Sir Robert Walpole's Poets: The Use of Literature as Pro-Government Propaganda, 1721-1742

Abstract

This is the first booklength study of the literature published in support of Walpole's administration. It explores important pro-government themes and explains how the propaganda network was organized and what precisely the Old Corps Whig leadership hoped to achieve. This book questions the myth that only Grub Street hacks were prepared to support Waipole. Over the years writers associated with him developed a fund of distinct themes, symbols, and imagery, and this rendered them capable of some aggressive myth-making of their own.