John Newbery: Publisher Extraordinary

To most historians and students of English Literature, John Newbery is chiefly to be remembered as the publisher and patron of Oliver Goldsmith. Newbery was the publisher to whom Dr Johnson had taken the MSS of The Vicar of Wakefield and it was to Newbery that Goldsmith turned whenever he needed money.

Newbery, indeed, was constantly paying the bills owed by Goldsmith to his landlady, Mrs Fleming, and in return he earned the epitaph ‘the honestest man in creation’. He was, in fact, none other than the ‘philanthropic publisher of St Paul’s Churchyard’ who, in The Vicar of Wakefield, helped Dr Primrose when he was lying sick at a roadside inn.

Newbery’s ‘philanthropic’ nature, however, should not disguise the fact that he was a ruthlessly effective businessman or that his career was a rags-to-riches tale. He was a Dick Whittington among booksellers. Born in 1713, the son of a Berkshire farmer, John Newbery was not destined to work on the land and at the age of sixteen he had been apprenticed to the proprietor of The Reading Mercury, William Ayres.