William Creech

LC name authority rec. n 82081638

LC Heading: Creech, William, 1745-1815

Biography:

Creech, William [pseud. Theophrastus] (1745–1815), bookseller and magistrate, was born in Newbattle, Edinburghshire, on 12 May 1745, the son of the Revd William Creech (1705–1745), minister of Newbattle, and his wife, the Calvinist Mary Buley (d. 1764) of the English family of Quarme, Devon, sometime ushers of the black rod in the House of Lords. His father died when Creech was only months old, and he was raised by his mother; he also survived two sisters, Margaret and Mary, who died in September 1749. Creech was educated as a gentleman in Perthshire and at Dalkeith Academy by Mr Barclay, tutor to Viscount Melville, and the Revd John Robertson of Kilmarnoch, tutor to Lord Glencairn's sons, boarders at Mrs Creech's. Intended as a physician, Creech went to medical lectures at the University of Edinburgh from 1761, but, on becoming co-founder in 1764 of the Speculative Society, reconceived himself as a member of the literati, establishing friendships with Hugh Blair, Alexander Duncan, and William Cullen. That year he became apprenticed to the royal printer for Scotland, Alexander Kincaid and John Bell. He formed professional alliances with William Strahan, Thomas Cadell, and others by travelling to London, Paris, and Holland for two years, and returned to Edinburgh in 1768. After a grand tour of France, Holland, Switzerland, and Germany with Lord Kilmaurs in 1770, in May 1771 he joined Kincaid in the firm of Kincaid and Creech, becoming in May 1773 the sole partner. Unmarried, Creech was an elegant, self-conscious man, with a passion for socializing. This he nourished in the homosocial milieu of the Edinburgh élite by hosting book auctions and weekly breakfasts in the room over his shop, known as ‘Creech's levees’, where he charmed such lifelong friends as Lord Kames, Henry Home, and Dr James Beattie with his irony and anecdotes.

As a bookseller, Creech was patriotic, ambitious, and ostentatiously high-minded, contributing greatly to the contemporary popularity of Scottish literature. He published works by Blair, Beattie, Cullen, Gregory, Ferguson, and Robert Burns, as well as Henry Mackenzie's periodicals The Mirror (1779–80) and The Lounger (1785–7), and belonged to the Mirror Club with Mackenzie, the lords Craig, Abercrombie, Bannatyne, and Cullen, George Home, and George Ogilvie. Publishing nationalistic, if unprofitable, texts, including Sir John Sinclair's Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–9) containing his own Account of the Manners and Customs of Scotland between 1763 and 1783, updated to 1791, he enraged Burns by his delay in settling his account with Burns for the publication of his Poems, turning the poet from flattering him as ‘witty’ to deriding him as

A little, upright, pert, tart, tripping wight,

And still his precious self his chief delight.

Under the pseudonym Theophrastus, Creech disparaged modern manners in the newspapers, and in 1791 published his own collection of satires garnered from the Edinburgh Courant, Edinburgh Gazette, and Caledonian Mercury, entitled Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces, and reissued with a biographical sketch of Creech in 1815.

In later life Creech entered politics. Founder with John Bell of the Society of Booksellers of Edinburgh and Leith, and a fellow of the Antiquaries Society of Edinburgh, he was a member of the Edinburgh town council, helping to form the Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures of Edinburgh in 1786, and serving as magistrate in 1788, 1789, 1791, and 1792, when he also founded the Corporation of Booksellers. A moderate and supporter of Pitt and Lord Melville, while he was provost from 1811 to 1813 the Edinburgh town council legislated for increases in trade pensions, noise curfews, a Charity workhouse, and the publication of studies on recent water and grain shortages. Famous throughout Edinburgh for his well-placed bookshop near St Giles's Church and his well-born friends, Creech was a businessman whose obituary, appearing in the Edinburgh Courant five days after his death in Edinburgh on 14 January 1815, praises his scholarship and social eminence.

Barbara M. Benedict

Sources B. M. Benedict, ‘William Creech and sentiment for sale’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 15 (1991), 119–46 · A. Constable, ‘An account of his life’, in W. Creech, Edinburgh fugitive pieces (1815), xi–xli · Edinburgh Evening Courant (19 Jan 1815) · NA Scot., Dalguise muniments, microfilm copy, W. Creech, correspondence, 1751–1793 · J. C. Carrick, William Creech: Robert Burns' best friend (1903) · Fasti Scot., new edn · Chambers, Scots. (1868–70), 1.398 · [W. Creech], Edinburgh fugitive pieces (1791); [another edn] (1815) · W. Creech, Letters, addressed to Sir John Sinclair, Bart. respecting the mode of living, arts, commerce, literature, manners, &c. of Edinburgh, in 1763, and since that period (1793) · Regulations for the tronmen, chimney-sweepers and firemen of Edinburgh, 27 Feb 1811, BL, Edinburgh session papers, Edinburgh 1811.80, Ry. 1.1.30, fol. 2 · J. Brown, Contract of agreement ... for building and endowing the Charity Work-House, BL, Edinburgh 1812.80, 1959.16, fol. 8 · By order of the ... Lord provost and magistrates of Edinburgh, BL, Edinburgh 1814.40, 6.1699, fol. 96 · Act of the right honourable the lord provost, magistrates, and council of the city of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 1813, Macc. 1537, fol. 3 · T. Telford and T. C. Hope, Reports on the means of improving the supply of water for the city of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 1813, BL, 5.142, fol. 13 · The petition of William Creech, bookseller in Edinburgh, against Lord Abercromby's interlocutor (14 Feb 1794) · A capital collection of books, to be sold by auction ... above Mr. Creech's shop (1780) · William Creech's sale catalogue (1791) [sale catalogue, Edinburgh, 1791] · R. H. Cromek, Reliques of Robert Burns (1808), no. 19, 23–7 · S. W. Brown, ‘Life of Creech’, The British Library book trade, 1700–1800, ed. J. K. Bracken and J. Eiliver (1995)

Archives BL · Edinburgh Central Reference Library, journal, letter-books, inventory of stock, etc. [journal: copy] · NA Scot., corresp. · NA Scot., Dalguise muniments · NL Scot., corresp. · NRA Scotland, priv. coll., corresp. and papers · Signet Library, Edinburgh, business diary

Likenesses H. Raeburn, oils, 1806, Scot. NPG

Barbara M. Benedict, ‘Creech, William (1745–1815)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/6662, accessed 19 Oct 2015]