Lines Per Page, Engravings, and Catchwords in Milton’s 1720 Poetical Works

John Milton’s Poetical Works published by Jacob Tonson II in 1720 is an important edition, not the least because Richard Bentley, “the greatest ever English classical scholar,”¹ adopted it as the working copy for his “notorious”² 1732 edition of Paradise Lost. This lavish pair of large quarto volumes (with main sections of 590 and 527 pages respectively) included many engraved tailpieces, which placed special demands on the compositors. By analyzing material traces seldom examined—such as lines of text per page—we can infer with reasonable certainty how they operated. Along the way we may provide a rationale for some of the catchword errors³ by connecting these inconsistencies with the printing and publishing of the book, especially illustration.

The Tonsons were well known for publishing deluxe books. William Thomas Lowndes, an eminent bibliographer of the early nineteenth century, defined Caesar’s Commentaries brought out by Jacob Tonson I in 1712 as “the most sumptuous classical work which England has produced.”⁴ The 1720 Milton is typically adorned with rich illustrations. Engraved vignettes open and conclude each of the books of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and the tragedy Samson Agonistes, finely framing the grand poems in pictorial art. Additionally, the first item in Poems, Lycidas, has a special headpiece. These thirty-five vignettes, plus eighteen historiated initials, help produce what Marcia R. Pointon calls “a splendid and expensive edition rather in the manner of the Venetian illustrated book of the period.”⁵ R. G. Moyles, another modern scholar, confirms it as “impressively beautiful … a much-coveted book.”⁶ Pointon compares Louis Chéron, the illustrator responsible for most of the decorations in the edition, unfavorably with John Baptist Medina, another early illustrator of Milton, but still admits that “Chéron’s illustrations are nearly always more skillfully composed than Medina’s and [that] the tailpieces and historiated initials make for a much richer general effect.”⁷ The list of 334 subscribers in volume 1 indicates that the costly book was eagerly sought after by aristocratic and elite readers (dukes, duchesses, earls, lords, sirs, esquires, doctors, ladies, and the like).⁸

Clearly Tonson strived to meet the aesthetic demands of his prominent customers. The paper used (printing medium, 585 x 455 mm) makes a large and handsome object, and the 22-line page adds much elegance. Our count of lines of poetic text on a typical full page excludes the headline and the direction-line. The standard number of lines is 22, with occasional variations of 21 or 23. When a 23rd line occurs it crowds the page and sometimes includes both part of the text and a catchword. But this additional line occurs only in less important works—in Addison’s Notes in volume 1, and in Poems in volume 2, beginning toward the end of A Mask.⁹ All the major poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and Lycidas, which are pictorially ornamented, contain no crowded pages. The different typographical treatment of the minor works and the major poems is dictated by, and also registers, the hierarchical status of the two categories of text. The publisher’s typographical intervention participates imperceptibly yet actively in the reception of the author and the construction of textual meaning.

The 21-line pages occur in the major works, as table 1 shows.

These typographical irregularities can be explained by aesthetic necessities. The plate mark of the vignette at the end of a book usually occupies a space of ten lines or more. Thus we find some pages toward the end of a book or poem composed in 21 lines, to avoid the awkward situation either of a section closing on a page with insufficient space left for the tailpiece or of the tailpiece being printed alone (with no text) on a separate page. In all the above sections, the normal 22-line pages would lead to such an awkward situation, and the spatial demand of the tailpiece required the reduction of some pages to 21 lines (Lycidas is an exception; see below). At the same time, the compositors also...