“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 place
Great Britain
Mediatype
Print (octavo)
Pages
236 (pp.) 1st ed.
The Touch-Stone; or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town (1728) is an anonymous satirical pamphlet now generally attributed to the Grub-Street writer James Ralph.[2][3] Issued in octavo and later re-titled The Taste of the Town (1731)[4], it delivers a mock-heroic tour of London’s operas, plays, puppet-shows, fairs and masquerades while urging dramatists to draw on “our most noted domestick Fables” such as Tom Thumb, Robin Hood and Dick Whittington and His Cat.[5]
Modern scholars value the book as one of the liveliest contemporary portraits of 1720s popular culture [6]—from Italian opera salaries to Bartholomew Fair booth-shows—and for its shrewd commentary on theatrical taste.[7] Helen Sand Hughes first demonstrated that its burlesque proposals directly inspired Henry Fielding’s early farces, above all Tom Thumb (1730) and The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731); later critics (e.g. Martin & Ruthe Battestin) have confirmed the connection.[8][9]
Publication history
1728: First edition issued anonymously in octavo, advertised for sale on 17 May 1728; imprint reads “Printed, and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster.”[1][10]
1729: The same sheets re‑issued with a cancel title‑page labelled “Second Edition” (no textual changes).[4]
1731: Remaining sheets re‑issued once more with a new title‑page, The Taste of the Town: or, a Guide to all Publick Diversions.[4]
Background
Literary historian Margaret McKinsey calls The Touch-Stone the moment when its (probable) author “pivoted 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 redirected his energies to prose satire (The Touch-Stone), verse lampoon (Sawney), and comic drama (The Fashionable Lady). McKinsey sees this switch as the first of many reinventions in a decidedly opportunistic career.[11]
Content and themes
Drawing on what Margaret McKinsey calls Ralph’s “first-hand feel for the pulse of the city”—sharpened 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.”[12][13] Kenny likewise hails the book as “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.[14] McKinsey emphasises the tract’s unusual blend of “serious criticism, thoughtful history and irreverent satire,” a mixture critics have compared to Hogarth’s graphic prints or—later—the comic novels of Fielding.[12]
The pamphlet is a plea for “good taste”and goes on to define 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.[12] Opera singers exact ruinous fees, scenic machines eclipse plot, and critics—“formal, deep-finish’d blockheads” in his phrase—heckle for sport.[15] The survey ranges from theatres to fairs, cock-pits and bear-baiting pits; Ralph pictures “gash’d faces, spouting veins, goary skulls” as a supposed national training-ground for martial valour—a grotesque joke that Margaret McKinsey compares to the later savageries of Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty.[16][17] Throughout, he slyly disclaims any wish “to reflect upon … Religion” before doing exactly that.[18] McKinsey argues that this blend of moralising, street reportage and irreverent wit makes The Touch-Stone the prose analogue of Hogarth’s satirical prints and a direct precursor of Fielding’s comic drama.[19][14]
The four “essays on Taste” mix mock-heroic rhetoric with practical theatre criticism:
Opera & tragedy – mocks Italian opera for “singing in an unknown dialect” and ridicules “merry Tragedies” that provoke laughter rather than pity and terror.[20]
Spectacle & fairs – dissects puppet shows, prize‑fights, Southwark vs Bartholomew Fair, John Henley’s oratory, and Count Heidegger’s masquerades, presenting a panoramic—and often scathing—portrait of 1720s popular culture.[22]
Critical jargon – satirises pedantic critics who prattle of “catastrophe, unity, probability” while praising unintelligibility as profundity.[23]
Reception and 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 facetious list of “home-bred Subjects”—“Dick Whittington, Robin Hood, the Dragon of Wantley, Tom Thumb”—was quickly echoed in Fielding’s work, and the prologue to The Temple Beau (January 1730) repeats Touch-Stone’s complaint that “true” comedy was being elbowed aside by farce and opera.[14]
Critics trace still 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 all parallel themes first sketched in The Touch-Stone.[24] Later scholarship has mapped the pamphlet’s stock of giants, dragons and the notorious “accident of the pudding” into Fielding’s expanded burlesque The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), while noting that the essay itself had mock-recommended Tom Thumb as a suitable opera subject—an in-joke Fielding flipped by turning the nursery tale into a full-scale comic tragedy.[25]
Early critical responses, however, were mixed. The essayist Nathan Drake dismissed the work as “a production altogether worthless, and written in a style of extreme vulgarity.”[26] But twentieth-century scholars reversed that verdict. Friedrich Brie (1927) called it a “wide‑ranging and knowledgeable” survey of London’s entertainments,[27] while Charles Harold Gray (1931) praised its contribution to early theatrical criticism.[7] Dane Farnsworth Smith (1936) emphasized its lively survey of amusements,[28] and W. L. MacDonald (1951) called it “one of the best guides to the diversions which engaged the leisure time of the more select citizens of London.”[29]
Later commentators stressed its documentary value. Musicologist Irving Lowens (1959) praised its opening chapter as a rare, vivid portrait of London’s post-Beggar’s Opera opera scene,[6] 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.”[30]
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:[31]
British Museum – 1728 Touch-Stone; fly-leaf annotated by collector James Bindley c. 1790s: “By Mr James Ralph …”.[32]
Northwestern University – 1728 Touch‑Stone; note reads: “By Mr James Ralph who since wrote a History of England &c &c &c.” Ink possibly pre-dates 1815.[33]
Princeton University – 1728 Touch‑Stone; front flyleaf inscription: “By Ralph—.” Dated by the curator to the eighteenth or very early nineteenth century.[33]
Bryn Mawr College – 1731 Taste of the Town; inscription reads: “This Book was first published under the name of the Touchstone, the Author of it was Ralph,” likely in an eighteenth-century hand.[33]
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.[6]
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.[17] Bibliographer John B. Shipley (1968) set out why the attribution still fits Ralph, answering Lowens on three practical points:
Printing history: the 1729 and 1731 impressions are the same 1728 sheets with new title‑pages, not fresh editions, so they reveal nothing about sales.
Silence of contemporaries: anonymity was standard; the silence of Thomas Birch—and even Pope, who noticed Ralph only after Sawney—does not weigh against authorship.
Composition window: drawing on Ralph’s recorded theatre‑going, Shipley shows the pamphlet could have been drafted after The Beggar’s Opera (29 Jan 1728) and on sale by 17 May, a perfectly plausible window.[34][6]
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.[35][6] He then marshalled internal parallels:
Shared satiric targets – The Touch-Stone ridicules both Gay and Swift, calling The Beggar’s Opera “a wretched piece.” This satiric posture closely mirrors the contempt Ralph expressed toward the same figures in his poem Sawney (26 June 1728), issued five weeks later.[36]
Consistent admiration for Dryden – Dryden is the most frequently praised critic in the pamphlet; Ralph likewise singles him out in The Muses’ Address to the King (Aug 1728) and later tried to prepare a collected Dryden edition.[37]
Mandevillean irreligion – Repeated jibes at clergy, church-going and Bible tales echo Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which the author cites approvingly; Ralph’s letters and Franklin’s memoir confirm his deist, anti-clerical bent and his known reading of Mandeville.[38][39]
Library concordance – The essays quote Juan Huarte’s Examen des Ingenios; a copy of that work was in Ralph’s personal library and was bought by Benjamin Franklin at the 1762 auction of Ralph’s books.[35][40]
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.”[41] McKinsey concurs that Shipley’s analysis “convincingly refuted” Lowens, turning the opera objection into evidence of Ralph’s broad satiric scope.[17] 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.”[42] Modern reference works such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and scholars including Martin Battestin follow Shipley’s verdict.[2][43]
Battestin, Martin C.; Battestin, Ruthe R. (1993). Henry Fielding: A Life. London: Routledge.
Brie, Friedrich (1927). Englische Rokoko‑Epik (1710‑1730). Munich: Beck. p.101.
Drake, Nathan (1809). Essays, Biographical, Critical, and Historical, Illustrative of the Rambler, Adventurer, &c. Vol.1. London: C. and R. Baldwin. p.65.
Ralph, James (1728). The Touch-Stone; or, Historical, Critical, Political, Philosophical, and Theological Essays on the Reigning Diversions of the Town. Published anonymously; modern scholarship attributes the work to Ralph. London: Printed, and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster.
Shipley, John B. (1956). "Franklin Attends a Book Auction". Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 80 (1): 37–45. Retrieved 21 July 2025.
Smith, Dane Farnsworth (1936). Plays About the Theatre in England from 'The Rehearsal' in 1671 to the Licensing Act in 1737. London: Macmillan. pp.153–154.
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