University of Virginia Library

I. William Tooke (1744-1820)

The Tooke family maintained friendships with the Nichols family through several generations. William Tooke and John Nichols were schoolboys together at the academy of John Shield in Islington. But while Nichols remained a quintessential Londoner, seldom straying far from the metropolis, the Tookes were for years a family of English exotics living far from their native shores. In 1771, five years after Nichols entered into the partnership with William Bowyer which launched his busy career in publishing, Tooke left England to become Chaplain in the English church at Cronstadt, in the Gulf of Finland, a position from which he moved to the Chaplaincy at the British Factory in St. Petersburg three years later. His two sons were born there, Thomas in 1774, William in 1777. Each of the three Tooke men made his mark in life and is the subject of an article in the Dictionary of National Biography. The elder William Tooke is identified as the "historian of Russia" whose many books on the history and culture of that country, as well as on a variety of theological and literary topics, made him a well-known author in his own day. Thomas Tooke is remembered as an economist whose theories had considerable impact on the formulation of monetary policy, the subject of his several books published during the earlier nineteenth century. The younger William Tooke, a solicitor by profession with a seat in Parliament for several terms, was one of the founding officers of London University and was active in the Royal Society and the Society of Arts. True to his name, he too was a contributor to the magazine.

In 1792, William Tooke and his family settled in London after he received a long-awaited inheritance from his uncle. Quite clearly, the two decades which the family spent abroad were powerfully formative years. They provided the Rev. Tooke, who had already published books on antiquarian

and theological subjects, immersion in the traditions of a fascinating foreign country and close access to contemporary Continental scholarship. Within this unusual general setting, his sons grew up in a richly cultured home where interesting, brilliant people visited and where books and bookishness were central in the daily routine. The very remoteness from England which members of the Tooke family shared during these years was undoubtedly a condition in which the seeds of their later achievements were given intense nourishment.

In his early twenties, William Tooke had demonstrated a proclivity for study and writing that was to be one of his characteristic traits. He published three works before leaving England. During the next twenty years, he found time to complete only two. Tooke had achieved sufficient notice to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1783. His duties as Chaplain to the British Factory, however, and his activities in the social and learned circles in which he moved, did not allow him time to produce the volume of writing which he would achieve later. In this period of his life, he seems to have been sorting out his interests, meeting and reading the work of Continental scholars, assimilating historical documents, studying the new French and German publications—it was the period in which he began the scholarship from which the great outpouring of printed volumes would emanate at the end of the century. During these years, The Gentleman's Magazine served Tooke as a clearing house, a place in which he could sketch out his observations and knowledge about Russia, a repository for information which he did not wish to delay conveying into print or for which he sensed there was an interested readership immediately at hand. In all, Tooke contributed twenty articles to The Gentleman's Magazine while he was living and working in St. Petersburg.[3]

In his situation a considerable distance from home (a distance made to seem much more considerable by the hazards of shipping) William Tooke read avidly the books which Nichols and other friends sent him. Among the products of the London press which Tooke received was The Gentleman's Magazine. Nichols had become a proprietor and the printer of the magazine several years after Tooke's departure from England, and Tooke noted with

pleasure the increasing traces he detected of his friend's presence in the text.[4] The magazine helped him keep abreast of the cultural issues currently engaging his English contemporaries, such as the 1782 controversy over authorship of the poetry claimed by Thomas Chatterton to have been written by a fifteenth-century priest named Rowley. Nichols was Tooke's publisher, and much of their correspondence through the early 1780s had to do with the progress of the two works which Tooke was publishing at a distance from the press that made him uncomfortable.

The personal letters he sent his boyhood friend are bathed in the consciousness of his situation. Unexcerpted, they are much more highly animated, more newsy, often more tenderly written than the texts which Nichols published in the Literary Anecdotes. Quite clearly, Tooke treasured his unusual locus, his place in a significant foreign capital which gave him entree into a most interesting society and brought him into contact with celebrated people. He knew how to value the opportunity to learn about aspects of his world with which few contemporary Englishmen were familiar, to explore realms which men and women like himself living throughout England would never directly experience. At the same time, he felt keenly what it is to live far from home and friends:

The twenty articles which Tooke wrote in Russia for The Gentleman's Magazine introduce a variety of matter. He enclosed the first in a letter to Nichols dated 9 August 1782 O.S.; the last appeared late in 1789. Though the sequence is a miscellaneous assortment as to subject—Nichols usually adopted the terms "Occasional Remarks" or "Original Correspondence" as running heads in the magazine—Tooke tended to write about specific places or curiosities of natural life in the earlier essays and to dwell at greater length on Russian history in the later ones. His accounts of the ancient city of Bolgari (LV, i, 15-18), of the "Burial place of the antient Khans, at Kazimof" (LV, i, 172-173), of the Russian muskrat Mus Jaculus (LV, i, 264-266) and Slepetz (LV, ii, 761) in 1785 were succeeded by topographical and naturalistic description of Pavlofsk (LVI, i, 455-457) and of the Crimea (LVI, ii, 643-648) and by an "Account of the Progress of Arts and Sciences in Russia" (LVII, i, 390-395) in 1786-87. In communicating these articles to Nichols, Tooke at times professed to be rather uninterested in what he wrote: ". . . I do not care one polushka about them, and . . . you may put them in any place you think

fit."[6] He took Nichols to task, however, for what he considered carelessness in the reproduction of at least one of the earlier engraved plates which accompanied his work,[7] and as one article succeeded another in the magazine his allusions to them in personal letters reveal well enough the purposefulness with which the articles were produced.

From the first, Tooke's Russian articles were published over a pseudonymous signature, "M. M. M.," which possessed some significance for him: the initials are those of the Tooke family motto, Militia Mea Multiplex.[8] Out of this motto, apparently, the author created a distinct persona, a man vaguely military by profession whose duties require him to travel extensively throughout the Russian territories. He told Mr. Urban at the beginning of his first article that the notes on the antiquities he described were derived from his travels and that he thought of sending them through "the accident of my meeting with some numbers of your Magazine at the house of a German officer at Simbirsk. . . . If the engravings are executed with accuracy from the drawings I herewith transmit, and the narrative faithfully given, I may be occasionally induced to send you more, as often as my warfare in this world, which is very various, will allow me avocation" (LV [1785], i, 15).

Perhaps to aid Tooke in the objectification of this persona, Nichols subjoined a footnote to the writer's remark that he sends the article as "a favour": "That we do 'esteem it a favour,' our friendly correspondent will see by its being so early inserted; which is done, we will assure him, without the most distant view to 'the bear-skin boots,' or 'the pastilla,' or 'the sweet kloukva quass,' or 'the caviar,' he so liberally promises.—The invariable rule of this Magazine is, never to receive a bribe for what is either inserted or omitted" (LV, i, 15). The ideas and information which Tooke transmitted in the succeeding articles may well have been drawn from excursions he actually made, but his care in dating each article from a specific place and his scattered references to duties which called him from one encampment to another served to perpetuate and confirm his fictional authorial identity.

Mr. Urban's correspondent "M. M. M.," whose avocation was to share a knowledge of Russian antiquities and natural history with his fellow readers of The Gentleman's Magazine, was also a contemplative observer of the more general human scene. Tooke came to use the opportunity of writing about Russia for discourse on human nature and on books in the vein of the eighteenth-century periodical essayists. His account of the Don Cossaks and their region, in two articles dated 31 Oct. 1785 O. S. (from Tscherkask) and 5 Nov. 1785 O. S. (from Azof), is prefaced, for instance, by several paragraphs on literature as a source of our insight into human character. The pretext for these remarks, he says, is "the vexatious want of character throughout the

regions I am doomed to traverse" (LVI [1786], ii, 548). His real agenda, however, would seem to be a call for more attentive biographical analysis in English literature. Attached to Tooke's long account of the Crimea is a similar prefatory essay even less integral to his primary subject. He expatiates on human tendency to rail against fate, when establishing self-control would allow us to deal purposefully with the "common occurrences of life." This leads him to compare the Spectator papers with Johnson's Rambler as guides to self-knowledge.

We find in the articles which William Tooke wrote for The Gentleman's Magazine during his sojourn in Russia the core of interests and play of mind which were to be displayed so richly in the numerous works he published after returning to England. Evidently he was all the while gathering documentary materials and storing observations that he wished to commit to publications of greater scope, and in his letters he indicates increasingly a desire to exchange his present situation in the world for a place closer to his publisher and to the reading public. In 1791 he told Nichols:

But until he returned, he could in a sense practice. Writing about the land and society within which he found himself, focusing from time to time on authors and literary works, modern and ancient, in the course of his reading, he prepared for an established periodical audience a series of articles in which he exercised various authorial manners. He wrote description, developed scientific and historical evidence, shaped speculative opinions about human nature, cultivated narratives faithful to a persona he created or, in a more complex exercise, pretended to weave together the disorganized notes of a fellow traveller.[10] A comparison of the books which Tooke published after residence in Russia with those published before and during that period would doubtless reveal a number of things, including simply a greater maturity. To the experience of writing articles for The Gentleman's Magazine, however, we may understand that Tooke owed a certain measure of the development he attained towards his establishment as an author of recognized importance among his contemporaries.

In the three decades of his life after he left Russia, Tooke continued to be a contributing writer for the magazine, and in fact provided a more significant level of work—eighty articles, as compared with the twenty he sent to Nichols from Russia. The preponderance of these were a group of sixty-seven articles (perhaps best conceived as successive segments of one long work)

on Horace which appeared from the latter part of 1806 through 1811. He wrote one or two obituary articles.[11] Of the remainder, two articles (for both of which he used his Russian signature, "M. M. M.") appear to be leftovers from Russia, published soon after the resettlement in England: a biographical note on von Haller and a note on annotation in a copy of Salmisii Exercitationes Plinianae.[12] The rest concerned a variety of things Russian and appeared in 1812 and 1815-16. All of Tooke's work published after 1800 appeared either anonymously or over his actual initials.

Tooke's long commentary on Horace is a work unto itself in his canon. In its conception, it is essentially the experience of a learned eighteenth-century reader, exploring the text of Horace's epistles and satires sequentially and offering remarks of various kinds—exegetical, philological, amplificatory—in apparently random fashion, though his progress through the text advances nearly line by line. It is the schoolroom exercise carried forward in maturity, the summary explication of a text grown, through countless readings, as familiar as the lines on the hand. There is constant interplay between painstaking analysis of the particular and highly generalized notions about the poet. The earliest installments in the series are called "Observations" and "Remarks," but thereafter they bear the title "Illustrations of Horace," a use of the term "illustration" which appropriately connects Tooke's work with the content and manner of literary scholarship as it was conducted in his generation and in many generations preceding his. His long series of remarks was, therefore, perfectly tailored for an audience such as the subscribers to The Gentleman's Magazine, a body of readers who had been provided such readings of the standard authors in previous volumes and who perhaps kept journals full of such remarks of their own in the privacy of their studies.

As representative of the genre, Tooke's remarks on Horace are delivered with a stylistic elegance which many of his knowing readers might not have been able to achieve. He is rarely content with the perfunctory observation: "Venafri. The oil from the territory of Venafrum was reckoned the best. Plin. lib xv. cap. 2." (LXXXI [1811], ii, 428). More characteristically, Tooke is given to broader periods:

In his obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine, we are told that Tooke was revising this series on Horace at the time of his death "for separate publication" (XC [1820], ii, 467). The revision must have consisted chiefly of new, more general introductory matter than Tooke wrote for the series as it originally appeared, for his remarks are highly polished in their original state and seem to represent decided opinions, a culminating rather than tentative reading of the Roman poet. His remarks on Horace are at the other end of the spectrum of composition from the early articles on Russian history, geography, and natural life. In them, Tooke introduced and rehearsed the subject matter of the major publications he projected. In the "Illustrations of Horace," Tooke delivered in the magazine a work of major scope very nearly in the finished state it would have possessed had he lived to publish it separately.

During the last three decades of his life, the Rev. William Tooke was not the only member of his family writing articles signed "W. T." in The Gentleman's Magazine. His son William—"that monkey Bill,"[13] as his father described him during boyhood in a letter to Nichols—began his own correspondence with Mr. Urban in a set of remarks on the current English passion for German literature in 1799 (LXIX, ii, 923-924). This was followed by an article entitled "Causes of Present Scarcity; and Remedies Proposed" in 1800 (LXX, ii, 918-920), by three articles on the distresses of chimney-sweeps in 1803-5,[14] and by a note on his own edition of Churchill's poetry (LXXIV [1804], ii, 1188-89). By now, the former little rascal was beginning a professional career, having served his apprenticeship to a solicitor in Gray's Inn with whom he entered into partnership in 1798. The claims of public life allowed little time for authorship during these years. Later, he was to republish his edition of Churchill in three volumes (1844), the two-volume Monarchy of France, its Rise, Progress, and Fall (1855), and a volume of verse (1860). His further work in the magazine included an article on Nicholas Rowe's will in 1822 (XCII, i, 207-208), one on the history of the Tooke family in 1839 (N. S. XII, 602-606), and several notes on literary and biographical matters in the early 1840s. His final contribution to The Gentleman's Magazine appears to have been an article signed "Vassili Vassilovich" entitled "The Chapters of 'Political Philosophy' on Russia" in 1843 (N. S. XIX, 40-42).

The younger William Tooke contributed more sporadically and less voluminously than his father did to the pages of Mr. Urban's miscellany. Like his father, who occasionally published in The Monthly Review, he also contributed to the New Monthly Review and the Annual Register. The work published by the two William Tookes in The Gentleman's Magazine, one hundred thirteen articles, constitutes, however, a special and distinctive body

of writing, a utilization of opportunities which the Gentleman's held forth to them, as it did to many others like them, in a way which made this periodical important to its era. It provided the opportunity to organize and shape ideas, as in the Rev. Tooke's miscellaneous observations on Russia and his son's commentary on reading tastes in late eighteenth-century London. As in the younger Tooke's remarks on the plight of young chimney-sweeps, it provided an immediate audience for addressing issues which challenged the conscience. Also, as in the elder Tooke's extended discussion of Horace, the magazine was ready to carry the more fully rendered productions of learning pursued in the private study. The magazine stood ready at any time to broadcast the request for information, to gather in the piece of fugitive evidence, to transmit the reply to a critic, to disseminate a decided opinion. In surveying the writings of the William Tookes, father and son, published in The Gentleman's Magazine, one comes to understand the diverse ways in which this periodical participated in the lives of its literate and thoughtful audience.