The dog ate my homework

Found while reading Blair Worden’s The Rump Parliament: the excuse of Sir Peter Wentworth, MP in the Long Parliament, for leaving London before Charles I’s execution and not returning until April 1649:

Honourable Sir, I must make my excuse to my master when I have played the truant: truly, sir, provision for my health was the occasion of my retiring into the country, I not being able to endure a whole winter siege in London, without a retreat to prevent many distempers which grow upon me for want of air and exercise : yet I intended but a short abode here, from whence I have not stirred at all; for it hath pleased God that sprains and bruises, by falls and other mischances, (one succeeding another,) have disabled me from pulling on a boot near these six weeks.

Very convenient…

1. Blair Worden,The Rump Parliament (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1974), p. 34.

2. Letter from Sir Peter Wentworth to William Lenthall, Speaker of the Commons, 24 February 1649. Quoted in Henry Cary, Memorials of the Great Civil War in England from 1646 to 1652 (1842), p. 123.

London panorama

A couple of years ago I went to the Museum of London and bought a couple of prints in the giftshop there, which between them show the panorama above of early modern London. The prints then promptly sat in a cupboard for two years until I recently got round to framing them. Below is a detail of London Bridge from the engraving - you’ll see that it is teeming with life and detail.

Since putting them up on my wall I’ve done some digging about the picture’s background, and actually it is not everything it seems. It is by the Dutch publisher Claes Jansz Visscher, the first in a printing dynasty that spanned three generations and which specialised in maps and other similar prints. The Guildhall Library has a copy dated 1616, and the Folger has a later variant from 1625.

Visscher’s panorama was long seen as an excellent source for reconstructing early seventeenth-century London, particularly the theatres on the Bankside. In the 1920s, E.K. Chambers used its depiction of the Globe to argue that it would have been octagonal. He was followed by John Cranford Adams in his book on the Globe of the early 1940s.

But later in the same decade, I.A. Shapiro demonstrated that Visscher’s engraving of the north bank was derived from Norden’s Civitas Londoni - one label gives "St Dunston in the cast", which has been copied from Norden’s print where the c’s are hard to distinguish from the e’s. The south bank is full of inaccuracies, and in fact there is no evidence that Visscher even worked in London. As a result, the picture cannot be relied upon. (My summary of this is drawn from a helpful history of Globe reconstructions by Gabriel Egan ).

So it seems that the Museum of London giftshop sold me an inaccurate picture of London… it does look good on my sitting room wall, though!

1. E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923) .

2. John Cranford Adams, The Globe Playhouse: Its Design and Equipment (1942) .

3. I.A. Shapiro, ‘The Bankside theatres: early engravings’, Shakespeare Survey I (1947) .

4. Gabriel Egan, ‘Reconstructions of the Globe: a retrospective’, Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999) .

A long time ago, in an archive far, far away…

A Photoshop contest at Worth1000 to mix Star Wars with fine art has produced a few really good early modern examples…

Via Boing Boing.

John Taylor and Henry Walker, part 5: conclusion

In my previous post I looked at the publishers behind Taylor’s pamphlets - Francis Coules, Thomas Banks and Thomas Bates. I ended by posing a question about the extent to which they had a role in engineering or prolonging Taylor’s battle with Walker.

We can find the answer to this by exploring the publishers’ backgrounds. Earlier in his career, Coules had been a junior member of a partnership of booksellers who had gradually bought up the copyright to popular broadside ballads.

As these ballad partners consolidated ballad copyrights, they also developed their strategy for marketing them. During the sixteenth century, woodcut illustration was unusual: only one fifth of surviving ballads were illustrated. The ballad partners and their contemporaries began to reverse this trend: five sixths of surviving ballads from 1600-1640 were illustrated, with much more effort made to match the picture to the content. At around the same time, the ballad partners also developed a specialist trade in small editions of books other than broadside ballads. Through his association with the ballad partners, Coules would have been well acquainted with the need to develop and maintain new markets for cheap print, and with the tactics for doing so.

The role of the partners in Taylor and Walker’s dispute needs to be seen in this context. The spring of 1641 saw a significant rise in the number of books being printed. Thereafter, pamphlets branched out into a wide range of literary styles and genres. With the declining influence of the Stationers’ Company, which regulated printing, publishers were now able to meet and drive popular demand for printed books. For Taylor’s publishers, illustrated satires were one lucrative route of increasing the market for their wares. As an extension of the illustrated ballad, they would have been a relatively risk-free means of doing so. Encouraging a literary dispute would also have been an attractive way of boosting sales. So it seems possible that Bates, Coules and Banks might just have had a hand in the dispute - perhaps helping to craft a pamphlet war that could appeal to a wide range of readers and give them high sales.

What I hope I’ve shown is that Taylor and Walker’s dispute cannot be fully understood without a detailed contextualisation of every player involved in it. Pamphlet publishing strategies in the early 1640s were nuanced and complex. Authors, publishers and readers were capable of producing and reading texts in complicated and subtle ways, on a number of levels. Pamphlets existed as part of a network of authors, printers, sellers and readers. Their form and content was shaped by the creative tensions between these groups. Analysis of the two authors’ texts has revealed the extent to which they cross-refer to each other, to past works by Taylor, and to other literary disputes and genres. A geographical and contextual analysis of Taylor’s publishers has revealed a more consensual but also a more commercial side to the dispute. Walker as well as Taylor had professional and social links to booksellers specialising in cheap print. And behind the literary experimentation of both authors lay decidedly financial concerns for the booksellers. Looking at the readership also shows that it’s misguided either to dismiss the dispute as a crude scatological spat, or to react the other way and stress its sophistication.

John Taylor and Henry Walker, part 4: publishers

So far I have looked at authors, texts and readers involved in John Taylor and Henry Walker’s pamphlet war. In this post I will look at publishers.

Walker’s texts were self-published. We know that in 1641, as well as working as an ironmonger Walker was moonlighting by running a book shop in Gracechurch Street.

Taylor’s pamphlets seem to have been published by a partnership of three booksellers called Thomas Banks, Francis Coules and Thomas Bates. All three were based in the Old Bailey, where they collaborated on a variety of cheap forms of print including ballads, short satirical pieces accompanied by woodcuts, and from 1642, newsbooks.

Bates and his fellow cheap pamphlet  partners did not publish according to strict ideological guidelines. They were happy to publish Taylor’s satires of puritan sects alongside sermons clearly pitched at an Independent audience. In fact, Bates and Banks also published at least one of Walker’s works: a fake petition from the inhabitants of Chester. Earlier in 1641, Walker and Bates had been two of the printers and booksellers hauled in front of the House of Lords for illegal printing. They were both part of a network of publishers flirting with illegal printing during the late 1630s and early 1640s.

So, for the publishers of Taylor’s side of the exchange, then, the pamphlet war was by no means a pitched battle between implacable opponents. Both Taylor and Walker would have been well-known to the three publishers.

And in fact Taylor and Walker themselves would probably also have been well-known to each other. Walker’s recycling of material from Taylor’s earlier poems shows a deep knowledge of Taylor’s writing, and his pamphlets also show knowledge about intimate gossip from Taylor’s private life. Taylor, meanwhile, went on to write an eight page pamphlet about Walker’s life history in 1642, which contained such a high level of detail that it suggests he was well-acquainted with Walker’s career. Like their flyting predecessors the Scottish poets Montgomerie and Hume, both of whom were court poets and well-known to each other, Taylor and Walker may have been closer than is supposed.

So, behind what appeared to be a ferocious pamphlet war, booksellers and authors were linked by mutual networks of sociability and profession. Political and religious ideologies were not the only filter through which relationships and ideas formed within the world of 1640s print culture. Commercial and social networks could be just as important, and could cut across more ideological connections.

If we look at the geography of the dispute, it confirms this impression.

Yellow = Old Bailey: shops of Francis Coules, Thomas Banks and Thomas Bates

Blue = Newgate Market: location where Henry Walker served apprenticeship

Green = Gracechurch Street: site of Walker’s bookshop

Red = St. Saviour’s parish, Southwark: home of John Taylor

Map adapted from Wenceslaus Hollar, Westminster and London (c.1658), British Museum, Pennington 1000.II,  AN48017001. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Unlike most booksellers, the partners were all based outside the City walls in the Old Bailey, in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Stationers’ Company. Taylor lived across the river in Southwark, but to judge from the volume of his pamphlets published by the partners, he was clearly a frequent visitor to the Old Bailey. Walker, too, had close geographical links to the partners. Although his own bookshop lay to the east of the Old Bailey in Gracechurch Street, before going into the book trade he had been an apprentice to an ironmonger in Newgate market. This was just round the corner from the Old Bailey, and it is likely that the book shops there would have been well known to Walker. In 1641, Walker himself printed a transcript of a theological debate he had with a Jesuit in Bates’s shop at the Old Bailey.

In addition to demonstrating links between Walker and the cheap pamphlet partners, this incident also shows that their bookshops were not just centres of commerce. They were also centres of communication. The title pages of pamphlets illustrated with woodcuts would have been on display to attract customers. Once there, they would also have been able to listen to or participate in other forms of communication. Walker’s debate with the Jesuit was one such form. Another was sermons: the partners’ shops were all in the parish of St Sepulchre, a parish with a long tradition of radical lecturers.

For authors and readers, such bookshops were an important centre for participation in the public sphere. For booksellers, on the other hand, creating such a public, politicised space would have had obvious commercial benefits in terms of attracting custom.

In my final post I will look at whether Bates, Coules and Banks might have had an interest in engineering or prolonging the dispute between Taylor and Walker.