John Partridge, the successful London astrologer and almanac maker
who entered his fame during the latter years of the seventeenth century, was
in 1709 brought before the Lord High Chancellor by the Worshipful
Company of Stationers in a significant suit which concerned monopoly in
publishing. Early in the reign of the first James the Stationers had obtained
royal grants for the virtually exclusive rights of publishing almanacs, if
allowed by the Church authorities, and by the end of the century these
annuals were established as a kind of publication so popular that the profits
therefrom were central to the business life of the Company.[1] This cheap booklet apparently
offered the
right mixture of instruction and innocent merriment to attract regular
purchase by any man of city, town, or farm; here he might find such
diverse matter as a Calendar, reference tables, entertaining prose and verse,
forecasts, astrological lore, a budget of
advertisements, and (if interleaved) space for scribbled memoranda.
The seventeenth century produced two thousand titles and issues of
almanacs by three hundred writers, and the total figures for distribution are
estimated at three to four million copies.[2] Among Partridge's predecessors
or rivals
as astrological compilers were Andrews, Booker, Coley, Dove, Gadbury,
Lilly, Pond, "Poor Robin," Rider, Saunders, Swallow, Tycho and Vincent
Wing, and many another astrologer with a public devoted to his special kind
of almanac, full of husbandry or commercial aids or facetious matter, or
offering the standard wares
fashioned in his individual mode. Not infrequently an almanac was so well
esteemed that its author's name continued to appear on its title page long
after his death. These ephemerides had a place, positive and negative, in the
history of the Enlightenment,
[3] and
the charlatan as astrologer naturally found his way into the works of the
satirists in several genres of the period. By the time Anne ascended the
throne almanacs had taken sure rank in the progress of the printed word as
one of the most profitable, influential, indicative, and interesting types of
profane publication, and John Partridge had become the leading almanac
maker.
[4]
The industrious Partridge published miscellaneous readings of the
stars, engaged in public quarrels with other pseudo-scientists, claimed to
have a medical degree, sold purging pills, and cast nativities for private
patients. In his almanac, Merlinus Liberatus, his
prognostications courted the obvious and equivocal, all in solemn phrase,
so it was natural that the master of precise imprecision should be chosen for
the principal role in one of the truly distinguished hoaxes in the history of
satire. Setting out to expose the mischief of astrology, Jonathan Swift made
the prominent astrologer-quack the butt of his irony. Under the putative
authorship of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. he published the Predictions for
the Year 1708, in which he specifically foretold the death of John
Partridge, and on the appointed day Swift brought forth a paper stating the
fulfillment of this special prediction, which Partridge answered in his next
almanac with a serious protest that he was
still alive and had been alive all the time. Town wits joined in the flimflam
by replying to Bickerstaff or by venturing further predictions in his name,
and in April of 1709 Richard Steele adopted the popular nom de guerre for
the editor of the Tatler, enlisting Partridge as a gambit and
Bickerstaff as a periodical eidolon.
This was all very tiresome for Partridge especially since his ill
fortune had not been completely of his own making. In the summer of
1709, however, the astrologer found himself in further trouble—this
this time with the powerful Company of Stationers and this time a difficulty
which he had clearly brought on himself.
