Jacob Tonson

Jacob Tonson , 1656?-1736, English publisher. He and his brother Richard purchased the publication rights to Milton's Paradise Lost, a transaction later claimed as the firm's most profitable. With John Dryden he published a series of miscellany volumes (6 vol., 1684-1709), edited by Dryden and often referred to as Dryden's miscellany or Tonson's miscellany. Tonson was secretary of the Kit-Cat Club, a literary club which he founded c.1700, and was publisher of works by Addison, Steele, and Pope, among others.

Bibliography: See study by K. M. Lynch (1971).

Tonson, Jacob (1656–1737), publisher and bookseller who published the foremost poets and playwrights of the age; his long association with Dryden began in 1679, with the publication of his version of Troilus and Cressida, and his other writers included A. Behn, Otway, Cowley, Rowe, Addison, and Pope; he also acquired the profitable copyright of Paradise Lost. He was well known for his Miscellanies (1684–1709) in six parts, of which the earliest were edited and largely written by Dryden; they contained translations from Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, Virgil, etc., as well as original work by Pope, A. Philips, Swift, and others. He was secretary of the Kit-Cat Club and the butt of satire from Dryden (who mocked his ‘two left legs’) and Pope, who took up the theme of his ungainly legs in the Dunciad. The firm was continued by his nephew and great-nephew who bore the same name.