Tonson was the first to commission critical editions of Milton's poetry, notably Paradise Lost, and to make substantial profit from a literary backlist. He also had a nose for new talent. Alexander Pope later wrote of ‘genial Jacob’ bringing forth poems and plays from ‘the Chaos dark and deep, / Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep’.8 This idea of a publisher bringing forth creativity—rather than being merely a mechanical maker of books—was unprecedented. That the same publisher should be trusted to make critical amendments to manuscripts was even more unheard of. While Victorian antiquarians would snobbishly try to portray Tonson as merely a grubbing tradesman, there is clear evidence he was a man of great intellect and wit: Tonson later boasted, for example, that in the 1680s he had written various commendatory verses for new editions and passed these off as the work of his star authors, John Dryden and Edmund Waller. (This is also evidence, of course, that the publisher was not above corrupting the corpus of his authors' works in order to boost sales.)
Being published by Tonson was soon seen as an author's shortcut to the richest, most powerful readers, thanks to the publisher's gift for networking. Tonson aspired to be considered a gentleman, on a level with his clients and authors, and so would have felt insulted when called the ‘chief merchant to the muses’9 or a great ‘wit-jobber’ (that is to say, no better than a City ‘stock-jobber’).10 He wished to set himself apart from other publishers and booksellers who were increasingly sullied by association with the hack writers of ‘any mean production’ in Grub Street.11
Though one contemporary bitingly remarked that Tonson ‘looked but like a bookseller seated among lords, yet, vice versa, he behaved himself like a lord when he came among booksellers’,12 Tonson, in fact, succeeded in his social climbing: his correspondence shows that his authors accorded him the same terms of politeness that they employed to address their aristocratic patrons.13 He was treated as their friend, not their servant. There is some disagreement as to how Tonson won this respect—one fairly impartial contemporary called Tonson a man who would ‘Flatter no Body’,14 while another described him as shamelessly obsequious whenever there was a profit to be gained.15 Certainly, from early in his career, Tonson made extravagant but well-calculated gestures of hospitality to both social inferiors and superiors. A bill survives for a 1689 dinner at a French-run ‘ordinary’ (a restaurant, usually run by Huguenot refugees) at which Tonson helped pay for a ‘great table’ of food, along with 20 gallons of claret, 6 of ‘Canary’, 4 of white wine, unspecified quantities of ‘Rhenish’ and champagne, 42 bottles of ale, musicians, servants, a constant fire, candles, pipes and tobacco, as well as a hired coach to pick up and deposit the guests—which, when added to compensation for ‘glasses broke’, came to £31. 8s. 6d. (around £4,000 today).16
John Somers was one of those invited to Tonson's parties before the Revolution17—one of the ‘gentlemen of genius and quality’ Dryden complimented Tonson on cultivating so assiduously.18 Born in 1651 to the son of a Worcestershire attorney, Somers had quickly established a reputation as a brilliant legal mind while studying at Middle Temple—an Inn of Court that the sons of professionals ‘ambitious of rule and government’19 were attending in increasing numbers. Somers' father had stood on the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, and, in the same spirit, Somers fell into the Whig party's political camp. The Whigs opposed James II's moves towards Catholic emancipation during the 1680s, and so, in June 1688, Somers acted as counsel for seven bishops who signed a petition against James's order for a pro-Catholic Declaration to be read from pulpits. Somers distrusted this Declaration because it was brought in by royal prerogative rather than parliamentary statute, and because of his deeply ingrained prejudice that the Catholic Church—with its centraliz ation to Rome and absolutist principles—was intrinsically ‘unenlightened’. The invitation to William of Orange to invade was carried from a set of Protestant English nobles on the very day that the seven bishops' acquittal was celebrated in the streets by ordinary Londoners.
Following the Revolution, Somers' Whig credentials and intellectual reputation ensured his rapid promotion in government. He chaired the committee that drafted the Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of the new constitutional monarchy, and guided William towards accepting its limitations on royal prerogatives. Somers helped mount a retroactive public relations campaign, portraying the change of monarch as the triumph of ‘Reason’—a simple expression of John Locke's ‘contract theory’, whereby unworthy rulers deserved to be deposed. In reward, Somers was appointed Solicitor General and then, in 1692, Attorney General, the latter a profitable office with extensive scope for patronage. Less than a year later, Somers was made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, in charge of the Court of Chancery, and Speaker in the House of Lords, though he himself did not yet have a peerage. By 1695, Somers was one of four men who formed the ‘Junto’ of leading Whigs—the Cabinet within the Cabinet when in the King's favour, and when out of it, a kind of unofficial opposition or ‘shadow’ Cabinet. The Junto's power came from its ability to form block votes in the Commons and to raise from the City of London the extra funds necessary to supply William's costly war.20 Somers was a particularly talented fundraiser, having no prejudice against the City's ‘money men’. He was appointed one of the Lord Justices or regents entrusted with the administration of the kingdom whenever the King was on the Continent running the war.
At home, Somers was an incurable bibliophile. His library in Powys House, the impressive brick residence the King had granted him in Lincoln's Inn, was dominated by the legal texts in which the Tonson family firm specialized. Like Tonson, Somers' claim to gentility depended on his display of learning, and this library was the most tangible proof of that education. Tonson was careful not to lose touch with his increasingly powerful friend. He kept Somers' shelves well stocked and met him regularly to ‘unbend’ over an after-work drink in a tavern near Temple Bar, where the commerce of the City intersected with the politics and law of Westminster.
Tonson also flattered Somers' learning by offering the statesman opportunities for dispensing patronage to various authors in Tonson's publishing fold. Being unmarried and without significant extended family to support, Somers was free to put his patronage to such use. His beneficiaries included Dryden, though Somers allegedly authored an anonymous poem critical of Dryden's Catholicism and regretting, ‘The knot of friendship is but loosely tied / Twixt those that heavenly concerns divide.’21 Dryden in turn introduced younger authors to Tonson and hence to Somers' purse. Two such authors who arrived in London during these exciting post-Revolutionary years would quickly become the leading playwrights of their generation: William Congreve and John Vanbrugh.
Congreve had been 4 years old when his father, an English army officer, was posted to Ireland in 1674. A perk for those, like Congreve's father, in nominal service to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was free education for their sons at the best Irish grammar school, Kilkenny. Some sixty pupils were enrolled at the school in the early 1680s and Jonathan Swift was enrolled two years behind Congreve. Congreve went on to Trinity College Dublin at age 16 in 1686, with Swift following a few years later; these