“The duties of society towards literature in this new condition of the world are becoming great, vital, inextricably intricate, little capable of being done or understood at present, yet all important to be understood and done if society will continue to exist along with it, or it along with society. For the highest provinces of spiritual culture and most sacred interests of men down to the lowest economic and ephemeral concerns, where ‘free press’ rules supreme, society was itself with all its sovereignties and parliaments depending on the thing it calls literature; and bound by incalculable penalties in many duties in regard to that. Of which duties I perceive finance alone, and free trade alone will by no means be found to be the sum.... What alone concerns us here is to remark that the present system of book-publishing discharges none of these duties—less and less makes even the appearance of discharging them—and, indeed, as I believe, is, by the nature of the case, incapable of ever, in any perceptible degree, discharging any of them in the times that now are. A century ago, there was in the bookselling guild if never any royalty of spirit, as how could such a thing be looked for there? yet a spirit of merchanthood, which had its value in regard to the prosaic parts of literature, and is even to be thankfully remembered. By this solid merchant spirit, if we take the victualling and furnishing of such an enterprise as Samuel Johnson’s English Dictionary for its highest feat (as perhaps we justly may); and many a Petitor’s Memories, Encyclopædia Britannica, &c., in this country and others, for its lower, we must gratefully admit the real usefulness, respectability, and merit to the world. But in later times owing to many causes, which have been active, not on the book guild alone, such spirit has long been diminished, and has now ‘as good as disappeared without hope of reinstation in this quarter.’”
To return to Dodsley, we find that in 1753 he commenced the World, a weekly essay ridiculing “with novelty and good humour, the fashions, follies, vices, and absurdities of that part of the human species which calls itself the World”. Three guineas was allowed as literary remuneration for each number, but Moore, the editor, a receiver of this allowance, obtained much gratuitous assistance from Lord Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, and other men of wit and fashion. Another periodical, but a bi-weekly, the Rambler, all the work of Samuel Johnson, appeared without intermission for the space of two years, and in its gravity, its high morality, and its sententious language presents a curious contrast to its livelier companion. Dodsley, after having published Burke’s earliest productions, entrusted to his care the management of a very important venture, the Annual Register, which was to carry Dodsley’s name up to our own times. In the same year, 1758, his last play Cleone, in which he ventured to rise to tragedy, after having been declined by Garrick was acted at Covent Garden amidst the greatest applause, and for a number of nights, that, in those times, constituted a wonderful “run.” And the author, fond to distraction of his last child, “went every night to the stage side and cried at the distress of poor Cleone;” yet when it was reported that Johnson had remarked that if Otway had written it, no other of his pieces would have been remembered, Dodsley had the good sense to say “it was too much.”
A long and prosperous career enabled Dodsley to retire some years before his death, which occurred at Durham, in 1764.
Thomas Cadell, who had served his apprenticeship to Andrew Millar, was now taken into partnership, and in a few years he and the Strahans quite filled the place that Dodsley and Millar had previously occupied. Together they became the proprietors of the copyright of works by the great historical and philosophical writers who shed a lustre round the close of the eighteenth century, and among their clients we find the names of Robertson, Gibbon, Adam Smith and Blackstone. For the History of Charles V. Robertson received £4500, then supposed to be the largest sum ever paid for the copyright of a single work, and out of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the booksellers are said to have cleared £60,000. Cadell retired with an enormous fortune, and was honoured by being elected Sheriff of London at a very critical and important time. Alexander Strahan, became King’s printer, and left a fortune of upwards of a million. His business was eventually carried on by the Spottiswoodes.
Thomas Cadell.
1742–1802.
The practice, we have already referred to, of booksellers fraternising pleasantly together for the purpose of bringing out expensive editions at a lessened risk, led to many famous associations, the earliest of which, the “Congers,” will be dealt with hereafter in connection with the history of families still represented in the trade, but the “Chapter Coffee House” is too important to be passed over altogether.
There is an amusing account of the Chapter Coffee House in the first number of the Connoisseur. It “is frequented by those encouragers of learning, the booksellers.... Their criticisms are somewhat singular. When they say a good book, they do not mean to praise the style or sentiment, but the quick and extensive sale of it.... A few nights ago I saw one of these gentlemen take up a sermon, and after seeming to peruse it for some time, with great attention, he declared it was ‘very good English.’ The reader will judge whether I was most surprised or diverted, when I discovered that he was not commending the purity or elegance of the diction, but the beauty of the type, which, it seems, is known among the printers by that appellation.... The character of the bookseller is generally formed on the writers in his service. Thus one is a politician or a deist; another affects humour, or aims at turns of wit or repartee; while a third perhaps is grave, moral, and sententious.”
In this Coffee House the associated booksellers met to talk over their plans, and many a germ of most valuable projects was originated here; the books so published coming in time to be called “Chapter Books.” Among the chief members of the association were John Rivington, John Murray, and Thomas Longman, James Dodson, Alderman Cadell, Tom Davies, Robert Baldwin (whose name, if not family, figured in bookselling annals for a century and a half), Peter Elmsley, and Joseph Johnson. Johnson was Cowper’s publisher; the first volumes of the poems fell dead, and he begged the author to think nothing further of the loss, which they had agreed to share. In gratitude Cowper sent him the Task as a present; it was a wonderful success, and altogether Johnson is said to have made £10,000 out of Cowper’s poems. He assisted in the publication of the Homer without any compensation at all. The most important “Chapter books” were Johnson’s English Poets, including his Lives of the English Poets, for which latter he received two hundred guineas, and a present of another hundred, and, on their re-publication in a separate edition, a fourth hundred. “Sir,” observed the Doctor to a friend, “I have always said the booksellers were a generous set of men. Nor in the present instance have I reason to complain. The fact is, not that they paid me too little, but that I have written too much.”