George Parker, Defoe, and the Whitefriars Trade: A 'Lost' Edition of A Tour thro' Great Britain
An odd silence has been maintained in the case of Curious and Diverting Journies, thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain (1734). This constituted the second printing of Daniel Defoe's Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, which had appeared between 1724 and 1726 (the third volume misdated 1727), and which remains the most cited contemporary survey of Britain in the early Hanoverian age. Before the appearance of the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, the Journies had slipped below the scholarly radar. No checklist cited this title until P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens allotted the item half a sentence in an entry for the Tour when they compiled their Critical Bibliography of Defoe in 2000.1 Equally, no editor has ever taken account of it; and no commentator on the later history of the Tour makes any allusion. Varied reasons may account for this omission — not least, in the case of the present writer, sheer ignorance. We could seek out more respectable explanations: the fact that the work was printed and first issued in parts, almost certainly within the pages of a cheap London newspaper, and the consideration that it survives in very few copies. To be precise, ESTC (T198850) lists only two surviving examples: both are cited as full runs, one at the Bodleian Library and the other at the National Library of Scotland. No incomplete runs have been reported elsewhere, and these two copies represent the solitary specimens of the work, in bound or unbound form, which have come to light anywhere.
Some importance attaches to the presumed publisher of the volume, George Parker; his position within the London book trade; and the milieu in which he operated, especially as this pertains to the corner of the industry dominated by printers in Whitefriars. These are the first issues I shall address. After that, the article will focus chiefly on the Bodleian copy, which holds a dual claim on the attention of bibliographers. In addition to the intrinsic interest of this rare volume, it has a noteworthy provenance, relating in part to one of the last acquaintances made by Samuel Johnson. A [End Page 33] concluding discussion will briefly relate some of these issues to Defoe's career in the literary marketplace. Finally an Appendix provides details of some of George Parker's other business activities.
I
Curious and Diverting Journies (henceforward C&DJ) appeared midway between the first and second editions of the Tour. The former edition was brought out by a group of London booksellers, made up of George Strahan, William Mears, Richard Francklin, Samuel Chapman, Richard Stagg, and John Graves; while the latter was edited and published in 1738 by Samuel Richardson. C&DJ followed three years after its author's death in 1731, and here we may locate a third reason for the silence that has prevailed. Self-evidently, Defoe had nothing to do with the new printing, and so C&DJ can claim no textual authority. Its minor departures from the first edition, to be described shortly, have their origin in an obvious desire to keep the work within manageable bounds, rather than to improve its readings from a literary or bibliographical point of view. Richardson would, naturally enough, ignore these changes when he came to edit the Tour four years later. A further circumstance crucial to establishing a textual history is that the publisher named had no connection with the booksellers who brought out the original version of the book — although he was almost certainly a close neighbour of Richardson.
The title-page of C&DJ states that the work is 'Printed and Sold by G. Parker, at the Star in Salisbury-Court, Fleet-street'. Among all the numerous individuals bearing this surname, only one member of the...
