Henry Delahay Symonds and James Ridgway’s Conversion from Whig Pamphleteers to Doyens of the Radical Press, 1788–1793

Robinson talks about Symonds and Ridgway's conversion from Whig Pamphleteers to Doyens of the radical press. In his review of the sixth, enlarged edition of Lessons to a Young Prince (1790), the classicist and historian John Gillies followed a persistent tendency in contemporary criticism to read (and to dismiss) Lessons as "another Whig tract," despite its appeal for the non-partisan consideration of alternative political constitutions and trenchant disavowal of any party interest. In his dismissal of the pamphlet's author, Gillies even enlisted the support of the not-so-long departed Samuel Johnson. Gillies's diagnosis derived from his conflation of the perceived political values of its publishers Henry Delahay Symonds and James Ridgway with the text itself rather than through a careful examination of the political values that it expressed, indicating that the publishers found it hard to slough off their earlier associations with the Whig press.