WILLIAM CASLON, 1720.
RINTING had reached a low ebb in England in the early years of the eighteenth century. A glance through any of the common public prints of the day, such, for instance, as official broadsides, political pamphlets, works of literature, or even Bibles,[447] points to a depression and degeneration so marked that one is tempted to believe that the art of Caxton and Pynson and Day was rapidly becoming lost in a wilderness of what a contemporary satirist terms “Brown sheets and sorry letter.”
With the exception of Oxford University, no foundry of the day was contributing anything towards the revival of good printing, or even towards the maintenance of such a standard as did exist. And Oxford, as we have said, owed its best founts to gifts procured, almost entirely, from abroad. Grover and Andrews, the heritors of the old founders, originated little or nothing; and where their efforts were put into requisition (as in the case of Andrews’ attempt to cut the Anglo-Saxon for Miss Elstob’s Grammar) they failed. Scarcely a work with any {233} pretension to fine printing was the impression of honest English type. Watson, the Scotch historian of printing, openly rebuked his brethren of the craft for not stocking their cases with Dutch type. Tonson, a king among English printers is said on one occasion to have lodged in Amsterdam while a founder there was casting him £300 worth of type; and James, the only English founder whose business showed any vitality, owed his success chiefly, if not entirely, to the fact that all his letter was the product of Dutch matrices; and even these, in his hands, were so indifferently cast as to be often as bad as English type.
57. From Hansard.
What was the reason for this lamentable decline—how far it was chargeable on the printer, how far on the founder, or how far both were the victims of that system of Star Chamber decrees, monopolies, patents, restraints and privileges which had characterised the illiberal days of the Stuarts—this is not the place to inquire. Nor, happily, are we called upon to speculate as to what would have been the consequence to English Typography of an uninterrupted prolongation of the malady under which it laboured. But it is necessary to remind ourselves of the critical nature of that malady in order to appreciate properly the providential circumstance which turned the attention of William Caslon to typefounding, and thus served to avert from England the disgrace which threatened her.
William Caslon[448] was born at Hales Owen in Shropshire in the year 1692. He served his apprenticeship to an engraver of gun-locks and barrels in London, and at the expiration of his term followed his trade in Vine Street, near the Minories.
The ability he displayed in his art was conspicuous, and by no means confined to the mere ornamentation of gun-barrels—the chasing of silver and the designing of tools for bookbinders frequently occupying his attention. While thus engaged, some of his bookbinding punches were noticed for their neatness and accuracy by Mr. Watts,[449] the eminent printer, who, fully alive to the present degenerate state of the typographical art in this country, was quick to recognise the possibility of raising it once more to its proper position. He {234} accordingly encouraged Mr. Caslon to persevere in letter-cutting, promising him his personal support, and favouring him meanwhile with introductions to some of the leading printers of the day.