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Jacob Tonson and Dryden's Linguistic Project Document généré le 24 sept. 2021 22:41 Lumen Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Travaux choisis de la Société canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle Improvised Patronage: Jacob Tonson and Dryden’s Linguistic Project Catherine Fleming Volume 36, 2017 URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1037856ar DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1037856ar Aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / Société canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle ISSN 1209-3696 (imprimé) 1927-8284 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Fleming, C. (2017). Improvised Patronage: Jacob Tonson and Dryden’s Linguistic Project. Lumen, 36, 95–111. https://doi.org/10.7202/1037856ar All Rights Reserved © Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies / Société Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle, 2017 services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ Improvised Patronage: Jacob Tonson and Dryden’s Linguistic Project Catherine Fleming University of Toronto The eighteenth-century bookseller is now recognized as a middleman through whom works reach the public, as a reflector of public taste, and as a cultural figure who slowly ousted the aristocratic patron in shaping and supporting literary production.1 The bookseller Jacob Tonson was one of the more important of these figures, using his publishing house and political relationships to support rising authors. Even before Tonson gained his social connections, however, he played an important part in literary culture. Tonson has usually been viewed as a patron in the sense of a provider of social and political introduc- tions, as Stephen Bernard shows in his recent examination of Tonson as a Whig publisher.2 Because scholars like Bernard have focused on Tonson’s extraordinary capabilities and connections, however, they have failed to fully examine the ways that, merely by being an inde- pendent bookseller who paid his authors rather than requiring them to fund their own writing, Tonson began to establish the type of rela- tionship that would eventually take the place of traditional patronage by the aristocracy. 1. Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print 1660–1740 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 83–139; William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2007), 375; Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996), 9–16. 2. Stephen Bernard, “Introduction,” in The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 66. lumen xxxvi, 2017 • 95-111 Lumen 36.final.indd 95 2016-10-18 11:48 AM 96 1 Catherine Fleming Tonson’s relationship with John Dryden began as a business matter. When Tonson agreed to publish Dryden’s translations, however, he began an association that ended in his taking the place of a traditional patron to Dryden’s long-standing desire to improve and promote the English language. In the process, they set a precedent for a new form of publication and an increased reliance on the bookseller. Dryden’s relationship with Tonson began a trend that culminated in Johnson’s declaration, in the 1750s, that his bookseller, Andrew Millar, was his patron and the “Maecenas of the age.”3 This transition to the centrality of the market and the seller was, as Dustin Griffin points out, not a “sudden change from a patronage economy,”4 but a slow movement in which booksellers began to supplement traditional patrons. Early in his career, Dryden benefited from all of the three main forms of patronage, which Deborah Payne categorizes as “titles or entitle- ments,” “access to positions” and social circles, and gifts of money from wealthy or titled supporters. 5 He supplemented this income by writing plays for the King’s Men, a position not directly reliant on a patron but which he gained in part through his court connections and the court’s reliable attendance at his plays. After the Glorious Revolution, how- ever, Dryden turned to other sources of income. Dryden’s reliance on Tonson began significantly earlier than the mid eighteenth century where scholars, often citing Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson as examples, typically place the shift from an elite patronage model to a new literary marketplace. Dryden’s experience shows how an early commercial venture evolved organically into a relationship that neither figure would have recognized as traditional patronage but that allowed Dryden comparable support. This empow- ered him to lead a group of writers to refine the English language through translation, appropriation, and adaptation and to promote the creation of a native English canon. 3. Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 297, n. 2; James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), I: 287–88. 4. Griffin,Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800, 10. 5. Deborah C. Payne, “Patronage and the Dramatic Marketplace under Charles I and II,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991), 139. Lumen 36.final.indd 96 2016-10-18 11:48 AM Tonson and Dryden’s Linguistic Project 1 97 Historically, scholars have considered the young Jacob Tonson’s acquisition of Dryden’s writings as a coup for the bookseller.6 Tonson’s editions of Dryden’s translations began a lucrative series that continued for years after Dryden’s death. Moreover, they established Tonson as Dryden’s personal bookseller during a period when, as Johnson later remarked, Dryden’s reputation “was such that his name was thought necessary to the success” of every literary work and “he was engaged to contribute something,” to almost every publication.7 At the same time, as Bernard demonstrates, during the 1670s Dryden’s previous bookseller, Herringman, stopped publishing new books, and Dryden needed a new bookseller.8 His relationship with Tonson enabled Dryden to finally act on a desire which he had put off for years. Beginning with the 1680 edition of Ovid’s Epistles by several hands and continuing in the loose verse Miscellanies of 1684, author and book- seller collaborated in a project that was to link their names together as authors, editors, and compilers, and which offers an early example of the bookseller as patron. Many scholars talk of Pope as the populariser of subscription pub- lishing, a slightly more egalitarian form of authorship,9 but, in fact, Dryden was one of the first authors to take up a monetary relationship with his bookseller. Dryden was the first of his calibre and prestige to publish on an equal footing with a bookseller and without the support of a patron. His Virgil, which even before its publication created a stir in England and on the continent, has been a focal point for studies of the transition between a patronage-based economy and a new, more broadly-based establishment where cultural capital was supported by and transformed into a cash-producing market.10 Of course, as Pat 6. Kathleen Lynch, Jacob Tonson: Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 17–34. 7. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), I: 372. 8. Stephen Bernard, “Henry Herringman, Jacob Tonson, and John Dryden: the Creation of the First Modern Publisher,” Notes & Queries 62. 2 (2015), 275. 9. Pat Rogers, “Pope and his Subscribers,” Publishing History 3 (1978): 7–36; Terry Belanger, “Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 21; W.A. Speck, “Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription 1700–1750,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 48. 10. John Barnard, “Early Expectations of Dryden’s Translation of Virgil (1697) in England and on the Continent,” Review of English Studies 50 (1999), 196–203; Lumen 36.final.indd 97 2016-10-18 11:48 AM 98 1 Catherine Fleming Rogers discusses, subscription publishing is also a form of patronage, and John Barnard shows how this patronage worked in relation to Dryden’s Virgil,11 but the expansion of the patrons of a work from a single aristocrat or a small group to a wider circle was part of a larger movement which took patronage out of the hands of the aristocracy. After the Glorious Revolution, Dryden was forced to rely on Tonson as an intermediary who could supply him with the income he had formerly enjoyed from the court.12 In doing so, he publicly created an altered patronage market in which the middling classes of society could participate. Even before the Glorious Revolution, however, when Dryden was not so reliant on Tonson as a source of income, Tonson’s support and shrewd analyses of the literary market allowed Dryden to write and circulate many of his pet theories. Although Dryden contin- ued to receive support from patrons throughout his life, Dustin Griffin shows how Dryden’s dedications demonstrate increasing autonomy during the later years of his life.13 Tonson’s interest in translation and occasional poetry as a money-making venture allowed Dryden the opportunity to put into practice the first steps of a project that he had long supported but for which he was unable to find an aristocratic patron, although he had been working to promote his linguistic project since the early 1660s.
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