I
The list of books printed by Richardson given in Professor Sale's
Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca,
1950)
is so comprehensive that random and incidental additions would be of little
use. The following title, however, deserves special consideration:
The / Matchless Rogue: / Or, An / Account / of the / Contrivances,
Cheats, Stratagems and Amours / of / Tom Merryman, / commonly called
/ Newgate Tom: / Who Stiled Himself, / Baron of Bridewell, Viscount of
New-Prison, / Earl of Holborn-Hill, Marquiss of Newgate, / And Duke of
Tyburn. / With / A particular Detail of his Life and Actions, both /
Comical and Tragical, from the Time of his / Birth in Newgate, to the
Hour of his Unhap-/py Exit at Tyburn. / [Rule] / [Motto] / [Rule] /
London: / Printed for A. Moore, near St. Paul's. MDCCXXV. / [Price
1s. 6d.]
The presence of Sale's ornaments 20, 29, and 65, with identifying defects,
shows that this fictionalized criminal biography is from Richardson's press.
The name of the pamphletshop proprietor A. Moore appears in the imprint
of a few other early pieces of Richardson's printing. I have examined
copies of
The Matchless Rogue in the Newberry Library and
the British Museum, but it is not listed by Arundell Esdaile.
Before Pamela, Richardson seems to have printed very
few works that can be classified as prose fiction. Sale's findings give us,
besides Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus and an abridgement of
Gulliver, only Defoe's New Family Instructor,
and,
in part, the New Voyage Round the World and
Religious
Courtship. The eighty-seven pages of The Matchless
Rogue carry Tom through a series of varied and disconnected
adventures to his final condemnation. The Preface emphasizes the intention
to convey a moral with every incident, whether related in "a Serious,
Ludicrous, Tragical, or Comical Manner." For example, "The unhappy tale
of the Mercer's Daughter, ought to caution all young Women from giving
Credit to the Promises; nay, even to the Oaths of deluding Men" (p. v). A
passage on the importance of paying heed to dreams as warnings sent by
Providence (pp. 52-53) may be imitative of Defoe. Nine years later
Richardson in his Apprentice's
Vade Mecum expressed his disapproval of Newgate
characters
on the stage.
[1] Despite the professed
didactic intention of
The Matchless Rogue, there is nothing
here
that he could not have got elsewhere and little of which he could have
approved, but the existence of this ignoble little story helps us to realize
that his work as a printer gave him an enforced familiarity with the popular
fiction of the day.
