James Ralph

Background

James Ralph was born, probably in the present New Jersey.

Career

It was wWhile living in Philadelphia, he became acquainted with Benjamin Franklin, whom he accompanied to London in December 1724, deserting his family because of a quarrel with his wife's parents. Unable for some months to secure literary work in London, Ralph lived upon Franklin's generosity until he secured employment as a teacher in Berkshire, where he assumed Franklin's name.

Franklin held himself responsible for unsettling Ralph's religious beliefs, and to him he dedicated his sceptical Dissertation Upon Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, in 1725. In his Autobiography Franklin blames himself for disrupting their friendship, by unwelcome attentions to Ralph's mistress, which were "repulsed with a proper degree of resentment. "

Turning to poetry in 1727, Ralph wrote The Tempest and Night, blank-verse poems, imitative of Thomson's Winter, which had just appeared. The poems have occasional American references. Sawney, an attack on Pope, inspired by the first edition of The Dunciad, ended Ralph's poetic career, for in the next edition Pope inserted the fatal couplet: Silence, ye Wolves! while Ralph to Cynthia howls, And makes Night hideous - Answer him ye Owls. Ralph next tried revising old plays, which, however, had but short runs. His original ballad-opera, The Fashionable Lady (1730), had a fair success, and is further noteworthy as the first play by an American to be produced on the London stage; John Crowne, Harvard's first playwright, had been English-born.

In 1728 Ralph had written The Touchstone, a burlesque guide to the city's amusements; it contained suggestions for plays based upon British folk-lore, which Henry Fielding utilized in Tom Thumb. A Tragedy (1730). The two men were friends, and in 1735 Ralph was Fielding's assistant in the management of the Little Theatre in Haymarket, a position he filled until the Licensing Act of 1737 ended Fielding's dramatic career.

Ralph now became a contributor to the Prompter and the Universal Spectator, but in 1739 joined Fielding as assistant editor of the Champion and devoted his talents to scathing attacks upon Sir Robert Walpole. Probably after Walpole's fall in 1742, Ralph entered the employ of George Bubb Dodington, writing several long political pamphlets of considerable effectiveness, as well as editing Old England and The Remembrancer, in the interests of Frederick, the Prince of Wales, Dodington's leader of the moment.

The only one of these politically inspired works of interest now is The History of England, from the Restoration through the reign of William III. ritten, in part, to refute Burnet and Oldmixon, but despite its partisan purpose is today a valuable compilation for the student of Restoration and Revolutionary England.

Ralph had planned the history to cover the reigns of Anne and George I, but did not finish it. He was also employed by both Frederick and Dodington as a sort of political liaison officer.

With the death of Frederick in 1751, Ralph could not, like his patron Dodington, make peace with the ministry, and in 1753 launched a new opposition weekly, the Protester, in the service of the Duke of Bedford. The paper ran less than half a year, for, through the good offices of David Garrick, Ralph was granted a pension of 300 pounds per year by the Pelham administration for renouncing political writing. Ralph's active career was ended, but his letters to the Duke of Newcastle, always written when a pension payment was due, show keen political interest; one in particular, January 31, 1756, urged the extension of the stamp tax to the American colonies, to lessen the burden on the mother country.

In 1756 Ralph joined the staff of the Monthly Review as political and historical critic but carefully avoided discussing anything which might be unpleasing to the ministry. In 1759 Franklin, now on good terms with Ralph, secured his assistance in preparing for the press An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania. Franklin, as agent of the Assembly, was seeking relief from the abuses of the colonial proprietors. It is highly probable that Ralph, an old hand at the business, actually did considerable work on the text. Ralph had experienced all the hardships of Grub Street in a period of declining private patronage; unsuccessful as poet and dramatist, for a time a bookseller's hack, he finally found his metier as a political writer and attained a state of comparative ease. In The Case of Authors by Profession (1758) he ably surveyed the unhappy lot of the hack writer and showed him to be entirely at the mercy of the bookseller, theatre manager, or party minister. The Case is an acute defense of the professional writer written when such defense was sorely needed, for the era of patronage of writers by the public was still many years in the future.

He died in Chiswick, England.

Achievements

• Judged by the standards of his own day, he was an able political writer; and was certainly the first American to succeed in eighteenth-century Grub Street.

Personality

Ralph has been represented as being completely venal; it is undeniable that he wrote for the side which paid the most. There is no evidence, however, that once the bargain was struck, he was false to his employer; once bought, he stayed bought.

Connections

He married Rebekah Ogden of Elizabethtown and by her had one daughter, Mary, born in March 1724.

Sposue:

Rebekah Ogden

Daughter:

Mary