4 - Historical Collections, Impartiality and Antiquarian Nostalgia

Summary

One of the best-known cheap print collections from the early modern period was compiled by the stationer George Thomason from 1641 to 1660. The ‘Thomason Tracts’, now in the British Library, comprise around 22,000 pamphlets and ephemera that, according to their collector, were ‘for the Use of Succeeding Ages’ when ‘Actions yet may be presidents to posterities’. In the early seventeenth century the founder of the Bodleian Library, Thomas Bodley, would have recoiled at the idea of purchasing such a collection. Bodley thought that ‘pamphlettes’, ‘almanackes, plaies, & an infinit number, that are daily printed, of very unworthy maters & handling’ were ‘not worth the custody in suche a Librarie’. Up until his death in 1666, however, Thomason hoped to find a purchaser for the collection and left its 2,000 volumes in the custody of the Oxford scholar, Thomas Barlow. While the deluge of print in the 1640s epitomised the issue of information overload, contemporaries valued Thomason’s collection for the ‘great pains and care’ taken in its compilation (including annotated dates of acquisition), its uniform binding by size, and its ‘well digested’ twelve-volume catalogue taken by the auctioneer, Marmaduke Foster. In 1707, Bagford acted as a broker for the collection’s sale, publicising it to Oxford-based clients as a ‘valuable collection of tracts which I beleve ye Like is not in Europe’. At this time, printed prospectuses also provided a fanciful origin story for the collection. Whereas Thomason was a presbyterian who supported parliament up until Pride’s Purge and the regicide, with connections to parliamentary officials such as John Milton and John Rushworth (‘a great confidant’), the prospectus gave the collection royalist-themed beginnings. It described how ‘Mr. Tomlinson’ (an error reproduced throughout the eighteenth century) was paid ten pounds by Charles I so the king could read pamphlets over at the collector’s house in St Paul’s Churchyard, and had experienced ‘great danger’ in hiding his collection from ‘the usurper’, Oliver Cromwell.

Giving the ‘Thomason Tracts’ royalist origins – with even the king find¬ing time to read over its cheap, seditious content – no doubt made the collection more appealing to potential Oxford-tory buyers at the Bodle¬ian. Yet the interest in such an extensive mass of ephemera also reflected the growing value placed upon historical collections of cheap print in the later Stuart period.