In the 1740s Haywood began to bend her talents ‘in a political way’ in a number of substantial works, two of which, The Female Spectator (1744–6) and Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), take the deliberately misleading form of ‘polite’ offerings to the ladies. Between December 1741 and April 1744 she operated a pamphlet shop at the Sign of Fame in the Piazza of Covent Garden where she sold a range of works including small-scale anti-ministerial items under her own imprint. The first half of her career had seen her shuttling back and forth between playhouse and publishing house, mending plays and writing some original ones of her own, performing on stage, producing translations and dashing off a variety of entertaining fictions. Except for the satiric fairy-tale romance Eovaai (1736), published in the off-season to build support for the Prince of Wales as a royal Patriot, there is little to prepare us for the oppositional journalism that looms large in the last fifteen or so years of her life. There is, to be sure, her work on stage at the Haymarket, but the mere fact of performing in satiric anti-Walpole revues at a time when it was the fashion to ridicule Walpole does little to clarify her political sentiments. But starting in the 1740s, she would write often and consistently as a Patriot in the opposition. The remaining chapters of this book tell that story. This chapter describes her publishing venture at the Sign of Fame and in the process begins to sketch the outlines of a largely untold story of behind-the-scenes involvement in mid-century oppositional journalism.

Winter 1741–2 was a time of political crisis. The ministry had sustained losses in the general election in May and when Parliament opened in December, Walpole's last as it turned out, the Commons was as closely balanced as any he had faced.