William Bowyer

Artist Info

William BowyerLondon, 1633 - 1737, London

Bowyer, William (1663–1737), printer, was born in July 1663, the son of John Bowyer, grocer of London, and Mary, daughter of William King, vintner of London. He was bound on 1 September 1679 to Miles Flesher (d. 1688), printer, and freed on 4 October 1686. His first marriage in 1686 or 1687 to Mary (surname unknown; d. 1689) brought two children, Frances and William, said to have died in infancy. On 6 March 1699 Bowyer married Dorothy Allport (1665–1727), widow of Benjamin Allport (bookseller of St Botolph without Bishopsgate, d. August 1695), daughter of Thomas Dawks (1636–1689) [see under Dawks, Thomas (bap. 1611, d. 1670)] and sister to Ichabod Dawks, printers. Their son, also William Bowyer, was born on 19 December 1699.

In the same year Bowyer set up as master printer at the White Horse in Little Britain, London, the first of his eighteen apprentices being bound on 7 August 1699. Before the end of the year Bowyer moved to Dogwell Court, Whitefriars, London. Called to the livery of the Stationers' Company on 6 May 1700, he advanced no higher in the company hierarchy, perhaps for reasons of conscience.

Fourteen years of progress ended suddenly in the small hours of 30 January 1713: Bowyer's dwelling house and workrooms above were gutted by fire. The loss, including works already printed, totalled £5146. The proceeds of a royal brief with debts forgiven and gifts from friends and members of the trade returned almost half this sum. In October 1713 Bowyer began again in Temple Lane, Whitefriars. Tailpieces depicting a phoenix renewed by fire thereafter ornamented many of the firm's works.

Bowyer brought his son into the firm in 1722, but the father alone continued to be mentioned in imprints and to keep the accounts. The achievements of father and son, best documented of any eighteenth-century London printers, were chronicled in Literary Anecdotes by John Nichols, apprentice, partner, and successor to the younger Bowyer, and have been comprehensively studied by Maslen and Lancaster (1991).

Works printed by the father from 1699 to 1737 total more than 2632. Their quantity and diversity are remarkable. The printing of literary works, for instance by Alexander Pope, is only a small part of the story. One class of works stands out, justifying the view that Bowyer aimed to be a scholarly printer in the best continental tradition. To this end he sent his son to university in 1716 to train to be a learned corrector. From the beginning Bowyer printed much in the emergent field of English antiquities, often directly for the authors. Works by the Anglo-Saxonists William and his sister Elizabeth Elstob, Roger Gale, the nonjuror George Hickes (Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesauri, ed. William Wotton, 1708), John Le Neve (Monumenta Anglicana, 1716–19), Thomas Rymer (many volumes of the Foedera from 1708), David Wilkins (Leges Anglo-Saxonicae, 1721), and Moses Williams (proposals issued 1719 for his edition of Humphrey Llwyd, Britannicae descriptionis commentariolum, 1731) form a representative few.

Motives for the study of English history included the wish to justify post-Reformation church reform. Bowyer's many nonjuring authors comprised an especially active subgroup of scholars whom Bowyer, a nonjuror himself, served beyond the commercial call of duty. The first work bearing his imprint, the anonymous Defence of the Vindication of K. Charles the Martyr, 1699, by Thomas Wagstaffe, nonjuring ‘bishop’ of Ipswich, reveals the printer's sympathies. Bowyer was nevertheless moderate in his dissent, like his friend Robert Nelson (of whose Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England he printed sixteen editions between 1704 and 1735). Nonjuring principles governed his choice of private school (under Ambrose Bonwicke) and college (St John's, Cambridge) for his son, and in the 1720s his attendance, with the printer James Bettenham, his stepson-in-law, at meetings to ordain nonjuring priests.

A learned printer required good and exotic types. Bowyer's first Anglo-Saxon types were burnt in the fire. A new fount, used in Elizabeth Elstob's Anglo-Saxon Grammar (1715), was later given to Oxford University. In the 1720s Bowyer was an important patron of the typefounder William Caslon. The first recorded use of Caslon's pica roman is in Bowyer's Anacreontis opera graece, 1725, while, according to Nichols, Caslon's pica Coptic, used in David Wilkins's Quinque libri Moysis prophetae in lingua Aegyptia, typis Gul. Bowyer, 1731, was cut in 1729 under Bowyer's supervision.

There are tantalizing glimpses of Bowyer's journeyman years. Letters written by him in 1696–7, reported by Ord (pp. 340–41) but now presumed lost, imply a serious-minded young man. In one letter, said to display a ‘vast mass of erudition’, he endeavoured to win back his sister ‘Elizabeth Ross’, who had ‘apostasised to popery, and died a professed nun of St. Clare's, at Dunkirk’. Another, addressed to ‘Mr. Bowyer, at Mr. Daniel Sheldon's, in St. Bartholomew's Close’ links Bowyer with members of the pre-1688 Anglican establishment. Sheldon (d. 1699), whose will Bowyer witnessed on 16 February 1697, was nephew to Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1677), and brother-in-law to John Dolben, archbishop of York (d. 1686).

Bowyer was a highly competent printer, widely respected in the trade and beyond, and able twice in his career to build up a large and successful business. He died in London on 27 December 1737, and was buried at Low Leyton, Essex, where he owned a country retreat. His son raised a monument to his memory in the local church.

Keith Maslen

Sources Nichols, Lit. anecdotes · The Bowyer ledgers: the printing accounts of William Bowyer, father and son, reproduced on microfiche with a checklist of Bowyer printing 1699–1777, a commentary, indexes and appendixes, ed. K. Maslen and J. Lancaster (1991) · D. F. McKenzie, ed., Stationers' Company apprentices, [2]: 1641–1700 (1974) · K. I. D. Maslen, An early London printing house at work: studies in the Bowyer ledgers (1993) · J. W. Ord, The history and antiquities of Cleveland (1846) · M. Treadwell, ‘London printers and printing houses in 1705’, Publishing History, 7 (1980), 5–44 · J. Mosley, ‘The early career of William Caslon’, Journal of the Printing History Society, 3 (1967), 66–81 · K. I. D. Maslen, The Bowyer ornament stock (1973) · E. R. Mores, A dissertation upon English typographical founders and founderies, ed. H. Carter and C. Ricks, new edn (1961) · K. I. D. Maslen, ‘Samuel Negus, his list and “His case”’, The Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982), 317–20 · private information (2004) [M. Treadwell] · rate books and marriage tax assessments, CLRO

Archives Bodl. Oxf., account books, paper stock ledger, MS Don. b.4 · Grolier Club Library, New York, ledgers A, B, and C, Grolier 19471, 19474, and 19472 [described in The Bowyer ledgers (1991)] :: Bodl. Oxf., Rawl. MSS · Col. U., Nichols archives [mostly printed in Nichols, Lit. anecdotes]

Likenesses J. Basire, line engraving, pubd 1812, BM, NPG; repro. in Nichols, Lit. anecdotes, vol. 1, frontispiece · oils, Stationers' Hall, London

Wealth at death estate, incl. business, to son: administration, TNA: PRO, PROB 6/114/2

Keith Maslen, ‘Bowyer, William (1663–1737)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3092, accessed 20 June 2014]