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Notes
The title-page of the 108 page pamphlet provides the following publication data: "Edinburgh, Printed by Drummond and Company, in Swan's Close, a little below the Cross-well, North Side of the Street, 1740." Dickson erroneously suggests, "This Address was published in London by Drummond and Company in August 1739," and Jensen accepts his suggestion.
Gerard E. Jensen, "An Address to the Electors of Great Britain . . . Possibly a Fielding Tract," Modern Language Notes, 40 (1925), 57-58.
A. Leroy Greason Jr., "Fielding's An Address to the Electors of Great Britain," Philological Quarterly, 33 (1954), 347-352. Greason's argument that the Address first appeared in the Champion in November 1740 is impeccable; equally convincing is his suggestion that Dickson confused the Address with a shorter pamphlet by "H. Goreham: London, 1739" and entitled An Address to the Electors and other free subjects of Great Britain. His discovery of its initial publication in the Champion gives the Address a dual bibliographical significance. No other essays firmly attributable to Fielding published in the Champion after October 21, 1740 are extant, though he may have continued to write for the journal until June, 1741. John B. Shipley has suggested that an essay in the Dublin Evening Post for December 30-January 3, 1739/40 is a reprint of a Fielding essay from the Champion published slightly earlier. But his evidence is too weak to finally support its assignment either to the Champion or to Fielding; "A New Fielding Essay from the Champion," Philological Quarterly, 42 (1963), 417-422. If the Address is Fielding's, the seven extant essays published between November 1 and November 15 (which correspond to pages 1 to 62 of the pamphlet) are his and the closing section of the Address (pages 63-108) represents, according to Greason's calculations, six more Fielding essays published through November 29, 1740.
William B. Coley, "The Authorship of An Address to the Electors of Great Britain (1740)," Philological Quarterly, 36 (1957), 488-495.
Coley, pp. 491-495. Though Coley does not attribute the Address to Ralph, he notes, among other things, that Ralph (Champion, March 18, 1739/40), as well as Fielding, had depicted the post of prime minister as an unconstitutional anomaly and that the one allusion by Fielding to Algernon Sidney cited by Greason is more than overbalanced by evidences of a "sustained and abiding association with the name and works of Sidney" in a number of works by Ralph published between 1741 and 1746; for example, his History of England (1744-46) includes a long and emotional account of Sidney's trial and execution for treason. In support of Coley, it can be added that Algernon Sidney's works provide many of the mottoes heading issues of The Remembrancer, a journal Ralph established in late 1747.
Fielding's depiction of the post of prime minister as dangerously unconstitutional is a standard opposition ploy. Analogues of his comparison in the Address (and the Champion for May 8, 1740) of the balanced constitution to the balanced machinery of the Newtonian universe and of the prime minister to an unbalancing "extra part" can be found everywhere in the opposition literature of the period. The Craftsman (cf. Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle [1968], pp. 20-21, 114-145) returns frequently to this position and it is given formal poetic utterance in J. T. Desangulier's opposition poem "The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model for Government" (1737). Indeed, in 1740 the House of Lords attempted to unseat Walpole on the grounds that his post was unconstitutional; see William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (1798), III, 465.
Fielding's scholarly arguments in favour of non-partisan independence among electors and legislators and his tracing of the precedents for an independent House of Commons to the Saxon Witenagemot are unique in his works. But many other opposition writers employed the same adaptations of the "Classical Republican" and "Gothick" traditions that had dominated "Whig" political thought since the seventeenth century. These traditions are lucidly discussed in, respectively, Zera Silver Fink, The Classical Republicans, 2nd ed. (1962) and Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England (1952); the dependence upon these traditions of the spokesmen of the anti-Walpole opposition is discussed in Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle (1968), esp. pp. 114-145.
Greason (p. 349, note 4) finds only two very minor discrepancies between the original essays and the first 62 pages of the pamphlet.
Greason (pp. 348-349) quotes the first advertisement and notes the existence of the others, but does not apply them to the problem of authorship, no doubt because he had not located Courteville's statement and was primarily concerned at that point in his argument with fixing the original publication date of the Address. Coley does not mention the advertisements.
Coley, p. 490, note 9. Fielding's usage is satirized in An Examen of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1750), p. 3.
The use of "hath" in The Crisis: A Sermon, a clumsily unimpressive work, seems best explained as an attempt to lend it a specious clerical air. While as careful a scholar as Henry Knight Miller has treated The Crisis as Fielding's (Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies [1961], pp. 6, 191n), Martin Battestin has questioned its authenticity ("Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews," Philological Quarterly, 39 [1960], 42-43). Neither offers evidence for his view.
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