Pamphlet, defined by Dr Johnson, himself an occasional writer of pamphlets, as 'a small book; properly a book sold unbound and only stitched,' and by him derived from the French par un filet, 'by a thread.' Skeat, rejecting other conjectural derivations, prefers to take the word from the name of Pamphila, a 1st-century historian, writer of small books. French and Germans use the word 'pamphlet' as an English importation and in its English acceptance. Hoccleve applies the name pamflet or pamphilet in 1411 to his rather long poem De Regimine Principum; and Caxton printed numerous pamfletts, but the word had not then the restricted sense it has come to bear. Any kind of matter, even metrical, may be published 'in pamphlet form;' but the term 'pamphlet' is now ordinarily applied to brief publications which as controversial are distinguished from ballads, narratives, folk-tales, chapbooks, or expository tracts. Even as thus limited, pamphlets include innumerable types and varieties—impassioned pleading for God's truth against an ungodly generation; the strenuous defence of a just cause imperilled by tyranny or fickle majorities; the mutual recriminations of irate scholars; the personal grievances of misunderstood and unrecognized inventors; the querulous polemics of circlesquarers, earth-flatteners, and other faddists; denunciations of iniquitous railway schemes or ruinous municipal undertakings; and the anonymous and scurrilous lampoons of personal malice and revenge. 'Pamphleteer,' according to Johnson 'a scribber of small books,' suggests associations with anonymous spite or venal hack-work. Religious convulsions and political crises produce both the higher and the meaner sorts: wherever, especially since the invention of printing, people have felt strongly and bitterly, or whenever hide-bound doctrinaires have felt convinced the country was going to the dogs, pamphlets have appeared. Greeks and Romans were no strangers to this kind of literature: mediæval controversies were fought out in this way; and the humanists and reformers (Hutten and Luther, for example) did much effective work by means of pamphlets. Buchanan's Chamæleon and Knox's Blast against the Monstrous Regiment of Women were remarkable productions in this category. Amongst famous pamphlets have been reckoned Milton's Areopagitica, Killing no Murder, the Marprelate series, Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters, Whately's Historic Doubts. The Deist controversy took largely the pamphlet form. Tom Paine's Common Sense had much influence on the American Revolution. The French Revolution was heralded, accompanied, and followed by swarms of pamphlets of all kinds. Wordsworth, most placid of poets, denounced the Convention of Cintra in a powerful pamphlet; Shelley's Necessity of Atheism led to his expulsion from Oxford. The exchange of pamphlets between Newman and Kingsley attracted the attention of all England. Chartism and the Reform Bill, Protestantism versus Catholicism and the Tractarians, Dissent versus the Church, the Sabbath Question, National Defence (as in Dame Europa's School and its successors), Anti-opium, Anti-liqour, Anti-vaccination, Anti-vivisection, Fair Trade and
Free Trade, the 'C. D.' Acts, Socialism, have been very freely and fully illustrated in innumerable booklets which seek their success rather in their direct appeal to the multitude through a wide and cheap circulation, than by addressing themselves to the cultured few with exhaustive logic or the graces of style. But articles in the magazines and letters to the newspapers have largely superseded pamphleteering.