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1655–1736
Jacob Tonson, the Elder (1655–1736), was a leading English bookseller and publisher whose career shaped the literary landscape of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Born in London and baptized at St Andrew Holborn on 18 November 1655, he was the son of Jacob Tonson, a shoemaker, and Elizabeth Walbancke. In 1670 he was apprenticed for eight years to stationer Thomas Basset; he gained his freedom in the Stationers’ Company in 1677 and soon established his own shop, first at the Judge’s Head in Chancery Lane and later at the Shakespeare’s Head in the Strand.
Tonson built a distinguished list that included major works by John Dryden, whose plays and translations he issued from the 1670s onward, and he secured half the rights to Milton’s *Paradise Lost* in 1683 (acquiring the remainder in 1690). He published the six-volume Rowe edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1709 and later editions that helped secure the playwright’s canonical status after the Statute of Anne. His *Miscellany Poems* series, begun under Dryden’s editorship in 1684, ran through multiple volumes and became a landmark anthology. Tonson also founded the Kit-Cat Club, serving as its secretary and hosting its meetings at his Barn Elms estate in Surrey; the club brought together leading Whig writers, politicians, and artists.
His nephew, Jacob Tonson the Younger (1682–1735), entered the business as partner and continued it after the elder Tonson’s partial retirement around 1718–1720. The elder Tonson never married and had no children; he died at Ledbury, Herefordshire, on 17 March 1736. He is remembered less as a creator of visual art than as the subject of striking portraits, notably the 1717 oil by Sir Godfrey Kneller now in the National Portrait Gallery, London—one of several images that preserve his likeness for posterity. His publishing ventures and club patronage left a lasting imprint on English letters and the social networks that supported them.