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Nobody's Perfect
A New Whig Interpretation of History
By Annabel Patterson Yale University Press
Copyright © 2002 Yale University
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-300-09288-1
Chapter One
John Almon MORE THAN A BOOKSELLER
In Early Modern Liberalism, I made this claim: when considering the origins of the liberal political and social thought that today we take for granted, our respect should be equally distributed between those who first formulated these principles and those who subsequently transmitted them to the future - men like Thomas Hollis, whose editorial efforts may have helped to educate a generation of late eighteenth-century Americans in seventeenth-century liberal thought. John Almon, Whig bookseller of the later eighteenth century, is another example of a neglected transmitter, someone to whom we owe more than is known or remembered and whose reputation among those who have remembered him has been probably unfairly tarnished. There may even be a class prejudice against booksellers, as there certainly was in the eighteenth century. Those who struggle to understand the unstable Georgian ministries and the personal inconsistencies of great figures like Pitt and Burke are unlikely to care about a commercial entrepreneur. But Almon was considerably more than a bookseller. Like Thomas Hollis, he believed in the power of the printed word to make or prepare for political changes; but instead of using his personal wealth to subsidize the reprinting of the liberal classics, he became, though starting from nothing, the greatest political publisher of his generation. Like Hollis, he supported the American Revolution and saw to it that the colonists' perspective was made available to the English public; but whereas Hollis kept a low profile personally, refusing to stand for Parliament, Almon adventured his personal safety in the legal struggles of his day, combatting the dangerously elastic laws of libel with powerful theoretical arguments as well as by guerilla tactics.
Almon also got things done. His activities on behalf of the freedom of the press resulted in at least one major breakthrough in his own time. Not single-handedly, but definitely leading the attack, Almon established, against all parliamentary efforts to the contrary, the rights of London newspapers to publish the debates of the House of Commons. And among his vast body of publications, some of which he wrote himself, is the tract that deserves to stand as the eighteenth-century equivalent of Milton's Areopagitica: the Letter Concerning Libels. This remarkable pamphlet, which appeared in seven editions, the first in 1764, updated the problems of freedom of the press for a culture that had substituted for the expired system of licensing an arbitrary and highly politicized concept of libel.
Almon is also an example of that phenomenon in which a regenerate individualism should be particularly interested: the self-made man, who, as distinct from the self-fashioning one, creates himself from scratch in defiance of social norms. Without a dynastic leg to stand on, without money or connections, Almon made himself into an institution. Although he did acquire invaluable patronage from the Whig leadership, which ensured that his bookselling business flourished, it was native talent and indefatigable energy that made his considerable fortune. It was stubborn courage that then lost it. Horace Walpole complained that Almon was "reckoned to have made a fortune of £10,000 by publishing and selling libels." It is difficult not to see this as the complaint of a very wealthy aristocrat, whose wealth was entirely inherited, against the success of an upstart working-class businessman.
In terms of the material history of print, Almon was brilliantly in advance of most of his contemporaries in grasping its structure conceptually, as well as in exploiting relatively new developments like the newspaper and the political cartoon. He intuitively understood publicity, distribution, and timing. He knew how to combine serious content with popular appeal. Almon also used his own quite serious brushes with the law to focus public attention on the law's abuses - a strategy he may have learned from John Lilburne, the great worker of the media in the mid-seventeenth century, whose career was well known to him. Perhaps because his own financial and even personal survival was at stake, Almon became a brilliant political writer in his own right. He had somehow acquired a literary education. And despite being unquestionably biased in favor of Whig writers, he was a refreshingly candid literary critic.
So who was John Almon, and why has nobody heard of him today? These questions have already been partially answered by Deborah Rogers, whose pioneering biography, Bookseller as Rogue, appeared in 1986. The title, taken from another sour remark of Horace Walpole's, seems slightly unfortunate if one is attempting to recuperate a figure from the past. Rogers apparently wrote under the shadow of a remarkable piece of character defamation, the chapter on Almon in Lucyle Werkmeister's study of the London press. We will return later to the motives for Werkmeister's attack on Almon as a striking instance of how the present can blacklist the past. Nevertheless, Rogers recreated for modern readers the broad outlines of Almon's career and retrieved in an appendix a huge list of works issued under his imprint, which gives us not only the shape and color of his project, but also some sense of his extraordinary energy and persistence. The list is somewhat inflated by the fact that in the later eighteenth century it was common for several booksellers to distribute the same work; but even so, it is clear that Almon's efforts on behalf of what he saw as his cause vastly exceeded in scale those of radical Whig publishers of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries such as the two John Darbys, father and son, or Richard and Anne Baldwin, or Francis "Elephant" Smith.
John Almon was an enterprising orphan from Liverpool, who, at the age of twenty-two, having lost both parents and his older brother, and having briefly tried the life of a sailor, moved to London. Having found employment as a journeyman-printer with John Watts, he took quickly to the world of the printed word. In 1759, his first year on the job, he published a curiously backhanded defence of Lord George Sackville at the battle of Minden, The Cowardice of a Late Noble Commander Examined, which attracted public attention to Sackville and his subsequent court-martial and which ran to two editions. This drew Almon to the attention of Charles Green Say, the printer and owner of the liberal Gazetteer, who hired him to compete against Oliver Goldsmith, writer for the Public Ledger. For Say, Almon wrote a series of articles on contemporary politics under such self-explanatory pseudonyms as "Independent Whig" and "Lucius [Junius Brutus]." He also wrote a defence of William Pitt's administration, broken off in 1761 by Pitt's resignation over the ending of the Seven Years' War, an essay that Almon shrewdly dedicated to Pitt's brother-in-law, Richard Grenville, Earl Temple. The result was that Temple sent for him, took him into his favor and under his patronage, and introduced him to many of the leading Whigs, including Pitt himself, the duke of New-castle, the duke of Devonshire, the marquis of Rockingham, and the about-to-become-notorious John Wilkes. In the autumn of 1763, with Temple's encouragement and financial support, Almon resigned from his job at the Gazetteer and started his own business as bookseller and publisher.
The Affair of Wilkes and the North Briton
1763 was a red-letter year in the old Whig historiography, since it featured a major legal and parliamentary debacle, one that helped to crystallise the deeper differences between groups whose ideological boundaries had been blurred, deliberately, by George III's determination to govern without recourse to political parties. The story of the notorious number 45 of the North Briton, which contained an attack on the king's speech at the end of the spring session of Parliament, has been told many times, most fully perhaps by Peter Thomas in his biography of Wilkes. The origins of the offending article were these. The royal speech of closure, to be delivered on April 19, was by convention undebatable; but the day previous to its public presentation Prime Minister George Grenville had, as a courtesy, sent a copy to his brother, Lord Temple, and he and Pitt were discussing its offensive qualities when Wilkes happened to visit. Together they agreed on the strategy whereby the speech would, in effect, be debated in public by way of the North Briton, the journal that Wilkes and Charles Churchill had founded as an antidote to the pro-Bute Briton. According to Thomas, Wilkes was the sole, though anonymous, author, but Temple and Pitt undoubtedly agreed on the content. The king took the article, which appeared on April 23, as a personal insult. On April 26, Lord Halifax, secretary of state, signed a general warrant for the arrest of "the authors, printers and publishers of a seditious and treasonable paper." A general warrant is one where no individual suspects are named, and its dubious legality as a procedure led to a major legal and constitutional debate which could only, both in the short and in the very long term, embarrass the government. Forty-five persons were arrested, including Wilkes, who, after a series of dramatic manoeuvres on both sides, was discharged by Chief Justice Charles Pratt, on the grounds that libel was not a breach of the peace and that his parliamentary privilege had been infringed. Both Pratt and Wilkes thereby became heroes of the Londoners, who demonstrated effusively in their support. A series of court cases awarded damages to those who had been so rashly arrested; but meanwhile the government was determined to pursue Wilkes on the libel charge.
As Almon would later candidly object, Wilkes irresponsibly played into his enemies' hands, and deeply embarrassed his supporters, by republishing the offending issue of the North Briton at his own private press, set up for the purpose; he also printed an obscene parody of Pope's Essay on Man. This, though intended only for private circulation among like-minded friends, fell into the hands of Lord Sandwich, who in a cabinet shuffle over the summer became the northern secretary of state. When Parliament reconvened in November, there was a double attack on Wilkes: in the Commons it was finally voted that parliamentary privilege did not extend to cover seditious libel; in the House of Lords, Sandwich read aloud parts of the Essay on Woman, which was voted a "scandalous, obscene and impious libel." That Sandwich would forever after be tagged with the name of Jemmy Twitcher, thanks to a saucy topical allusion in a performance of The Beggar's Opera, was small comfort to the Opposition. On December 1, the Lords accepted a proposal from the Commons that North Briton, no. 45, should be publicly burned by the common hangman. On December 6, Wilkes's action for trespass in relation to the search of his house and seizure of his papers resulted in a verdict by Pratt that general warrants were illegal when used as an excuse for widespread searches, especially against printers. Meanwhile, Wilkes had been summoned before the Commons to answer the charge that he was indeed the author of North Briton, no. 45, and after several days of evasion, pleading ill health, he decided to flee to Paris. In his absence, on January 19, Wilkes was expelled from his parliamentary seat.
The Letter Concerning Libels
This extremely truncated account of the affair of North Briton, no. 45, is a necessary introduction to John Almon's role therein. In the first place, as Wilkes's personal friend and ally, Almon had been a crucial go-between in the flurry of action that began with Wilkes's arrest. Having by chance arrived at Wilkes's house at that very moment, Almon was able to take a message to Temple, asking him to arrange for a writ of habeas corpus. He then communicated steadily with Wilkes in France, keeping him fully informed about political events and especially about Temple's reactions. Far more important, however, were Almon's public gestures on Wilkes's behalf. Beginning in the early spring of 1764, he published a series of pamphlets linked by a dramatic fictional premise. First came A Letter to the Public Advertiser from someone who called himself "Candor," whose strategy was that of total reverse irony; that is to say, he presented himself as a defender of the government's actions in the Wilkes case, and in particular of Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, on whom he lavished obsequious compliments, declaring him a successor to George Jeffreys, who had held the same office in the 1680s: "In short, the language of Law, touching Libels, was, in the Court of King's Bench, the same before the Revolution as it is now. And Lord Jeffreys and Lord ******** not only concur in sentiment, but in expression" (p. 9). Since Jeffreys, as Candor reminded his readers (p. 8), was the notorious judge who had condemned to death Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney, cases that became part of the ideology of the revolution, not many of Candor's contemporary readers could have missed the irony; but reverse irony is an unreliable tool, as witnessed by Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters.
Perhaps initially to avoid the possibility of misprision, of having Candor's opinions be taken as genuine support for Mansfield's jurisprudence, Almon published a second attack on Mansfield's doctrine about libels, self-dated October 17, 1764. As Robert Rea points out, this had originally been advertised by Almon as a second Letter from Candor, but during the printing process the pseudonym was changed to "Father of Candor"; the title was also expanded to give, as it were, a table of contents: An Enquiry into the Doctrine, Lately Propagated Concerning Libels, Warrants, and the Seizure of Papers; with a View to Some Late Proceedings and the Defence of Them by the Majority; upon the Principles of Law and the Constitution. In a Letter to Mr. Almon from the Father of Candor. Rea suggests that the change of pseudonym was made "as an added note of mystery and with an eye to greater sales"; but he does not articulate the important point that the two pamphlets must have had a single author. The seven subsequent editions, with their fame already established in advance, used a slightly more economical title, A Letter Concerning Libels, Warrants, the Seizure of Papers, and the Sureties for the Peace of Behaviour.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nobody's Perfect by Annabel Patterson Copyright © 2002 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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