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Notes
For the earliest years covered by the Clay records, Ian Maxted's The London Book Trades, 1775-1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (1977), p. xxxi, indicates that 649 books were published in London in 1746, 508 in 1747, 528 in 1748, and 574 in 1758 and 1759 as well.
These are the periods that the surviving Daventry records cover. Table 1 contains a complete list of the Clay records, a mine for eighteenth-century social historians.
The Rugby ledgers include a few customers other than boys and masters who were generally connected with the school: e.g., Miss Crossfield, the daughter of Thomas Crossfield, headmaster between 1742 and 1744. She boarded some of the schoolboys.
The distances from Daventry are cited in The Universal British Directory of Trade, Commerce, and Manufacture (1791), 2: 771. Day book D2925 indicates that John Clay took orders in Rugby on Wednesday, October 12, and Wednesday, October 19, 1768; he may have been en route to Lutterworth for the Thursday market there. Although Lutterworth was seventeen miles from Daventry, it was only six or eight miles from Rugby by contemporary roads, according to rather inconsistent entries in Paterson's Roads, as revised by Edward Mogg (1824), pp. 550 and 383. Early evidence that Clay kept a horse is provided by an entry on November 4, 1746 (NRO D64), indicating that he put his horse in a neighbor's close for three weeks.
In his article, Feather cites the manuscript version of Table 1 that has been on file at the Northamptonshire Record Office since August, 1980. He must have found the table confusing, for in it D2925 is labelled a Rugby day book.
Comparative Account of the Population of Great Britain in the Years 1801, 1811, 1821, and 1831 . . . Ordered to be Printed by the House of Commons, 1831 (1831).
As Tables 3.1 and 3.2 show, our figures do not entirely correspond with Feather's. The discrepancies reflect differences in reading and interpreting entries. For example, Feather has a total of 7s6d spent on medicine in October, 1768, whereas we have none. Probably he considered the charge of 7s6d for "Buchan's Domestic Medicine" a reference to a patent medicine; in fact, William Buchan's Domestic Medicine (Edinburgh: Balfour, Auld, and Smellie, 1769) was one of the most popular medical books of the period. (See Charles E. Rosenberg, "Medical Text and Social Context: Explaining William Buchan's Domestic Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57 [1983]: 22-42.) The entry for Buchan's book is in fact a re-entry. The original sale was made to Mr. Hawkes, an apothecary, on December 24, 1777, re-entered ("Brot forwards") because still unpaid on April 2, 1778, and then re-entered again on October 17. Accordingly, we have not counted it among books sold in October 1778.
These purchases are analyzed in our unpublished paper, "Chapbook Reading and Provincial Readership," presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual convention in Boston, April 1984.
"The Colonial Retail Book Trade in America," in William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench, eds., Printing and Society in Early America (1983), p. 144.
We are engaged in a fuller study of provincial buying and reading habits. At present, some indication of what sorts of books provincial customers bought and read can be found in the appendices to Fergus, "Eighteenth-Century Readers in Provincial England: The Customers of Samuel Clay's Circulating Library and Bookshop in Warwick, 1770-72," PBSA 78 (1984): 200-214.
The exception occurs in December, 1746, when (as mentioned earlier) Mr. Brice ordered £17.5.6 worth of stationery, making the total sales of stationery for that month exceed those for books by about £2 (more than £22 for stationery versus more than £20 for books and other printed matter; see Table 2.2).
See Fergus, "Women, Class, and the Growth of Magazine Readership in the Provinces, 1746-80" to be published in volume 16 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (1987). The partial list given there in Table 2.2 of magazines taken in December 1770 differs from Feather's list on p. 209, which seems to refer to the same month. The discrepancies appear to be due to the cramped, crowded handwriting used in the entries. For example, nine customers took the Gentleman's Museum or Grand Imperial Mazazine, not forty-nine; the other forty took the Town and Country. Thirty took the London Magazine, not thirty-four; the remaining four subscribed to the Freeholder's Magazine. The "Review" is the Monthly Review, with eight subscribers.
See Fergus, "Women, Class, and the Growth of Magazine Readership"; see also discussion of class in relation to buying and borrowing of books, "Eighteenth-Century Readers," pp. 186-189.
Sales of stationery in the market shops at Rugby and Lutterworth, however, may have been predominantly legal throughout. Unfortunately, since no records survive before 1768, it is impossible to determine what earlier purchases were. The Caldecott who bought so many legal supplies from John Clay in October 1768, identified by Feather as Thomas Caldecott of Daventry, was in fact William Caldecott, a prosperous attorney in Rugby and a member of the Calcott/Caldecote family of Cat-thorpe in Leicestershire (see John Nichols, History and Antiquities of Leicester [1815; reprint ed. East Ardsley, Wakefield, Yorkshire: S. R. Publishers Ltd. and Leicester County Council, 1971], 4:70).
See the entry for May 16, 1770 in NRO D2930. John Clay had married Ann Rushworth, the daughter of a Northampton physician, on April 14, 1743 at Church Brampton near Northampton. Charles Watkins had married her sister Alicia on December 7, 1741 (NRO H. I. Longden Pedigree/Rushworth). Clay probably met his wife through Charles and Alicia Watkins, for Ann Rushworth was listed as a resident of Daventry at the time of her marriage (NRO Church Brampton 67p/2). Interestingly, through the connections of his wife's large family, John Clay was related to many of his customers—which may in fact be true of other successful tradesmen in the provinces.
The title page of a book located in the British Library, shelf mark 11201.b.1— General View of Geography, Ancient and Modern . . . For the Use of Rugby School (Coventry: N. Rollaston, 1789)—indicates that the work was sold by "S. Clay in Rugby." We are grateful to R. C. Alston for locating this reference for us in ESTC. See also his list of other Clay publications in "The Clays of Daventry: A Footnote to Booktrade History," in Factotum: Newsletter of the XVIIIth century STC, no. 21 (1985), 10-11.
We are grateful to J. A. Minchinton of the Northamptonshire Record Office for bringing this document to our attention.
Robert Darnton has also rejected the notion that a clear "reading revolution" took place in the eighteenth century in France; see The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), pp. 249-251.
Professor Ronald Sawyer, History Department, Rice University, brought this fact to our attention; we are collaborating on a study of customers who bought medical works and medicines through the Clays.
A number of transactions listed between October and December 1747 do not indicate prices; these include, among others, sixteen books and twelve plays ordered in November, at least thirteen reams of paper, etc. Almost all the 1747 figures are thus somewhat lower than they should be. A number of entries for October-December 1746—particularly sales to a William Smart, who may have been a bookseller—also lack prices. By contrast, only a few entries in 1779 are similarly unpriced.
Includes £18.10.3 for wholesale almanacks sold to Mr. Clew of Boddington, Mr. Billingham, and Mr. Rowell.
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