politics that have disturbed so many readers of Tom Jones’, while Homer Obed Brown has argued that because the novel ‘places itself … on the outskirts of the events of the 1745 Rebellion in England … the meaning of this placing has always presented a problem for its interpretation’. More recently, John Allen Stevenson has bluntly asked what he calls ‘the central question’ – which is not simply why Fielding ‘decided to introduce the fact of the Forty-Five just here’ in the narrative, nor why he ‘waited so long to introduce the subject’ in Tom Jones, but ‘why has he not thought fit to mention it before?’

By posing the question in this way, Stevenson assumes that there must be a narrative, if not a political significance, in Fielding's decision, even though he cannot explain why

Little is known of Fielding's activities between his ill-fated attempt to elope with Sarah Andrew from Lyme Regis in November 1725 and the publication early in 1728 of both his satirical poem, The Masquerade, and his first play, Love in Several Masques. The timing of Fielding's entrance into London life was, however, hugely significant on several counts. ‘The new plays of the early and mid-1720s largely continue the modes established around the turn of the century’, Robert D. Hume wittily remarks. ‘A Rip Van Winkle who saw The Beaux Stratagem and fell asleep in 1707 would not have found great changes had he awakened in 1727’. The première of Love in Several Masques on 16 February 1728 followed on immediately from the brilliant run in January of Vanbrugh and Cibber's The Provok'd Husband at the theatre in Drury Lane. Perhaps of even more significance to Fielding's subsequent career as a dramatist, it actually coincided with the beginning of The Beggar's Opera's record-breaking run at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. That Fielding's first play lasted four nights should perhaps in the circumstances be viewed as a minor triumph. However briefly, the series of events triggered by the unprecedented success of The Provok'd Husband and The Beggar's Opera transformed the theatrical world. ‘The success of The Beggar's Opera demonstrated conclusively that London had a large, hitherto almost untapped audience’, Hume explains. ‘The play pulled into the theatre not only a multitude of repeat attenders but also a large group of potential and occasional theatre-goers who could perhaps be persuaded to attend regularly’. Moreover, Gay's burlesque opera encouraged theatrical managers to risk staging more experimental drama, rather than the tried-and-tested old favourites with which they had persevered prior to 1728.

Of equal importance to Fielding's subsequent career as a playwright, The Beggar's Opera was immediately talked up by the opposition press as ‘the most venomous allegorical Libel against the G[overnmen]t that hath appear'd for many Years past’ in which ‘satirical Strokes upon Ministers, Courtiers and Great Men, in general, abound in every Part of this most insolent Performance’.