The State Dunces was published in June 1733; it appears in the list of new books for that month in the Gentleman's Magazine, and a series of excerpts amounting to more than 90 lines was included in the poetry section for June.  It attracted attention immediately; the same June poetry section includes an "Answer to the State Dunces," and the register of new books lists "A Friendly Epistle to the Author of the State Dunces."  ("The Court Dunciad," in the same list, is an anthology of short pieces intended for female readers.)    The poetry section of the July number presents excerpts from the "Friendly Epistle"  and from "The Counterpart to the State Dunces,"  both answers to Whitehead that, like "Answer to the State Dunces," mock his youth and inexperience.  the poem was published anonymously,  but since two of the answers name Whitehead as its author his identity must have become public knowledge very soon after publication.

There is no modern scholarly edition of Whitehead's verse.  Whitehead was a previously unpublished poet, and The State Dunces was the first publication of his bookseller, John Dickenson. The first edition is catalogued by David Foxon as W428 (English Verse 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions (New York: Cambridge UP, 1975) 1: 892); in the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue it is numbered T160413.  It is neatly printed, but contains one error, "implore" on p. 16 (line 315; line 343 of the present text).  When Dickenson realized he had a hit on his hands, he needed more copies. The second impression (Foxon W427: ESTC T48573) appears to have been made by the same printing house; ornaments and type are the same, but the pages have been hastily reset.  The lines of type are uneven, and on p. 7 and p. 10 a swash italic A appears instead of the italic A of the first impression.  The erroneous "implore' is replaced by "deplore."  Meanwhile Whitehead, whose poetical competence had been called in question by the answers, had additions to make to improve his poem, which then went into a second edition (Foxon W426; ESTC T45872).  The added lines 31-38 softened an awkward transition, and assert a parallel between Pope's friendship with Bolingbroke and Whitehead's admiration for Pulteney; lines 57-64 deal with another abrupt transition, and bring the opening address to Pope to a strong conclusion; lines 150-151, 154-157 again smooth a transition, and develop Britannia as a female figure ravished, rather than simply as the representative of Britain.  A different printer seems to have been employed; the type is not identical, and the ornaments on title-page and first page of text are quite different; the ornament on the lower part of the last page is omitted.  The word "Dulness" has been changed in all but two places to "Dullness." The present text is based on the first impression of the first edition, incorporating the additions of the second edition.  The various spellings of "Britannia" have not been regularized.  The Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto holds copies of all three printings: first edition, first printing: E10-1901; first edition, second printing: E10-5269; second edition: E10-2678.

The title-page has a motto: "I from my Soul sincerely hate / Both [Kings] and M[iniste]rs of State."  This is attributed to "Swift."  It comes from Jonathan Swift's poem, first published in 1730, "A Libel on Doctor Delany and a Certain Noble Lord,"`lines 173-174.  "Minister of State" was a common way of referring to Sir Robert Walpole.

Nothing is known about Whitehead's contractual arrangements with his bookseller, but there is reason to believe that he either retained copyright in his poem or re-assumed it after Dickenson ceased publishing in 1735.  In 1739, when Manners was made popular by the prosecution of the publisher, Robert Dodsley, by the House of Lords, there were a number of reprints issued with missing or doubtfully authentic imprints.  Two of these add The State Dunces; both give the augmented text of the second edition, but both spell "Dulness" with one l throughout.  There were plenty of copies of the first edition in circulation, the second is not so identified, and the changes might easily escape notice unless a careful comparison were made.  It is somewhat remarkable that both publishers should have chosen the second edition, and quite remarkable that both printers should have corrected "Dullness" to "Dulness."  It is hard to resist the conclusion that Whitehead was in a position to license these reprints, ensuring reproduction of the augmented text, with the restoration his favoured spelling of the keyword "Dulness."

Whitehead may have been at work on his poem for some time, but the immediate stimulus to completion and publication in June 1733 was the crisis of Sir Robert Walpole's political authority that Walpole provoked by advancing his excise scheme. On its face an administrative change in the way in which duties on wine and tobacco were collected, it aroused widespread opposition, and was quickly identified as a "wedge issue," that might be exploited to bring about the "prime minister's" fall.  Walpole bowed to the inevitable and withdrew the bill on April 12, 1733; the next day he saw to it that the Earl of Chesterfield, the most prominent of his former supporters who had opposed the bill, was dismissed from all his positions at Court.  Other dismissals followed, as Walpole showed he was still in charge by punishing his opponents and rewarding those who had either not deserted him or had allowed themselves to be recalled by promises of future reward.

In suggesting to Pope that he stop scarifying poetasters and extend the concept of Dulness in the Dunciad to politics, Whitehead is following the model of another poem, but in the reverse direction.  David Mallet's Of Verbal Criticism. An Epistle to Mr. Pope was published two months before the State Dunces in April 1733; in it, Mallet urges Pope to devote his energies to literary satire, with particular reference to misguided critics who concentrate on words rather than ideas, and prefer correcting punctuation and rediscovering the inartistic matter of the uncultured past to observing the good taste exemplified by writers such as Pope. Pope himself may have been influenced by both Mallet and Whitehead in revising and amplifying the Dunciad in 1742-43, but while he mentions Mallet's poem with respect in a note, he gives no recognition to Whitehead.

The names of the persons attacked in the State Dunces are "dashed;" that is, first and (usually) last letters are given, and the intervening letters are represented by hyphens, sometimes, but not always, one hyphen for each omitted letter.  This device, common in satirical writing, was a defence against prosecution; it had the secondary effect of hiding part of the meaning of the poem from readers unfamiliar with the political scene.  In this case, an annotated copy survives in the British Museum, from which several of the identifications provided here have been taken.  Some names are not identified, notably the "C--n" of line 306.  Captain Edward Thompson completes a number of the names in his posthumous edition of Whitehead's Poems and Miscellaneous Compositions (1777), but one is certainly wrong, and he does not attempt the more difficult ones.  In this edition, the names are given with the supplied letters in square brackets.

In his life of Whitehead, Thompson is emphatic that Whitehead was a republican in politics.  It may then seem a little odd that he should in this poem so carefully observe the social hierarchy of his victims.  Of course, it is Walpole, not Whitehead, who introduces his team of understrappers to the goddess Dulness, starting with the House of Lords, first lay peers (184-215), then the bishops (222-261); next the Commons (262-305; Hervey's elevation to the peerage in his own right came in June, too late for notice in the poem).  The lines on Compton (the Earl of Wilmington) which follow (306-309) are anomalous, since he is denied his place among the Lords; this is perhaps the mark of a late addition to the poem. Finally Walpole turns from Parliament to journalism, and to characters whose position in society is such that they can be spared the courtesy of dashing names.