by Roy Porter
12 See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997), p. 428; Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing (1998). A Foucauldian might modify Pope and write of the appearance of the ‘author function’: Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ (1977); see the discussion in Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (1994), p. 29.
13 William Worthington, An Essay on the Scheme and Conduct, Procedure and Extent of Man's Redemption (sn, 1743), pp. 155–6; Edmund Law, Considerations on the State of the World, with Regard to the Theory of Religion (1745), p. 25.
14 George Davie, The Democratic Intellect (1961), p. 66; T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (1969), p. 478; R. A. Houston, ‘Scottish Education and Literacy, 1600–1800’ (1989).
15 According to a parliamentary survey, in 1819 there were 4, 167 ‘endowed’ schools in England, including grammar schools, with 165,433 pupils; 14,282 unendowed schools, from ‘dame schools’ to Dissenting academies, with 478,849 pupils; and for the children of the poor, 5,162 Sunday schools with 452,817 pupils. See John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (1973), pp. 226–66.
16 E. G. Hundert, The Enlightenment's Fable (1994), p. 122; Soame Jenyns, Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), pp. 49–50. Johnson put Jenyns in his place:
The privileges of education may sometimes be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to withhold them, lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy; and under the appearance of salutary restraints, should be indulging the lust of dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others depressed.
Samuel Johnson, ‘A Review of Soame Jenyns’ “A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil” ’ (1757), in B. Bronson (ed.), Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Poems and Selected Prose 3rd edn (1971), p. 224.
17 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 36.
18 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 187; John Money, ‘Teaching in the Market-Place, or “Caesar Adsum Jam Forte; Pompey Aderat” ’ (1993). Professor Money is engaged on a biography of Cannon.
19 G. D. H. and Margaret Cole (eds.), The Opinions of William Cobbett (1944), p. 17; George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend (1982), p. 18; Cobbett went on to Dryden, Pope and Goldsmith, who were his favourites, and also Milton, Marvell, Butler, Cowley, Churchill, Thomson and Cowper, some Byron, Wordsworth and Southey, and the novels of Fielding, Sterne, Le Sage and Cervantes. He studied Blackstone's Commentaries, Watts's Logic, and Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric, and some of Bacon, Evelyn, Gibbon, Addison, Paley, Johnson and William Temple.
20 Samuel Bamford, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford (1848–9; repr. 1967), vol. i, pp. 23, 40; see also Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (1991), pp. 31, 90: ‘My mind was ever desiring more of the silent but exciting conversation with books.’
21 John Clare, ‘The Autobiography, 1793-1824’, in J. W. and A. Tibble (eds.), The Prose of John Clare (1951), p. 14.
22 David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture (1989), and Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (1982).
23 James Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-five Years of the Life of James Lackington, 7th edn (1794), pp. 254–5.
24 Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-five Years of the Life of James Lackington, pp. 232, 257; see Altick, The English Common Reader 1800–1900, pp. 36ff.; Roy McKeen Wiles, ‘The Relish for Reading in Provincial England Two Centuries Ago’ (1976), pp. 85–115.
25 See Altick, The English Common Reader 1800–1900, p. 57. Apprenticed to a cobbler, Lackington became a Methodist and set about educating himself, going without food to buy books. In 1774 he moved to London, working as a cobbler. On his first London Christmas he went to get Christmas dinner – but bought instead a copy of Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–5). Becoming a bookseller and selling with small profits, he increased the value of his stock to £25 within six months. In 1779, he published his first catalogue, listing a stock of 12,000 volumes. By the 1790s, when his annual sales were counted in tens of thousands of volumes, he proclaimed: ‘I found the whole of what I am possessed of, in Small Profits, bound by Industry, and clasped by Economy’: Memoirs of the First Forty-five Years of the Life of James Lackington, pp. 210–14, 256–9, 268.
26 Samuel Johnson, ‘Milton’, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1939 [1779–81]), vol. i, pp. 103–4, quoted in Altick, The English Common Reader 1800–1900, p. 41. A Prussian visitor to London wrote that his landlady, a tailor's widow, ‘reads her Milton and tells me that her late husband first fell in love with her, because of the good style in which she read that poet’: Carl Philip Moritz, Journeys of a German in England (1982 [1783]), p. 30.
27 William Hazlitt, Life of Thomas Holcroft (1816), in P. P. Howe (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, vol. iii, p. 42; see also A. S. Collins, The Profession of Letters (1973 [1928]), p. 31.
28 Indeed, it may have actually dipped towards 1800 amid rapid population growth and the disruptions of early industrialization. See R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe (1988); David Cressy, ‘Literacy in Context’ (1993). Between 1650 and 1800 female literacy in England increased from under 15 per cent to about 36 per cent: Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort (1996), p. 85.
29 Quoted in Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (eds.), Revolution and English Romanticism (1990), p. 2; Dror Wahrman, ‘National Society, Communal Culture’ (1992).
30 These terms were developed by Rolf Engelsing, who claimed a ‘reading revolution’. See his Der Burger als Lesser (1974). For discussion, see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (1995), p. 19; Robert Darnton, ‘History of Reading’ (1991); Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print (1989); Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings (1995), and The Order of Books.
31 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 169. ‘Receipts in physic’ means medical remedies. For a classic ‘intensive’ reader, see the portrait of Anthony Liddell offered by Thomas Bewick: A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself (1961 [1862]), p. 29: Liddell read the Bible, Josephus and Jeremy Taylor's sermons.
32 Quoted in Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 169.
33 John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), pp. 25–6.
34 Samuel Johnson thought sermons essential to any gentleman's library: J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism (1994), p. 125.
35 David Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner of East Hoathley (1984), p. 347. Turner read Locke on 26 May 1757.
36 In 1758, Samuel Johnson judged that ‘almost every large town has its weekly historian’: Bate, Bullitt and Powell (eds.), Samuel Johnson: The Idler and Adventurer (1958–71), no. 30, p. 22 (11 November 1758). For newspapers, see Roy McKeen Wiles, Freshest Advices (1965); Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole (1987); Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds.), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries (1986); Jeremy Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (1986); Geoffrey Alan Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper 1700–1760 (1962), and The Press and Society from Caxton to Northcliffe (1978); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-century England (1998).
37 Samuel Johnson, preface to the Gentleman's Magazine, 1740, quoted in Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper 1700–1760, p. 93.
38 G. Crabbe, The News-paper in Norma Dalrymple-Champneys (ed.), George Crabbe: The Complete Poetical Works (1988), vol. i, p. 182. On newness, see C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England (1997).
39 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. iv, pp. 90–94 (Friday, 8 August 1712); see vol. v, no. 625, pp. 134–7 (Friday, 26 November 1714) for the ‘pleasure of news’.
40 C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteent
h Century (1997), p. 196.
41 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1946 [1791]), vol. i, p. 424; Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. ii, p. 170. Johnson also said that ‘books have a secret influence on the understanding’: quoted in Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 167.
42 C. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in 1725–29 (1995 [1902]), p. 102.
43 Collins, The Profession of Letters, p. 19.
44 Alexander Catcott, A Treatise on the Deluge, 2nd edn (1768), p. vi. For this dyed in the wool reactionary, see Roy Porter and Michael Neve, ‘Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology’ (1977).
45 Josiah Tucker, Four Tracts (1774), pp. 89–90.
46 In full it runs:
Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem
Cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat.
Horace, Ars poetica, 1. 143.
47 Richmond P. Bond (ed.), Studies in the Early English Periodical (1957), p. 17; Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode (1997).
48 Bond, Studies in the Early English Periodical, p. 19.
49 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, vol. ii, pp. 362–4.
50 The Female Spectator was preceded by the Female Tatler (1709–10), but, while professedly handled by ‘Mrs Crackenthorpe’, it was actually an all male affair. See Gabrielle M. Firmager (ed.), The Female Spectator (1992), p. 5; Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen (1992), p. 149; Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture (1989); Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street (1998).
51 Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? (1996). Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) was a friend of Richard Steele. Her The Female Spectator (1744–6) was a collection of moral tales and reflections in twenty-four monthly parts. She wrote several popular novels, among them The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).
52 C. L. Carlson, The First Magazine (1938); Terry Belanger, ‘Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-century England’ (1982), p. 5. For some of its functions, see Roy Porter, ‘Laymen, Doctors and Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’ (1985), and ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’ (1985).
53 Bond, Studies in the Early English Periodical, p. 27; Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review (1934–5); Derek Roper, Reviewing Before the Edinburgh (1978), p. 21.
54 M. Bailey (ed.), Boswell's Column (1951), p. 21.
55 G. McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House (1972), p. Michael Mascuchh, Origins of the Individualist Self (1997), p. 148; John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London (1960 [1818]).
56 McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House, pp. 23f., 130.
57 A phrase used by John Byrom: H. Talon (ed.), Selections from the Journals and Papers of John Byrom, Poet – Diarist – Shorthand Writer (1950), p. 47.
58 Daniel Defoe, ‘On Pope's Translation of Homer’ (1725), in William Lee, Daniel Defoe: His Life and Recently Discovered Writings (1869), vol. ii, p. 410. Talk followed of ‘novel manufactories’: Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, p. 21; Alvin Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (1987), pp. 17f.
59 Henry Fielding, The Author's Farce (1966 [1730]), p. 28; Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740 (1997), p. 28; Philip Pinkus, Grub St Stripped Bare (1968), p. 71.
60 John Clive, ‘The Social Background of the Scottish Renaissance’ (1970), p. 227; Frederick A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell's London Journal, 1762–1763 (1950), p. 287.
61 Pat Rogers, Grub Street (1972). Grub Street ran just outside the city wall in Cripplegate, near Bethlem Hospital. The use of the term to denote the home of shabby hack-writing emerged in the Restoration. Pope extended this idea in The Dunciad, that epic of Grub Street, with its hacks, dunces and poetasters as attendants to the Queen of Dulness. See also Johnson's An Account of the Life of Richard Savage, 2nd edn (1748).
62 The narrator of the Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus thus boasted of getting his education amongst ‘the Learned of that Society’, and it perhaps provided the germ for the idea of the Grand Academy of Lagado in Gulliver's Travels: Rogers, Grub Street, p. 182.
63 For ‘pimps’, see Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine (1996), p. 44.
64 Johnson, An Account of the Life of Richard Savage; Richard Holmes, Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993). It was a label ironically self-affixed by Coleridge amongst others: Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956), vol. i, p. 185, letter 105 (22 February 1796).
65 John Dennis, The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar, Call'd by Himself Sole Monarch of the Stage in Drury-Lane (1720), in E. N. Hooker(ed.), The Critical Works of John Dennis (1943), vol. ii, pp. 191–2; Martha Woodmansee, ‘The Genius and the Copyright’ (1984), pp. 417–32; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (1993). A conceptual focus is offered by Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’; Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740, p. 5.
66 Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998), p. 353; Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–1740, p. 23; John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics (1994).
67 Not a bad advance, being a hundred times the annual income of a labourer. See Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, pp. 9–10, 25; Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson, p. 10.
68 Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson, p. 47; James Aikman Cochrane, Dr Johnson's Printer (1964).
69 James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated with Regard to Booksellers, the State and the Public (1758), p. 22.
70 Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 153.
71 Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, p. 157.
72 Patron was defined by Johnson as ‘one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’: see Robert DeMaria Jr, Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986), p. 211; Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (1996).
73 R. W. Chapman (ed.), Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1970), pp. 196–7.
74 Hill, Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. i, p. 262, from James Boswell (ed.), The Celebrated Letter from Samuel Johnson, LLD to Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield (1790).
75 Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), 11. 159–60, in Patrick Cruttwell (ed.), Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings (1986), p. 143.
76 Oliver Goldsmith, Selected Essays (1910), p. 65.
77 Altick, The English Common Reader (1957), p. 36.
78 Altick, The English Common Reader, p. 56; Roy McKeen Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (1957). A letter in the Grub-Street Journal complained of ‘that strange Madness of publishing Books by piecemeal, at six or twelve Pennyworth a Week’: ‘The Bible can't escape. I bought the other Day, three Pennyworth of the Gospel, made easy and familiar to Porters, Carmen, and Chimney-Sweepers… Well, what an Age of Wit and Learning have I the happiness to live in!’: Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper 1700–1760, p. 52.
79 An alliance of forty London booksellers attempted to steal Bell's thunder by publishing an upmarket collection of British poets, for which Samuel Johnson wrote his famous prefaces: Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets:
80 Stanley Morrison, John Bell (1745–1831) (1930), p. 88.
81 Hazlitt's father purchased Cooke's ‘Select Edition of the British Novels’ from 1792, the first being Tom Jones – a work ‘sweet in the mouth’. The boy soon read Joseph Andrews, and in due course the works of Smollett and Sterne: Catherine Macdonald Maclean, Born Under Saturn (1943), pp. 49–51; Altick, The English Common Reader, p. 54; Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (1984), p. 157.
82 Pat Rogers, The Augustan Vision (1974), p. 8; John Feather, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-century England (1985), p. 29; Jack Lindsay, William Blake: His Life and Work (1978), p. 3.
83 Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, p. 178.
84 ‘Ma
dam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year! – and depend upon it, Mrs Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last’: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (1961 [1775]), act I, scene ii, ll. 33–7 On libraries see Paul Kaufman, Borrowings from the Bristol Library, 1773–1784 (1960); M. Kay Flavell, ‘The Enlightened Reader and the New Industrial Towns’ (1985); James Raven, ‘From Promotion to Proscription’ (1996), p. 175 – Raven proclaims a ‘library revolution’. Great houses might even contain servants' libraries: Joanna Martin (ed.), A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen (1988), p. 67.
85 W. R. Scott, Adam Smith as Student and Professor (1937), pp. 344–5, from the draft for the Wealth of Nations, written in 1769 but expunged from the published text: as society progressed, ‘philosophy, or speculation… naturally becomes, like every other employment, the sole occupation of a particular class of citizens’: Adam Smith, ‘Early Draft of Part of The Wealth of Nations’ (1762), in Lectures on Jurisprudence (1982), pp. 570–74. See discussion in Outram, The Enlightenment, p. 14; see also Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]), bk I, ch. 1, para. 9.