Lydia Bailey: A Checklist of Her Imprints

Setting the Stage

Lydia Bailey Mistress of Her Situation Setting the Stage The career of the printer Lydia R. Bailey spans the better part of the nineteenth century, a period when the printing trade was undergoing major changes. The extant material documenting her work includes almost a thousand imprints, seven manuscript workbooks, and miscellaneous contemporary printed and manuscript accounts. This combination of materials permits a scrutiny not usually afforded by contemporary sources and opens a window onto the economic, social, and individual experiences of this long-lived and quite successful printer. In some ways, her experiences reflect those of other letterpress printers who preceded her. In other ways, they teach us more about how an individual young widow broke new ground, prospering as the proprietor of one of the busiest printing establishments in Philadelphia during the first half of the nineteenth century.1 By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the American printing trade was dominated by small, tightly knit networks of craftsmen and entrepreneurs located primarily in urban environments, whose services and influence reached into surrounding regional communities.2 The trade followed traditional European models, in which individuals were often responsible for a multitude of the activities associated with the manufacture and distribution of books. Entrance into the trade was either through the apprenticeship system or through family. Printing offices were fairly small businesses run by families employing a handful of workers and apprentices, many of whom were relatives or personal acquaintances living on or near the premises. These businesses commonly combined letterpress printing with the wholesale distribution of books. Frequently closely allied were such related activities as copperplate printing, papermaking, typefounding, binding, newspaper publishing, retailing, and the selling of stationery and other dry goods. Although not every printing firm carried on all aspects of production, often close kin specialized in various branches of the trade, coordinating their efforts with one another. Operations rarely exceeded more than a dozen workers and two or three presses.3 2 D lydia bailey Lydia Bailey’s heritage was typical for a woman entering the printing trade, to whom the formal apprentice route was generally not available and whose involvement in the marketplace relied on learning the trade at home and through family connections.4 She was born Lydia Steele on February 1, 1779, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (see fig. 1).5 Her father, William Steele (1750/1751–1822), was the son of a respected gentleman landowner in Lancaster County of Scotch-Irish descent, also named William Steele (1707–1780). The senior William Steele was married to Rachel Carr “of Maryland” (1726–1798), who came from a prominent printing family active in Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia.6 He and all his sons distinguished themselves in the military (most of them in the American War of Independence, some in the War of 1812) and, as a result, assumed prominent roles in the social communities of Lancaster and Philadelphia. One of his sons, John Steele (1753–1827), who had attained the rank of general and had served directly under Washington in the Revolutionary War (at one point acting as personal bodyguard to Mrs. Washington ), began operating a small printing shop in Philadelphia in 1783. In 1788 he established a paper mill on Octoraro Creek on the border of Lancaster and Chester Counties; this mill flourished until 1844 under the proprietorship of John and another brother, James, who also did a small amount of printing in the 1790s in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.7 The junior William Steele was a local prothonotary (clerk of the courts) and justice of the peace and had a partial interest in his brothers’ businesses. What little evidence he has left behind (some war letters to his wife and his will) suggests that he and his family led a comfortable, if not lavish, life.8 Lydia Bailey’s mother, Elizabeth Steele, was herself born a Bailey. The Baileys were both neighbors and business associates of the Steeles. Lydia Bailey’s maternal grandfather , Robert Bailey Sr. (1708–1798), like the senior William Steele, had amassed a large estate in Lancaster County by the mid-eighteenth century (more than 230 acres); he also owned a country estate in Octoraro Valley. He had six children : Jacob, Francis, Lydia, Abigail, Jane, and Elizabeth.9 Both sons grew up to be successful revolutionary-era printers, and the daughters reportedly learned the craft by their sides. According to one apocryphal story, “Before her marriage [Abigail] lived with her brother in Lancaster, Francis Bailey. . . . She often sat in...