The Case of Opposition Stated (1732)

Simon Varey

2003
149 pages
$39.50
ISBN 9780838755532
LC 003052477

Simon Varey's edition of William Arnall's Case of Opposition Stated (1732) stands to enrich the ongoing discussion of politics and propaganda in the British 'paper wars' of the 1720s and 1730s. The pamphlet, funded by Sir Robert Walpole's administration, attempted to undermine the credibility of the opposition spearheaded by Viscount Bolingbroke and William Pulteney. Arnall's point-by-point rebuttal of a recent number of Bolingbroke and Pulteney's newspaper, the Craftsman,had a particular urgency about it: the Craftsman's printer had recently been convicted for seditious libel, and the Craftsman was reveling in the publicity, selling more copies as it intensified its attacks on Walpole and George II. Arnall's blistering polemic constituted the administration's most forceful attempt to turn the debate against the opposition. The edition includes a scholarly introduction and notes as well as transcriptions of several numbers of the Craftsman and sections of Dr. Varey's previously unpublished manuscript on the [iCraftsman. The late Dr. Varey published widely on eighteenth-century subjects.

About the author:

Simon Varey, who received a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1976, taught English at the University of Utrecht and UCLA before becoming director of special projects at UCLA's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and, subsequently, Director of Grant Development at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. He wrote extensively on eighteenth-century English literature, traditional Mexican pharmaceutical botany, and various aspects of food history in Europe and the Americas. His publications include Space and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1990), an edition of Lord Bolingbroke's essays for the Craftsman (1982), and three other books on eighteenth-century topics, as well as articles on tea, coffee, and chocolate; banquets; viper soup, and Edward Kidder. Dr. Varey was general editor of The World of Dr. Francisco Hernandez (2000), a two-volume work on native Mexican medical practice, and coeditor of The Scriblerian.