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Emil Rybczak: Selling Drama in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Johnson, Branding and Canonising from the Margins

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Emil Rybczak: Selling Drama in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Johnson, Branding and Canonising from the Margins Emil Rybczak: Selling Drama in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Johnson, Branding and Canonising from the Margins. 7: Imitating a Pirate Thomas Johnson’s branding strategies had far reaching consequences across the eighteenth century. These are manifest in both the material form that printed drama was to take, and the plays that publishers made central to their canons. This chapter extract discusses the influence that Johnson’s publications had in two instances. These should be taken as both indicative of the quality of his brand, and the capacity of peripheral publishers to influence those at the centre in the form and content of their publications. We first consider an extraordinary episode concerning Jacob Tonson’s (1665/6-1736) 1714 Works of Shakespeare.1 This reveals the influence of Johnson’s product on a publisher who is frequently characterised as the father of the English canon. We also explore the connection between the plays published by Johnson and those issued by George Risk of Dublin (c.1700-1762) circa 1725-26. Although there is not space in this extract, in the full chapter we then move forward to the publications of Thomas Lowndes (1719-1784), mainly of the 1770s, to witness the enduring significance of Johnson in the presentation of London publications. This encompasses Lowndes’ novels and his collaborative dramatic series. Finally, in the full discussion, we also address the influence of Johnson’s brand in the work of Robert and James Dodsley (1704-1764; 1724-1797), specifically their Annual Register, which was issued from the 1750s into the nineteenth century.2 The link between these publishers is their appropriation of Johnson’s distinctive TJ monogram. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change Elizabeth Eisenstein suggests that the devices of the earliest printers could have ‘special occult meanings’ known only to the initiated.3 Although many publishers have made use of monograms, few have done so in so consistent and complex a manner as Johnson, nor indeed with such seemingly talismanic attraction. However, this most overt and identifiable form of evidence 1 William Shakespeare, The Works of Mr. William Shakespear (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1714). Two variants bear the imprint (London: Printed for J. Tonson: and are to be sold by J. Knapton and D. Midwinter, A. Betsworth [sic], W. Taylor, T. Varnam and J. Osborn, and J. Browne, 1714) and (London: printed for J. Tonson, E. Curll, J. Pemberton, and K. Sanger: and are to be sold by J. Knapton and D. Midwinter, A. Betsworth [sic], W. Taylor, T. Varnam and J. Osborn, and J. Browne, 1714). 2 Various imprints. First issue Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politicks, and Literature, of the Year 1758 (London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1759). 3 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge; New York: CUP, 1980), p. 280. 1 should elucidate rather than obscure the many other means by which Johnson affected the mainstream canonical tradition. His influences include the use of a pocket format, most especially octavo but also duodecimo, clean and understated title pages, editorial interventions combined with a limited textual apparatus, and the very idea of a play series by a variety of authors unified under a distinctive title or house style.4 If we step back from details of format to make the more general (but not uncontroversial) assessment that texts as consequential agents only exist in the context of their material reproduction, we can begin to see the more far-reaching influence Johnson and his piratical brethren have had on the national psyche. The flyleaf blurb to Harry M. Solomon’s The Rise of Robert Dodsley suggests his is the first biography of an individual bookseller to integrate the ideas of Eisenstein concerning the print phenomenon as a powerful factor in historical change.5 Solomon’s work is a comprehensive biography and suggests the active part that Dodsley played in the literary world. However, the author does not follow Eisenstein in drawing out the more far-reaching social consequences of the publisher’s activities. Solomon demonstrates that Dodsley’s career stands at the intersection of Augustan and Romantic literature, but does not address how the shift from one literary epoch to another might have come about.6 This is because the biographically oriented author is necessarily focussed on the work of an individual and not the cultural tendencies of which his business practices were a consequence. Unless we recognise how what people read influences their ideas and actions, it is easy to read the details and not the implications. Solomon claims ‘Most earlier booksellers [than Dodsley] were un- learned tradesmen, and the profession was not afforded much prestige, nor did it exercise great influence.’7 This statement is disproved by the specific debts that the Dodsleys owed to Johnson. Furthermore, such a statement does not fit well with a characterisation of Solomon’s book as integrating the work of Eisenstein. In her book the author demonstrates the extraordinary ingenuity of printers, most frequently also booksellers, from the beginnings of the trade, and suggests the significant influence their work had on shaping European history. Eisenstein also emphasises the special 4 This final point is repeatedly stressed by Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume in The Publication of Plays in London 1660-1800 (London: The British Library, 2015), esp. pp. 245-48. 5 Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). 6 Solomon, Robert Dodsley, p. 264. 7 Solomon, Robert Dodsley, p. 51. 2 position of printer-booksellers as marrying the roles of artisan, businessman and scholar.8 Dodsley was part of this tradition but he did not create it. Solomon suggests that Dodsley used innovative techniques and so was influential in what and how the public read. The consequence of this is that he affected what canon was formed and how people would encounter it. The idea of literature that Dodsley perpetuated continues to shape the cultural standard by which we measure ourselves and our perception of the world. With his focus on an individual publisher Solomon is forced to leave unanswered where Dodsley’s innovations came from. I maintain that they were inspired by and tapped into a market created by the actions of earlier publishers, specifically Johnson, whose own innovations were the consequence of socio-economic pressures felt on account of his geographical and English-cultural marginality. I frequently refer to such men as peripheral, in light of their own and contemporary estimation. However, Johnson and his counterparts in areas of English-language publishing outside London were actually central to the long-term formation of a national canon and British cultural identity. This thesis builds on the work of Eisenstein in interrogating the agency of an individual printer-bookseller, but I supplement her ideas with a model of cultural influence which could not exist in the earlier period of printing with which she is concerned. As an emergent industry, printing was conducted in a wide constellation of areas which makes meaningless any divisions between dominant centre and emergent periphery. In Britain at least the significance of the capital did not emerge until the Stationer’s Company was recognised by royal charter in 1557. The full implications of the copyright system for discouraging innovation did not become apparent until the Statute of Anne in 1710, 8 Ann. c. 21. The following chapter shows some of the specific debts which are owned to Johnson, whose work began in earnest around this time. It suggests a centripetal model of cultural development that invites further testing and development in analysis of the practice and productions of other peripheral publishers across the eighteenth century. 8 Eisenstein, Printing Press, p. 248, 521 and passim. 3 Tonson, Curll and Darby In 1709 Jacob Tonson issued the first eighteenth-century Works of Shakespeare.9 His poems were not included in this edition since Tonson held the copyrights for the plays only. This created the opportunity for Edmund Curll (1674/5-1747) to publish a supplementary volume that contained these, with ‘Critical Remarks’ and an ‘Essay’ by Charles Gildon (c.1665-1724).10 This volume was designed to augment the Tonson series, and was therefore published in the same octavo format. Curll’s title page, like Tonson’s, bears no emblem whatsoever. However, Curll did not copy all aspects of Tonson’s design (see fig.s 1 and 2).11 The imprints of these publications clearly display their variant origins. Likewise the Tonson volumes contain engraved frontispieces that were not duplicated in the Curll volume. Curll would seem to have been incorporated more fully in Tonson’s 1714 reissue of the Works. Curll seems to have held the proprietary rights to Shakespeare’s poems, and the success of his 1710 publication suggests that the public expected their inclusion in a complete Works. Many readers bound Curll’s volume uniformly with those of Tonson, as Curll had hoped.12 There exist three states of Tonson’s collection title page for this second edition.13 The first version states that the Works comes in eight volumes, and bears Tonson’s name only. The second again claims eight volumes with the name of Tonson, and adds various booksellers from whom the plays might be purchased. The third state is titled as consisting of nine volumes, and Curll and his associates are added to the list of Tonson’s collaborators. Collections sold by Tonson containing the plays only would bear the first of these title pages, and those by his associates the second. He clearly wished to minimise the number of copies that associated him and his star author with a publisher with whom he thought he had little 9 William Shakespeare, The Works of Mr.
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