Nathaniel mist, daniel defoe, and the perils of publishing

Abstract

The article concerns a neglected episode in the career of the Jacobite printer and newspaper proprietor Nathaniel Mist (d. 1737). It has been suggested, on the basis of press advertisements, that Mist published his own pirated edition of Daniel Defoe's novel Captain Singleton in 1721. Reasons are given for doubting the existence of such an edition. These hinge on the circumstances in which Mist found himself at this juncture, caused mainly by his prosecution on two separate charges of seditious libel (amounting to high treason) in his newspaper The Weekly Journal; or Saturday's Post. One of these cases allegedly involved Daniel Defoe, who had been a regular contributor to the Journal.On the basis of unpublished documents in the National Archives, as well as extensive newspaper coverage, the course of these prosecutions is described for the first time, including the issue of a royal proclamation for the capture of Mist's two assistants. On the first charge Mist received sentence in February 1721, including a spell in the pillory, where he was hailed as a hero by Jacobite supporters. Eventually the government was forced to drop the second charge. In the aftermath, however, Mist and his assistant Doctor Gaylard were pursued relentlessly by the authorities, and Mist himself absconded. The article seeks to explore the conditions in which publishers (as well as writers such as Defoe) operated at a time of fervent political controversy, intensified when the divisive Atterbury affair was uncovered. It describes the ways in which the authorities attempted to regulate the book trade, and some of the means by which publishers, journalists and printers resisted this pressure. © 2009 The Bibliographical Society (typography) and the contributors (content).