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34 D lydia bailey printing office, clinging to apprentice-trained labor, and largely dependent on familial associations for work, she was not an effective competitor in the burgeoning printing industry of the mid-nineteenth century and watched her business steadily decline during its last couple of decades.128 By midcentury, printing establishments typically had managers who lived apart from their offices, and whose wives remained in the home, removed from exposure to the clamor of the print shop. Their operations were housed in buildings built for work purposes only, and their employees also lived off the premises and worked fixed hours. By the end of her days as a master printer, Lydia Bailey was truly a relic of earlier times. In retrospect, depending on one’s perspective, she represents the last gasp of the outmoded tradition of the “useful” widow printer or a modern model of the brave and resourceful single mother who provided both herself and her family with quite comfortable lives for most of the nineteenth century.129 In any case, there is no doubt that Lydia Bailey was indeed an impressive mistress of her situation. notes 1. Anyone who looks at Lydia Bailey’s name long enough will naturally ask two questions. One is whether she bears any relation to Kenneth Roberts’s 1947 historical romance of the same name. Roberts was known for the research that he put into his novels and also published the journals of a well-known Frenchman, Méderic Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, who traveled through eighteenth-century Philadelphia. There is no doubt in my mind that he came across the real Lydia Bailey’s name in the course of his research and thought that it suited the Philadelphia-born, demure, and beautiful object of his hero’s love. That is where the connection ends. The second question is what the “R” in Lydia R. Bailey stands for. Although the romantic in me likes to imagine a young widow adopting it to memorialize her dear dead husband, the realist in me has some doubts about that. If anyone out there knows, please tell me. 2. The leading cities, in order, were Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Charleston, and Baltimore . For the best overview, see Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) (hereafter cited as Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic). For two specific studies, see Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Michael Hackenberg, ed., Getting the Books Out: Papers of the Chicago Conference on the Book in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1987). The circumstances leading up to the period under discussion are discussed in depth in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World ([Worcester, Mass.]: American Antiquarian Society; Cambridge and New York:Cambridge University Press, 2000) (hereafter cited as Hugh and Amory, Colonial Book in the Atlantic World). 3. One notable exception was Isaiah Thomas’s operations, which, in the 1790s, claimed twelve presses in his Worcester printing office alone. 4. What information exists on Bailey’s ancestry is scattered. Some genealogical material is at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP) and the Lancaster Historical Society . See also the entries for her and Francis Bailey in The Dictionary of American Biography (New Mistress of Her Situation D 35 York: Scribners, 1928–58) and my entry on her in The American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Contrary to popular belief, women indeed entered the printing trade occasionally as apprentices. For examples of this, see D.F. McKenzie, ed., Stationers ’ Company Apprentices, 1701–1800 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1978). 5. She was the first of seven children, the last of whom was born in 1798. 6. W. A. Dorland, “The Second Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (hereafter PMHB) 53 (1929): 381–82; see Charles Evans, American Bibliography, 13 vols. (Chicago:Priv. print. for the author by the Blakely Press, 1903–55), and Clifford Shipton and James E. Mooney, National Index of American Imprints Through 1800; The Short-Title Evans, 12 vols. (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers , 1969), for the Carrs’ printing...

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