The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons ed. by Stephen Bernard (review)

Print culture. How often we use this catch-all catchphrase to name that which transforms an author's thoughts into a reader's experience. In eighteenth-century studies, "print culture" refers to the materials of bookmaking and the mechanical processes that made manuscript foul papers into typeset commodities, simultaneously evoking the human networks of printers, publishers, and sellers who labored to package and distribute the written word. The term lends conceptual stability to a vibrant but bewildering world of patronage, marketing, deal-cutting, and quarrel, encompassing the story of a literary work that resides "apart from that recounted by its text," in D. F. McKenzie's phrase. Grasping print culture, therefore, entails combing through a fragmentary archive of letters, ledgers, wills, and catalogues to reconstruct as fully as possible the early modern business of literature.

From this view, Mr. Bernard renders crucial service to the study of book history and eighteenth-century society by locating, transcribing, and annotating the professional correspondences of Jacob Tonson (1656–1736) and his nephew, Jacob Tonson the Younger (1682–1735). For almost six decades, these two men ran the most important publishing house in Britain. The Tonsons brought to press the works of their luminous contemporaries, Dryden, Behn, Congreve, Gay, Addison, Steele, Prior, and Pope. They secured the posthumous reputations of Shakespeare and Milton through editions that not only sold widely but inaugurated traditions of textual scholarship that persist in the present. Jacob the Elder pioneered the practice of anthologizing poets within miscellanies as a strategy to stimulate reader interest in authors new and old. Jacob the Younger exploited the copyrights accumulated by his uncle to republish earlier works in editions ranging from lavish folios to cheap duodecimos, making him "the shepherd of the English literary canon, tending Tonson [the Elder's] flock." Together, the Tonsons shaped not only the literary markets of their time, but our present-day estimation of what writing from this period mattered.

Despite their central role in the London book trade, we know relatively little about the Tonsons' day-to-day working lives beyond what Kathleen Lynch detailed in her 1971 biography of Jacob the Elder. The Literary Correspondences helps remedy this deficit by collating 158 of the Tonsons' letters—those related to their business operations and authorial relationships—which today lie scattered among manuscript archives across Britain and the United States. Mr. Bernard's transcriptions are clear and forthright, regularly flagging passages where the original manuscript is too damaged to render an accurate reproduction, or where marginal writing clarifies (or confounds) body text. The notes that accompany each letter are concise yet thorough, themselves the product of wide-ranging historical fluency and obvious toil. The quantity of sweat and erudition that went into this edition is so great that readers could easily overlook the critical program driving its diligence. Mr. Bernard's selfaware enterprise is nothing less than to present "evidence of the personal relationships fundamental to the creation of literature." By highlighting and explaining these interactions, he pushes readers away from abstractions like print culture, and toward the challenge of rekindling the "white heat" of literary invention from the book trade's extant remains. His overarching goal is to show through epistolary glimpses into the Tonsons' business how "booksellers actually work to get from the idea for a book to the material text."

What can we learn from the letters themselves? Even the most casual browser will enjoy the correspondences' many ill-timed speculations, gossipy asides, and humanizing anecdotes. Tonson vouches risibly for the "undeniable truth" of William Bedloe and Titus Oates's allegations of a Popish Plot conspiracy to assassinate Charles II in a letter to Narcissus Luttrell. Similarly gratifying is a 1719 note from John Vanbrugh to Tonson that marvels at the fortunes of the South Sea Company, then "rising so vastly." In another letter from the late seventeenth century, Aphra Behn asks Tonson to conceal from Thomas Creech that she disliked his commendatory verse published at the front of...