Richard Burton (pseud. Nathaniel Crouch), Historical Remarques and Observations (1681)

By Daniel Woolf

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Nathaniel Crouch (c. 1640–1725) was a prolific publisher and writer, with a specialty in epitomes and digests taken from other works. He published other writers, including many nonconformists, as the article on him by Jason McElligott (2004) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography indicates. His own epitomes and compendia largely appeared in smaller formats and mainly under the pseudonyms Robert or Richard Burton. (Mayer 1994: 391 asserts the name “Robert Burton” to have been used principally for Crouch-authored books published after Crouch’s own death).

Crouch was familiar with a number of intellectual figures from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries including Anthony Wood, Robert Plot, and John Dunton, who praised him in his own Life and Errors. Dunton wrote of Crouch, “I think I have given you the very Soul of his Character, when I have told you that his Talent lies at Collection. He has melted down the best of our English Histories into Twelve-Penny-Books, which are fill’d with Wonders, rarities and Curiosities.” (Life and Errors, 1.206). Crouch had apprentices, including a woman named Elizabeth Guard.

Crouch carried a significant stock as the advertisements in his books indicate, and as McElligott indicates, the location of his shop in London changed several times during his career.

This particular book is fairly typical of Crouch/Burton’s output. It is in a small format (duodecimo) and collates as follows:
[4], 116; [2], 116, [2] p., [6] leaves of plates : ill. ; 15 cm. (12mo)
Signatures: A-E¹² Aa-Ee¹². This is the same collation as the specimen in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (Wing C7329), but must be a separate issue from that volume in which the author’s name appears only as “R.B.”

While there are no annotations to the text, the front flyleaf has written upon it, twice, the following: “Sarah Duffeild Her Booke.”

The script is a late seventeenth-century or early eighteenth-century italic hand, and the repetition of the ownership inscription suggests that the owner, Sarah Duffeild, may have been a child or young woman, perhaps practicing her writing. There appears to be some further text below the second, finer, inscription of her name but it has been scrawled out.

The book came into my hands in 2015 from the antiquarian book dealer Unsworth’s. The sheepskin binding appears to be original and is in relatively poor shape with boards somewhat loose though the text block is mainly intact. The volume is destined eventually to join the Schulich-Woolf Rare Book collection in the W.D. Jordan Special Collections Library at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. https://library.queensu.ca/locations/print-collections/schulich-woolf-rare-book-collection.

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Source: Book currently in private ownership. Photos by Daniel Woolf, reproduced with permission.

Further Reading

J. McElligott, “Crouch, Nathaniel [pseud. Robert Burton] (c. 1640–1725?)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. https://doi-org.access.authkb.kb.nl/10.1093/ref:odnb/52645.

R. Mayer, “Nathaniel Crouch, Bookseller and Historian: Popular Historiography and Cultural Power in Late Seventeenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27.3 (1994): 391-419.

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