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Ralph's Case of Authors: Its Influence on Goldsmith and Isaac D'Israeli

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert W. Kenny*
Affiliation:
Brown University

Extract

In 1758, after thirty years of hack writing, James Ralph published The Case of Authors by Profession, a short pamphlet which vigorously defended professional writers and severely arraigned their principal employers, the booksellers, theatre managers, and politicians. The essay received favorable comment in the Monthly Review and the Critical Review as a just appraisal of the difficulties of authorship. It has additional interest because Oliver Goldsmith may very well have received from it certain ideas which appeared in his Essay on the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, and because from it Isaac D'Israeli quoted, without acknowledgement, extensive passages which appeared in his Calamities of Authors.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1937 , pp. 104 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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References

page 104 note 1 The Monthly Review, xviii, 348.

page 104 note 2 Case of Authors, p. 2.

page 105 note 3 Ibid., p. 5.

page 105 note 4 Ralph did not consider ministerial writing a province, as there was so little call for it; which, when needed, could be supplied at slight cost from either of the universities.

page 105 note 5 Ibid., p. 21.

page 106 note 6 Ibid., p. 22.

page 106 note 7 Ibid., p. 24.

page 106 note 8 Ibid., p. 25.

page 106 note 9 Roderick Random, Chap. 53.

page 107 note 10 Case of Authors, pp. 27–28.

page 107 note 11 A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, p. 268.

page 107 note 12 Case of Authors, p. 31.

page 108 note 13 Ibid., p. 32.

page 108 note 14 John Nichols: Literary Anecdotes, ii, 90–97.

page 108 note 15 Case of Authors, p. 60.

page 109 note 16 Ibid., p. 63.

page 109 note 17 Ibid., p. 72.

page 109 note 18 Present State of Polite Learning, ed. Cunningham, iii, 22.

page 110 note 19 Ibid., iii, 54.

page 110 note 20 Ibid., iii, 55.

page 110 note 21 Ibid.

page 111 note 22 Ibid., p. 57.—It should be remembered that Goldsmith left the employ of Griffiths in September, 1757, after a disagreement. His tedious labor there helped to fill a periodical.

page 111 note 23 Ibid., p. 70.

page 111 note 24 Davies, Life of Garrick, ii, 150.

page 112 note 25 Isaac D'Israeli, Miscellanies of Literature (New York, 1841), i, 113–119.

page 112 note 26 Case of Authors, pp. 3–11, 18–19, 31–38, 60.