The Chronicles of John Cannon, Excise Officer and Writing Master, Part 1: 1684–1733 (Somerset, Oxfordshire, Berkshire) ed. by John Money (review)

John Cannon described his own career thus: “from a schoolboy I became a plow-boy, and from a plowboy an Exciseman from an Exciseman a Maltster and from a Maltster to an almost nothing except a Schoolmaster, so that I might be called the tennis ball of fortune.” This was not exactly the trajectory of the “flaxen headed cowboy” who rose to be a great man “lolling in my chariot”; nevertheless it is another eighteenth-century tale of improvement on humble beginnings, albeit one ending in a fall. When he had recovered from it, he wrote what he called his “Chronicles or Annals or Memoirs of the birth education life and death [sic] of Mr. John Cannon.” These, amounting to an estimated 600,000 words, were ultimately entered in a folio volume now in the care of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society. Mr. Money has judiciously pruned it to less than half its length, summarizing rather than suppressing passages not printed verbatim, so that this edition of it runs to two volumes. They have been published to stand on their own as separate items.

Invaluable as a source for the social and economic history of England in the eighteenth century, the Memoirs record the interests of an individual in that century and not those of readers in the twenty-first. It needed an editor sensitive to both to interpret them. Mr. Money’s Introduction is a superb analysis of the significance of Cannon’s experiences and observations by a first-rate historian. Biographies of twenty-nine individuals are appended to both volumes, while many others are identified in footnotes throughout each.

The Introduction to the first part outlines Cannon’s biography, detailing his career as excise man, parish and town accountant, and schoolmaster, and the importance of religion to his life. Cannon’s drawing up deeds, leases, and wills, and also writing letters illustrates Susan Whyman’s thesis that letter writing extended much further down the eighteenth-century social scale than was thought (The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–2011). Cannon spent a substantial portion of his income on books, to the point of becoming short of cash and obliged to borrow to eke out a living. Mr. Money provides an analysis of the books he acquired, many of them histories. His editorial decision to summarize passages in the Chronicles, however, does raise questions about his criteria for selection. For instance, he makes a tantalizing reference to “a punning Lilliputian epigram on Benjamin Keane,” but fails to provide it. Cannon represented a significant element in the eighteenth-century reading public: the autodidact with a voracious, if eclectic appetite for literature.

Most of the passages that describe Cannon’s political views seem to have been selected for summary. Admittedly, the text was chosen for publication because of its significance for social and economic history, and Mr. Money discusses the political context of Cannon’s text in the Introduction. As a political historian, however, I lament that an opportunity was lost to document fully the political outlook of a relatively humble individual. Cannon clearly had strong views about politics. He seems to have been a High Church Tory in Queen Anne’s reign and came to be suspected of Jacobitism and even Catholicism under her successors. During the reign of George II he shared the attitude of the Patriot opposition, despising Walpole and extolling Frederick Prince of Wales. One of his heroes was Sir William Wyndham, and his entry on his funeral in June 1740 is apparently fully transcribed. But most of Cannon’s political convictions have to be deduced from summaries. For instance his “full page, double column obituary and eulogy of Sir William Wyndham as Hanoverian Patriot Tory” is thus summarized, though Cannon’s epitaph on him, six lines of doggerel...