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The Life of James Lackington, Bookseller, 1746-1815
Local History Notes 24: by James Lackington (1791, rev. 1827, ed. Peter Hopkins 2004)
James Lackington was born in 1746 in Somerset, the son of a shoemaker. At ten a travelling pieman, and at 14 an apprentice shoemaker, he then found work in Bristol, where he started to read and buy books. After his first marriage, to Nancy Smith, he left for London, with half a crown (12.5p) in his pocket. He set up a combined bookstall and shoemaker's shop in Featherstone Street, just north of what became Bunhill Fields. His stock was a sack of old theological books for which he gave a guinea (£1.05) and some scraps of leather. But a loan of £5 from a Wesleyan fund (for much of his life he was a practising Methodist), his own hard work and his wife's thrift enabled him to build up a stock worth £25 and to give up shoemaking.
The Lackingtons moved to Chiswell Street, a little nearer in to the City, where in 1776 they both caught fever. Dorcas Turton, "the young woman that kept the house, and of whom [they] then rented the shop, parlour, kitchen and garret", nursed them both, and fell ill herself. Nancy died, but Lackington and Dorcas survived, and shortly afterwards this "charming young woman" became the second Mrs Lackington. "Having drawn another prize in the lottery of wedlock", wrote Lackington "I repaired the loss of one very valuable woman by the acquisition of another still more valuable". He was right; Dorcas loved books and proved most helpful in the business.
By 1780 he had developed the trading policies that were to bring him both fame and financial success. His terms became (unusually for the time) cash only; he sold at rock-bottom prices, and he was a pioneer dealer in large quantities of publishers' 'remainders', which he sold at cut price. He also bought up whole libraries, and was soon issuing catalogues of 30,000 volumes and more. By 1791, when his annual profits were £4000, and he wrote the first version of his Memoirs, he had installed himself with Dorcas in a country house in Merton and set up his own carriage.
This was Spring House, the early 18th-century house in Kingston Road, which was demolished in the 1930s and replaced by the Spring House flats. As was quite usual at the time, the Lackingtons leased rather than bought their house, although they could have easily afforded to purchase.
Around this time Lackington became the proprietor of a shop with a frontage of 43 metres (140 feet) at the southwest corner of Finsbury Square. Crowned with a dome from which flew a flag, it was called 'The Temple of the Muses', and was one of the capital's tourist attractions. Within was an immense circular counter, round which it was said was room enough to drive a coach-and-six. 'Lounging rooms' were reached by way of a broad staircase, and there was a succession of Galleries, where the stock was cheaper and shabbier the higher one climbed.
Lackington was industrious, shrewd and vain. A tireless self-promoter, he would have been at home on today's chat-show circuit, and his vaunted love of books seems to have died once his fortune was made. But he tells his own story with relish and (apparent) candour, and it is an entertaining read.
Now you can buy your own edition of his autobiography, which merited the following comment from his editor in 1827:
"It is easy to find more important autobiographies than that of this pertinacious bookseller, sceptic and methodist, but few are more lively, curious, or characteristic."
Although much material of a general nature has been omitted from our edition, this is a bumper volume of 68 pages, but generously priced at £2.95, and available to members at £2.40.
Review by Judith Goodman in MHS Bulletin 149 (Mar 2004)
