University of Virginia Library

Supplementary Notes on Samuel Richardson as a Printer by Alan D. McKillop

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 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.

II

Existing correspondence between the Rev. James Hervey and Richardson and other references in their letters give fairly full information about Richardson's printing of Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs, Reflections on a Flower-Garden, and later the collected Meditations and Contemplations. The evidence is gathered by Sale, pp. 174-175, and the present note includes only additional details gathered from a few other letters. The earliest surviving reference to the project seems to be in a letter of May 25, 1745, dated from Thomas Hervey's, Basinghall Street, from James Hervey to an unnamed correspondent, possibly a printer associated with Richardson:

On June 28, 1746, Hervey wrote to the Rev. Mr. Thompson of St. Ginnys: "My little piece, entitled 'Meditations among the Tombs' and 'Reflections on a Flower Garden,' has been published a considerable time. . . . Mr. Richardson, the author of 'Pamela,' is my printer. Seven hundred and fifty copies are struck off; the printer and writer are joint adventurers with regard to pecuniary advantages, if any such should accrue from the sale."[3] Though the Meditations and the Reflections have separate titlepages,

collation, and pagination, they were simultaneously published as a single piece; the Dedication and the Preface, printed as pp. i-viii of the Meditations, are designed for and refer to both parts.

Richardson also brought out the second edition, and took so long about it that Hervey had time to add contemplations on night and on the "Starry Heavens." On August 22, 1747, he wrote to Dr. Stonhouse asking to borrow a copy of Andrew Baxter's Matho for use in completing the latter piece: "If your Matho is not lent out of Town, I wish you woud be so good as to send for it, & favour me with a Sight of it by the Bearer. The Reason of my requesting this, is, that Mr. Richardson informs me by my Brother, if He has not this last Piece by the middle of next Week, his Press must stand still. And, methinks, I wd gladly peruse Matho, before I suffer my last Essay to depart."[4]

III

Dr. Thomas Birch, a close acquaintance of Richardson during the whole of his literary career, gives us from time to time in his letters some interesting details of the printer's business:

Birch gives us the fullest account we have of the fire of 1752 in Richardson's printing house:

Birch, though a friend and admirer of Richardson, remarked unsympathetically some weeks later: "Sam. Richardson's Will is a real Curiosity, as I am inform'd by all, that have seen it, being an odd Compound of Vanity and Spleen."[8]

IV

One of the oddest contemporary references to Richardson appears in an obscure tale of low life in London, The Life and Imaginations of Sally Paul, which bears the imprint, "London: Printed for S. Hooper, at Caesar's-Head, near the New Church, in the Strand. 1760." The caption-title is "The History of Sarah Paul." I do not find this title recorded in any bibliography, but there is a copy in the Fondren Library, The Rice Institute. Sally, a prostitute, lives with an old man, and the wretched couple are trying to eke out an existence in the City. She is disguised as a boy.

The reference to parliamentary printing and the location of the press 'in Fleet-street' (really in White Lion Court, running from Fleet Street to Salisbury Square) identify the printing house of the novelist, who thus makes an appearance in a work of which he would have heartily disapproved.

Notes