Removing Henry Cromwell’s name : a 1663 reissue of a 1658 schoolbook

In 1658 the London bookseller Humphrey Robinson published an edition of the Greek geographer Dionysius Periegetes’s Περιήγησις τῆς οἰκουμένης, a description of the known world. The book had a commentary and a student guide to the Greek text by a former Oxford don, William Hill, who had been a fellow of Merton College before moving to Ireland, where he became master of the Dublin grammar school under the patronage of Henry Cromwell, a younger brother of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Henry Cromwell had been made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1657.

Hill’s book became a regular school textbook in England for those studying Greek. Humphrey Robinson launched it on the market again in 1663. Canterbury Cathedral Library has a copy of this re-issue which had apparently been bought second-hand for 3s 6d (three shillings and sixpence) by Richard Forster who was an undergraduate at Brasenose College in the mid 1660s. Forster later became rector of the country parish of Crundale in Kent; on his death in 1729 he left his library to his successors as rectors of Crundale and it is now on deposit at Canterbury Cathedral.

Examination of the Crundale copy shows that it is not quite what it appears at first glance. It has a close copy of the 1658 title page with the new date in the imprint. The rest of the book also looks like a page-for-page reprint of the earlier edition. However, this is not the case. It appears that Robinson had not sold all the copies of the first edition and had piles of unsold sheets in his warehouse. It was a common practice at the time to ‘refresh’ old sheets by printing a title page with a new date and putting the work on sale again as a fresh edition.

There was just one problem with this strategy. The original edition in 1658 had a long and flattering dedication by William Hill to his patron Henry Cromwell. By 1663 Henry was back in England in retirement and the name of Cromwell was not welcome under the restored Stuart monarchy. The solution to this problem was easy. The title page and Epistola dedicatoria took up the first fourteen pages of the book. Nothing could be easier than to discard these pages and replace them with a new 1663 title page, removing all mention of the problematic name of Cromwell.

The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists 25 surviving copies of the 1658 edition. The 1663 re-issue survives in 3 copies so far recorded. New editions are recorded in 1676, 1679 and 1688, showing a continued demand for the work by schoolmasters and their pupils.

Further references