by Anne Scott
He set up in Duke’s Court opposite St Martin’s in the Fields and then opened in Round Court off the Strand. For over a century the book trade had been expanding, moving from Saint Paul’s Churchyard into Paternoster Row and then west to Drury Lane and the Strand, creating a hereditary ground base for the bookshop neighbourhood of Charing Cross Road and Cecil Court.
Round Court was already busy in the 1740s with specialist map and atlas booksellers. Was Tom Davies one of them? More likely he was in general business with literature. There was so much poetry to sell: Alexander Pope had been publishing every year for a decade since 1730, and there was exciting innovative prose. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels had been out since 1726, Daniel Defoe was selling well, and now there was a new genre in the first appearance of the novelist Samuel Richardson, David Hume’s Essays, and quick-to-sell copies of The Gentlemen’s Magazine with pieces from young Samuel Johnson making his name. By the late summer of 1749 though, the book to buy was Tom Jones. Trade was whirling at the counters of Round Court.
But by then, Tom Davies had left the book trade, leaving no trace. Somewhere between 1746 and 1747 he had ‘met with misfortunes’ and had gone back to the theatre and to Scotland. In 1749 he was acting at The Concert Hall and The New Concert Hall in Edinburgh. He was now thirty-seven years old.
Edinburgh was popular with touring companies. The audiences were sophisticated enough for light drama and the elegant-reckless roles Tom Davies played thrillingly. He was retained in the company for a long tour to Dublin, to appear at The Green Room Theatre under the direction of Samuel Foote, whom he would meet again further into his life, in his Russell Street Bookshop. One other fact: the Company returned to England to play in The New Theatre, York and there he met Lucy Yarrow, the daughter of a theatrical family, and a supreme beauty. By the time he is again playing in Edinburgh, he and Lucy are married.
In January 1750 in a bitter Edinburgh winter, he is Edgar in King Lear playing at The Concert Hall off the Canongate near Playhouse Close. This old theatre cannot hold the new audiences and is in desperate need of repair: foundations for a new one are already laid but it is being built on credit. The January performance is to bring in money to pay the builders enough to continue. The Caledonian Mercury put it like this:
‘By particular desire, in order to pay part of the expense of erecting the New Concert Hall, at The Concert Hall in the Canongate on 23rdJanuary 1750 will be performed a Concert of Musick. After the first part of the Concert will be presented The True and Ancient History of King Lear and His Three Daughters by Shakespear.’
Two days later Davies was in The Fair Penitent and then he appeared in six roles in a hectic seven weeks: on Feb. 13th in Venice Preserved, Feb 15th The Ghost in Hamlet, Feb 22nd, Manly in The Provok’d Husband, March 1st in Shakespeare’s Henry IV: March 29th the title part in Joseph Addison’s Cato, and by 7th April, he was (surely a weary) Osric in Hamlet.
In the month that followed, there were changes in the Company. Tom Davies’s reputation was high and he was playing major roles. On May 5th he was given the title role of Othello. This was a benefit performance for him and has all the appearance of an accolade for the Company’s new leading actor. In September he becomes Co-Director of The New Concert Hall. The Caledonian Mercury reports that he has purchased from the Proprietors of The New Concert Hall ‘all their right, title and interest, together with cloathes, scenes, and everything else thereunto belonging.’
The New Concert Hall opened magnificently on 5th November 1750. Two days later, Tom Davies plays Horatio to Mrs Lucy Davies’s Callista in the trusted The Fair Penitent, her first performance in Edinburgh. By November 28th, Davies is playing Hamlet. A month later, on 3rd December 1750, he and Lucy appear together as Othello and Desdemona, setting out on the partnership they will continue in London at the Drury Lane Theatre.
The Edinburgh Company continued their regular performances in The New Concert Hall through 1751. From then till 11th June 1752, when a guest-actor from Drury Lane played Hamlet, there is no record of them, and Tom Davies’s directorship of The New Concert Hall seems to have ended. The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage refers to the unexpected cost of ‘an enlarged orchestra, the special charges for a harpsichord and player to accompany voices, the payments to guest actors and singers from Dublin and London.’
But by 1753 Thomas and Lucy Davies are back in London, successful touring actors. They appear together season after season at Drury Lane until, it was said, indifferent reviews and then some low sarcasm from Charles Churchill in The Rosciad began to weaken Davies’s nerve. After ten years on the stage, he became a bookseller again.
And that is why in 1762, he and Lucy are opening at 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden. The sight of a new double-fronted bookshop, and the gossip news about an exquisite wife and a lively companionable actor/bookman, brought Davies the customers he needed to begin. He never fully ceased to be an actor: the shop turned him into an impresario.
Here was an empty stage waiting to be scene-set into whatever his imagination and personal spirit would make it. He began to stock whatever was new – unusual maps, diaries, histories of military campaigns with intricate detailed battle-lines to be fought out again on drawing room tables. In July 1762 he bought three copies of Machiavelli’s Essays for 12s. from George Hawkins, his wholesaler.
He stocked up with medical treatises: books on inoculation, histories of surgery, Thompson on Gout. Some were his own interests – the books on elixirs, the memoirs, history, letters, scripts of plays, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry. He bought histories of great estates and so made contact with families who might have libraries to sell.He bid for sermons in conversations with divines who became customers in his shop, and then friends through the talk in the back room. He sold novels in this enduring time of English novelists: Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, and Henry Fielding, his friend from the Edinburgh acting days.
His name and Lucy’s were known to theatregoers and – a great good fortune – to David Garrick, the most popular actor of the time whose god-like presence in the bookshop ensured that others followed.
The windows were recessed and floored, allowing Davies to dress them with displays. In this time before colourful dust jackets, the window books were opened at interesting pages, illustrations, maps, portraits, cartoons: and sometimes at their end papers to show the gilt leaves, the vellum covers on the boards, the perfect cut of the pages. Where these were uncut, the book depended on the flair of its binding, its leather, calf and Morocco, and the brilliant clarity of the gilded title.
After just a single year, Davies could on an ordinary day look forward to seeing in his shop Oliver Goldsmith, Ambrose Phillips the poet, Richard Sheridan, James Boswell (who addressed him as ‘Mr Davies, the Actor’ in his correspondence, with great deference), and Samuel Johnson. If Johnson had heard that Tom was a consummate mimic of him, he decided to know nothing about it. There was a special sympathy between them. When Johnson’s father, Michael, was a bookseller in Lichfield, his son had seen the suffering caused by failing custom, broken orders, lost money, the fickleness of the trade: and they were of an age, Johnson 53 when they met, and Davies 50.
James Boswell was less frequently present. He was in love with London but he could be there only when the vacations released him from the Edinburgh law studies enforced by his father, Lord Auchinleck, a High Court Judge. In the early summer of 1763, he came swift by coach, eager – no, desperate – to meet Samuel Johnson. To hear such a man would be to find a way into a new perception of the world. He was only 23, fretful already at lost time, sensing genius, wild to be away from home, longing to know Johnson, to watch him think. Tom Davies had promised to set up a meeting.
On 16th May 1763 at almost seven7 in the evening, when Boswell was taking a dish of tea with Davies and Mrs Davies in the inner room, there was a flurry of sound in the shop. Davies rose, pointed forward through the glass door to the shop and said, ‘Look, my lord, it comes
!’
An actor’s line, out of Hamlet. It had Boswell on his feet. Johnson came hurriedly through, later than usual, catching sight of Boswell at once. Davies introduced him as having come from Scotland, gleefully pushing Johnson into his habitual attack on the Scots, directed now at young Boswell who was ‘stunned by this stroke’ but not defeated by it.
What did each of them see? Boswell a little overdressed, plump-faced, watchful: Johnson, thirty years older, is bold and famous, instantly able to read fakery in a man but eager to admit a new intelligence. They talked together for three hours.
The friendship begun that night ended only with Johnson’s death in 1784. When the great and truthfully titled The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell was finished and ready for sale in 1790, Boswell held back its appearance until 16th May 1791, to let it be published on the 28th anniversary of that meeting. Although they spent only 270 days together in all, The Life is the finest evidence we have that one man may communicate truthfully and objectively the mind and self of another. Nothing else I can name is such a record absolute of two minds so different, and so engaged with each other, that each of them now stands as illuminated as when they were alive. Neither man had any glimpse of how these things would come about, but a few days after those hours in Davies’s bookshop, Boswell was visiting Johnson at home and the great listening conversations had begun.
Meantime Tom Davies had books to sell. Competition for trade was quickening in Covent Garden. Francis Noble’s Circulating Library in nearby King Street had begun to offer ‘ready money’ for ‘any parcel of books’. More spacious establishments appeared, selling books and also art – Alexander Donaldson’s at the corner of Arundel Street off the Strand, Jonathan Kendal and Alexander Hogg in Paternoster Row. At 8 Russell Street, it was time for the owner to diversify his activities, or in the words of his time, to ‘find a competence’ in writing and publishing.
Over the next fifteen years, Davies wrote, published and sold countless topical pamphlets, edited the Works of the 17th century poet Thomas Browne in 3 volumes in 1772 and the Poems of John Davies in 1773. In that same year he brought out Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces by the Author of The Rambler, who was Johnson.
By 1775 The Royal Academy appointed him official Bookseller and when The Academy’s first President, Joshua Reynolds, inscribed his initial Address to David Garrick, the historic work was ‘printed for Thomas Davies’. He had it made in quarto size with marbled endpapers, the pages uncut, the whole book laid into a half blue morocco case. Later that year he wrote and published The Works of George Lillo with An Account of His Life, a graceful compliment to 1736 when he was twenty four and played in Lillo’s plays at The Haymarket Theatre, in another life.
In 1777 he contributed a second profound service to literature. Early that year, he had received word of a new Collection of Poets being prepared in Edinburgh, to be sold in London. Its compass seemed to him ‘small in size and print, a poor publication’. Therefore, following his instincts and speculating without money to back them, he and two brother booksellers quickly ‘treated on a bargain’ with Samuel Johnson to undertake a great new work. His commission was to write critical prefaces and biographical accounts of the English Poets suitable to be set within proposed new editions of the poets’ works. Johnson agreed.
He worked without notes and needed no research. He wrote for three years out of his knowledge, the thinking he had done, his habitual reading and memorising of poems over a lifetime, and best of all, from his understanding of men and writing. It was finished in 1781, so magnificently developed with critical insight that it was published in its own right as a collection of defining essays on the poets. The Lives of the Poets was recognised at once as a summation and a future source.
Davies was struggling to sustain his own literary reputation while also administering his business. As a topical work, he wrote in 1777 a series of literary portraits of King George III, Queen Caroline, Sir Robert Walpole, Mr Fox and Mr Pitt, his first and only political writing. But increasingly, his situation in a crowded profession was too fragile. In 1778 he ‘unfortunately failed in his circumstances’ and was saved from ruin by his friends. Within days of hearing of the losses, Johnson, Boswell and Garrick persuaded Richard Sheridan to put on a benefit play for him at Drury Lane Theatre. The fund helped to restore balance and some confidence to him, and when in 1779 David Garrick died, he began to write what would be his own great work, the two-volume Life of David Garrick. It was published in 1780, was sold in his own shop and over the counters of his neighbours and rivals, successful and acclaimed by them.
In December 1784, Samuel Johnson died and was buried in Westminster Abbey near to David Garrick. They had travelled together from Lichfield to London in 1737 as young men, Garrick then Johnson’s student.
Now, in the back room they had both known so well, Tom Davies turned in his mind to the theatre again to write his ‘Dramatic Miscellanies of Shakespeare’. His heart was still an actor’s: he joyfully brought out a second edition only days before he died on the 5th May 1785.
On the 200th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s death, English Heritage assigned a Blue Plaque to Thomas Davies’s house and shop in Covent Garden.
In this house owned by Thomas Davies, Bookseller
Dr Samuel Johnson met James Boswell
For the First Time in 1763.
There was so much more to say.
13. Watkins Bookshop, Cecil Court, London:
Through
It was early morning. The cab driver warned me there’d be ‘nothing doing yet’ but here I was in the quiet of 10 a.m. outside Marchpane in Cecil Court which lies between Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane, thoroughfares whirling with traffic and people, but here only a pigeon or two. This must be the best time to arrive.
Marchpane at 16 sells books for children and has curling ivy in the window. It makes a secret garden, a bosky place over-running the back panels. A heavy brown leather-bound Harry Potter – The Order of The Phoenix – stands tall among 19th century Alices in Wonderland. So many editions are there, so many illustrators. Yet every Alice is long-haired, fair, a young Virginia Woolf, pinafored, looking upward, gesturing with long pale arms and vanishing now like The Cheshire Cat himself on these old book boards. Behind her, balanced without holds, there’s a poster in Aubrey Beardsley style, clearly an original even in the dusk of the window. It shows a fin de siecle Hamlet-young man elegantly buying books from a Wizard with a stall, a very old man, a learned Lear, a bookseller.
The glass door has ‘Closed’ on it. In front and nearer to me, hangs a folding iron gate, its two parts crazily, beautifully, unequal and unmatched. Where else would you see two halves of an intricately patterned screen from two different smiths? But how right – surely this is some fine solution reached in a corner of forested Europe, a dangerous moment passing as a wise man stands forward to the angry iron-masters in the Forge and says:-
From both we’ll take and make the gate so of each and both.
And here it is.
In window by window along the Court, I see early letters folded into packets addressed in pale brown inks, then sealed in gloss scarlet wax, stamped but not with postage stamps. Ink bottles, blotting sands. An unlit window is filled with glass bottles in green, dark amber, cornflower, aqua, purple: one is the cobalt blue of an apothecary poison flask. I try to see if its surface has quilting or spiking, protective devices legally imposed against error. They are of ribbed, plain, clouded glass stoppered baroquely, one with a marble for its top.Plain jaunty stoneware for early beer drinkers lie on their sides.
Another window has little toy theatres and figures. I have seen some in Edinburgh but here these are drawing-room characters, suave villains and beauteous women, more modern than the pirates in the northern shops. Streets outside the Court are named for the actors Henry Irving and David Garrick: Wyndham’s Theatre and the Shaftesbury Avenue playhouse district are within call of these tiny audiences painted in rows. I’d like
to see this toyshop window lit as it will be soon. Just now it seems as if the little coloured theatres have gone dark -
Here and there, though, inside the shops along the passage way, tiny lights like stars blink from ceilings, night-lights in the full morning, like Bethlehem at dawn. These shine on some wonders that have little light themselves. How pale the rarest stamps are, fading green and brown, and penny puce. The wide pictorials are from South America, glamorous queens, singers, women out of history, tacked now into place on silk padded boards, gold edged leaves. How Egyptian the Penny Black looks! Coins, however rich and old, are disappointingly unlike the doubloons and treasure in books – dazzling gold beyond belief. These are dark, used, immensely coveted.
The Court where all these are was built out of fields in the late 1600s. Through that first life there were cheesemongers here, brandy-shops, the Ham pub, Eleanor Pickhaver’s boiled beef house, Kendrick the Bootmaker. Two centuries on, wild, rundown, too often scarred by fires and poverty, it was cleared and rebuilt into these sturdy well set-up shops and flats in the late 19th Century.
The earliest tenants were booksellers attracted by the solid frontages, relative quiet for browsers, good safe stockrooms, the nearness of hundreds of people at each end of the lane all day. Just as the bookmen at St Paul’s Churchyard in 1600 had relied on professions in the neighbourhood for business, so Cecil Court looked to the nearby civil servants and legal officials to be readers with interests in literature, art, music, incunabula, and, especially, in collecting – coins, medals, stamps, maps, model railways . . .
In 1901 John Watkins opened his first shop at No. 21. Along from him at No. 16 – now Marchpane – the Foyle brothers started up too in 1904, with assistance from John Watkins. Soon film distributors and publishers of film trade papers arrived to sell and to stock flammable film in the deep stone foundation rooms. In 1912, or just after, The Pioneer Film Company Ltd opened at No. 27, advertising as ‘ house for up-to-date comedies’. For a time the street became ‘Flicker Alley’. The Camera Club began in the last shop at the Charing Cross end, and The Photographic News had premises at No. 9. I have heard that Cecil Court is the original of Diagon Alley and that Harry Potter bought his first wand in Watkins’ Bookshop. I hope so, for the sake of the old film ghosts around.
