|DEC. 22. Mr. John Newbery, of St. Paul's who knew him.' These words,
copied from the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1767, record the death of one
who, in his way, was an eighteenth century notability. He belonged
to the good old 'Keep-your-Shop-and-your-Shop-will-keep-you' class of
tradesmen, who lived without pretence near their places of business
in the City, worked industriously during the week, marched off to St.
Bride's or St. Dunstan's on Sunday morning with a crop-eared 'prentice
in the rear to carry the great gilt Bible, and jogged away in crowded
chaises of summer afternoons to eat tarts at Highgate or drink tea out
of china in the Long churchyard, sincerely lamented by all.
In due time they made their 'plumbs;' sent their sons to St. Paul's or
Merchant Taylors', sometimes even to Oxford or Cambridge; and finally
left their portraits to posterity in the becoming and worshipful garb of
Sheriffs or Common-councilmen. Unfortunately for this paper, there is no
such limner's likeness of 'honest John Newbery.' Yet we are not wholly
without details as to his character and personal appearance. That
'glorious pillar of unshaken orthodoxy,' Dr. Primrose, formerly
of Wakefield, for whom, as all the world knows, he had published a
pamphlet' 'against the Deuterogamists of the age,' describes him as a
red-faced, good-natured little man, who was always in a hurry. 'He was
no sooner alighted,' says the worthy Vicar, 'but he was in haste to be
gone; for he was ever on business of the utmost importance.' 'Mr. Idler'
confirms this indication. 'When he enters a house, his first declaration
is, that he cannot sit down; and so short are his visits, that he seldom
appears to have come for any other reason but to say, He must go.' It
is not difficult to fill in the outline of Johnson and Goldsmith.
'The philanthropic bookseller in St. Paul's church-yard' was plainly
a bustling, multifarious, and not unkindly personage, essentially
commercial, essentially enterprising, rigorously exacting his money's
worth of work, keeping prudent record of all casual cash advances, but,
on the whole, not unbeneficent in his business fashion to the needy
brethren of the pen by whom he was surrounded. Many of John Newbery's
guineas passed to Johnson, to Goldsmith, to poor mad Christopher Smart,
who married his step-daughter. As Johnson implies, it is not impossible
that he finally fell a victim to that unreasoning mental activity which
left him always struggling hopelessly with more schemes and proposals
than one man could possibly manage. His wig must often have been awry,
and his spectacles mislaid, in that perpetual journey from pillar to
post which ultimately landed him, at the comparatively early age of
fifty-four, in his grave at Waltham St. Lawrence.
It was at Waltham St. Lawrence, a quiet little Berkshire village, whose
churchyard is dotted with the tombs of earlier Newberys, that he had
been born. His father, a small farmer, destined him for his own calling.
But, like Gay, it was not John Newbery's fate 'to brighten ploughshares
in paternal land.' He passed early into the service of a 'merchant,'
otherwise a printer and newspaper proprietor, at Reading, managing
so well that, when his employer died, he was left a co-legatee in the
business. Thereupon, being a resolute man, he did better still, and
married his master's widow, who had three children. Even this succeeded;
upon which, progressing always in prosperity, he began to think of
starting in London. Before doing so, he made a tour in the provinces.
Of this expedition there exists a curious record in the shape of an
unprinted journal, throwing much light upon modes of travelling in those
early coaching days, when the unfortunate outside passenger (like Pastor
Moritz in a later paper *) had to choose between being jolted to
death in the basket, or clinging like a fly to the slippery top of the
vehicle.
* See-post, 'A German in England.'
The majority of the entries are merely matter of business,--titles for
new books, recipes for diet-drinks, shrewd trade maxims, and the
like. But here and there the writer intersperses notes of general
interest,--on Dick Turpin the highwayman, on Lady Godiva and peeping
Tom, and (more than once) upon that 'curious and very useful machine,'
the Ducking-Stool for scolds, a 'plan of which instrument (he says) he
shall procure and transplant to Berkshire for the good of his native
county.' His business at Reading was as miscellaneous as his memorandum
book, and he seems to have dealt in all kinds of goods. About 1744 he
removed to London, opening a shop at the sign of the 'Bible and
Crown,' near Devereux Court, without Temple Bar, together with a branch
establishment at the Royal Exchange. To this Johnson probably refers
when he says: 'He has one habitation near Bow Church, and another about
a mile distant. By this ingenious distribution of himself between two
houses, he has contrived to be found at neither.' From the 'Bible and
Crown,' which had been his old Reading sign, he moved a year later to
the 'Bible and Sun' in St. Paul's Churchyard. This continued to be his
headquarters until his death. Gradually his indiscriminate activities
narrowed themselves to two distinct branches of business, in these days
incongruous enough,--the sale of books and the sale of patent medicines.
While at Reading, he had become part owner, among other things, of
Dr. Hooper's Female Pills; and soon after his settlement in London, he
acquired the sole management of a more famous panacea, Dr. James's Fever
Powders, which had in their time an extraordinary vogue. According to
Mrs. Delany, the King dosed the Princess Elizabeth with them; Gray and
Cowper both believed in their efficacy; and Horace Walpole, declared he
should take them if the house were on fire. Fielding specially praises
them in 'Amelia,' affirming that in almost any country but England
they would have brought 'public Honours and Rewards' to his 'worthy and
ingenious Friend Dr. James;' while Goldsmith may be said to have laid
down his life for them. With the sale of these and kindred specifics,
John Newbery alternated his unwearied speculations as a bookseller. He
was at the back of Smollett's venture of the 'British Magazine;' it was
for his 'Universal Chronicle' that Johnson wrote his 'Idler' and quizzed
his proprietor as 'Jack Whirler;' he was the publisher of Goldsmith's
'Traveller' and 'Citizen of the World;' and lie probably found part
of the historical sixty guineas which somebody paid for the 'Vicar of
Wakefield.' He died at Canbury or Canonbury House, Islington, in the
still-existent Tower of which he was an occasional resident. Indeed, it
is more than probable that he was at one time the responsible landlord
of that favourite retiring place for literary men,--a retiring place not
without its exceptional advantages, if we* are to believe last-century
advertisements, which, in addition to a natural cold bath, speak of
'a superlative Room, furnish'd for a single Person, or two Gentlemen,
having a Prospect into five Counties ['_longos prospicit agros!_'],
and the use of a good Garden and Summer-House.' Besides this there were
traditions of Prior Bolton and Anne of Cleves, of Bacon and Elizabeth,
of Sir John Spencer and William Fielding, Earl of Denbigh (the
novelist's grand-uncle), which certainly have figured in any schedule of
attractions, and must naturally have been interesting to the Smarts
and Hills and Woodfalls and Goldsmiths who afterwards inhabited the old
ivy-clad Tower.
Newbery's epitaph in the churchyard of his native village lays its
main stress upon his connection with Dr. James's nostrum; and it was
doubtless to this and the other patent medicines with which he was
connected that he owed the material part of his prosperity. Yet it
is not now upon the celebrated 'Arquebusade Water' (dear to Lady Mary
Coke), or the far-famed 'Cephalic Snuff,' or the incomparable 'Beaume
de Vie,' once so familiar in eighteenth-century advertisements, that
he bases his individual claim to the gratitude of posterity. It is, to
quote his biographer, Mr. Welsh, as 'the first bookseller who made
the issue of books, specially intended for children, a business of
any importance;' as the publisher of 'The Renowned History of Giles
Gingerbread: a little Boy who lived upon Learning,' of 'Mrs. Margery
Two-Shoes' (afterward Lady Jones), of the redoubtable 'Tommy Trip and
his dog Jouler,' of the 'Lilliputian Magazine,' and of numbers of other
tiny masterpieces in that flowered and gilt Dutch paper of which the art
has been lost, that he is best remembered. Concerning these commendable
little treatises, with their matter-of-fact title-pages and their
artless appeal to all little Masters and Misses 'who are good, or intend
to be good,' there are varying opinions. Dr. Johnson, according to Mrs.
Thrale, thought them too childish for their purpose. He preferred the
'Seven Champions,' or 'Parisenus and Parismenus.' 'Babies,' he said in
his legislative way, 'do not want to hear about babies. They like to
be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and
stimulate their little minds.' 'Remember always,' he added, 'that the
parents buy the books, and that the children never read them.' Yet it is
claimed for Robert Southey that in Newbery's 'delectable histories' he
found just that very stimulus which made him a life-long book-lover;
and it is characteristic of Charles Lamb (a better judge of children's
literature than Johnson) that he puts forward these particular
publications against the Bar-baulds and Trimmers ('those blights and
blasts of all that is human in man and child'), as presenting the very
quality which Johnson desired, the 'beautiful interest in wild tales,
which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to
be no bigger than a child.' 'Think what you would have been now,' he
writes to Coleridge of 'Goody Two-Shoes,' 'if instead of being fed with
tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with
geography and natural history!' The authorship of these 'classics of the
nursery' is an old battle ground. Newbery, it is alleged, wrote some of
them himself. He was (says Dr. Primrose when he met him) 'at that time
actually compiling materials for the history of one Mr. Thomas Trip,'
and if this can hardly be accepted as proof positive, it may be safely
asserted that to Newbery's business instincts are due those ingenious
references to his different wares and publications which crop up so
unexpectedly in the course of the narrative. For example, in 'Goody
Two-Shoes' we are told that the heroine's father 'died miserably'
because he was 'seized with a violent Fever in a place where Dr. James's
Powder was not to be had!' But who were Newbery's assistant authors?
Giles and Griffith Jones, say some; Oliver Goldsmith, say others.
With respect to the last-named no particular testimony seems to be
forthcoming beyond his known relations to the publisher, and the
so-called 'evidence of style.' In the absence of confirmatory details
the former is worthless; and the latter is often entirely misleading.
Without going back to the time-honoured case of Erasmus and Scaliger's
oration, two modern instances of this may be cited. Mr. Thackeray, says
Mr. Forster, claimed the 'Pleasant and Delightful History of Thomas
Hickathrift' for Henry Fielding. But both Mr. Forster and Mr. Thackeray
should have remembered that their common acquaintance, Mr. Isaac
Bickerstaff, of the 'Tatler,' had written of Hickathrift as a chap-book
when Fielding was a baby. In the same way 'Tommy Trip' has, by no mean
judges, been attributed to Goldsmith upon the strength of the following
quatrain:--=
````'Three children sliding on the ice
`````Upon a summer's day,
````As it fell out they all fell in,
`````The rest they ran away.'=
Alas! and alas! for the 'evidence of style.' Not only had these
identical lines been turned into Latin in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for
July, 1754, when Goldsmith was still studying medicine at Leyden; but
they are quoted at p. 30 of 'The Character of Richard St[ee]le,
Esq;' by 'Toby, Abel's Kinsman,' which was issued by 'J. Morphew, near
Stationer's Hall,' as far back as the month of November, 1713. As a
matter of fact, they are much older still, being affirmed by Chambers in
his excellent 'Book of Days' to be, in their first form, part of a long
and rambling story in doggerel rhyme dating from the early part of
the Civil Wars, which is to be found at the end of a little old book
entitled 'The Loves of Hero and Leander,' 12mo, London, 1653, and 1677.