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Based on archival research, this fascinating new work represents the first full-length biography of John Almon, the most important political bookseller of the second half of the eighteenth century. Using Almon as a case study, Deborah Rogers examines the way in which political pressure on booksellers affected the literature of the period. Bookseller as Rogue chronicles Almon's relationships with such important politicians as Richard Grenville (Earl Temple), John Wilkes, John Calcraft, Edmund Burke, and Benjamin Franklin. Rogers also analyzes Almon's libel trials, his fight for freedom of the press, and his efforts on behalf of the American Revolution. A valuable appendix catalogues works issued under Almon's imprint.
A compelling account of how passionately partisan editors in the early Republic overthrew impartial journalism and sparked the birth of democracy in America
The administration of George Grenville, 1763-1765, continues to divide historians. The passage of his American Stamp Act was widely debated by his contemporaries, damned by nineteenth-century Whig historians, and criticized by many historians well into the twentieth-century. The Stamp Act proved to be a political blunder which helped precipitate the outbreak of the American Revolution, and it is this, together with Grenville’s own forbidding personality, which has coloured how he has been largely remembered. Indeed, as one of his more recent biographers has noted, Grenville’s political career has been mainly judged on the comments made by his contemporary political enemies. Grenville, ho...