Paratext and Self‐Promotion in the Memoirs of the First Forty‐Five Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller (1791)

Abstract

At least four editions of James Lackington's Memoirs appeared in the four years following its initial publication in 1791. During this time both the text and its numerous paratextual devices were amended and expanded. Through adjustments to paratext, Lackington aimed to refine the nuance of his Memoirs in line with changing public tastes and ideas, and as a response to critics' accusations of self-aggrandisement. This article will explore how these paratextual alterations, which began as a means of modifying self-presentation, implicitly reveal a careful attention to detail that is in itself the most authentic representation of Lackington's personality and identity.A self-proclaimed entrepreneur from his youth, James Lackington was an individual with considerable talent when it came to making money. Although initially apprenticed to a shoemaker, he switched to selling books and would later claim to have entered business with only £5. By cheaply purchasing unsold 'remainder' stock from publishers, and by selling at a price that gave him only a small profit on each sale, he rapidly developed a strong and valuable business, opening the famous Temple of the Muses bookshop in London's Finsbury Square in 1794. That we know so much about his life is largely owing to a further entrepreneurial activity on Lackington's part, namely the composition of his autobiography, Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller (1791).When Lackington wrote his life story, the memoir genre was typically comprised of 'recollections by the publicly prominent who chronicled their social accomplishments', and was thus perceived as the province of an intellectual or aristocratic elite. 1 The text itself is constructed in the form of letters, apparently addressed to a 'very particular friend' who Lackington claims in the preface had pressured him into writing the Memoirs, and who was supposed to 'digest the whole into a regular narrative'. Instead, this 'friend' decided that the text should be 'exhibited to [the public] in the plain and simple manner in which these letters were written'. 2 Jacob Sider Jost suggests that Lackington was a 'pioneering autobiographer', 3 albeit not necessarily an entirely truthful one. James Raven points out that many of 'Lackington's claims to originality [...] are not always correct', in particular those which assert personal innovation in key aspects of his business strategy. The purchasing of remainder stock, for example, was not unique to Lackington; his use of superlative phrasing in declaring that he was making books available 'on such moderate terms as were heretofore unknown' and enjoying the public's 'approbation to a degree eminent as unprecedented' certainly indicate a preference for narcissistic hyperbole rather than actual facts (Memoirs, p.vi, vii).

Recent approaches to paratext studies in eighteenth‐century literature

“…Examples include late Romantic use of pithy epigraphs in print culture, and Stokes further conjectures that the exclusion of African‐American writers and some white women from the literary canon might ironically have been partly owing to a reliance upon paratextual quotation leading to assumptions of unoriginality. The use of epigraphs and title‐page quotations as a means of self‐presentation are also addressed in Readioff (2020), who focuses upon this phenomenon in successive revised republications of The Memoirs of the First Forty‐Five Years of the Life of James Lackington, Bookseller (1791).…”