FOREWORD
Some years ago a literary investigator came into my office and inquired whether he could find a copy of Richard Tickell’sAnticipationin our library. He was thinking of sending to the British Museum for a photostatic copy, in case we could not supply his need. We were able to reply that we had sixteen editions of this book—ten of them printed in the year 1778 alone. Now publishers do not re-issue a book unless someone is reading it. The number of reprints induced me to read the book, and I found it one of the best of eighteenth-century satires on the ponderous serio-comic addresses delivered in what is still pleased to call itself the M-th-r of P-rl—m-nts. Though Mr. Butterfield has restrained himself in the matter of drawing parallels between the bumbling follies of that legislative conclave, then and now, yet the writer of a foreword may be permitted to do so.
In the summer of 1941, I received in the mail a pamphlet, in an envelope which bore a Chinese postage stamp and the postmark of Shanghai. The pamphlet was one of the familiar blue-covered fascicles which we all recognize as the format of theParliamentary Debates. This particular fascicle purported to contain the debate for August 15, 1941, and was typographically exact, even to the reproduction of the arms of H-s Br-t-nn-c M-j-sty on the cover. An examination revealed it to be the twentieth-century parallel of Tickell’sAnticipation—a satiric report of the debates in the H—s- of C-mm-ns as of 1941. It was obvious German propaganda, but so well done typographically that I found some of my learned colleagues had read a part of it before it dawned on them that the whole thing was analogous to Tickell’sAnticipation. But let no American be complacent about the failure of the H—s- of C-mm-ns to progress during the intervening one hundred and sixty-three years. Let him dip into our ownC-ngr-ss—n-l R-c-rd.
Mr. Butterfield and the publisher could have chosen no more appropriate time than the present at which to issue the twentieth-century editionof this book. It ought to be read by all students of American history—elementary and advanced.
Randolph G. Adams
The W. L. Clements LibraryAnn Arbor