Jacob Tonson Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard C. Boys

Critical Essay by Richard C. Boys

SOURCE: Boys, Richard C. “Some Problems of Dryden's Miscellany.” ELH 7, no. 2 (June 1940): 130-43.

In the following essay, Boys discusses the mystery surrounding the publication of the various editions of Dryden and Tonson's Miscellany and Tonson's part in the matter.

In 1684 the rising young bookseller, Jacob Tonson, added another feather to his cap by publishing Miscellany Poems, which came to be known as Dryden's or Tonson's Miscellany and enjoyed popular approval until 1727. In all there were six parts to the anthology in the forty-three years of its existence. Constantly re-issued it proved to be the most successful of the early eighteenth-century collections, with the possible exception of Poems on Affairs of State.¹ One manifestation of the vogue of Dryden's Miscellany is the large number of imitators it had. It is not too much to say that it set the fashion for one kind of collection, which...
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