[In the following excerpt, Clapp discusses the style and content of Tonson's letters, which she says provide insights into the man's character.]

“To entertain you I will show you … a phenomenon worth seeing and hearing, Old Jacob Tonson, who is the perfect image and likeness of Bayle's Dictionary;¹ so full of matter, secret history, and wit and spirit, at almost four-score.” Thus wrote Pope in 1731 to Lord Oxford. Imitating Pope, this pamphlet makes and hopes in some measure to fulfil the same promise, using a small group of letters by and about Jacob Tonson senior, all of them written during the last eight years of his life, and variously reflecting his character and his career as an eminent London bookseller.

The four letters about the elder Jacob reveal his agedness, his increasing deafness, his bad personal hygiene, his idiosyncrasies. Theirs is a portrait comical in its realism until one comes to perceive beneath its surface the old man, alone save for servants and whilom visitors, further isolated by extreme hardness of hearing, reduced finally to the improvement of his abode, as the best amusement he was capable of. True, his eyesight held out “to almost a miracle,” and he now had leisure to look into some of the books he and his brother Richard and his nephew Jacob had published, and to regard for content where he had heretofore regarded for monetary profit.

Certain details in Croxall's sketch of Tonson at home confirm a suspicion that Tonson could be niggardly in some directions. Or he may merely have been indifferent to physical amenities other than those of the palate. He was wearing, on a snowy March day, only a thin cotton cap and “a poor old unwadded gown.” His bedchamber was without hangings. He was living in a house that must have been partly under construction, since two door places in his bedroom afforded a thoroughfare for the wind, and “a new apartment” had as yet nothing on its brick walls.

Dr. Oliver's portrait of Tonson at Bath is much like Croxall's of him in Herefordshire. His letters are less reports of a physician on a patient than takeoffs on a “most Singular Peice.” They convey Tonson's addiction to gustatory pleasures and support belief that he could deal sharply, meditating how to be beforehand with those who he apprehended meant to impose on him. They offset the amiable picture of him urging family visits and buying estates to bestow on his nephew, besides suggesting the younger man's not feeling an entirely tender affection. For had Dr. Oliver known such an affection to exist, he would scarcely have characterized the uncle to the nephew as “the good old Sardanapalus” or sent him a message that he should “hear of the Motions of the Enemy.” Oliver's sad diagnosis of a paralytic conscience, lost to all sense of feeling, tallies with Tonson's emotional insensitivity to the death of Congreve, which might be expected to have saddened him or to have alarmed him with apprehensions of his own demise. Instead, he speculated about the deceased poet's age, recalled some of his productions, and admonished his nephew to issue a new edition of Congreve promptly, before a fading public memory led to decreased profits.

Tonson's epistolary style is notable for forthrightness and economy, though he can give details when they matter to him. Organization is erratic; topics are abruptly introduced and may receive scattered treatment. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are not uniform and do not adhere to the best even of eighteenth-century practices. These erraticisms I have rarely edited, leaving them as flavorful of their writer as are his occasional dialecticisms. Paragraphing, too, is Tonson's, as nearly as permitted by his disposition to juxtapose topics or to begin a new one with a line projecting to the left rather than indented. Much of the paragraphing in the transcript gives him the benefit of considerable doubt.

Tonson's own letters, though they have range, pause a great deal on domestic matters. Minutiae concerned him, even the due return of his man Tom's riding coat, the health of a servant whose civil carriage compensated for service not so considerable as his wages, the particular inn where his drivers and team should rest while in London, the protection of merchandise against roguery on the road, a purchase of onion seed for a lady of his acquaintance. A bachelor, he looked to the equipment of his country house. He was ever ordering special food and wine. His pickles were to be good ones, his onions from Portugal, his wines the best foreign varieties. He thought of food in lavish terms, of onions by ropes, of beef by buttocks, of wine by dozens of bottles. He proposed to import fruit trees from France, thus making his plantings equal, at least in quality, to those of Wanstead and Blenheim and Claremont, the mansion of his beloved Duke of Newcastle. Whatever might be his outlay for raiment and household comfort, he did not mind expense where food and improvements on his estate were concerned.

Emerging from Tonson's letters along with these domestic matters is his character. He was generous, not only in gifts to friends, but also in assigning estates to his nephew “with a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure.” Not anti-social, he was fond of company, hospitably urging visits not alone from relatives but even from Lintot, his one-time rival. He anticipated his own visit to Bath during the spring and summer of 1728, while Congreve was there, a guest of the Duchess of Marlborough. Gay too was there, exhilarated by the success of “The Beggar's Opera.” Tonson, if he did go, doubtless had a very good time. Congreve, however, anguished with gout and blinded with cataracts, was scarcely the companion in drinking and jest that he had been. His death the following January diminished Tonson's surviving intimates.

Remarkable about Tonson at his age and in his removal from the London bookselling scene are his distinct memory of past events and his interestedness in the business that had been his and was now his nephew's. Nor was his interest passive. There is not wanting a note as of instruction to the younger man, lest he lack knowledge and wisdom. Not only did the uncle recall that Waller's son corrected the proofs of his father's poems and that Congreve was his own editor in 1710, he inquired who was to supervise a posthumous edition of Congreve, and passed judgment on an advertisement of Rymer's Foedera.

When he looked into the 1721 reprint of Dryden's Virgil, he discovered an error that had lingered there during the thirty-one years since he himself first brought out the translation. The mistake is in Dryden's dedication to the Earl of Mulgrave, the passage reading: “Even the least Portions of [heroic poems] must be of the Epick kind; all things must be Grave, Majestical, and Sublime: Nothing of a Foreign Nature, like the trifling Novels, which Aristotle and others have inserted in their Poems.” The blunder of “Aristotle” for “Ariosto” would be more readily observed than corrected. A literary tyro might know that Aristotle did not produce trifling novels. Fitting the description to Ariosto would require somewhat fuller knowledge, not, however, too much to expect of a person who had consorted with England's greatest poets of the last fifty years. During much of his career he may well have been too busy to peruse much of what he published. Now, long after sparring with Dryden over payments for the translation of Virgil, he took a look at it.

Note

1. Pope's allusion to Bayle's Dictionary is apt, Tonson having received, in 1701, a royal license for printing it and having been, in 1710, one of those for whom it was printed.