Language of Politics

• Part 1: Political Controversy 1769-1771 1. Wilkes and the Middlesex Election: A Brief Survey 2. The Letters of Junius 3. Samuel Johnson: The False Alarm 4. Junius and Johnson: The Falkland Islands Dispute 5. Edmund Burke: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents Part 2: Political Controversy 1790-1793 6. The Publication of Burke’s Reflections and the Subsequent Controversy: A Survey 7. Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France 8. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: The Vulgar Style 9. Vindiciae Gallicae 10.’True Morality Shuns not the Day’: Other Pamphletters in Prose and Verse 11. William Godwin, Philosopher and Novelist. Conclusion Appendix: Chronological Survey of the Controversy concerning Burke’s Reflections, 1790-1793 Index.

‘As a work in its own right and as an example of the successful application of literary methods to the understanding of social and political controversy, (the book) has the rare quality of becoming standard on first publication.’ - History and Theory, IV, III, 382, 1965‘Like many other students of literature, I was introduced to the prose of the 1790s by James Boulton’s Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, a book from which I have been learning for a decade or more.’ - Marilyn Butler