Junius, LETTERS OF, a series of seventy letters signed Junius, which appeared in the Public Advertiser between the 21st of January 1769 and the 21st of January 1772. They were revised by the author, and reprinted two months later in two small volumes by Henry Sampson Woodfall. An edition which appeared in 1812 contained one hundred and thirteen letters in addition to the seventy in the author's edition; five only of the one hundred and thirteen were signed Junius, and one of the five, dated 21st of November 1768, was the first which appeared with that signature. Soon after Junius began to write he attracted attention owing both to his apparent familiarity with current politics and notable persons, and to his boldness in commenting upon them, the climax being reached by him in his letter to the king on the 16th of December 1769. Woodfall was prosecuted for printing and publishing it in the Public Advertiser, and acquitted on a technical point, while Almon, a bookseller, was punished for selling a reprint of it. The audacity of Junius in bidding George III. remember that 'while the crown was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another,' stimulated public curiosity as to the writer of that letter and others. Burke was generally supposed to be Junius till his denial was accepted as conclusive. Among the many supposed authors of the letters were Lord Shelburne, Barré, Lord George Sackville, Wilkes, Horne Took, and Thomas, Lord Lyttelton. It was not till after the publication of the edition of 1812 that the name of Sir Philip Francis (q.v.) was publicly affirmed to be concealed under that of Junius. John Taylor was the first to advance what is now known as the Franciscan theory. He wrote two books on the subject: the first appeared in 1813, and was entitled A Discovery of the Author of the Letters of Junius; the second in 1816, and was entitled The Identity of Junius with a Distinguished Living Character Established. In the first Taylor argued that the letters were from the pens of Dr Francis and his son; in the second, that the son was the sole author. De Quincey, Earl Stanhope, Lord Macaulay, and other critics and historians of note have accepted the Franciscan theory. Taylor was led to frame it by reading a letter which had appeared in the Public Advertiser on the 23d of March 1772 signed Veteran, in which Lord Barrington is charged with expelling Francis from the War Office. The 'Memoirs' of Sir Philip Francis by Parkes and Merivale appeared in 1867, containing private letters from Francis in which he wrote that he had resigned his clerkship and declined promotion to a higher post in the War Office, and that he was on terms of cordial intimacy with the Lord Barrington whom Veteran vilified. The extant manuscripts of Junius are said to have been written in a disguised hand, and many fancied resemblances have been traced between it and Francis's natural hand. Woodfall, the printer of the Public Advertiser, Tomkins, the principal writing-master of his day, and other contemporary authorities considered the handwriting of the manuscripts to be not only natural, but to bear a close resemblance to that of many men and women who lived when Junius wrote. Moreover, it was not till half a century after the publication of Junius's own edition of his letters that the theory of a disguised handwriting was started in order to get over the difficulty that the natural hand of Francis was unlike that of the Junnian manuscripts. No direct or indisputable proof has yet connected Francis with Junius. The authorship of the letters signed Junius remains a mystery. Junius was not the only important political writer of his time, many others being conspicuous and admired, yet the letters of Wilkes and Horne Tooke, to name those of two popular writers, were neither so uniformly brilliant, nor were they so carefully polished, as the letters signed Junius. This great anonymous writer set a pattern for the leading articles, which were unknown in his day, and through which newspapers now influence public opinion.
See Junius (2 vols. 1772); Junius, including Letters by the same Writer under other Signatures (3 vols. 1812); the articles on 'Junius' in Dilke's Papers of a Critic; articles in the Athenæum by the present writer; Chabot and Twistleton, The Handwriting of Junius (1871); and H. R. Francis, Junius Revealed (1894).