Improvised Patronage: Jacob Tonson and Dryden’s Linguistic Project

The eighteenth-century bookseller is now recognized as a middleman through whom works reach the public, as a reflector of public taste, and as a cultural figure who slowly ousted the aristocratic patron in shaping and supporting literary production. The bookseller Jacob Tonson was one of the more important of these figures, using his publishing house and political relationships to support rising authors. Even before Tonson gained his social connections, however, he played an important part in literary culture. Tonson has usually been viewed as a patron in the sense of a provider of social and political introductions, as Stephen Bernard shows in his recent examination of Tonson as a Whig publisher. Because scholars like Bernard have focused on Tonson’s extraordinary capabilities and connections, however, they have failed to fully examine the ways that, merely by being an independent bookseller who paid his authors rather than requiring them to fund their own writing, Tonson began to establish the type of relationship that would eventually take the place of traditional patronage by the aristocracy. Tonson’s relationship with John Dryden began as a business matter. When Tonson agreed to publish Dryden’s translations, however, he began an association that ended in his taking the place of a traditional patron to Dryden’s long-standing desire to improve and promote the English language. In the process, they set a precedent for a new form of publication and an increased reliance on the bookseller. Dryden’s relationship with Tonson began a trend that culminated in Johnson’s declaration, in the 1750s, that his bookseller, Andrew Millar, was his patron and the “Maecenas of the age.” This transition to the centrality of the market and the seller was, as Dustin Griffin points out, not a “sudden change from a patronage economy,” but a slow movement in which booksellers began to supplement traditional patrons. Early in his career, Dryden benefited from all of the three main forms of patronage, which Deborah Payne categorizes as “titles or entitlements,” “access to positions” and social circles, and gifts of money from wealthy or titled supporters. He supplemented this income by writing plays for the King’s Men, a position not directly reliant on a patron but which he gained in part through his court connections and the court’s reliable attendance at his plays. After the Glorious Revolution, however, Dryden turned to other sources of income. Dryden’s reliance on Tonson began significantly earlier than the mid eighteenth century where scholars, often citing Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson as examples, typically place the shift from an elite patronage model to a new literary marketplace. Dryden’s experience shows how an early commercial venture evolved organically into a relationship that neither figure would have recognized as traditional patronage but that allowed Dryden comparable support. This empowered him to lead a group of writers to refine the English language through translation, appropriation, and adaptation and to promote the creation of a native English canon. Historically, scholars have considered the young Jacob Tonson’s acquisition of Dryden’s writings as a coup for the bookseller. Tonson’s editions of Dryden’s translations began a lucrative series that continued for years after Dryden’s death. Moreover, they established Tonson as Dryden’s personal bookseller during a period when, as Johnson later remarked, Dryden’s reputation “was such that his name was thought necessary to the success” of every literary work and “he was engaged to contribute something,” to almost every publication. At the same time, as Bernard demonstrates, during the 1670s Dryden’s previous bookseller, Herringman, stopped publishing new books, and Dryden needed a new bookseller. His relationship with Tonson enabled Dryden to finally act on a desire which he had …