No More Learning

Chesterfield, Shenstone and
Spence were of this circle, and Johnson, who held 'Doddy' in
especial regard, said that he looked upon him as his patron.
Besides works by Pope and Johnson, it was from Tully's Head
that Young's Night Thoughts, Shenstone's Schoolmistress, Aken-
side's Pleasures of Imagination, Goldsmith's Present State of
Polite Learning, with many others of equal note were sent forth ;
and, if Gray's Eton Ode fell flat in 1747, the failure was more than
compensated for by the acclaim which greeted the Elegy in 1751.
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## p. 324 (#346) ############################################

324 Book Production and Distribution [ch.
But the publications by which Dodsley remains a living name
in English literature are the two anthologies to which he stood
in the relation of editor as well as publisher : the Select Collection
of Old Plays (1744-5) and the Collection of Poems by several
Hands (1748—58)? When the first of these was announced in
1743, sufficient names to justify the undertaking were received in a
week, and, at the time of publication, there were nearly eight
hundred subscribers.
Apparently, Dodsley considered a periodical publication to be
a proper adjunct to a house of standing, for he made more
than one adventure in that hazardous emprise. The Public
Register, which he launched in 1741 as a weekly rival to The
Gentleman's Magazine, was killed at its twenty-fourth number by
a boycott on the part of opposition journals. Five years later, he
projected a fortnightly literary magazine, called The Museum,
which appeared under the editorship of Mark Akenside ; and this
was followed by The World, which Edward Moore successfully
conducted from 1753 to 1756. But his greatest achievement
was The Annual Register, which he founded in conjunction with
Edmund Burke, and which still makes its yearly appearance.
In
March 1759, just before the first issue of the Register was
published, Dodsley relinquished the cares of business into the
hands of his younger brother, James, whom he had taken into
partnership some time previously.
It is understood to have been Robert Dodsley who first sug-
gested to Johnson the idea of the Dictionary; but the chief part
in the arrangements for its publication was undertaken by Andrew
Millar, a man of quite different calibre. Though not possessed of
great literary judgment himself, Millar had the instinct to choose
capable advisers, and his hard-headed business faculty carried him
into the front rank of his profession. He ventured boldly, and
must have been fairly liberal in his dealings with authors, or
Johnson, speaking from a writer's point of view, would scarcely
have expressed respect for him on the ground that he had raised
the price of literature. When Hume's History was in danger of
falling flat, it was Millar's energy that contributed largely to
securing its success ; and when, after giving Fielding a thousand
pounds for Amelia, he feared the book would not go off, he resorted
to a ruse to incite the trade to buy it.
The Dictionary, after the manuscript had at length been ex-
tracted from Johnson, was published jointly by several booksellers
1 See ante, vol. ix, pp. 190–1.


## p. 325 (#347) ############################################

XIV]
Trade
Books
325
iar:
JE
it
who had joined forces for the occasion. This practice of cooperation
in important undertakings was a regular feature in eighteenth
century publishing, and various associations for the purpose were
brought into existence. One of these, called The Conger, was
formed in 1719, and this was followed in 1736 by the New Conger.
After these came the famous organisation which met for the
transaction of business at the Chapter coffeehouse in St Paul's
churchyard; hence, books brought out by the associated partners
were, for a time, styled Chapter books, but, later, came to be
known as Trade books. This method of publication led to many
literary properties being divided into numerous shares, sometimes
80 many as a hundred or even more, which were bought or sold
and freely passed on from one bookseller to another. In 1776,
a sixteenth share of Pamela was sold for £18, and a thirty-second
part of Hervey's Meditations brought £32, while, in 1805, £11
was given for a one-hundredth share in The Lives of the
Poets. William Johnson, a London bookseller, stated, in 1774,
that three-quarters of the books in the trade had his name as
part proprietor. The cooperative system was attempted also on
behalf of authors, and a Society for the Encouragement of Learning
was founded with the object of securing to writers the whole pro-
duct of their labours ; but, though some books of note were
published through this channel about the middle of the century,
the society can hardly be said to have flourished.
Perhaps the largest combine for the issue of a trade book, was
that which brought out the edition of English Poets for which
Johnson wrote the Lives. In this undertaking, some forty book-
sellers were concerned, and the names of the proprietors included,
as Edward Dilly, one of the partners, said in a letter to Boswell,
“almost all the booksellers in London, of consequence! ' The
object was to defeat what they deemed to be an invasion of their
literary property, in the shape of a comprehensive issue of British
Poets, printed at the Apollo press in Edinburgh, in a hundred
cheap and handy volumes, and sold by John Bell of the Strand.
This John Bell, founder of Bell's Weekly Messenger, was a pioneer
in the production of cheap books, and, being a man of modern
ideas, he initiated, so it is said, the abolition of the long s.
Another form of cheap literature which had come into vogue, was
the 'Paternoster Row numbers,' so called from the Row being
their chief place of issue. These publications, which came out in
the form of weekly parts, consisted of standard works such as
Dit
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1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G. B. , vol. II, p. 111.
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## p. 326 (#348) ############################################

326 Book Production and Distribution
[ch.
family Bibles with notes, Foxe's Martyrs, the works of Josephus,
the life of Christ, histories of England and the like, which, if
not read, at least gave a good air to the home. One of the earliest
to make a speciality of this form of publishing was Alexander
Hogg, who seems to have been possessed of all the arts and wiles
of the modern book canvasser; and his assistant, John Cooke,
after starting in the same line of business on his own account,
made an even better thing of it. He is said to have cleared some
thousands of pounds by Southwell's Notes and Illustrations on the
Bible, and his were the little 'whity-brown' covered sixpenny
numbers of the British poets on which Leigh Hunt 'doted. ' This
series of books, running, in all, to several hundred weekly parts,
consisted of three sections : select novels, select classics and select
poets-select, no doubt, meaning then, as now, those which could
be reprinted with impunity.
But the booksellers did not confine their meetings at coffee-
house or tavern to the business of dividing the profits on a book or
of planning a new venture. They also met for social intercourse
and good cheer; and occasional gatherings at the Devil tavern by
Temple bar developed into a regular club. It was at this club that
Davies first conceived the idea of writing his Life of Garrick, and,
as the work proceeded, he brought instalments of it to the club
which he read to the company with much complacency, and not a
little to their general information. And, in their relations with
authors, the festive side was not neglected by individual publishers,
such as the Dillys—the big house in the Poultry—'at whose
hospitable and well-covered table,' says Boswell, 'I have seen a
greater number of literary men, than at any other, except that
of Sir Joshua Reynolds. '
Thomas Cadell, too, the successor of Andrew Millar, celebrated
the completion of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, in 1788, by a literary
dinner at his house. Cadell, who was partner with William
Straham in many of his more important undertakings, was for
nearly a quarter of a century at the head of his profession, and his
name is associated with the leading historical writers of the time :
Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Blackstone, Adam Smith. This was a
golden age for successful writers, and remuneration was on an
unprecedented scale. For his History of Charles V, Robertson
received £4500, and for his dull but popular history, Robert Henry
was paid £3300; Hume's History is said to have brought him
upwards of £5000, and Gibbon had two-thirds of the very hand-
some profits on his History; Cadell and Straham paid John 7
>


## p. 327 (#349) ############################################

XIV]
Edmund Curll
327
Hawkesworth £6000 for his Account of voyages. . . in the Southern
Hemisphere, and gave Hugh Blair £1100 for his three volumes
of Sermons ; and Charles Elliot, the Edinburgh bookseller, was
venturesome enough to give William Smellie a thousand guineas for
his Philosophy of Natural History when, according to Lackington,
only the heads of the chapters were written.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the third Thomas
Longman had recently entered on his successful career; the
theological house of Rivington was in the hands of Francis and
Charles Rivington, grandsons of the founder; Thomas Cadell,
the younger, had succeeded his father, who was now enjoying
wellearned leisure; the firm of Edward and Charles Dilly was
represented by the surviving partner, Charles ; George Robinson,
the king of the booksellers,' had yet a year to reign over his huge
business in Paternoster row; and John Murray, lately come
of age, had just assumed control of the business in Fleet street
which his father, the first John Murray, had acquired in 1768.
Naturally, most of those who engaged in bookselling and
publishing were primarily men of business, but there were among
them not a few who knew something more of books than merely
their title-pages and selling price. Many were attracted to the
calling by a taste for, and appreciation of, literature, and several
even aspired to enter the lists of authorship. Besides such out-
standing instances as Robert Dodsley, Samuel Richardson and
Thomas Davies, there was John Dunton of the Life and Errors,
and Lackington of the Memoirs and Confessions. Thomas Evans,
the humorist, who edited Shakespeare and Prior, and Andrew
Jackson, the Drury lane dealer in old books, who published the
first book of Paradise Lost in rime and cast his catalogues in
similar form, are representative of another class. To the criticisms
of his publisher, Joseph Johnson, William Cowper acknowledged
himself to be indebted; and Peter Elmsley, the Strand bookseller
and honoured friend of Gibbon, was noted for his discriminating
nicety in both the French and the English languages. To these
may be added Alexander Cruden, who compiled his Concordance
at his shop under the Royal Exchange; Arthur Collins, of the
Peerage; the younger William Bowyer, styled 'the learned
printer,' and his partner John Nichols, of the Anecdotes.
If Tonson, Lintot and Dodsley may be accounted among the
aristocracy of the publishers of their time, the nadir of the
profession is well represented in their contemporary, Edmund
Curll, that shameless rascal, in whom even the writer of The


## p. 328 (#350) ############################################

328 Book Production and Distribution [CH.
6
Dunciad found his match for scurrility. In the annals of the
trade, Curll's name stands for all that is false, low, dishonest and
obscene; indeed, his activity in producing books of an indecent
character added a new word—Curlicism—to the language. His
many misdeeds brought him varied experiences : from the trick
which Pope played upon him at the Swan tavern, and the tossing
he received at the hands of the Westminster scholars, up through
more than one appearance at the bar of the House of Lords, down
to imprisonment, fine and the pillory. But none of these things
deterred 'the dauntless Curll’ from his vicious course. After
he had been fined for printing The Nun in her Smock, and had
stood in the pillory for publishing The Memoirs of John Ker of
Kersland, he continued to advertise these books in his lists, with
a note appended to the latter calling attention to the fact that he
had suffered fine and corporal punishment on account of it.
At the outset of his career, he put forth as a 'second edition,
improv'd,' a mere reprint with new title-page-not an unknown
deception, it is true; but, with Curll, literary fraud was habitual,
and he had no hesitation in suggesting a wellknown writer to be
the author of some worthless production by one of his hacks.
Elizabeth Montagu, in a letter of 12 November 1739, writes
indignantly :
I got at last this morning the poems just published under Prior's name,
brought them home under my arm, locked my door, sat me down by my
fireside, and opened the book with great expectation, but to my disappoint-
ment found it to be the most wretched trumpery that you can conceive, the
production of the meanest of Curl's band of scribblers.
Curll's connection with the issue of Court Poems (1716)2 led to
his first encounter with Pope, and he afterwards made ignoble
appearance in The Dunciad; later, these two were concerned
in the talpine proceedings connected with the publication of the
1735 volume of Pope's Correspondence.
Curll's personal appearance, vividly sketched by Amory, was
as unprepossessing as his cast of mind. · Edmund Curll,' he says,
‘was in person very tall and thin, an ungainly, awkward, white-
faced man. His eyes were a light-grey, large, projecting, goggle,
and pur-blind. He was splay-footed, and baker-kneed. ' He adds,
however, that he had a good natural understanding, and was
well acquainted with more than the title pages of books. ' And,
since even a Curll must have his due, it should not be forgotten
i Climenson, Emily J. , Elizabeth Montagu (1906), vol. I, p. 38.
2 See ante, vol. ix, pp. 78 and 247.
3 Life of John Buncle (1825), vol. III, p. 262.


## p. 329 (#351) ############################################

XIV]
Grub Street
329
that he published a number of books of antiquarian, topographical
and biographical interest.
The name of Curll is also closely associated with Grub street,
a domain which is wont to be a temptation to indulge in the
picturesque—and to figure as a literary hades, inhabited by poor,
but worthy, geniuses, with stony-hearted booksellers as exacting
demons. Not that the existence of Grub street is to be doubted :
it was, indeed, a grim actuality, and many a garreteer realised
by experience
How unhappy's the fate
To live by one's pate
And be forced to write hackney for bread 1,
But the iniquity was not all on the side of the bookseller, nor did
the initiative come from him alone.
It was in the first half of the eighteenth century, after the
expiry of the licensing laws had removed all restraint from the
press, that this underworld of letters most flourished, writers and
booksellers striving with avid haste to make the most out of the
opportunity of the moment. Unscrupulous members of both
professions were little troubled by conscience, their common
concern being to produce—the one with the minimum of labour,
the other at the minimum of expense—anything that would sell.
Booksellers were 'out' for business, and paid as little as possible.
Some of them were hard taskmasters, no doubt, but they had a
sorry team to drive, and one may believe that, in general, these
Grub street authors got as much as they were worth.
In his Life of Dr John North, Roger North speaks of the
pickpocket work of demi-booksellers, who 'crack their brains to
find out selling subjects, and keep hirelings in garrets at hard
meat to write and correct by the groat’; and Amory, writing of
Curll, says that ‘his translators in pay lay three in a bed in the
Pewter Platter Inn at Holborn, and he and they were for ever
at work to deceive the public? ' John Dunton, a man of many
projects, who, in his time, published some six hundred books
and himself was the possessor of a ready pen, had considerable
experience of hackwriters. As soon as he set up in business,
they began to ply him with 'specimens'; but he conceived a very
poor opinion of the race, and thought their learning very often
lay in as little compass as their honesty. Of William Bradshaw,
1 Fielding's The Author's Farce (act 11, sc. 3), a lively picture of a bookseller and
his hirelings at work.
2 Life of John Buncle (1825), vol. II, p. 263.


## p. 330 (#352) ############################################

330
Book Production and Distribution [CH.
whom he considered to be the best accomplished hackney author
he had met, and who wrote for him The Parable of the Magpye,
of which many thousands were sold, he says,
I had once fixed him upon a very great design, and furnished him both
with money and books. . . but my Gentleman thought fit to remove himself,
and I am not sure that I have seen him sincel.
On the other hand, he represents John Shirley, who wrote
for him 'Lord Jeffreys's Life,' of which six thousand were sold,
as being 'true as steel to his word, and would slave off his feet
to oblige a bookseller. '
One of the multifarious occupations of these literary parasites
was the abridgment of successful works. Pirate booksellers,
like Samuel Lee of Lombard street, 'such a pirate, such a cor-
morant was never before,' or Henry Hills, in Blackfriars, who
regularly printed every good poem or sermon that was published,
might, at their risk, reprint whole books; but the safer way was
to bring out an abridgment, a method of filching against which
there was no legal redress. This was the course pursued by
Nathaniel Crouch, who
melted down the best of our English Histories into twelve-penny books,
which are filled with wonders, rarities, and curiosities; for, you must know,
his title-pages are a little swelling.
The 'indefatigable press-mauler,' Shirley, was an adept at this
art of collection, as it was called,
his great talent lies at Collection, and he will do it for you at six shillings a
sheet. He knows how to disguise an Author that you shall not know him,
and yet keep the sense and the main scope entire3.
In his daily task the Grub street denizen lost his own personality
in many disguises ; and Richard Savage, under the name Iscariot
Hackney, thus described, with a bitter cynicism born of experience,
the varied role of a hireling writer :
'Twas in his (Carll's] service that I wrote Obscenity and Profaneness,
under the names of Pope and Swift. Sometimes I was Mr Joseph Gay, and
at others theory Burnet, or Addison. I abridged histories and travels,
translated from the French what they never wrote, and was expert at finding
out new titles for old books. When a notorious thief was hanged, I was the
Plutarch to preserve his memory; and when a great man died, mine were his
Remains, and mine the account of his last will and testament*.
Occasionally, an author might be an employer of his less fortunate
brethren, and the Sunday dinners given by Smollett to his hacks
1 Life and Error's (1818), p. 182.
3 Ibid. p. 184.
2 Ibid. p. 206.
4 The Author to be Let.


## p. 331 (#353) ############################################

XIV]
Little Britain
Britain Booksellers
331
suggest that the conditions of work in his literary factory' may
have been less intolerable than in some other establishments.
Several of the best writers of the age-Fielding, Johnson,
Goldsmith-served some apprenticeship in this lower walk, and
the latter, in his Present State of Polite Learning, has feelingly
depicted the hardships endured by the 'poor pen and ink labourer. '
But, while many of those who were worthy in due time freed
themselves from thraldom, others, like Samuel Boyse, sitting at
his writing wrapped in a blanket with arms thrust through two
holes in it, found therein a natural habitat
M
The revival of literature and consequent expansion of the
book trade which followed upon the return of the monarchy were
accompanied by drawbacks, of which the establishment of the
censorship under L'Estrange, in 1663, was only one. Two years
later, business in London was almost paralysed by the effects of
the visitation of the plague: a check nearly equalled the following
year in the havoc which the great fire made among the stock of
books, by which fresh disaster many of those stationers who had
survived the plague now found themselves ruined.
By this time, Little Britain, with its artery Duck lane, had
become an important centre of the retail book trade, threatening
the long supremacy of the neighbourhood of St Paul's cathedral.
In 1663, Sobière, the French traveller, speaks of the vast number
of booksellers' shops he had observed in London, especially in
St Paul's churchyard and Little Britain, where there is twice as
many as in the Rue St Jacque in Paris. ' And Roger North,
writing of the same period, says,
Then Little Britain was a plentiful and perpetual emporium of learned
authors; and men went thither as to a market. This drew to the place a
mighty trade; the rather because the shops were spacious, and the learned
gladly resorted to them, where they seldom failed to meet with agreeable
conversation. And the booksellers themselves were knowing and conversible
men, with whom, for the sake of bookish knowledge, the greatest wits were
pleased to conversel.
One of the chief of these Little Britain booksellers was Robert
Scot, whom North describes as no mean scholar and a very con-
scientious good man. He was not only an expert bookseller, but
was ‘in his time the greatest librarian in Europe ; for, besides
his stock in England, he had warehouses at Frankfort, Paris and
other places. ' Here, also, was the shop of Christopher Bateman,
1 Lives of the Norths, ed. Jessopp, A. (1890), vol. 11, p. 281.


## p. 332 (#354) ############################################

332 Book
Book Production and Distribution [CH.
6
who dealt principally in old books, and from whom Swift purchased
'for our Stella' three little volumes of Lucian in French. In
some shops, it was the practice to allow customers to turn over
the books and, for a small payment, to read any of them on the
premises. Bateman, however, would have none of this, nor would
he, it is said, suffer any person to look into any book in his shop,
giving as a reason :
I
suppose you may be a physician or an author, and want some recipe or
quotation; and, if you buy it, I will engage it to be perfect before you leave
me, but not after; as I have suffered by leaves being torn out, and the books
returned, to my very great loss and prejudicel.
Before the middle of the eighteenth century, the tide had begun
to ebb from Little Britain, and, with the death of Edward Ballard,
in 1796, there passed away the last of the profession who in-
habited it, and the last representative of a family which, for over
a century, had been famous there for its trade in divinity and
school books.
John Macky, in his Journey through England (1724), tells us
that
The Booksellers of antient books in all languages are in Little Britain and
Paternoster Row; those for Divinity and the Classics on the North side of
St Paul's Cathedral; Law, History, and Plays about Temple Bar; and the
French Booksellers in the Strand.
These were the chief quarters of the trade, but bookshops might
be found in most quarters of the city; eastwards, along Cheapside,
passing the shop of Thomas Cockerell ‘at the Three-legs in the
Poultry, over against the Stocks Market,' and on to the Royal
exchange, where, at the Bible under the Piazza, Ralph Smith
carried on his business. In Cornhill, the sign of the Three
Pigeons pointed out the house of Brabazon Aylmer, from whom
Tonson purchased Paradise Lost; and, a little to the south,
London bridge was a centre of some activity, though mostly in
the less distinguished branches of the trade. Holborn, too, had
its booksellers, and in Gray's inn gateway dwelt Thomas Osborne,
an expert in all the tricks and arts of his trade. In the west, John
Brindley was established in New Bond street, and Pall Mall was
the scene of Dodsley's operations. In Westminster hall, book-
sellers had plied their trade from at least 1640, and probably
much earlier. Mistress Breach's portly presence was, doubtless,
a familiar figure there from 1649 to 1675; Matthew Gilliflower was
1 Nichols's Literary Anecdotes (1812), vol. 1, p. 424.
2 See, also, ante, vol. ix, p. 357, and vol. x, p. 166.
9


## p. 333 (#355) ############################################

XIV]
*Honest Tom Payne'
333
equally well known in it during the last quarter of the century,
and booksellers were still in occupation there at the end of the
eighteenth century.
At this time, coffeehouses were a favourite resort for social
and political gossip and the reading of the news! In Guy Miege's
Present State of Great Britain, for 1707, it is remarked that
The Coffee-houses particularly are very commodious for a free Conversa-
tion, and for reading at an easie Rate all manner of printed News, the Votes
of Parliament when sitting, and other Prints that come out Weekly or
casually. Amongst which the London Gazette comes out on Mundays and
Thursdays, the Daily Courant every day but Sunday, the Postman, Flying-
Post, and Post-Boy, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and the English
Post, Mondays, Wensdays, and Fridays; besides their frequent Postscripts.
As being similar centres for intercommunication in the book-
world, where the literati met and discussed new books or learned
of projects for forthcoming works, some of the bookshops came
to be known as literary coffeehouses. One of the first to be
thus designated was a little low 'elbow-shed' at the gate of the
Lower mews, near Leicester fields. This was the bookshop of
'honest Tom Payne, one of the most celebrated booksellers of
the day. The little L-shaped place, lighted by a skylight, was
but ill adapted for the reception of the number of people who
not only frequented it but during certain hours of the day were
never out of it. ' The habitués of this nookery included Thomas
Tyrwhitt, bishop Percy, William Heberden, Bennet Langton,
George Steevens and Sir John Hawkins, and, at about one o'clock,
almost any day, would be found there a group of people
discussing literary themes or otherwise improving the art of
conversation, probably more to their own satisfaction than to
that of honest Tom, who found them much in his way. The
spacious and handsome shop which Henry Payne, a younger
brother, opened in Pall Mall with the hope of attracting some
of these literary loungers failed to detach their allegiance from
the dingy little resort, which the elder Payne occupied for nearly
fifty years and which was continued by his son till the early years
of the nineteenth century. Another of these literary howffs was
the shop in Russell street, Covent garden, kept by Thomas Davies,
the actor, whom Johnson befriended and whose Life of Garrick
brought him more fame and probably more money than all his
bookselling. It was when taking tea in Davies's back parlour,
which looked into the shop through a glass door, that Boswell,
1 Concerning coffeehouses as literary resorts, see ante, vol. ix, pp. 31–37.


## p. 334 (#356) ############################################

334
Book Production and Distribution [CH.
in 1763, at length had the gratification of being introduced to
Johnson.
The book-collector in search of fine editions, and the reader
with literary tastes enquiring for the latest hit in belles lettres,
would, naturally, go to Tonson's, Payne's, Dodsley's, or one of the
other leading shops, such as that of Samuel Smith, bookseller to
the Royal society, who spoke with fluency both French and Latin,
and specialised in foreign literature. But, among the wider and
less cultivated class of readers, there was a large demand for
small and cheap books in what is commonly known as practical
divinity, and this literature formed an important feature in the
stock-in-trade of the smaller booksellers. In the seventeenth
century, James Crump, who had his shop in Little Bartholomew's
Well-yard, was one of the publishers who made a speciality of
providing this class of book, and Richard Young, of Roxwell in
Essex, a voluminous writer of such matter, furnished him with
A short and sure way to Grace and Salvation, The Seduced Soul
reduced, and rescued from the Subtilty and Slavery of Satan,
together with some thirty other tracts with similar compelling
titles ; and these, consisting severally of eight or a dozen pages,
were sold at a penny each. More substantial examples of this class
of popular literature are the practical' works of Richard Baxter
and The Pilgrim's Progress, of which eleven editions appeared
within ten years of its first publication. John Dunton, who,
with wide experience in catering for the popular taste, had great
faith in the commercial value of such books, printed ten thousand
copies of Lukin's Practice of Godliness, and, concerning Keach's
War with the Devil and Travels of True Godliness, of which the
same number were printed, he ventured the opinion that they
would sell to the end of time.
But practical divinity, though immensely popular, was not the
whole of the literature which the lower reading classes affected.
Cheap quarto ‘histories'-Reynard the Fox, Tom a Lincoln, or
the Red Rose Knight, The Life and Death of Mother Shipton,
Scogin': Jests, with many others of that genus—had a ready sale
at sixpence or a shilling; while the smaller chapbooks—the
* Penny Merriments' and 'Penny Godlinesses' which Pepys, with
an eye ever alert for the broad humours of the populace, found
amusement in collecting—were printed vilely and sold in
thousands. These latter consisted of old popular favourites, such
as The Friar and the Boy, The King and the Cobbler, Jack of
Newbery, with Cupid 8 Court of Salutations, garlands of songs,


## p. 335 (#357) ############################################

XIV]
Rubric Posts
Book Auctions
335
6
books of riddles, cookery recipes, dream interpreters and
fortune tellers. While the Licensing act was still in force, many
of these trifles were solemnly submitted to the censor, who, ap-
parently, did not consider it part of his office to refine the coarse
crudities which appealed to the taste and wit of the democracy,
since they bear his imprimatur on their title-pages. Besides being
exposed for sale in the smaller shops, they were hawked about
the streets by 'flying stationers,' or 'running booksellers,' and
carried further afield by country chapmen or hawkers, who got
their supplies from the shop of William Thackeray, at the Angel
in Duck lane, or John Back, at the Black Boy on London bridge,
or from one of the several other stationers who specialised in this
literature and sometimes combined with it the sale of pills or of
‘Daffy's Elixir Salutis ’ at half-a-crown the half-pint bottle.
The business of a retail bookseller was carried on mainly by
direct transactions in his shop. In the eighteenth century, the
rubric posts, referred to by Ben Jonson in his oft-quoted lines 'To
my Bookseller,' were still in use as a means of advertising new
publications, and Pope makes mention of them as a conspicuous
feature of bookshops in his day. Upon these posts were stuck up
the title-pages of works to which the bookseller desired to call
attention. Lintot made extensive use of them, and it was near the
end of the century before they disappeared, John Sewell in Corn-
hill, according to Nichols-, being, perhaps, the last who exhibited
the leading authors in this way.
It seems that, about the middle
of the century, the custom of displaying new books upon the
counter was an innovation recently adopted from Oxford and
Cambridge booksellers? . For the extension of his business, a
pushing tradesman would also be active in the circulation of
‘proposals' (prospectuses) for subscriptions to forthcoming books ;
and there were yet other devices at the command of an enter-
prising man, such as that adopted by Payne, who, in 1768, sent out
copies of Richard Gough's Anecdotes of British Topography, to
such as were likely to buy them, with the result, as Gough records,
that, when William Brown, the other bookseller, had sold but five,
Payne had disposed of forty or fifty.
The sale of books by way of auction, or who will give most for
them' had already been in practice on the continent for three
quarters of a century when William Cooper, a bookseller who
carried on business at the Pelican in Little Britain, introduced it
1 Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. II, p. 405.
9 Ibid. vol. iv, p. 440.
6


## p. 336 (#358) ############################################

336
[
Book Production and Distribution [ch.
into England. The first sale was that of the library of the late
Lazarus Seaman ; it began on 31 October 1676, and occupied
eight days. The success of this experiment soon caused the inno-
vation to become popular, and, before the end of the century,
considerably over one hundred auctions had taken place. The
majority of these sales were held by Cooper and Edward Millington,
the latter a born auctioneer, whose quick wit and wonderful fluency
of speech contributed in no small degree to his success in this rôle.
He may have professed that his object was to afford 'diversion
and entertainment' without any sinister regard to profit or ad-
vantage ; but, by his ready fund of professional patter, he could
often enhance the values of his wares, and sell 'em by his Art for
twice their worth". '
Booksellers were not long in perceiving that this method of
disposing of private libraries might, with similar advantage, be
applied to relieving their own shelves of overweighted stock,
and quite a number of sales consisted of books from this source.
Prominent among the many who conducted book auctions in the
eighteenth century are Christopher Bateman, the Ballards, Lockyer
Davis and his son-in-law, John Egerton. Samuel Paterson, too,
who gave up bookselling for auctioneering, was, in his day, a noted
cataloguer, with a wide and curious knowledge of the contents of
books ; but he had an invincible weakness for dipping into any
volume that might excite his curiosity during cataloguing, so it
not infrequently happened that catalogues were ready only a few
hours before the time of the sale. The domus auctionaria which
Samuel Baker set up in York street, Covent garden, in 1744, was
the earliest establishment devoted entirely to book auctions. On
Baker's death, in 1788, his partner George Leigh, of the famous
crumple-horn-shaped snuff-box, associated with himself Samuel
Sotheby, and thus brought into the firm a name which has survived
to the present day.
The chief rules under which sales were conducted were much
akin to those still customary; but the sums by which bids advanced
were curiously small, a penny being a common bid. Tricks of the
trade developed on both sides with the progress of the business.
Cases of an auctioneer raising the prices by phantom bids were
not unknown; and already, in 1721, we find suggestion of the
fraudulent “knock-out' in practice among booksellers. Concerning
a certain auction in that year, Humfrey Wanley, in his journal
as Harleian librarian, records ‘for the information of posterity. . .
1 Brown, Thomas, Elegy on Mr Edward Millington (in Familiar Letters, 1718).


## p. 337 (#359) ############################################

xiv] Lackington's "Temple of the Muses' 337
'
that the books in general went at low, or rather at vile rates :
through a combination of the booksellers against the sale? '; and
he observes, also, that the current prices of books had much
advanced during late years.
It is possible that the success of the auctionary' method of
disposing of superfluous stock may have suggested the catalogue
of books at marked prices as a means of facilitating communication
between bookseller and buyer and of placing additional temptation
in the way of the latter. At all events, by the middle of the
eighteenth century the practice of issuing such catalogues was
widely in use, and many booksellers sent out their priced cata-
logues annually or even twice a year. Conspicuous among these was
Thomas Osborne, insolent and ignorant, but with enough business
wit to amass a considerable fortune, the Ballards, noted for their
divinity catalogues, the Paynes and James Lackington. Lacking-
ton, whose Memoirs contain a lively account of his remarkable
business career, with a strange variety of other matters, in-
cluding the state of the bookmarket of his day, began life as a
shoemaker, but soon abandoned that calling for the more congenial
occupation of trafficking in books. From his initial experiment
in bookselling, the purchase of a sackful of old theology for a
guinea, le progressed steadily, in spite of lack of education. His
first catalogue, issued in 1779, caused mirth and derision by its
many blunders, but he got rid of twenty pounds' worth of books
within a week. He sold for ready money only, and made a practice
of selling everything cheap with the object of retaining the cus-
tomers he had and of attracting others. The success of these
principles, which he was not above proclaiming in his carriage
motto, ‘Small gains do great things, brought him an enormous
increase of business. His shop, known as “The Temple of the
Muses,' occupied a large corner block in Finsbury square, and has
been described as one of the sights of London”. In the centre
stood a huge circular counter, and a broad staircase led to the
lounging rooms and to a series of galleries where the volumes
arranged on the shelves grew shabbier and cheaper as one ascended.
Every one of these thousands of books was marked with its lowest
price and numbered according to a printed catalogue. In 1792,
,
Lackington estimated his profits for the year to be about £5000; at
that period, he was issuing every year two catalogues, of which he
Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vol. 1, p. 91 (where is printed a series of interesting
extracts from Wanley's journal).
· Knight, C. , Shadows of the Old Booksellers (1865), pp. 282–3.
B. L. XI. CH. XIV.
22
2


## p. 338 (#360) ############################################

338 Book Production and Distribution
[CH.
printed more than three thousand copies, and he calculated that
he was selling upwards of 100,000 volumes annually.
In his Memoirs, written about 1791, Lackington observes that
the sale of books in general has increased prodigiously within the last twenty
years. According to the best estimation I have been able to make, I suppose
that more than four times the number of books are sold now than were sold
twenty years since.
He also remarked that the recent general introduction of histories,
romances, stories and poems into schools had been a great means
of diffusing a taste for reading among all ranks of people. The
extensive increase in the habit of reading naturally brought with
it the need of an ampler supply of literature, and, though books
had become cheaper and more plentiful, it is hardly to be supposed
that the demands of the large body of general readers could be
satisfied by the limited number of books they were able to buy or
borrow, and the medium of circulating libraries was an obvious
method of augmenting supplies.
The earliest recorded date of the establishment of a circulating
library in London seems to be 1740; but, for some fifteen years
before this, Allan Ramsay, the poet bookseller, had been lending
out to the citizens of Edinburgh English novels and romances at a
penny a night, possibly to the scandal of the unco guid, but
thereby letting a breath of wider air into the particularism of the
Scottish literary taste of the time. The movement soon spread,
both in the metropolis and in the provinces : in 1751, the enter-
prising William Hutton of Birmingham added a library to his
bookshop; and, in the same decade, a subscription library was
established in Liverpool. John Nicholson, familiarly known as
Maps, had his library in Cambridge ; and, by the end of the
century, others were to be found in most towns of any importance.
The numerous private bookclubs which existed in every part of
the country also formed a considerable channel for the distribution
of books. In these clubs, members contributed a certain sum
periodically for the purchase of books, which were circulated in ro-
tation among subscribers, much in the same fashion that still obtains.
The chief lists of current English books in the middle of the
seventeenth century are the catalogues issued by John Rothwell
and William London. It was in 1657 that the latter, a Newcastle
bookseller, brought out his Catalogue of the most vendible Books
in England, prefaced by an ‘Introduction to the use of books'
from his own pen. It is significant of the prevailing taste of the
time that more than two-thirds of the books in this list come under
6


## p. 339 (#361) ############################################

XIV] Catalogues
Trade Sales
339
the heading divinity. Various other catalogues appeared ; but
there was no organised attempt to publish a regular list of new
books until 1668, in which year John Starkey, a Fleet street book-
seller, issued, under the title Mercurius Librarius, the first
number of what are known as Term catalogues? Starkey was
soon joined by Robert Clavell, of the Peacock, in St Paul's church-
yard, and, from 1670 to 1709, the list was issued quarterly under
the title A Catalogue of Books continued, printed and published
at London. Clavell also brought out, in 1672, A catalogue of all
the Books printed in England since the Dreadful Fire, a fourth
edition of which, continued to date, appeared in 1696 ; and
publications relating to the popish plot were so numerous that he
thought it worth while to issue, in 1680, a special catalogue of them.
In 1714, Bernard Lintot essayed to take up the work of recording
new books; but his Monthly Catalogue came to an end after eight
numbers, and, again, there was a lapse, until John Wilford, in
1723, began another Monthly Catalogue, which ran for six years.
From about this point, the gap is partially filled by lists of new
books in the monthlies, such as The Gentleman's Magazine, The
London Magazine, The Monthly Review and The Critical Review.
Advertisements of new books, especially those issued by subscrip-
tion, are also to be found in newspapers, and critical notices of
books begin to appear in reviews. In 1766, there was published,
for the use of booksellers, A complete catalogue of modern books,
published from the beginning of this century to the present
time, and this was followed by several similar compilations, the
most active in this field being William Bent of Paternoster row,
who continued his work into the nineteenth century,
A considerable proportion of the business of distributing books
from the publisher to the retail bookseller was effected through the
medium of sales, and trade sales were as much an institution of the
eighteenth century as were trade books. These sales, to which only
booksellers were admitted, and often only such as were invited by
having a catalogue sent to them, consisted either of new books,
which were offered to the trade' on special terms before publica-
tion, or of the stock of a bookseller retiring from business, or, again,
of the remaining stock of certain books which had not 'gone off' to
the publisher's expectations. It was customary for purchasers of
these ‘remainders' to destroy a large proportion of them and charge
6
1 Reprinted by Arber, E. , 3 vols. , 1903—6. For an account and bibliography of
these and other catalogues, see Growoll, A. , Three centuries of English booktrade
bibliography, New York, 1903.
22-2


## p. 340 (#362) ############################################

340 Book Production and Distribution
[ch.
full price for the rest; and there was an understanding that, if
anyone was known to sell such books under publication price, he
should be excluded from future sales. James Lackington, the cheap
bookseller, who always took a strong line of his own, after a time
broke through this custom, and sold off his purchases at a half or
even a quarter of the regular price.
In the provinces, the expansion of the booktrade after the
restoration was not less marked than in the metropolis, though the
volume of business still remained insignificant compared with that
of London. From early times, stationers had been established in
certain important centres, but, between 1640 and 1647, there were
bookshops in about forty different towns, and, in 1704, John Dunton
speaks of three hundred booksellers now trading in country towns.
Some of these enlarged their sphere of operations by itinerant
visits to neighbouring places ; in this way, the needs of Uttoxeter
and Ashby-de-la-Zouch were supplied by the Lichfield bookseller,
Michael Johnson-father of Samuel Johnson—who, also, on market
days, made the journey to Birmingham and opened a shop there.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, William Hutton, the
historian of Birmingham, made similar visits from Birmingham to
Bromsgrove market. In 1692, Nevill Simmons, bookseller, of Shef-
field, held the first book-auction in Leeds, on which occasion, as
related by Ralph Thoresby, who was a buyer at the sale, the room
was so overcrowded that the floor gave way. A few years previous
to this, the enterprising Edward Millington had introduced to the
bookbuyers of Cambridge and other towns this attractive method
of selling books; and Dunton, in 1698, startled Dublin booksellers
by taking across a large quantity of books and selling them by
auction there. Other supplies were carried into the country by
certain London booksellers, who attended regularly the chief
provincial fairs, such as Sturbridge and Bristol, which were still
important centres of book-distribution; and a considerable num-
ber of books found their way direct from London to country
customers, many of the clergy and other buyers of better-class
literature having a bookseller in town from whom they ordered
such books as they wanted. It might very well be expected that
books to be found on the shelves of provincial shops would be
chiefly of a popular nature, and this Lackington discovered to be
the case when, towards the end of the eighteenth century, he made
his progress through the principal towns in the north. He was
struck by the scarcity of books of the better class in the shops he


## p. 341 (#363) ############################################

xiv]
The Provinces Scotland
341
visited: in York and Leeds, it is true, there were a few good books
to be seen, but in all the other towns between London and Edin-
burgh, he declares that nothing but trash was to be found.
Owing to legislative restrictions which permitted no presses to
be set up outside London, except at Oxford, Cambridge and
York, hardly any printing was done in other parts of the country
before the end of the seventeenth century. By 1724, however,
presses had been started in nearly thirty other places ; but Oxford
and Cambridge continued to be the chief provincial centres of book
production.
At Oxford, the university press, which, in 1669, was installed
in the new Sheldonian theatre, made great progress under the
vigorous direction of John Fell, and the excellent work which it did
during this period is seen in books like Wood's Historia (1674),
and Hudson's Dionysius (1704). Clarendon's gift of the copyright
of his History of the Rebellion provided for it, in 1713, a new
habitation and the title Clarendon press. At Cambridge, it was
owing to the zeal of Richard Bentley that, at the end of the
seventeenth century, the university press there experienced a
corresponding revival and the real foundations of the modern
institution were laid.
With the exception of John Baskerville's work at Birmingham,
the book printing done in other provincial towns in the eighteenth
century is not of much account. At York, Thomas Gent combined
topographical authorship with the art of printing, but excelled in
neither; and, in the same city, John Hinxman, in 1760, published
the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy. The booksellers of
Newcastle were numerous enough to have a Stationers' company of
their own about the same date. At Bristol, there was William
Pine, the printer, also Joseph Cottle, the bookseller who published
poems by Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth; while Eton's
bookseller, Joseph Pote, was well known for half a century. Of
private presses, the most noteworthy was that which Horace
Walpole maintained at Strawberry hill from 1757 to 17891.
Unsatisfactory workmen were not his only trouble, for, in a letter
of 1764, to Sir David Dalrymple, he complained that
the London booksellers play me all manner of tricks. If I do not allow them
ridiculous profit they will do nothing to promote the sale; and when I do,
they buy up the impression, and sell it at an advanced price before my face.
North of the border, some respectable printing by Robert Urie
in Glasgow was followed by the establishment of the classic press
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, p. 245.
a


## p. 342 (#364) ############################################

342 Book Production and Distribution [CH. XIV
.
of the brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis; and it was John Wilson
of Kilmarnock who printed the first edition of Burns's poems in
1786. But Edinburgh was the headquarters of the Scottish book-
trade, and the business of printing books for the English market,
which afterwards became a great industry, had already begun, though
the earlier manifestation of its development—the printing of the
cheap books imported into England by Alexander Donaldson and
John Bell—did not meet with appreciation from the London trade.
In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, the admirable printing
done by James Watson and the scholarly press of Thomas Ruddi-
man foreshadowed the excellence that was to become characteristic
of Edinburgh printing ; and, when James Beattie was making
arrangements for the issue of a subscription edition of his essays
in 1776, he was advised to have it printed in Edinburgh, as it
would be more elegantly and correctly done than in London. ' In
the latter half of the century, William Creech was the leading
figure in the Edinburgh trade, and his principal contemporaries
were John Balfour, John Bell and Charles Elliot. Archibald
Constable entered on his initial venture in publishing just four
years before James Ballantyne, of Kelso, made, in 1799, his first
experiment in book-printing, which led to the establishment of the
famous Ballantyne press.
The dominant names in the Dublin trade during the eighteenth
century were those of George Faulkner and Stephen Powell. But,
Irish booksellers displayed their activity chiefly in reprinting all
the best new English books, both for home use and for export.
Since Ireland was outside the scope of the Copyright act, and
produced nothing to tempt reprisals, this practice could be pursued
with impunity, and the story of eighteenth century literature
abounds in complaints against the misdeeds of these pirates.


## p. 343 (#365) ############################################

CHAPTER XV
THE BLUESTOCKINGS
?
DURING the first half of the eighteenth century, Englishwomen
had little education and still less intellectual status.
sidered ‘unbecoming' for them to know Greek or Latin, almost
immodest for them to be authors, and certainly indiscreet to own
the fact. Mrs Barbauld was merely the echo of popular sentiment
when she protested that women did not want colleges. "The best
way for a woman to acquire knowledge,' she wrote, “is from con-
versation with a father, or brother, or friend. It was not till the
beginning of the next century-after the pioneer work of the
bluestockings, be it observed—that Sydney Smith, aided, doubt-
less, by his extraordinary sense of humour, discovered the absurdity
of the fact that a woman of forty should be more ignorant than
a boy of twelve.
In society, at routs or assemblies, cards or dancing were the
main diversions. Women were approached with flattering respect,
with exaggerated compliment, but they were never accorded the
greater compliment of being credited with sufficient intelligence
to appreciate the subjects that interested men. What dean
Swift wrote in 1734 to Mrs Delany from Ireland applied equally
well to general opinion in England : “A pernicious error prevails
here among the men that it is the duty of your sex to be fools in
every article except what is merely domestic. '
There were then, as there always had been, exceptions. There
were women who, by some unusual fortune of circumstance, or
by their own persistent efforts, had secured a share of the educa-
tion that was given to their brothers as a matter of course. One
such woman, Elizabeth Carter, a learned linguist and prominent
bluestocking, wrote to Mrs Montagu concerning a social evening :
As if the two sexes had been in a state of war the gentlemen ranged them-
selves on one side of the room where they talked their own talk and left us
a


## p. 344 (#366) ############################################

344
The Bluestockings
[CH.
a
a
poor ladies to twirl our shuttles and amuse each other by conversing as we
could. By what little I could overhear our opposites were discoursing on the
old English Poets, and this did not seem so much beyond a female capacity
but that we might have been indulged with a share in it.
The faint resentment underlying this gentle complaint indicates
how a few women with a natural and cultivated taste for literature
began to regard the limitations imposed by traditional prejudice
on their mental activities. As an unconscious protest against this
intellectual stifling, as well as against the tyranny of cards,' it
began to be
much the fashion for several ladies to have evening assemblies, where the
fair sex might participate in conversation with literary and ingenious men,
animated by a desire to please 1,
The first conversation,' however, had been given in the early
fifties, many years before Boswell wrote this. It was held at the
house of Mrs Vesey, wife of Agmondesham Vesey, a member of
the Irish parliament, and daughter of Sir Thomas Vesey, bishop
of Ossory. She was a witty Irishwoman with a taste for literature,
who determined to unite the literary and the fashionable society
of her acquaintance—worlds that had hitherto been kept apart.
Much perverse ingenuity was wasted by the writers of the first
quarter of the nineteenth century in trying to account for the
term 'bluestocking. ' Abraham Hayward, de Quincey, Mrs Opie, all
sought for an obscure origin in France, in Italy, anywhere, in fact,
save where it lay embedded in the writings of the bluestocking
circle. The point is still disputed, but critical authorities lean to
the Stillingfleet origin, supported by Boswell, and corroborated
by Madame d'Arblay. During the annual migration of the great
world to Bath, Mrs Vesey, meeting Benjamin Stillingfleet, invited
him to one of her 'conversations. ' Stillingfleet, the disinherited
grandson of the bishop of Worcester, was a botanist and a poet,
a philosopher and a failure. He had given up society and was
obliged to decline the invitation on the score of not having
clothes suitable for an evening assembly. The Irishwoman, a
singularly inconsequent person, giving a swift glance at his every-
day attire, which included small-clothes and worsted stockings,
exclaimed gaily: 'Don't mind dress. Come in your blue stockings. '
Stillingfleet obeyed her to the letter; and, when he entered the
brilliant assembly where ladies in ‘night gowns' of brocade and
lutestring were scarcely more splendid in plumage than men in
garments of satin and paduasoy, the shabby recluse claimed
1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G. B. (1887), vol. iv, p. 108.


## p. 345 (#367) ############################################

Xv]
Elizabeth Vesey
345
permission to join them by whimsically murmuring: 'Don't mind
dress. Come in your blue stockings. '
Stillingfleet was so popular at these conversation parties, that
'blew stockings,' as he was called, was in great request.
'Such was the excellence of his conversation,' wrote Boswell, that it came
to be said, we can do nothing without the blue stockings, and thus, by degrees,
the title was established. '
By one of the ironic subtleties of nomenclature, a term origin-
ally applied to a man was gradually transferred in deepened tint
to the women of these assemblies. It was a name, 'fixed in playful
stigma,' as one of the circle happily phrased it. For, though blue-
stockings were estimable women, individually held in high honour,
the epithet 'blue,' if not a designation of scorn like les femmes
savantes, held at least a grain of goodhumoured malice; possibly,
because few of them were free from what their 'queen,' with frank
selfcriticism, called, the female frailty of displaying more learning
than is necessary or graceful. '
But it is only just to say that Mrs Vesey! , “the first queen' of
the bluestockings, was free from this particular female frailty.
Though she delighted in literary conversation, she had neither
literary ambition, nor desire to pose as a learned woman. She was
ethereal and imaginative, and, said her friends, even in old age,
combined the simplicity of a child with the eager vivacity of
eighteen. Her intimates called her the sylph, and, of the blue-
stocking hostesses, without question, she was the best-beloved.
By nature unconventional, Mrs Vesey was noted for her amusing
horror of the paralysing effect of the conventional circle. Her large
reception rooms in Bolton row-and, later, in Clarges street-
appropriately upholstered in blue, were crowded with guests, who,
by her deft arrangement of chairs and sofas 'naturally broke up
into little groups' that were 'perpetually varying and changing.
There was ‘no ceremony, no cards, and no supper,' and Mrs Vesey,
we are told, had the almost magic art of putting all her company
at their ease without the least appearance of design. And, what
was possibly even more conducive to the success of her assemblies,
‘it was not absolutely necessary to talk sense. '
Vesey, though not a model husband, was an excellent host,
with sufficient interest in literature to help Lord Lyttelton with
his Life of Henry II, and to be delighted when he was elected
a member of Johnson's Literary club. Husbands were not much
in evidence in the bluestocking circle—by a curious coincidence,
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, chap. XI, p. 261.


## p. 346 (#368) ############################################

346
[ch.
The Bluestockings
they were rarely seen in Parisian salons—but Vesey, undoubtedly,
contributed to the success of his wife's literary parties. To the
Veseys belongs the credit of being among the first to welcome
authors and people with an interest in literature to social inter-
course with the great. Even of Johnson, Croker remarks in a
footnote that, 'except by a few visits in his latter years at the
basbleux assemblies of Mrs Montagu, Mrs Vesey, and Mrs Ord,
we do not trace him in anything like fashionable society. In the
bluestocking coteries, however, he was regarded as a literary lion
of the first rank, 'whose roar was deeper in its tone when he meant
to be civil. ' We get a bluestocking picture of the literary autocrat
from Bennet Langton, one of the best talkers among the 'blues,'
who, knowing Boswell's amiable hero-worship, sent him an ac-
count of an evening at Vesey's. Here, surrounded by duchesses,
lords, knights, and ladies, ‘four if not five deep,' Johnson held
converse with Barnard, provost of Eton, while the company
listened with respectful attention. The evenings were probably
pleasanter, however, when there was less monopoly, and the
various groups conversed among themselves. Hannah More,
whose critical judgment was equal to that of any of the blue-
stockings, not only gave precedence to ' Vesey, of verse the judge
and friend in her poem Bas Bleu, but she also wrote 'I know
of no house where there is such good rational society, and a con-
versation so general, so easy and so pleasant. '
For more than thirty years, Mrs Vesey's house was a notable
centre of the most cultivated society in London. After her
husband's death, however, her mind became clouded, and, for a
few years before she died in 1791, she was unable to recognise
her friends, who, nevertheless, visited her with a loyal devotion,
lest at any time she should regain her faculties, and miss their
society. In 1787, Hannah More wrote:
Mr Walpole seldomer presents himself to my mind as the man of wit, than
as the tender-hearted and humane friend of my dear infirm, broken-spirited
Mrs Vesey.
>
Though Mrs Vesey was indirectly responsible for the title of
the bluestocking coteries, it was Mrs Montagu', who, by her
dominant character, by her husband's wealth and by the almost
unique position she made for herself in London society, was
speedily recognised as what Johnson in a moment of wrath
satirically called her, the Queen of the Blues. ' Elizabeth
6
1 See, also, ante, vol. x, chap. XI, pp. 261 ff.


## p. 347 (#369) ############################################

Xv] 'The Queen of the Blues'
“
347
Robinson was born at York in 1720, one of a family of twelve
children. Much of her childhood was spent in Cambridgeshire,
with her maternal grandmother, the wife of Conyers Middleton,
librarian of Cambridge university. At Cambridge, the pretty pre-
cocious child was looked on as something of an infant prodigy.