Throughout his life, he was very kind to his relatives, lending money when needed to help some, and pensioning others. To charities, whose purpose was pure benevolence, apart from sectarian motive, his purse was ever open, and St. Thomas’s Hospital and the Stationers’ Company were largely indebted to his generosity.
In his latter days, Guy was able to multiply his fortune many fold. The South Sea Company was a good investment for a wary, cool-headed business man, and he became an original holder in the stock. “It no sooner received,” says Maitland, “the sanction of Parliament, than the national creditors from all parts came crowding to subscribe into the said company the several sums due to them from the government, by which great run, £100 of the Company’s stock, that before was sold at £120 (at which time, Mr. Guy was possessed of £45,500 of the said stock) gradually arose to above £1,050. Mr. Guy wisely considering that the great use of the stock was owing to the iniquitous management of a few, prudently began to sell out his stock at about £300 (for that which probably at first did not cost him about £50 or £60) and continued selling till it arose to about £600 when he disposed of the last of his property in the said company,” and then the terrible panic came.
He was between seventy and eighty years of age when he determined to devote his fortune to building and endowing a hospital which should bear his name, and, dying in 1724, he lived just long enough to see the walls roofed in. The cost of building “Guy’s Hospital” amounted to £18,793, and he left £219,499 as endowment. At Tamworth, his mother’s birthplace, which he represented in Parliament for many years, he erected alms-houses and a library. Christ’s Hospital received £400 a year for ever, and, after many gifts to public charities, he directed that the balance of his fortune, amounting to about £80,000, should be divided among all who could prove themselves in any degree related to him. Guy’s noble philanthropy would be unequalled in bookselling annals, but that Edinburgh, happily boasting of a Donaldson, can rival London in the generosity of a bookseller.
We have had occasion to quote several times from “Dunton’s Characters;” and, as the author was himself a bookseller, and was, moreover, the only contemporary writer who thought it worth his while to preserve any continuous record of the bookselling fraternity, we must give him a passing notice here. John Dunton, the son of a clergyman, was born in 1689, and, after passing through a disorderly apprenticeship, commenced bookselling “in half a shop, a warehouse, and a fashionable chamber.” “Printing,” he says, “was the uppermost in my thoughts, and hackney authors began to ply me with specimens as earnestly and with as much passion and concern as the waterman do passengers with oars and sculls.”
Having some private capital he went ahead merrily, printing six hundred books, of which he repented only of seven, and these he recommends all who possess to burn forthwith. Somewhat erratic in his habits he went to America to recover a debt of £500, consoling his wife, “dear Iris,” through whom he became connected with Wesley’s father, by sending her sixty letters in one ship. Here he stayed for nearly a twelvemonth, pleasantly viewing the country at his leisure, and cultivating a platonic friendship with maids and widows. At his return he found his business disordered, and sought to make amends by another voyage to Holland. By this time he had pretty nearly dissipated his capital, but luckily came “into possession of a considerable estate” through the death of a cousin. “The world,” he says, “now smiled on me, and I have humble servants enough among the stationers, booksellers, printers, and binders.”
Of all his publications, the only one that attained any fame was the “Athenian Mercury,” which reached twenty volumes. His three literary associates in this work were Samuel Wesley, Richard Sault, and Dr. John Norris, and with his aid they resolved all “nice and curious questions in prose and verse,” concerning physic, philosophy, love, &c. They were afterwards reprinted in four volumes, under the title of the Athenian Oracle, and form a curious picture of the wants, manners, and opinions of the age; but the work is, perhaps, chiefly to be remembered as one of the earliest periodicals not professing to contain “news.”
Dunton now, finding that he did not make much money by bookselling in London, went over to Dublin for six months with a cargo of books and started as auctioneer, naturally falling foul of the Irish booksellers, whom he dressed off in a tract entitled “The Dublin Scuffle.” He returned to England complacently believing that he had done more service to learning by his auctions “than any single man that had come into Ireland these hundred years.”
In London, however, he was by this time so involved in commercial difficulties, that he was fain to give up bookselling altogether, and take to bookmaking instead; and his pen was so indefatigable that he soon bid fair to be the author of as many volumes as he had published. The book that concerns us most here is the “Life and Errors of John Dunton, written by himself in Solitude,” in which is included the “Lives and Characters of a Thousand Persons now living in London.” In this latter part he was obliged, “out of mere gratitude,” “to draw the characters of the most eminent of the profession in the three kingdoms;” consequently we find some half-dozen lines of “character” given to every bookseller of his time in London, “gratitude” compelling him, however, to be almost invariably laudatory; the other parts of the “three kingdoms” are thus summarily and easily dealt with, “Of three hundred booksellers now trading in country towns, I know not of one knave or a blockhead amongst them all.” The book, however rambling and incoherent, contains much worth preservation, and is not unpleasant desultory reading.
Dunton’s own “character” has been preserved elsewhere than in his Life and Confessions. Warburton describes him as “an auction bookseller and an abusive scribbler;” Disraeli, “as a crack-brain, scribbling bookseller, who boasted that he had a thousand projects, fancied he had methodised six hundred, and was ruined by the fifty he executed.” His greatest project, by the way, was intended “to extirpate lewdness from London.” “Armed with a constable’s staff, and accompanied by a clerical companion, he sallied forth in the evening, and followed the wretched prostitutes home to a tavern, where every effort was used to win the erring fair to the paths of virtue; but these he observes were perilous adventures, as the cyprians exerted every art to lead him astray in the height of his spiritual exhortations.”
There is something so Quixotic about his schemes, so complacent about his marvellous self-vanity, that we are really grieved when we find him ending his life, as most “projectors” do, with Dying Groans from the Fleet Prison; or, a Last Shift for Life. Shortly after this, in 1733, his teeming brain and his eager pen were at rest for ever.