Abstract
This chapter focuses on the historical and autobiographical writings of Thomas Gent (1693–1778), a prominent printer in eighteenth-century York. It considers several of his major works: his History of the Famous City of York (1730) and History of the Magnificent Great Eastern Window (1762), in dialogue with his autobiography, Life of Mr Thomas Gent, Printer, Of York (1746), and a pamphlet, The Contingencies, Vicissitudes or Changes of This Transitory Life (1761). In his historiography, Gent celebrates the grandeur and honour of his region: the historical city of York and the county of Yorkshire. His life writing, on the other hand, presents an acrimonious picture of his life in the city and his rivalries in the print trade. Where these may appear to be separate genres, the historiography is inescapably infused with the life writing. Gent’s works have barely been studied but this chapter positions him as a print trade author among other print trade professionals whose own writings typically intertwine the articulation of their professional identity with their cultural output.
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Notes
- 1.
The category of ‘print trade author’ is not established in authorship studies, though I refer to this group (variously configured) repeatedly in Stenner (2018). Cf. Lisa Maruca’s description of the overlapping manual and intellectual work of print labourers as ‘text work’, and her discussion of Samuel Richardson as a figure who performed both roles, complicating the narrative of increasing proprietary authorship (2007, 4, 128–57).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
On the early text trades in the city, see Gee (2000).
- 5.
Kaley Kramer and Sarah Griffin in this volume (Chap. 2) discuss the work of Alice Broad. Like Gent, White is typical of the group of print trade professionals who ‘played a significant role in the spread of printing from London to the English provinces’ in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Stoker 2004, 28).
- 6.
For a full list of his publications see Davies (1868, 144–232).
- 7.
He names the poem elsewhere (Davies 1868, 220).
- 8.
For discussion of this view, see Jewell (1994, 28–56).
- 9.
Jody Greene (2006, 30) discusses this move in relation to Francis Kirkman.
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Stenner, R. (2022). Historiography, Regionality, and Print Trade Life Writing: The Case of Mr Thomas Gent, Printer, of York. In: Stenner, R., Kramer, K., Smith, A.J. (eds) Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period . New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88055-2_3
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