Newbery, JOHN

Newbery, JOHN, a London bookseller, intimately associated with Dr Johnson, Goldsmith, Christopher Smart, Smollett, and many other men of letters, was descended from an old bookselling family, and born a farmer's son, in the Berkshire parish of Waltham St Lawrence, about midsummer 1713. He had first a shop for general wares at Reading, and about 1744 settled in London as a vendor of books and such medicines as Dr James's Powder—the panacea of Horace Walpole as of Goldsmith. He was the first to publish little books for children such as have ever since been popular, and he was himself, in conjunction with Giles and Griffith Jones (1722-86), and perhaps Goldsmith, part author of some of the best of the series, as the histories of Goody Two-Shoes and Giles Gingerbread and the Travels of Tommy Trip. He published many books of a more useful character, a complete list of which is given in Mr Welsh's careful volume. In 1758 he started the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette, in the numbers of which the celebrated Idler was first printed. The Public Ledger, commenced in 1760, has continued to our own day—in its early numbers appeared Goldsmith's Chinese Letters, later reprinted as The Citizen of the World. His death took place 22d December 1767. He had a genius for advertising, even to an ingenious method of bringing in allusions to his books and wares in the text of his stories. Johnson sketched him humorously as 'Jack Whirler' in No. 19 of the Idler. It was to Francis Newbery (1743-1818), his nephew and ultimate successor, that Boswell tells us Dr Johnson told him he sold for sixty pounds the manuscript of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, in which John Newbery has been immortalised as 'the philanthropic bookseller in St Paul's Churchyard, who has written so many little books for children. He called himself their friend, but he was the friend of all mankind.' This transaction has occasioned much difficulty, as Boswell himself gives no date, while the accounts of Mrs Piozzi and Hawkins differ very materially, and Mr Welsh has discovered that B. Collins of Salisbury on October 28, 1762, paid Goldsmith £21 as one-third price of the book. Boswell describes the book as then 'ready for the press;' Mrs Piozzi says Johnson procured the distressed author 'some immediate relief;' Hawkins says the price that Johnson brought him was £40. The year of the sale by Dr Johnson was most likely 1762, when the greater part of the book was written; and it is most probable that Johnson did not mean that he brought the whole sum, but only an instalment of it. See Charles Knight's Shadows of the Old Booksellers (1865); and A Bookseller of Last Century, by Charles Welsh (1885).