Millar’s obelisk

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book trade

Dovehouse Green is a small patch of public green, situated on the corner of Dovehouse Street and King’s Road, Chelsea. The paths run crosswise from the four corners and where they meet stands an obelisk, known as Millar’s Obelisk.

Dovehouse Green was given to the parish by Sir Hans Sloane to be used as an overspill graveyard. It was consecrated as such in 1736, but by 1812, the new cemetery on Sydney Street had taken over its function and only interments in existing family tombs were allowed. In 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, the neglected piece of ground was revamped and opened to the public as Dovehouse Green. The centre piece is the obelisk that was originally erected by Andrew Millar, a bookseller, to commemorate his wife and children.

Andrew Millar (1705-1768) came to London from Schotland in the 1720s to work in the bookshop on the Strand that his Edinburgh master James McEuen (or M’Euen) had opened. In January 1728, young Andrew took over the shop, continuing the name, Buchanan’s Head, and starting with the stock that McEuen had had in the shop. But Millar had grander ideas than just selling books and libraries. He became a respected publisher who did his origins proud by publishing, or acting as agent of, a large number of Scottish authors. Samuel Johnson said of him that he was “the Maecenas of the age” who “raised the price of literature”. Unlike most of his competitors, he looked after his authors and gave them bonuses when their books sold well. Was he without fault? No, of course not. Some thought him a bumpkin upstart with unscrupulous tendencies. Perhaps they were just jealous, but perhaps they were right. If nothing else, Millar must at least have been a sharp businessman to get where he ended up as one of the, if not the, most important publisher of the mid-eighteenth century. He was the publisher who took care of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary and his patience must have been sorely tried by the ever-extending time it took to complete. Allegedly when Millar received the last sheet, he sent his compliments with the money due and thanked God he had done with Johnson. To which Johnson replied that he was glad that there was at least something Millar thanked God for.⁽¹⁾

Mindfull / of Death and of Life
ANDREW MILLAR / of the Strand London Bookseller
Erected This / Near the Dormitory
Intended / For Himself and his Beloved Wife
JANE MILLAR / When it shall please Divine Providence
To call them hence / As a place of Like Rem[embrance]
For other near Relations / and / In Memory of
the deceased Pledges of their love
MDCCLI

In 1751, Millar had the obelisk erected over the vault where his relations were or would be buried. On the four sides, texts were carved on the pedestal and base to commemorate the family members who were interred, but time has erased most of the inscriptions. On one side, a coat of arms can be seen. And on the other side is still, faintly, visible that the remains of Margaret Johnstone who died in 1757 are buried there. She was Millar’s unmarried sister-in-law who had lived with the family most of her adult life. Although we can no longer read them, we do know what the texts on the other sides originally said. They commemorate the three children of Andrew and Jane Millar who all died young: Robert in 1736, just one year old; Elizabeth in 1740, also one year old; and Andrew junior who died in Scarborough, five years old. The sorrow of the Millar parents is expressed in a poem:⁽²⁾

Reader ! if Pity ever touch’d thy Heart
At these sad Lines a tender Thought impart
Think with what Sorrow we inscribe the Stone
That speaks us Parents and that speaks us None.

The bookseller himself died in 1768 and his widow (by then remarried to Sir Archibald Grant) in 1788.

The information on Andrew Millar has come from Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment & the Book. Scottish Authors & Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, & America 2006), p. 275-294.
The information on the obelisk has mainly come from “Chelsea Old Town Hall to Knightsbridge”, a publication of Kensington and Chelsea Royal Borough which I can no longer find on their website, but which can still be accessed through Google (online here); and from the Survey of London, Volume 11, Chelsea, Part IV: the Royal Hospital. Originally published by London County Council, London, 1927 (online via British History Online here).

(1) Paul J. Korshin, ‘The mythology of Johnson’s Dictionary‘ in Anniversary Essays on Johnson’s Dictionary, ed. Anne McDermott (2005), p. 16-17.
(2) Samuel Richardson had composed another epitaph on Andrew junior’s death, but Millar chose this one (see here for Richardson’s text).

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Alexander Cruden, the Corrector

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book trade

Looking up in London is always a good idea if one can do so without getting run over and in traffic free streets such as Camden Passage it is very rewarding. Looking over an awning into the street is the face of Alexander Cruden who styled himself “the Corrector”. Next to his face is a plaque which reads:

Alexander Cruden 1699-1770 / Humanist scholar and intellectual / Born Aberdeen Educated Marischal College / Came to London 1719 as tutor Appointed / book seller to Queen Caroline in 1737 / Compiled the Concordance to the Bible / Died here in Camden Passage, November 1st / whom niether infirmity nor neglect could debase Nelson 1811

The mis-spelled quote “whom neither infirmity nor neglect could debase” comes from John Nelson’s History, Topography, and Antiquities of the Parish of St. Mary Islington, in the County of Middlesex (1811)⁽¹⁾ The phrase is frequently said to come from Alexander Chalmers who first wrote the entry on Cruden in 1778 for the Biographia Britannica (vol. 4, pp. 619-624), but it does not appear there. Nor does it appear in The General Biographical Dictionary of 1813 which was revised by A. Chalmers and in which he says in a footnote that his entry on Cruden is the same as that prefixed to the Concordance of 1810. The phrase does appear in the Memoirs attached to later editions of the Concordance, so I think I will give the benefit of the doubt to Nelson and will assume that Chalmers incorporated the phrase without acknowledgement when he enlarged his biography of Cruden in later editions of the latter’s Concordance.

Over the years, much has been written about Cruden and not all of it positive. He was considered, if not completely mad, at least a touch deranged and he spent several spells in various madhouses because those around him did not know how else to stop him behaving like – in their eyes – a lunatic, or, to put a negative slant on the motives of those who had him incarcerated, against their interests. What I can gather from the biographies is that he was considered rather excentric, but as he did no real harm, he certainly should not have been locked up.

portrait used in the 3rd edition of the Concordance to the Bible 1769 (Source: National Portrait Gallery)

But let’s start at the beginning. Alexander Cruden, the son of a merchant, was born in Aberdeen in either 1699 or 1701, depending on who you believe. After attending grammar school and Marischal College, he apparently intended to study for the ministry, but an unhappy love affair and a spell in the mad-house, probably for knowing about the illicit affair of his intended with her own brother, decided him to leave for London. He worked as a private tutor until 1726 when he became a proof reader. A notice in The London Journal of 16 November 1734, states that he was “lately corrector to the Printing Office in Wild-Court”, but now bookseller at the Bible and Anchor under the Royal Exchange. Just a month before this notice, Cruden had obtained the freedom of the City via the Stationers’ Company by redemption, that is, by paying a fine for not following the usual route of a 7-year apprenticeship.⁽²⁾ In the following years, quite a number of advertisements appeared in the newspapers to annouce books that could be bought at Cruden’s, but also one for Doctor Rogers’s Oleum Arthriticum: or, Specifick Oyl for the Gout. The doctor sold the stuff from his house in Stamford, Lincs, and he had agents in all the major towns. Cruden was the only address in London where the miraculous cure for gout could be obtained. These days, we would find it most peculiar if patent medicines were sold in our local bookshop, but certainly up to Victorian times it was quite an accepted sideline.

In 1735, Cruden was given the honourable title of “Bookseller in Ordinary to her Majesty”, that is, to Queen Caroline.⁽³⁾ He replaced a Mr. E. Matthews who had died. Honourable as the title may have been, it probably did not bring many financial rewards and Cruden kept his bookshop running besides embarking on an ambitious project to compile a concordance to the Bible. Apparently he worked on it every morning, attending to business in the afternoon, and at the end of 1737, the publication was announced.

Advertisement in The Daily Post, 10 November 1737

Although the advertisement says “this day is published”, you must not take that too literally, as they still said that in advertisements in December, but it certainly indicates ‘very recently’. The booksellers thought fit to put the year 1738 on the title-page, but that was just a ploy to make sure the book did not appear out of date within a few months. Please note that the volume was “dedicated to Her Most Sacred Majesty”. However, a few days after Cruden presented Queen Caroline with his Concordance, she was taken ill and died shortly afterwards (on the 20th). The advertisement in the paper for Cruden’s work had to be changed rapidly and the one in a paper of 26 November had the phrase “dedicated to her late Sacred Majesty”. Cruden was rather upset about the death of the Queen – not to mention rather put out by not receiving the financial reward he had expected from the queen for his monumental work – and not long afterwards, he gave up bookselling and returned to his former occupation of proof-reading.⁽⁴⁾ He corrected, for instance, Thomas Newton’s edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost for Tonson and Draper who published that work in 1749.⁽⁵⁾

In 1754, Cruden unsuccessfully tried to become an M.P. for London, perhaps an understandable failure considering his antics and spells in madhouses, however unfair these may now seem. His eccentricities were usually considered harmless and amusing rather than threatening, although they were probably highly irritating for the ‘victims’ of his attention. But, he gradually grew in his role as self-appointed Corrector of Morals rather than as Corrector of Books. It is said that he walked around with a sponge in order to wipe out offensive graffiti, especially “No. 45” in use by the supporters of John Wilkes.⁽⁶⁾ The numer 45 was a reference to instalment 45 of The North Briton which appeared in April, 1763, and in which Wilkes wrote an essay mocking the monarchy.⁽⁷⁾

In 1761, the second, and in 1769, the third revised editions of his Concordance were published and it remained the most authoritative of that kind of work until well into the 19th century. 1769 was also the year in which Cruden finally returned to Aberdeen. He stayed up north for about a year and on 10 April 1770 wrote his will before returning to London.⁽⁸⁾ The General Evening Post of 15 May, 1770, reporting on the return of “Mr. Alexander Cruden, Corrector of the People”, said that he speeched in various towns on the way “upon the necessity of Reformation” and “many hundreds of papers were given away in the roads and towns by Mr. Cruden, as he came up in the post-chaise”. Unfortunately, Cruden was not to complete his self-imposed task of reforming the people, as he died on 1 November of that year. He had never married, despite several desperate attempts, and left his property to various relatives and to the City of Aberdeen for the purchase of religious books to be distributed to the poor. Despite his wish to be buried in Aberdeen, his body was interred in the dissenters’ burial-ground at Deadman’s Place, Southwark.

Lloyd’s Evening Post, 2 November 1770

According to London Remembers, the plaque in Camden Passage was unveiled by John Betjeman, but it is not the only plaque for Cruden. His hometown of Aberdeen also honoured its – albeit slightly wayward – son with one quite close to where he was born in Cruden’s Court, off Broad Street, apparently also unveiled by Betjeman.⁽⁹⁾

Source: blueplaqueplaces.co.uk

[Postscript 4 January 2017:] Louis Hemmings has written a poem about Cruden which he thought you might appreciate, see here.

Besides the sources mentioned in the text, information on Cruden can be found in:
– Lionel Alexander Ritchie, ‘Cruden, Alexander (1699–1770)’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
– E. Olivier, The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden (1934).
– J. Keay, Alexander the Corrector: the tormented genius who unwrote the bible (2005).
– J. Lim, Alexander Cruden on the website http://www.ebenezeroldhill.org.uk/articles.
– R. Pearsal, “Cruden of the Concordance 1701-1770” in New Blackfriars (1971), pp. 88-90.

——————–
(1) Cruden’s biography pp. 392-400.
(2) The fine was 46s 8d.
(3) London Daily Post, 21 March, 1735 and General Evening Post, 12 April 1735.
(4) The Land Tax records for the Royal Exchange only show his name in 1835 and 1836, apparently sharing the property (their names are bracketed) with Portman Safford, hatter, who took over the whole shop after Cruden left.
(5) Percy Simpson, Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1935), p. 159-160.
(6) Charles Henry Timperley, Encyclopedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote (1842), p. 723.
(7) http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/summer03/wilkes.cfm
(8) National Archives, Kew, Prerogative Court of Canterbury and Related Probate Jurisdictions: Will Registers: PROB 11/963/7.
(9) David Toulmin in his A Chiel Among Them: A Scots Miscellany (1982) says “Alexander Cruden had to wait nearly two hundred years for his nameplate in Broad Street, when it was unveiled by Sir John Betjeman, the Poet Laureate, in 1968”.

Bunhill Fields: John Bunyan and his Publisher

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Baptists, book trade, Bunhill Fields, Daniel Defoe, Francis Smith, John Bunyan, Nonconformists, William Blake

As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world,
I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn:
& I laid me down in that place to sleep:
And as I slept I dreamed a Dream⁽¹⁾

Bunhill Fields’ green space is the last resting place for some 120,000 bodies. The area was used in the mid-sixteenth century to deposit bones from the overflowing charnel house of St. Paul’s; the bones were just dumped and covered with a layer of soil. So many were brought here that the elevation was enough to give windmills a good position above the otherwise flat fen landscape. In 1665, the year the plague raged through London, the City authorities decided to use the ground as a common burial ground for the victims of the disease, but it was most likely never used for that purpose. From the seventeenth century onwards it became the burial ground for dissenters and some well-known names can still be seen on some of the stones or tombs, such as William Blake (1757–1827), John Bunyan (1628-1688), Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles of Methodist fame (1669-1742), Isaac Watts (1674-1748) and Daniel Defoe (1661-1731). So many nonconformists choose this as their place of burial, that Robert Southey named Bunhill Fields “the Campo Santo of the Dissenters”.⁽²⁾

Bunhill Fields – Defoe

Bunhill Fields – Blake

Bunhill Fields – Bunyan

The last burial took place in 1854, but it took more than ten years before the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground Act was passed (1867) which gave the City of London the right to maintain the site as an open space. Following damage done in WWII, the park was shaped in the 1960s with a lawn on the northern side and the memorials in regimental rows on the southern side, many of them just plain headstones with the texts no longer legible.

Bunhill Fields Committee Report 1867

In 1867, as part of the effort to have the ground declared a designated open space, the Bunhill Fields Committee published a report to which was annexed a list of the still legible headstones, reprinted from a volume published in 1717 (see here for the e-book).

Most of the inscriptions run along familiar lines, ‘so and so was buried here on the [day] of [month] in the [year] in his/her [age] year’, but some go well beyond that. One of them runs into a whole biography:

Here lyeth the Body of FRANCIS SMITH,
Bookseller, who in his youth was settled in a separate
Congregation, where he sustained, between the Years
of 1659 & 1688, great Persecution by imprisonments,
Exile, and large Fines laid on Ministers and Meeting-
Houses, and for printing and promoting Petitions
for calling of a Parliament, with several things
against Popery, and after near 40 Imprisonments, he
was fined 500l. for printing and selling the Speech
of a Noble Peer, and Three times Corporal Punish-
ment. For the said Fine, he was 5 Years Prisoner in
the King’s-Bench: His hard Duress there, utterly
impaired his health. He dyed House-keeper in the
Custom-House, December the 22d, 1691.

This sound really grim, but then Francis Smith was a rather controversial figure. He became known as ‘Elephant’ Smith, because his bookshop had the shop sign “Elephant and Castle”, from 1659 to be found “without Temple-Bar”, from 1673 in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange and from 1688 in Pope’s Head Alley”. He was a committed Baptist who also acted as a Baptist Minister and published all sorts of dissenting and radical publications which led him into trouble on numerous occasions, if not into prison. He was one of John Bunyan’s principal publishers in the 1660s and 1670s, for instance for Sighs from Hell of which he brought out several editions.

J. Bunyan, Sighs from Hell

Smith was often accused and taken into custody for publishing seditious material, either of a religious or a political nature, but he was also frequently acquitted by a sympathetic Whig jury. Nevertheless, as the epitaph states, he had to spend several shorter or longer periods in jail. In 1681, he was linked to the printing of Stephen College’s ballad A Ra-Ree Show which was one of the pieces of evidence against the author in a trial for ‘treasonable talk and actions’. College was found guilty and executed. Smith fled the country and his business was continued by his wife Eleanor and their children. In March 1684 he returned to England and was immediately arrested and fined £500. He was unable to raise the money and thrown into jail once more until January 1688, when he was pardoned by the King. After the Glorious Revolution, he petitioned King William and was given the job of watchman in the port of London which he kept until his death in 1691.⁽³⁾

(1) J. Bunyan, A Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678. First lines.
(2) Robert Southey, Common-place Book, vol. 3 (1850), p. 161, no. 405.
(3) Beth Lynch, ‘Smith, Francis (d. 1691)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39672, accessed 10 Nov 2012]

More information on location, opening times, etc. for Bunhill Fields can be found here.

Daily Express

Tags

Aumonier, book trade, Daily Express, Fleet Street, newspapers

In 1932, the brand new art-deco building at 120 Fleet Street was opened to house the printing works and offices of the Daily Express.

William Maxwell (Max) Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879-1964), the owner of the paper, had commissioned the architects Ellis and Clarke to extend the existing Daily Express building towards Fleet Street. Complications arose with the original design because the printing room had to become one large space running through the basement of the old and the new building. Sir Evan Owen Williams (1890-1969), originally an aircraft designer who made his name as an architect with the concrete structures for the Wembley Exhibition of 1924, was drafted in to resolve the problems. His engineering skills were especially useful and he came up with the plan to construct a giant concrete box to house the printing room and to stop water from filtering into the building.
The outside of the building, which, in the original plan, was to be clad in Portland stone, was redesigned and is now faced with black glass panels with chromium strips. The western corner of the building was rounded off and in the recent refitting this was matched on the eastern corner. The wide entrance with chrome canopy above leads to the lobby which was designed by Robert Atkinson (1883-1952) and contains two massive plaster reliefs ‘Britain’ and ‘Empire’ designed by the sculptor Eric Aumonier (1899-1974). Aumonier came from an artistic Huguenot family who fled the Poitou region of France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Eric’s father, William (1869-1943) had also worked as a sculptor and carver, and his grandfather, another William (1839-1914) established a highly successful firm of architectural sculptors and carvers in New Inn Yard, Tottenham Court Road.⁽¹⁾

Daily Express relief detail

Very similar office buildings to the one in London, also clad in black glass, were opened by the Daily Express in Glasgow (1937) and Manchester (1939).
The newspaper vacated the London building in the late 1980s and the building was left empty for several years. Fortunately the present owner had the good sense to restore the lobby to its former glory as “the Byzantine vestibule and Sassanian lounge of Copper House” that so “rudely shocked” William Boot, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. This glamorous lobby, minus the “chrys-elephantine effigy of Lord Copper in coronation robes”⁽²⁾, can now be seen on Open House London days.⁽³⁾

Daily Express relief ‘Britain’

Daily Express relief ‘Empire’

You may also like to read the post on Ashentree Court and Northcliffe House or the one on Magpie Alley.

———

(1) J.C. Aumonier, “Aumônier: a Huguenot family from Haut-Poitou” in Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, vol. 18 (1947-1952), pp. 311-324; ‘William Aumonier Junior’ and ‘William Aumonier Senior’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011
(2) Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, 1938, pp. 29-30. Waugh worked for a short time in 1927 at the Daily Express.
(3) Most of the information in this post, except that on the Aumonier family, comes from the information sheet given out by openhouselondon.org.uk.

Magpie Alley

Tags

book trade, Fleet Street, newspapers

Fleet Street is named after the river Fleet that flows from Hampstead Heath down towards the Thames, although for most of its way it is hidden underground as it became so polluted and clogged up over the years that it was no longer navigable. In the eighteenth century it was covered over in sections, except for the first part on Hampstead Heath, so that no water can now be seen for most of its course. Fleet Street and the area around it has been associated with publishing since Wynkyn de Worde, William Caxton’s apprentice, set up business near Shoe Lane at the sign of the Sun in the year 1500 or 1501.

Wynkyn de Worde’s device
Source: www.martinfrost.ws

More printers and booksellers followed and from 1702 so did the newspapers, starting with the Daily Courant, followed by, among others, the Morning Advertiser, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Express. Bouverie Street, leading from Fleet Street to the Thames, was the home of the News of the World for a while. The newspapers have all moved out of the City to larger premises on the Isle of Dogs or in Wapping, but a memorial to the hustle and bustle of the publishing days can be seen in Magpie Alley.

You need to go slightly off the beaten track, but it is well worth having a look. From Fleet Street, turn into Bouverie Street (opposite number 160, Bouverie House) and walk down towards the river. Please note the great view of the OXO building across the river you have from here. Keep an eye out for Magpie Alley on your left.

Magpie Alley entrance (from Google Maps)

The alley leads to Whitefriars crypt (see here), but now I just want to draw your attention to the tiled wall of the alley which tells the story of the association of Fleet Street with publishing and printing through the ages.

Alan Brooke has written a booklet: Fleet Street. The Story of a Street (2010) with a wealth of information if you want to know more about the street.

You may also like to read the post on the Daily Express building or the one on Ashentree Court and Northcliffe House.