Episode 136: Ink, Industry, and Innovation – London’s Printing Revolution

Host: Hazel Baker

Hazel is an active Londoner, a keen theatre-goer and qualified  CIGA London tour guide.

She has won awards for tour guiding and is proud to be involved with some great organisations. She is a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors and am an honorary member of The Leaders Council.

Channel 5’s Walking Wartime Britain(Episode 3) and Yesterday Channel’s The Architecture the Railways Built (Series 3, Episode 7). Het Rampjaar 1672, Afl. 2: Vijand Engeland and Arte.fr Invitation au Voyage, À Chelsea, une femme qui trompe énormément.

Related Podcast Episodes:

Episode 65: London Nursery Rhymes

Reading List:

Grenby, M.O. The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Whalley, Joyce Irene, and Tessa Rose Chester. A History of Children’s Book Illustration (John Murray, 1988)

Raven, James. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (Yale University Press, 2007)

Earle, Rebecca. Ephemera and the Female Publisher: Mary Cooper and the Chapbook Trade in The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book
(Oxford University Press, online resource)

Transcript:

Hazel Baker:

Hello, and welcome to The London History Podcast. I am Hazel Baker, and today we are diving deep into one of the most transformative periods in London’s literary history: the extraordinary flowering of the printing industry in the 1740s, and the remarkable little book that helped revolutionise childhood reading forever.

Picture this: London in 1744, a bustling metropolis of approximately 675,000 people. In the narrow streets around St Paul’s Cathedral, the air carries the clatter of presses, the shouts of apprentices running proofs across courtyards, and the smell of ink and damp paper. At the heart of it all lies Paternoster Row, the densest cluster of booksellers, printers, and publishers in Europe. From one of its shopfronts emerged a book so small it could sit on your palm – Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book – yet its influence would carry across centuries of childhood.

The London of 1744: A Literary Powerhouse

Let me set the broader scene. The 1740s were an energetic decade in British letters. Alexander Pope was still a dominant voice; Samuel Johnson was beginning to shape London literary life, though his great dictionary was still to come. The novel was evolving rapidly. Public debate, satire, and pamphleteering flourished in coffeehouses, print shops, and private clubs.

London itself was still living in the long afterlife of the Great Fire of 1666. The rebuilt city bore the architectural mark of Christopher Wren, nowhere more dramatically than in the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1710. New building codes meant brick and stone were replacing timber-framed medieval structures; streets were slowly widening; and firebreaks, insurance schemes, and parish watch systems reflected a capital learning to live with risk.

Politics also pressed in. The Jacobite rising of 1745 – only a year after Tommy Thumb appeared – sent waves of panic through the capital when the Stuart army advanced as far south as Derby. Contemporary accounts describe Londoners hiding valuables, closing shops, and worrying about bank collapses as rumours flew. Troops mustered on the northern approach roads—just 113 miles from London. Even when the immediate threat passed, the mood of uncertainty lingered.

Paternoster Row: The Beating Heart of English Publishing

Now, to the street that concerns us most. Paternoster Row ran in the shadow of St Paul’s. It was never grand – more service lane than boulevard – but by the mid eighteenth century it had become the nerve centre of the English book trade. Premises were identified by hanging signs rather than numbered addresses: The Ship, The Black Swan, The Globe, and so on. Behind those signs were counting-houses stacked with quires of paper, compositor rooms thick with type, and networks of partnership agreements that stretched nationwide.

The growth was dramatic. Across the long eighteenth century, the number of printers and booksellers active in London expanded severalfold. Rising literacy, expanding middle-class purchasing power, and a widening reading public drove demand for everything from sermons to satire, travel writing to children’s chapbooks. Paternoster Row acted as a clearing house, wholesaler, and innovation lab all at once.

Copyright, Commerce, and Opportunity

A key shift that opened the field was the early eighteenth-century rethinking of copyright, formalised in legislation often referred to as the Statute of Anne. The Stationers’ Company’s national monopoly powers effectively lapsed in 1695 when Parliament refused to renew the Licensing Act. The Statute of Anne, passed in 1710, then established for the first time publishing rights that could be defined in law, timed, transferred, and defended in the courts.

Under the new regime, authors and their publishers could hold exclusive rights for fourteen years, with the possibility of renewal for another fourteen years if the author was still alive. That time limit mattered. It created incentives to produce new material and repackage older texts before the right expired. It also encouraged investment in niches that the old monopoly system had neglected – including literature for the young.

The Pioneers: Mary Cooper and Thomas Longman

Two figures help bring this world to life.

First, Mary Cooper. Widowed in the early 1740s, she carried on and expanded her late husband Thomas Cooper’s business at The Globe, 8 Paternoster Row. Active through to 1761, she became one of the first London publishers to target children explicitly. Long before John Newbery became the poster child for early children’s publishing, Mary Cooper was issuing small, affordable books for “little Masters and Misses” – and Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book was among them.

Cooper was what contemporaries called a trade publisher. She would take in copy from authors or other booksellers, arrange printing, and send sheets back out through wholesale channels. This model made it possible to publish controversial or experimental material without tying up too much capital. Her list was famously diverse: children’s items, religious pamphlets, satirical pieces, even the occasional risqué title. She also held copyright to a meaningful number of works in her own name – no small achievement for a woman in mid eighteenth-century London.

Second, Thomas Longman. In his twenties, he invested heavily to acquire an established Paternoster Row business identified by the sign of The Ship (and associated neighbouring premises). From that purchase grew the Longman publishing house, which would go on to shape English literary culture for generations. Long-term partnerships, share-purchases in promising manuscripts, and careful cultivation of authors became the hallmarks of the firm.

Technology on the Row: Copper Plates and Colour

Although hand presses still dominated everyday printing, specialist techniques were advancing. Copperplate engraving – an intaglio process more often associated with maps, music, fine illustration, and calligraphic copybooks – offered levels of line quality and decorative flourish that ordinary letterpress could not. It is this technique that gives Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book its distinctive look.

Instead of setting tiny movable type, the printer-engraver worked text and images into copper plates. Letters could be punched, engraved, or etched; images cut with burins; and ornamental borders added. Paper was dampened, laid over the inked plate, and driven through a rolling press under high pressure so the fibres picked ink out of the recessed lines. The result: crisp impressions, a tactile plate mark, and the capacity for fine detail at miniature scale.

A playful design touch in Tommy Thumb alternated openings in red and black ink. Producing this effect required separate inking passes (or separate plates), increasing labour and cost – but the visual payoff on such small pages was considerable. Imagine a child turning a book where colour changes from spread to spread; it invites attention and repeats engagement.

The Marvel of Scale

How small was it? About three inches by three and three-quarter inches – genuinely pocket-sized for a child. Miniature formats were not unheard of, but pairing that size with engraved illustrations and alternating colour gave Tommy Thumb novelty appeal. Small books were cheaper to post, easy to tuck into parcels, and tempting as impulse purchases displayed near a shop counter.

George Bickham the Younger

The copper work for Tommy Thumb is attributed to George Bickham the Younger, part of a family of celebrated engravers. His father, George Bickham the Elder, produced The Universal Penman, an influential engraved masterwork of calligraphic exemplars. The younger Bickham moved across genres: music, satire, trade cards, decorative prints – and, in this case, a children’s rhyme collection. Contemporary and later commentators note that his output ranged from respectable commissions to more provocative material; the eighteenth-century print market had porous boundaries between polite and bawdy.

What Was Inside?

The surviving volume (Volume II) gathers thirty-nine short pieces. Many are still sung today. You will recognise:

• Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
• London Bridge Is Falling Down
• Hickory, Dickory, Dock
• Oranges and Lemons
• Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
• Little Tommy Tucker

There are also verses that have since fallen out of nursery rotation, including one memorably titled Piss a Bed – a reminder that eighteenth-century humour could be earthy, even when aimed at the young. The rhymes are brief, rhythmic, and often paired with small illustrative motifs that invite pointing, chanting, and repetition. This was literature to be performed with children rather than silently read to them.

The Lost Volume I

We know that Tommy Thumb’s Song Book – effectively Volume I in the series – was advertised slightly earlier than the Pretty Song Book, yet no confirmed copy has survived. Notices of the time billed it as suitable “to be sung to them by their Nurses ’till they can sing themselves.” That line captures the oral culture surrounding early childhood: caregivers voicing the text, gestures and tunes added on the fly, literacy developing through sound and play.

Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the contents of the lost first volume by comparing later reprints, trade catalogues, and references in other children’s titles. While we cannot be certain of every item, the work of reconstruction helps map how popular rhyme migrated across cheap print formats.

A Turning Point for Children’s Publishing

The mid 1740s saw a burst of interest in “little books” pitched to young readers. Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book showed that playful, entertaining material could sell. Its success sits alongside other early children’s ventures – including those of John Newbery – that blended instruction with amusement. What had once been a narrowly moral, religious genre began to broaden. Publishers experimented with size, illustration, pricing, and tone.

From these beginnings grew the commercial children’s book trade: chapbooks, spelling aids with pictures, moral tales softened by narrative, and eventually the richly illustrated Victorian gift book. Tommy Thumb helped open that path.

From Oral Tradition to Print

Most nursery rhymes had long, tangled lives before they reached the press. Many originated in adult song, street cries, political satire, or folk verse. When printers gathered them for children, versions were shortened, rearranged, or stripped of topical references. Print stabilised certain wordings while oral performance kept them fluid. The subtitle about nurses singing until children could sing themselves says it all: this was a bridge medium between memory and print.

Circulating Print: Libraries, Newspapers, and Networks

Why did small-format books travel so widely? Because eighteenth-century Britain was developing the infrastructure to move print quickly. Commercial circulating libraries – shops where you paid a subscription to borrow books – were spreading. Newsprint consumption exploded as daily and tri-weekly papers reached coffeehouses, taverns, and private homes. Parcels of books were shipped out to provincial towns and overseas colonial markets. In that environment, a low-cost children’s chapbook could ride along with larger wholesale bundles.

Women in the Trade

Mary Cooper was not alone. A surprising number of widows, daughters, and wives took the reins of print businesses when male relatives died – and many proved highly capable. Mary Lewis, for example, managed substantial printing and bookselling operations across several decades. Women negotiated rights, extended credit, trained apprentices, and decided what would go to press. Their contribution to the vitality of London’s print culture is only now being fully appreciated.

The Global Reach

London’s publishing innovations did not stay local. Sheets, stereotypes, and reprint rights travelled to Dublin, Edinburgh, the American colonies, and beyond. Children’s items were reissued abroad, translated, pirated, or adapted. An eighteenth-century nursery chapbook printed off Paternoster Row could turn up years later in a Massachusetts shop or be packed in a crate to the Caribbean. The mechanisms of imperial trade extended the cultural footprint of London’s printers.

The Rarity Factor

Let us return to Tommy Thumb itself. Only two copies of Volume II are known: one held in the British Library in London; the other in the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University in the United States. Volume I, as far as current knowledge goes, is lost. To put that in perspective: dozens of Gutenberg Bibles survive; Tommy Thumb exists in just two fragments of evidence for its second volume. When a copy surfaced at auction in 2001 it realised £45,000 – a reflection of both rarity and research value.

Preservation and Modern Access

Eighteenth-century children’s books almost never survive in good condition. They were handled, dropped, scribbled in, and eventually discarded. That any copy of Tommy Thumb endured is remarkable. Conservation efforts at major research libraries now stabilise fragile paper, house items in climate-controlled stores, and make high-quality facsimiles available so that scholars – and curious listeners like you – can explore them without damaging the originals.

Why It Still Matters

If you grew up in the English-speaking world, chances are you learned at least one rhyme first printed in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book. The book helped shift expectations: children’s reading could be lively, musical, and pleasurable. Publishers took note. Educators followed. From these tiny engraved pages flowed an entire tradition of literature that balances learning with delight.

 

So, next time you are near St Paul’s Cathedral take a little wander down Paternoster Row, and take a moment to reflect on its global reach of the eighteenth-century book trade, the women who drove it, and the enduring sounds of the nursery.

Thank you for joining me on this exploration of London’s printing revolution and the birth of modern children’s literature. If you enjoyed this deep dive, please share the episode with someone who loves books, history, or a good story about how small things can have enormous consequences. Subscribe wherever you listen, and if you have a favourite London nursery rhyme please message through the London Guided Walks website and I’ll see what I can do.

Until next time, I am Hazel Baker, and this has been The London History Podcast.

🎵 Hear the Songs from History
Step back into the 18th century with Tommy Thumb’s Song-Book (1744), the very first collection of nursery rhymes ever published. These charming verses—meant to be sung by nurses to children—include early versions of familiar songs that have been passed down for generations.

Click below to listen and read along to the original songs that entertained “little masters and misses” nearly 300 years ago.
Tommy Thumb’s song