Georgian London: Into the Streets Read Free Page A

master’s daughter. In 1724, he took up the premises of the Black Swan and the Ship in Paternoster Row, and went into business on his own account. He purchased the stock and buildings of William Taylor, the publisher of Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
. Soon after this, Longman embarked on one of the Enlightenment’s greatest printing endeavours.
    In the intellectual crucible of late seventeenth-century Europe, texts on science, astronomy, philosophy and the natural world proliferated, but many were too specialized for the ordinary reader. In 1704, John Harris produced
Lexicon Technicum
, but it rambled and lacked an index, rendering it unsearchable. Someone needed to produce a concise guide to this new knowledge. The need to categorizeinformation is a constant modern theme (the Wikipedia experiment is the most recent and certainly the largest attempt in history).
    Ephraim Chambers was born in Kendal in 1680. Gifted but poor, he was apprenticed to a London mechanic, ‘but having formed ideas not at all reconcilable to manual labour he was removed from thence and tried at another business’. This attempt also failed and ‘he was at last sent to Mr Senex, the globe-maker’.
    Senex globes are now prized for their astronomical accuracy (although his maps are equally prized for showing California as a large island). Ephraim Chambers was no ordinary apprentice; Senex, a man from Shropshire turned Royal Society Fellow and Freemason, was only two years older than his charge, making Chambers one of London’s oldest apprentices at the age of about thirty-four. Ephraim spent his time studying, and a friend noted that he left the apprenticeship ‘a very indifferent globe-maker’. Instead, he had decided he was going to write ‘the best Book in the Universe’.
    It was a huge undertaking and, in 1728, his
Cyclopaedia
appeared. Chambers laid out his considerable aspirations for the book on the title page: ‘Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences’. He died in 1740, still working on another edition. There were rumours of trouble amongst the collection of publishers who had undertaken to produce the massive
Cyclopaedia
but the only one mentioned specifically after Ephraim’s death is Longman, who ‘in particular used him with the liberality of a prince and the tenderness of a father’. It is surely no coincidence that Longman’s of Paternoster Row would go on to publish Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, in 1775, which did for words what the
Cyclopaedia
had attempted to do for art and science.
    Society as a whole was becoming more literate, and it was not only aided by the rise of books. In 1680, William Dockra had introduced his ‘New and Useful Invention, commonly term’d the PENNY POST’. A letter brought to the Post Office at 8 a.m. could be delivered across London by 10 a.m., or would be on its way out of town on one of the six Post Roads. Throughout the Georgian period, the Post Office was overseen by the Treasury and comprised a small elite group of supervisors: John Evelyn worked hard to get the countryoffices in order; Francis Dashwood campaigned to get rid of boys on ponies with messenger bags, replacing them with horses and carts; and William Pitt the Elder recorded the necessity of disinfecting mail coming in from certain foreign locations.
    The eighteenth century saw the emergence of letters as something not only for the elite classes, but for everyone. Writing equipment had become cheap enough for those of even the lowest social classes to obtain, and the Post allowed them to convey their thoughts, ideas and hopes to distant hands and eyes. Ink pigment and quills were hawked about the streets by specialist pedlars. The very poor burned wool and pounded it into a black powder. The best quill was the third feather in from a goose’s wing. Right-handers preferred a quill from the left wing of the goose as they curve more comfortably over the hand. A rare left-hander used the right wing