I
When, in the early seventeenth century, leadership in all the activities
connected with the printing press passed from Germany and Italy to France
and the Netherlands, England was still very far behind. It produced very
little paper, for instance, and all its type was imported or of foreign design.
In the next hundred years, however, the picture changed dramatically: in
1686 the many efforts to manufacture good white paper for printing had
succeeded sufficiently for the White Paper Makers to be incorporated, and
by 1713 two-thirds of the country's requirements were being produced at
home; as for type, Caslon set up his foundry in 1720, and from then
onwards his ideas, and later Baskerville's, turned England into an exporter
of type and a leader in typographical design.[1]
We find very similar contrasts when we turn from methods of
production to types of publication. In the early seventeenth century, for
example, Holland and then France led in the field of the newspaper, but the
world's first daily, the Daily Courant, came out in England
in 1702. The foundation of the Journal des Savants in 1665
exemplifies France's earlier prominence in another kind of periodical, the
learned review; but the foundation of the Tatler and
Spectator shows the England
of Queen Anne initiating quite a new periodical genre which became very
popular abroad; and Cave's
Gentlemen's Magazine, founded
in 1731, was equally novel and influential. Among the many other signs of
England's increasing prominence two other important innovations in the
world of letters may be cited: in England the effective development of the
circulating library began in 1740, whereas the spread of the
cabinet
de lecture in France came later, in about 1763; and there is a similar
twenty-year priority in the matter of encyclopaedias—that of Diderot
published between 1751 and 1776 followed the example set in England by
the printer Ephraim Chambers in 1728.
I make these contrasts only to underline the fact that the appearance
of the Dunciad in 1728 coincides with England's very
recently
achieved leadership in a great number of publishing activities, activities
which set the pattern for future developments both there and elsewhere. The
main causes of these developments, I suppose, are the same as those which
had brought about England's commercial expansion in general; but one of
them seems to be of special importance: the ending of Stuart absolutism,
with all its traditional and restrictive social and economic attitudes, by the
Glorious and Protestant Revolution of 1688, with its encouragement of free
individual enterprise in every field. The importance of this changed
commercial and ideological background can be estimated either by looking
at how the Stuarts had earlier attempted in innumerable ways to control and
restrict the development of printing and bookselling, or at how in France
authors, printers, and publishers
alike remained subject to every kind of harassment at the hands of
autocratic and clerical power until the French Revolution.
In the eighteenth century, then, the English book trade in general
flourished as never before; it remains to inquire why it was the booksellers
rather than the printers who held the dominating position; and, first of all,
therefore, to inquire what the division of functions actually was. For, in the
present context, the term "bookseller" is itself very confusing; there was no
real eighteenth-century equivalent to our booksellers today, men exclusively
devoted to the retailing of books; and on the other hand the convenient
practice of equating the "bookseller" of the eighteenth century with the
"publisher" of today is also misleading, since at that time no one was
exclusively engaged in the publishing business either.
There are really five main roles in the business of getting a book into
the purchaser's hands: first, of course, the writing of it; second, the transfer
of the manuscript to the printer; third, the printing itself (in which category
I include, as the eighteenth century did not, folding,
tying and binding the printed sheets); fourth, the storage and distribution of
the finished product; and fifth, the retailing of it to the buyer in a shop or
through some other channel. Today, we usually think of the publisher as
one who undertakes or controls the middle three of these operations: getting
the copy from the author, arranging for the printing, and lastly, storing the
book and sending it out to the retail booksellers. From the Elizabethan
period until quite late in the nineteenth century, however, almost any
permutation or combination of any of the five functions was possible,
although the increasingly common practice in the eighteenth century was for
the booksellers to perform not only the three functions we now expect of
a publisher, but also the final one, that of selling the book to the
public.
The 1757 edition of Campbell's The London Tradesman
makes the position reasonably clear: the bookseller's function is "to
purchase original copies from authors, to employ printers to print them, and
publish and sell them on their own account, or at auctions, and sell them
at an advanced price: but," the writer adds, significantly, "their chief riches
and profit is in the property of valuable copies." It is the "property of
valuable copies" which occasioned not only the many legal battles of the
booksellers in the eighteenth century, but also most of the public attacks
against them; and it is this control of copies which I shall have primarily
in mind when I refer, as I normally shall, to booksellers or publishers
without distinction as far as the eighteenth century is concerned. I should
perhaps add that contemporary usage of the term "publisher" was itself
confusing: normally, as in Swift and Pope, it refers to whoever is
responsible for making a book available to the
public, under whatever conditions, but later a more technical sense also
appears, confined to the wholesaling, and perhaps the retailing, of the
finished book, and specifically excluding responsibility either for printing
or for ownership of the copy.
The division of labor in the book trade in the eighteenth century,
then, had not yet crystallized into its present form, although we must
remember that it has not done so universally even today, especially in
backward areas: University Presses, for example, often both print and act
as publishers. Compared with the earliest days of printing, however, when
Caxton had personally written the text, set it up, printed it, and sold it, the
division of labor had gone fairly far by the time of Pope; in fact it is not a
gross oversimplification to say that the big London booksellers, the
Tonsons, the Lintots, Andrew Millar and Robert Dodsley, carried on their
business very much as publishers do today, except that they also happened
to run bookstores.
In the general history of the book trade the crucial separation was that
between printer and bookseller, usually said to have begun with Anthony
Koberger as early as the end of the fifteenth century. By the end of the
sixteenth century the English printers were already loudly complaining that
they could hardly make a living because the booksellers, through their
complete control of the retail market, were able to dictate their own terms
and had forced printing prices down very severely. The main reason for the
economic advantage of the bookseller, I suppose, is that by its nature
printing requires both a large initial capital outlay, for the press, type and
so on, and a considerable regular volume of business to meet costs and
wages. Bookselling, on the other hand, needs no staff, and very little in the
way of premises or equipment; while in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, at least, it was very easy to acquire a stock. John Dunton, one
of the Dunces attacked by Swift
and Pope, describes in his Life and Errors how, in 1681, he
merely "took up with half a shop [and] a warehouse," published one
religious work, Thomas Doolittle's The Sufferings of Christ,
and then, "exchanging it through the whole trade" of booksellers "furnished
my shop with all sorts of books saleable at that time."
It was easy, then, to become a bookseller. To trade with any security,
however, also involved being a member of the Stationers' Company and
this normally required a good deal of capital: the commonest way of
becoming free of the Company was by serving a seven-year apprenticeship,
and the average premium charged by master printers, for example, during
the eighteenth century was about twenty pounds, a very considerable sum
in those days. But that was the only hurdle, at least after 1695 when the
Licensing Act of 1662 had lapsed, and with it the restrictive powers both
of the Stationers' Company and of the "Surveyor of the Imprimery and
Printing Presses," a post created by the 1662 Act and long filled by the
notorious Sir Roger L'Estrange.
The end of licensing had even more important indirect implications
for the development of bookselling, since it terminated the many
government efforts to hold the number of printers down to the theoretical
legal limit of twenty which had been set by the Tudors and reaffirmed by
a Star Chamber decree of 1627. By 1724 there were seventy-five printers
active in London, and by 1785 the number had risen to 124. Nor does this
alone fully indicate the scale of the increase after 1695: the number of
presses in an individual printing office, which had previously been limited
to two in most cases, was now free to go up, sometimes to as many as
nine; and even more important, perhaps, printing in the provinces, which
had been forbidden by a Star
Chamber decree of 1586, spread rapidly—in 1724 there were already
at
least twenty-eight provincial printers at work.
The development of the provincial market no doubt helped to foster
the spread of the reading habit on which the prosperity of
eighteenth-century booksellers was partly based; and so did the increase in
newspapers which was much stimulated by the ending of effective
censorship. Whatever the reasons, there is no doubt that, compared either
with their former condition or with that of their French counterparts, the
booksellers of the Augustan period were extremely well off. The bookseller
Thomas Guy, helped it is true by a variety of speculative enterprises, was
the most eminent charitable endower of the time—Guy's Hospital is
but
one of many benefactions; Jacob Tonson paid over twenty thousand pounds
for his country estate, Hazel; and a generation later both Andrew Millar
and William Strahan left fortunes of nearly a hundred thousand pounds.
They and a good many others, booksellers such as the elder Thomas
Osborne, Awnsham Churchill and Bernard Lintot, printer-publishers such
as Samuel Buckley, John Barber and Samuel Richardson, were as wealthy
as all but the biggest London merchants and financiers. The improved social
and economic status of the paper, printing, and bookselling trades in
general is further suggested by the fact that the Stationers' Company, which
had produced no Lord Mayor of London during its first hundred years,
produced no less than five of them during the eighteenth century.[2] The solid prosperity of the
bookselling
trade in particular is attested by the fact that several publishing houses were
founded which continue today—Charles Rivington set up shop, for
example, in 1711, Thomas Longman in 1724, and John Murray in 1768;
while John Brindley, in 1728, started a bookshop in New Bond Street which
still survives, under the name of Ellis's.
The contrast with the position in France is striking. The greatest of
the booksellers there, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, made only a very modest
fortune—"une honnête aisance"—and that right at the end
of the
eighteenth century. Until then the chief authorities[3] agree that the very dark picture of
French
eighteenth-century bookselling painted by Diderot in his Lettre sur
le
Commerce de la Librairie (1767) is in the main justified. It is true
that Paris had always had many more booksellers
than London, some 235 in 1600 apparently, a figure which was certainly
not equalled in London until the end of the eighteenth century; and also that
in the early decades of the seventeenth century publishing flourished, with
Scarron earning as much as a thousand livres—some fifty pounds,
perhaps—for one book of his
Virgile travesti, and with
the
bookseller Claude Barbin occupying a privileged position among literary
men somewhat like Tonson's in England half a century later. But from the
time of Louis XIV onward printers, publishers and authors alike were
increasingly subject to a crippling interference and persecution from church,
state and nobility: most of the great French writers of the eighteenth century
knew imprisonment or exile, and many of their works—perhaps the
majority—were published abroad, banned, or only issued
posthumously.
As for the booksellers, they were, for example, forbidden to set up shop
anywhere except in two of the quarters of Paris, so that
the police could keep their eye on them more easily; further, they needed
official approval before any book could be published; and even so the royal
imprimatur was always liable to be suddenly
revoked—as
happened in the famous battle between Diderot and the Jesuits over the
Encyclopédie.
