Malignant Reading: John Squier's Newgate Prison Library, 1642-46

The controversies of the English Civil War are preserved in the profusion of printed material that it created. Support for Milton's idealizing image of people, particularly in London, 'wholly tak'n up with the study of the highest and most important matters to be reform'd', is provided more or less comprehensively in George Thomason's collection of tracts.¹ But while this material exists, indications of how it was read are rare, and few contemporary pamphlet collections survive to be studied.² One such collection, which never could have been very extensive, has partly survived, and the major portion of it was assembled in only four years, from 1642 to 1646. Its scope falls almost completely within the coverage of Thomason's book buying, in those years at its most comprehensive, yet its character is revealed as much by its narrow range as by its extent. Of its remaining 150 items over sixty per cent are signed and exactly dated. Above all, what makes the collection exceptional is that many show in vigorous marginalia the reader's vehement engagement with contemporary controversies.

The collection survives within the much larger library bequeathed to Eton College by Edward Waddington (c. 1670–1732), Bishop of Chichester and Fellow of the College, the first new collection in the recently built College Library.³ Strong in theology and particularly in tracts of the previous halfcentury, the bequest contained nearly five thousand pamphlets and had previously been housed in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, and at the bishop's palace at Chichester.⁴ Such an established provenance conceals the fact that almost all the items under consideration here had been assembled and read while their original owner, John Squier (c. 1587–1653), was in Newgate Prison.⁵

What remains of Squier's prison collection of quarto pamphlets and broadsides is now largely bound up in eight of Waddington's volumes.⁶ One of these has an original binding, and is designated 'Vol:10' by Squier on the first leaf.⁷ It contains twenty separate pamphlets and 1,080 pages. Another contemporary binding contains eighteen pamphlets corresponding to his handwritten index of 'Pamphlets in this'.⁸ Both are paginated on odd pages by Squier. The contents of the two volumes are arranged in no clear order, although dates of publication in each cover about two years. A third volume is almost complete, perhaps lacking only the first thirty-six of 1,118 pages, but it has been rebound, most probably for Waddington, when it was so severely trimmed that many of its marginalia have been ruined. Apart from these, substantial parts of another five of Squier's original volumes can be established by linking his characteristic if erratic manuscript pagination with dates of reading or publication. Some groups post-date the material in 'Vol:10' to suggest that his prison library contained at least a dozen quarto volumes, and perhaps 260 pamphlets overall, while a few other items can be determined by his marginal references.

The majority of Squier's pamphlets carry his signature with mottoes in Greek and English and a date. This uniform inscription always appears on the final page, which suggests, even when marginalia are lacking, that he had read the foregoing material. Changes of ink in his marginal notes suggest that some texts were read more than once, and cross-references to his own pagination show that he was also using the pamphlets in their bound form. With the exception of Sir George Paule's Life of Whitgift (1612), all Squier's pamphlets are contemporary, although there can be little doubt that he had possessed a library before 1641, which no longer survives. The reappearance of a further pamphlet and, recently, a whole volume from his library (now at the Houghton Library) may mean that not all is lost.⁹

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John...