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This is a cleverly designed half-sheet in the form of a hue-and-cry poster. The black letter in the title gives it an air of authenticity. The printing is quite crisp, and I suspect this may be the product of John Barber’s workshop, even though he was unwilling to own this unflattering picture of the Earl of Nottingham disguised as a chimney sweep. Another edition, with additional verse, was issued as Dunkirk to be Let. The nature and source of that edition is mysterious.
John Barber (baptized 11 April 1675, died 2 January 1741) was the government printer while the Tories were in office: he printed the Votes of the House of Commons, The Examiner, and The Mercator and, in association with Benjamin Tooke, The London Gazette. He and Tooke were also Stationers to the Ordnance; together they were granted the reversion of Queen’s printer, but that was held by John Baskett and the assigns of Henry Hills and Thomas Newcomb until January 1740. Barber was also printer to the South Sea Company; Barber also had a successful career in London politics, becoming an alderman and serving as Lord Mayor in 1733-4. He had a large printing shop, employing two apprentices and seven journeymen, one of his compositors being John Wright, later the printer of Pope’s Dunciad
Variorum and other of his later works. The output of Barber’s shop is generally very impressive in quality, and he showed considerable ingenuity in operating with reissues and cancels. Swift’s relations with Barber seem to have been good. They often dined together. Mrs Manley, who took over the writing of The Examiner from Swift, lived with Barber.
John Morphew was a trade publisher. He had been a journeyman in Edward Jones’s printing house and took on John Nutt’s business when Nutt took over Jones’s printing shop in 1706. He continued the publishing business until he died in 1720. He seems to have been the trade publisher the Tories preferred. His was a small business, employing only a woman and a boy.
References Jonathan Swift, English Political Writings, 1711-1714, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Ian Gadd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 420-4 (421-2); The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis and others, 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-74), vol. vi, pp. 139-41, 210-11; Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962-83), vol. ii, pp. 569-70; Charles A. Rivington, ‘Tyrant’: The Story of John Barber (York: William Sessions, 1989); Michael Treadwell, ‘Swift’s Relations with the London Book Trade to 1714’, in Author/Publisher Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1983), pp. 1-36; Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers, 1675-1750’, Library, 6th ser. 4 (1982), 99-134.