The Touch-Stone

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The Touch‑Stone; or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town
Internet Archive scan of Title page of The Touch-Stone (1729 edition), an anonymously published satirical pamphlet attributed to James Ralph.png
Title page (1729 issue)
AuthorAnonymous (attributed to James Ralph)
LanguageEnglish
GenreSatire, theatre criticism
Publisher“Printed, and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster” [1]
Publication date
1728 (1st ed.); 1731 (re‑issued as The Taste of the Town)
Publication placeGreat Britain
Media typePrint (octavo)
Pages236 (1st ed.)

The Touch-Stone; or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town is a 1728 anonymous satirical pamphlet, generally attributed to the Grub-Street writer James Ralph. Issued in octavo and reissued in 1731 under the title The Taste of the Town, it offers a mock-heroic survey of London entertainments—Italian opera, spoken drama, puppet-shows, fairs and masquerades—while arguing for “good taste” and proposing native English subjects such as Tom Thumb , Robin Hood and Dick Whittington and His Cat for the lyric stage. The essays lampoon exorbitant opera fees, scenic spectacle that overwhelms plot, and the jargon of pedantic critics.

Contents

Later scholars have described the pamphlet as a lively contemporary portrait of 1720s amusements and an early contribution to English theatrical criticism. The work also influenced the early burlesques of Henry Fielding, especially Tom Thumb (1730) and The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731).

Although published anonymously, the work has long been attributed to Ralph. The attribution has been debated, notably over the tone of its opening essay on Italian opera, but subsequent analyses read that passage as sustained irony; modern reference works and recent critics generally accept Ralph as the author.

Publication history

Authorship

The Touch-Stone appeared anonymously in 1728 and was reissued in 1731 as The Taste of the Town. Four late-18th- or very early-19th-century fly-leaf inscriptions, apparently independent of one another, preserve the traditional attribution: [5]

Musicologist Irving Lowens (1959) dismissed the Bindley note as “late second-hand gossip” and—seemingly unaware of the other copies or Bindley’s standing as an antiquarian—argued that the pamphlet’s seemingly earnest defence of Italian opera was alien to Ralph, “a newcomer of less than four years’ residence” and no opera devotee; he therefore proposed an unnamed Grub-Street author instead. [8]

Literary historian Margaret McKinsey suggests that Lowens had “failed to understand the spoof,” mistaking the opera essay’s sustained irony for literal praise and thus overlooking the satire that pervades all seven essays. [9] Bibliographer John B. Shipley (1968) set out why the attribution still fits Ralph, answering Lowens on three practical points:

Shipley acknowledged that Lowens’s most substantial objection lay inside the text itself: the opening essay appears to deliver an earnest, learned defence of Italian opera—an enthusiasm seemingly at odds with Ralph’s lifelong devotion to the spoken stage. Lowens inferred from this that “nothing known about Ralph … marks him an opera buff.” Shipley, however, argued that the defence dissolves in parody: halfway through, the author slyly proposes folk ballads such as “The Children in the Wood” for Italian treatment, revealing the whole encomium as an extended lampoon of fashionable taste. Read in that ironic light, the opera essay no longer contradicts Ralph’s outlook but fits the pamphlet’s broader burlesque method. [11] [8] He then marshalled internal parallels:

Because these stylistic markers dovetail with the four early fly-leaf attributions, Shipley concluded that their “combined force … lends weight to the traditionally accepted view that Ralph wrote The Touch-Stone; until better evidence appears, the case rests on that good possibility.” [17] McKinsey concurs that Shipley’s analysis “convincingly refuted” Lowens, turning the opera objection into evidence of Ralph’s broad satiric scope. [9] Even Lowens allowed that “there is no clear internal evidence … that would make an attribution to Ralph impossible … [and] certain small touches … seem to lend credence to such a claim.” [18] Modern reference works such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and scholars including Martin Battestin follow Shipley’s verdict. [19] [20]

Background

The pamphlet marked a pivot from high-flown heroic verse to the more marketable world of satire. After two ambitious blank-verse poems—The Tempest (1727) and Night (1728)—failed to find readers, James Ralph turned to prose satire (The Touch-Stone), verse lampoon (Sawney), and comic drama (The Fashionable Lady), the first of several reinventions in his career. [21]

Content and themes

Drawing on the author’s “first-hand feel for the pulse of the city”—sharpened, according to one account, by nights spent roaming St Bartholomew’s and the play-houses with the young Benjamin Franklin—The Touch-Stone announces its aim “to animadvert upon the standard Entertainments of the present Age, in hopes that those who have Power and Capacity may one Day fix our publick Diversions upon a Basis as lasting, as beneficial to Mankind.” [22] [23] One study calls the book “a broad and racy account of the amusements of the London pleasure-seeker,” noting that its running lament over the eclipse of “true comedy” by ballad-opera, harlequinades and stage-machinery became a rallying-cry for reform-minded playwrights. [24] The tract blends “serious criticism, thoughtful history and irreverent satire,” a mixture that has been compared to Hogarth’s graphic prints and, later, to the comic novels of Fielding. [22]

The pamphlet is a plea for “good taste” and defines taste as the harmony of truth, propriety and civility, then tours London’s amusements to show how far the town has strayed from that ideal. [22] Opera singers exact ruinous fees, [8] scenic machines eclipse plot, and critics—“formal, deep-finish’d blockheads” in the author’s phrase—heckle for sport. [25] The survey ranges from theatres to fairs, cock-pits and bear-baiting pits; the depiction of “gash’d faces, spouting veins, goary skulls” as a supposed national training-ground for martial valour has been compared to the later savageries of Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty . [26] [9] Throughout, the author disclaims any wish “to reflect upon … Religion” before doing exactly that. [27] This blend of moralising, street reportage and irreverent wit has been read as the prose analogue of Hogarth’s satirical prints and a direct precursor of Fielding’s comic drama. [28] [24]

The four “essays on Taste” mix mock-heroic rhetoric with practical theatre criticism:

Reception

Early responses were mixed. The essayist Nathan Drake dismissed the work as “a production altogether worthless, and written in a style of extreme vulgarity.” [33] In the twentieth century, scholars reversed that verdict. Friedrich Brie (1927) called it a “wide-ranging and knowledgeable” survey of London’s entertainments, [34] while Charles Harold Gray (1931) praised its contribution to early theatrical criticism. [35] Dane Farnsworth Smith (1936) emphasized its lively account of amusements, [36] and W. L. MacDonald (1951) described it as “one of the best guides to the diversions which engaged the leisure time of the more select citizens of London.” [37] Later commentators stressed its documentary value: musicologist Irving Lowens (1959) highlighted the opening chapter as a vivid portrait of London’s post- Beggar’s Opera opera scene, and John B. Shipley (1968) noted its “sound knowledge of and insight into the various forms of public entertainment in the London of the mid-1720s.” [8] [38]

Influence

The Touch-Stone made itself felt on London’s stages almost at once, most clearly in the early farces of the twenty-three-year-old Henry Fielding. The pamphlet’s list of “home-bred Subjects”—“Dick Whittington, Robin Hood, the Dragon of Wantley, Tom Thumb”—was echoed in Fielding’s work, and the prologue to The Temple Beau (January 1730) repeats its complaint that “true” comedy was being elbowed aside by farce and opera. [24] Critics have traced closer borrowings in Fielding’s smash-hit burlesque Tom Thumb the Great (1730): the nursery-rhyme hero, the mockery of heroic tragedy, and the satire of pedantic critics such as Bentley and Theobald parallel themes first sketched in The Touch-Stone. [39] Later scholarship has mapped the pamphlet’s stock of giants, dragons and the “accident of the pudding” into Fielding’s expanded burlesque The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731). The essay had even mock-recommended Tom Thumb as an opera subject—an in-joke Fielding inverted by turning the nursery tale into a comic tragedy. [40]

References

  1. 1 2 Hughes 1922, p. 20.
  2. Shipley 1968, p. 191.
  3. Shipley 1968, p. 190.
  4. WorldCat OCLC & 8882191.
  5. Shipley 1968, pp. 197–198.
  6. Shipley 1968, p. 197.
  7. 1 2 3 Shipley 1968, p. 198.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 Lowens 1959, p. 325.
  9. 1 2 3 McKinsey 1973, p. 67.
  10. Shipley 1968, pp. 190–191.
  11. 1 2 Shipley 1968, p. 192.
  12. Shipley 1968, pp. 193–194.
  13. Shipley 1968, p. 194.
  14. Shipley 1968, pp. 194–196.
  15. McKillop 1961, p. 45.
  16. Shipley 1956, p. 42.
  17. Shipley 1968, p. 196.
  18. Lowens 1959, p. 341.
  19. Okie 2004.
  20. Battestin & Battestin 1993, p. 76.
  21. McKinsey 1973, p. 62.
  22. 1 2 3 McKinsey 1973, p. 65.
  23. Ralph 1728, p. 236.
  24. 1 2 3 Kenny 1940, p. 221.
  25. Ralph 1728, p. 159.
  26. Ralph 1728, p. 219.
  27. Ralph 1728, p. 51.
  28. McKinsey 1973, p. 66.
  29. Hughes 1922, pp. 21, 27.
  30. Hughes 1922, pp. 22–23.
  31. Hughes 1922, pp. 30–32.
  32. Hughes 1922, pp. 27, 29.
  33. Drake 1809, p. 65.
  34. Brie 1927, p. 101.
  35. Gray 1931, p. 56.
  36. Smith 1936, pp. 153–154.
  37. MacDonald 1951, p. 10.
  38. Shipley 1968, p. 189.
  39. Kenny 1940, p. 222.
  40. Hughes 1922, pp. 24–28.

Sources