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  • Postscript: "Tonson's Remains":The Earliest Letters of Jacob Tonson the Elder
  • Stephen Bernard

Introduction

Of the one hundred and twenty or so letters and documents that survive in the hand of Jacob Tonson the elder, the preeminent London bookseller in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, the first three are perhaps the most unusual. Written to an unspecified recipient and to Narcissus Luttrell in 1680, they are three newsletters, a form to which, if Tonson ever returned, none other has survived, although one other letter to Luttrell, also of 1680, but otherwise undated, survives, in which Tonson promises that after a journey out of the metropolis, "I shall be full fraught wth new newes & you shall bee sure of the first."1 Written on four folio sheets, the newsletters are to be found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and among the Luttrell Papers held in the Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford. The latter are part of the collection that formed the basis for Luttrell's Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs (1678-1714), which was published first in 1857, and most recently in 1969.2

The content, if baldly set out in the first newsletter, becomes in the second and third letters rather sensational, as becomes a newsletter, and [End Page 188] touches on (among other things) the aftermath of the political storm and legal travesty known as the Popish Plot (1678-80). This is a subject on which we know Luttrell dwelt for a considerable time, being a keen collector of Popish Plot ephemera, which, some might argue, constituted a considerable part of the plot itself.3 Perhaps for this reason they are alone to have been preserved of Tonson's letters among Luttrell's papers, but this we simply cannot know. What we do know is that Tonson is not thought to have published of any of the tracts on the Popish Plot that Luttrell was so keen to collect, although he was the publisher the following year of John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Luttrell's copy of which is marked "Ex dono Amici Jacobi Tonson," indicating the degree of acquaintance that existed between them.4 These letters are important in that they reveal what Tonson, who was later to become an arch-Whig of the early eighteenth century, thought worthy of comment towards the end of the Exclusion Crisis (1678-81), the period in which the binary English political parties of Whig and Tory were to emerge. The connection with John Starkey, and, through him, the Whig Green Ribbon Club, revealed in the first of the letters is of particular importance, given Tonson's role as founder and secretary of the Whig Kit Kat Club in the late 1690s.5

These newsletters were not designed for direct commercial gain and were written at a time when there was nothing more sensational coming from Tonson's press than Alexander Radcliffe's rather pedestrian Ovid Travestie, a Burlesque upon Several of Ovid's Epistles (1680), a defense of Dryden's edition of Ovid's Epistles (1680), which Tonson had published earlier in that same year.6 Such a contrast of what we might expect and what we find among Tonson's remains suggests no small disproportion between the public and the private aspects of the bookseller; there is, these three brief letters suggest, much about Tonson's early life and career that we simply do not know.

We do not know, for example, who Tonson's writing-master had been: his hand is rather old-fashioned for a twenty-four-year-old writer in the late seventeenth century and, typically, he writes a little "Scurvily," for example, failing to cross his t's.7 Additionally, Tonson would seem to have been working from notes: in the third newsletter, he anticipates the destination of "Tangier" when writing "Portsmouth," a small clue that he may have been copying his newsletter from notes or from an original, that is, perhaps furnishing more than one correspondent with his newsletter, or that he at least took some if not thorough care in sending out to the provinces news [End Page 189] from the...

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