The Old Printer and the Modern Press

The Old Printer and the Modern Press

In 1844 I wrote, and published in my series of 'The Weekly Volume,' William Caxton, a Biography. That little work sold as largely as any of the collection. It will not be reprinted, as I have cancelled the stereotype plates. In the present work I have remodelled that biography; rendering it a more compact narrative of the state of knowledge before the invention of printing, of the personal history of the man who brought the invention to England, and of the nature of his efforts to diffuse information amongst his countrymen. This account forms the First Part of this volume. In treating of the remarkable revolution of our times in the prices of books, I cannot avoid incidentally noticing some of my own labours in that direction. I have done so as slightly as possible; and, I trust, in the impartial spirit of an honest chronicler. In the first book printed in the English language, the subject of which was the 'Histories of Troy,' William Caxton, the translator of the work from the French, in his prologue or preface, says, by way of apology for his simpleness and imperfectness in the French and English languages, "In France was I never, and was born and learned mine English in Kent, in the Weald, where I doubt not is spoken as broad and rude English as in any place of England." The Weald of Kent is now a fertile district, rich in corn-land and pasture, with farm-houses and villages spread over its surface, intersected by good roads, and a railway running through the heart of it, bringing the scattered inhabitants closer and closer to each other. But at the period when William Caxton was born, and learnt his English in the Weald, it was a wild district with a scanty population; its inhabitants had {2} little intercourse with the towns, the affairs of the busy world went on without their knowledge and assistance, they were more separated from the great body of their countrymen than a settler in Canada or Australia is at the present day. It is easy to understand therefore why they should have spoken a "broad and rude English" at the time of Caxton's boyhood, during the reign of Henry V. and the beginning of that of Henry VI. William Lambarde, who wrote a hundred and fifty years after this period, having published his 'Perambulation of Kent' in 1570, mentions as a common opinion touching this Weald of Kent, "that it was a great while together in manner nothing else but a desert and waste wilderness, not planted with towns or peopled with men as the outsides of the shire were, but stored and stuffed with herds of deer and droves of hogs only;" and he goes on to say that, "although the property of the Weald was at the first belonging to certain known owners, yet it was not then allotted into tenancies." The Weald of Kent came to be taken, he says, "even as men were contented to inhabit it, and by piecemeal to rid it of the wood, and to break it up with the plough." In some lonely farm, then, of this wild district, are we, upon the best of evidence, his own words, to fix the birth-place and the earliest home of the first English printer. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 59966
Author: Knight, Charles
Release Date: Jul 22, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English