James Ralph

James Ralph (c. 1705 – 24 January 1762) was a British political journalist, historian, and periodical essayist. A companion of Benjamin Franklin in the 1720s, he later worked in Grub Street and was singled out by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad. His writings ranged across poetry, stage adaptations, pamphlets, cultural criticism, and large-scale history.

Ralph wrote for and edited several opposition weeklies, including The Champion (editor, 1741–1743), Old England (co-editor, 1743–1744), and The Remembrancer (founder and editor, 1747–1749). He also reported parliamentary debates for the Universal Spectator and contributed to other London papers. Much of his journalism was undertaken with the patronage of George Bubb Dodington and, in the late 1740s, the circle of Frederick, Prince of Wales.

His books include A History of England during the Reigns of William III, Anne, and George I (1744–46), the constitutional survey The Use and Abuse of Parliaments (1744), and the anonymous The Case of Authors by Profession (1758), an analysis of the economics of authorship. Earlier works include The Touch-Stone (1728), a satirical survey of London entertainments; later scholarship has also attributed to him A Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments in and about London and Westminster (1734).

In 1753 Ralph accepted a government pension on the understanding that he would withdraw from active pamphleteering. He returned briefly with The Case of the Late Resignation (1761) and died at Chiswick on 24 January 1762. Contemporary opinion often derided his poetry, but his histories retained readers into the nineteenth century, and modern scholars emphasize his prominence as a mid-eighteenth-century political journalist and commentator on authorship and the book trade.