ANTICIPATION
BY
RICHARD TICKELL
Reprinted from the
First Edition, London, 1778
With an
Introduction, Notes & a Bibliography
of Tickell’s Writings
BY
L. H. BUTTERFIELD
NEW YORK
King’s Crown Press, Morningside Heights
1942
Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography copyright 1942 by
L. H. BUTTERFIELD
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
KZ-19-VB-500
King’s Crown Press is a division of Columbia UniversityPress organized for the purpose of making certain scholarlymaterial available at minimum cost. Toward that end, thepublishers have adopted every reasonable economy exceptsuch as would interfere with a legible format. The work ispresented substantially as submitted by the author, withoutthe usual editorial attention of Columbia University Press.
To C. J. F. B.
Some years ago a literary investigator came into my office and inquiredwhether he could find a copy of Richard Tickell’s Anticipation in ourlibrary. He was thinking of sending to the British Museum for a photostaticcopy, in case we could not supply his need. We were able to replythat we had sixteen editions of this book—ten of them printed in theyear 1778 alone. Now publishers do not re-issue a book unless someoneis reading it. The number of reprints induced me to read the book, andI found it one of the best of eighteenth-century satires on the ponderousserio-comic addresses delivered in what is still pleased to call itself theM-th-r of P-rl—m-nts. Though Mr. Butterfield has restrained himselfin the matter of drawing parallels between the bumbling follies of thatlegislative conclave, then and now, yet the writer of a foreword may bepermitted to do so.
In the summer of 1941, I received in the mail a pamphlet, in an envelopewhich bore a Chinese postage stamp and the postmark of Shanghai.The pamphlet was one of the familiar blue-covered fascicles which we allrecognize as the format of the Parliamentary Debates. This particularfascicle purported to contain the debate for August 15, 1941, and wastypographically exact, even to the reproduction of the arms of H-sBr-t-nn-c M-j-sty on the cover. An examination revealed it to be thetwentieth-century parallel of Tickell’s Anticipation—a satiric report ofthe debates in the H—s- of C-mm-ns as of 1941. It was obvious Germanpropaganda, but so well done typographically that I found some of mylearned colleagues had read a part of it before it dawned on them thatthe whole thing was analogous to Tickell’s Anticipation. But let no Americanbe complacent about the failure of the H—s- of C-mm-ns to progressduring the intervening one hundred and sixty-three years. Let him dipinto our own C-ngr-ss—n-l R-c-rd.
Mr. Butterfield and the publisher