Bernard Lintott

Artist Info

Bernard LintottSouthwater, England, 1675 - 1736, London

Lintot [Lintott], (Barnaby) Bernard (1675–1736), bookseller, was born on 1 December 1675 at Southwater, near Horsham, Sussex, the son of John Lintott, yeoman. He was bound apprentice to the bookseller Thomas Lingard on 1 December 1690, but was turned over to John Harding before being freed on 18 March 1700. At this time he usually spelt his name with a double t (the decided preference for only one dates from around 1716), but he may have been related to Joshua Lintot, printer to the House of Commons between 1708 and 1710, whose son John he took as his apprentice on 4 February 1724. Bernard began to trade independently, at the Cross Keys in St Martin's Lane, London, before the official end of his apprenticeship, his name appearing on the title-pages of six plays in 1698. He married Catherine Langley (1664–1748), widow, at St Bartholomew's, Smithfield, on 13 October 1700, and that same year he moved premises, to the Post Office or Post House in the Middle Temple Gate in Fleet Street, where he remained until 1705. He then moved to the Cross Keys (sometimes ‘and Crown’ or ‘Cushion’), between the two Temple Gates in Fleet Street or next to Nandy's Coffee House at Temple Bar, the first house east of Inner Temple Lane.

Lintot, in conscious rivalry with Jacob Tonson, rapidly became the premier literary bookseller of the first third of the eighteenth century. By investing first in plays and later in translations and poetry he secured a significant role in the development of English literature. In the first decade of the century his name is found in the imprints of plays by Farquhar, Dryden, Congreve, Steele, Baker, Centlivre, Cibber, and lesser figures. Between 1705 and 1712 he regularly published the plays performed at Drury Lane, and on 16 February 1718 he agreed with Tonson that they should in future share all the plays they purchased. Publications also included practical, especially legal, guides, Dennis's criticism, and works by the deists Toland and Wollaston. The major playwrights were regularly reprinted, with editions continuing to be issued well into the 1750s.

In 1712 Lintot published Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, which contained the first version of Pope's Rape of the Lock. The collection was designed to rival Tonson's series of Poetical Miscellanies, edited by Dryden, with Pope taking Dryden's role. Pope and Gay humorously compared Lintot to the great humanist printers of the Renaissance, with Pope exalting Lintot over his great predecessors:

Others with Aldus would besot us;

I, for my part, admire Lintottus.

(Twickenham Edition, 6.83)

In the following two decades Lintot published first editions of important works by Pope, Gay, and their friend Rowe: Windsor Forest, Temple of Fame, Eloisa to Abelard, Three Hours after Marriage, Trivia, The What d'ye Call it, Jane Shore, and Lady Jane Grey, as well as Pope's Works (1717), Gay's Poems on Several Occasions (1720), and Rowe's posthumous Works (1728).

Nichols's extracts from Lintot's accounts show he was generous to successful authors. Farquhar received £15 for the Twin Rivals, but £30 for the Beaux' Stratagem; Rowe was paid £50 15s. for Jane Shore and £75 for Jane Grey; Gay earned £43 from the copyright of Trivia and £75 from the ‘Revival of the Wife of Bath’. For Urry's Chaucer, Lintot agreed to pay all the cost of publication but to take only one-third of the subscription. Shrewdly he paid Cibber £105 for the Nonjuror; inexplicably he paid the same to James Moore Smythe for The Rival Modes. But the contracts with Pope were the most generous. For his six-volume translation of the Iliad (issued in instalments, 1715–20) Pope was given £2201 by Lintot: £1275 in copy money and £926 in books. Lintot hoped to make a complementary profit of £2200 himself by selling 250 illustrated large folios and 1750 plain small ones to the public, but he miscalculated and for the second volume reduced his print run of small folios to 1000. Moreover, a Dutch duodecimo piracy in 1720 undercut his folios and forced him immediately into his own duodecimo edition. Nevertheless, he probably made over £600 profit on the first edition, and over £2000 on the duodecimos in 1720. For the Odyssey translation that followed, Pope tried to win Tonson as publisher by agreeing to edit an edition of Shakespeare for only £100; but he failed. Fenton reported to Broome, on 9 January 1724, ‘Tonson does not care to contract for the copy, and application has been made to Lintot, upon which he exerts the true spirit of a scoundrel, believing that he has Pope entirely at his mercy’ (Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 2.214). The terms of the contract were less generous than for the Iliad. For five volumes, Pope was given £367 10s. in copy money and £673 14s. 7½ d. in books (worth, as it turned out, £5,549 5s. in subscriptions). Lintot's profits again amounted to over £600 on the folios, with about £1500 from the duodecimos, but this time the poet and bookseller quarrelled. When Tonson advertised the Shakespeare subscription for his own benefit (23 January 1725), Lintot became infuriated at the contrast between his own position and Tonson's and retaliated with ‘Proposals by Bernard Lintot, for his own Benefit’ offering the equivalent folios for a guinea less than Pope's quartos. Pope declared Lintot a scoundrel and resolved never to employ him again, but Lintot held the copyright to the majority of Pope's early poems and continued to reprint them at regular intervals.

Lintot figures as a minor character in Pope's Narrative of Dr Norris and Full and True Account of the poisoning of Curll, and he laments his treatment by Pope in Oldmixon's The Catholick Poet. In the Dunciad Pope mocks Lintot's fondness for the red and black title-pages he liked to post outside his shop, and then compares him to a dabchick in his race against Curll. Lintot was large, clumsy, and choleric; Young described him to Spence as ‘a great sputtering fellow’ (Spence, 848). Pope comically describes a ride in Lintot's company, marked by the bookseller's profanity and callousness but revealing his ingenuity in using gentlemen to check the work of his translators. Lintot had better relations with the trade than with Pope; his accounts list many arrangements with other booksellers, including thirteen agreements with the Tonsons. He was also a pioneer in book advertising, and established the Monthy Catalogue (1714–16), the first regular listing of books. After the accession of George I he became one of the printers of the parliamentary votes and retained the office until 1727. In 1708 he was called to the livery of the Stationers' Company, in 1715 he was renter warden, in 1722–3 he joined the court of assistants, and in 1729 and 1730 he was under-warden.

From 1730 Bernard Lintot shared the business with his son Henry [see below], buying land near his father's holding in Sussex and becoming semi-retired. In November 1735 he was nominated high sheriff for Sussex, but did not live to enjoy the office. Pope reported him ill of an asthma on 12 January 1736 and he died in London on 3 February. He was buried in St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street, London, on 9 February. His will, made on 17 December 1730, was proved on 14 February 1736 by his son Henry.

Henry Lintot (bap. 1703, d. 1758), bookseller, son of Bernard and Catherine Lintot, was baptized at St Clement Danes, London, on 6 August 1703. He was educated at Westminster School. In 1730 he married Elizabeth (d. 1734), daughter of Sir John Aubrey, bt, of Llantrithyd House, Glamorgan, and Boarstall, Buckinghamshire, and his father made a settlement, providing for an estate in land of £200 a year. Henry became a freeman of the Stationers' Company by patrimony on 1 September 1730, and joined his father in business. He inherited the business and estates in 1736, when he was also appointed high sheriff for Sussex in place of his father. Humfrey Wanley reports a visit by Lintot to the Harleian Library on 31 January 1726 in search of family arms, and Bugden's unofficial heraldic visitation of Sussex, 1724, lists the arms of Henry Lintot of Southwater, who must be either the bookseller or a near relation. Lintot also had a town house, Broome House, Fulham.

Henry Lintot retained his father's literary copyrights and issued regular editions of major writers, but he made little attempt to develop that side of the firm's list. He did, however, buy the copyright to the Dunciad when it became available, resisted Pope's threats of litigation, and secured his share of profits in editions of Pope's works. He built up the firm's interest in law books and became law printer to the king on 10 March 1749. Lintot's first wife died on 21 January 1734 and he married his second wife, Philadelphia, daughter of John Gurr of Fulham (and possibly the sister of two of his apprentices) on 29 December 1752. They had no children. Henry Lintot died on 10 December 1758 and was buried at the Temple Church on 17 December. Philadelphia Lintot died in 1763.

Catherine Fletcher [née Lintot], Lady Fletcher (1733–1816), printer, was the only survivor of the four children of Henry and Elizabeth Lintot; according to the family Bible, she was born by Temple Bar, London, in 1733. She succeeded to her father's business on his death in 1758, but quickly withdrew from active management. Much of the literary property she had inherited was sold at a trade sale on 26 April 1759, and on 24 June 1760 she sold half her patent as king's law printer to Samuel Richardson. Richardson removed her printing house from the Savoy to join his own in White Lyon Court, Fleet Street. On Richardson's death in 1761 she continued the business for a year with his widow, Elizabeth, but they then sold the patent to Henry Woodfall and William Strahan. On 20 October 1768 she married Captain Henry Fletcher (1727?–1807) of Ashley Park, Walton-on-Thames, bringing with her a fortune of £45,000; together they had a son and a daughter. On 20 May 1782 her husband received a baronetcy. Lady Fletcher died on 17 October 1816 at Ashley Park; a monument was raised to her and her husband in the church of Walton-on-Thames.

James McLaverty

Sources ESTC · Nichols, Lit. anecdotes · M. W. Barnes, ‘The firm of Lintot’, MA diss., U. Lond., 1943 · D. F. Foxon, Pope and the early eighteenth-century book trade (1991) · The correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburn, 5 vols. (1956) · J. Spence, Observations, anecdotes, and characters, of books and men, ed. J. M. Osborn, new edn, 2 vols. (1966) · The Twickenham edition of the poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt and others, 11 vols. in 12 (1939–69) · J. P. Fletcher, ‘Bernard Lintot, bookseller’, N&Q, 6th ser., 2 (1880), 293 · M. A. Lower, ‘Family of Lintot’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 8 (1856), 275–6 · W. S. Ellis, ‘Bugden's unofficial heraldic visitation of Sussex, 1724’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 25 (1873), 85–100 · The diary of Humfrey Wanley, 1715–1726, ed. C. E. Wright and R. C. Wright, 2 vols. (1966) · J. Thorne, Handbook to the environs of London (1876) · D. F. McKenzie, ed., Stationers' Company apprentices, [3]: 1701–1800 (1978) · G. Creed, ‘Bernard Lintot’, N&Q, 2nd ser., 4 (1857), 149 · VCH Sussex · Old Westminsters · Stationers' Company records, Stationers' Hall, London · private information (2004) [M. Treadwell, Trent University, Canada] · W. M. Sale, Samuel Richardson: master printer (1950) · GM, 1st ser., 38 (1768), 494 · GM, 1st ser., 86/2 (1816), 468

Archives BL, Add. MS 4809 · BL, Egerton MS 1951 · BL, Egerton Charters MS 128–130

James McLaverty, ‘Lintot , (Barnaby) Bernard (1675–1736)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16746, accessed 20 June 2014]