Ned Ward

Prose satires that followed were Female Policy Detected, or, The Arts of Designing Woman Laid Open (1695) and A Trip to Jamaica (1698).

[2] The London Spy was followed by over 100 satires in prose and verse, whose targets included ale-house keepers, dissenting ministers, lawyers and booksellers.

Taken into custody both in February and June 1706, Ward was charged with seditious libel for accusing the Queen Anne of failing to support the Tories in Parliament, and was condemned to stand in the pillory.

His writings abated somewhat under King George I, focusing after 1712 on local and personal experiences, notably The Merry Travellers (1712), which discussed his own customers.

[8] During this time his writings were still gaining popularity and spreading across to the Americas, where even Cotton Mather, the socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister, author and pamphleteer, warned in 1726 against "such Pestilences, and indeed all those worse than Egyptian Toads (the Spawns of a Butler, and a Brown, and a Ward...)".

This type of satirical account, first used by Ward on Jamaica, was extended by him to New England (which he did not visit), Islington, Sadler's Wells, Bath and Stourbridge.

In The London Spy, Ward presented the seamier side of life through graphic description, racy anecdotes and character sketches.

Some such satires were expanded into periodicals, allowing for extended commentary on specific human and individual vices that Ward experienced personally, particularly within London and in his own taverns.