Bøger i Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies serien

John Gay was a dramatist and poet, best-known for writing The Beggar's Opera. Through his membership of the Scriblerus Club, Gay developed lasting friendships with Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, all of whom influenced his writing. The study will be invaluable to scholars of eighteenth-century literature and political history.

This is the first study to assess the entire career of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) in relation to the political issues of his time.

William King (1650-1729) was perhaps the dominant Irish intellect of the period from 1688 until his death in 1729. An Anglican (Church of Ireland) by conversion, King was a strident critic of John Toland and the clerical superior of Jonathan Swift.

While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet Eliza Haywood insisted she 'never wrote any thing in a political way'. This study of the life and works, the first full-length biography of Haywood in nearly a century, takes the measure of her duplicity.

John Toland was notorious. A pamphleteer, a polemicist and a prankster of the first order, modern scholarship has struggled to position his writings within the debates of his day. This study is the first to fully recount his remarkable biography, situating his writings within the controversies that sparked and shaped them.

A Tory pamphleteer, playwright and satirical historian, Delarivier Manley was regarded by her contemporaries Jonathan Swift and Robert Harley as a key member of the Tory propaganda team. This biography offers details about her life, including evidence about three illegitimate children by John Tilly, Governor of Fleet Prison.

Speck's biography examines Paine's work afresh, in light of new thinking about the role of religion in the formation of his political ideology, and also places Paine within the recently-developed context of 'Atlantic History'.

Richard Steele is famous as an early writer of sentimental drama and as half of the writing team, Addison and Steele. He is notable both for the indirect propaganda he developed with Addison and for the open partisanship of his own periodicals. He wrote extensively about responsible economics but was famously irresponsible in his own affairs.

It is the few, but brilliant, political writings of his English career - including the collection of five pamphlets featuring the character, John Bull - that form the crux of this biography.

One of the most durable eighteenth-century writers, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) is best remembered for his sparkling and rangy entries in the Tatler (1709-11) and the Spectator (1711-12), both co-edited with Richard Steele. This biography puts his literary career into a political context.

Johnson rose from obscure origins to become a major literary figure of the eighteenth century. Through a detailed survey of his major works and political journalism, Hudson constructs a complex picture of Johnson as a moralist forced to accept the realistic nature of politics during an era of revolutionary transition.