Was born in the Weald of Kent, about 1422. The particulars of the life of this great benefactor of his country are scanty. He was apprenticed in 1439 to Robert Large, a wealthy London mercer. At the death of the latter in 1441, he went to Bruges, where in 1462 or 1463 he seems to have been governor of a chartered association of English adventurers trading to foreign parts. In 1471, Caxton entered the service of Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy, formerly an English princess; and apparently towards the end of 1476 he set up his wooden printing-press at the sign of the red pale in the almonry at Westminster. The art of printing he had acquired during his sojourn in Bruges, doubtless from Colard Mansion, a well-known printer of that city; and in 1474 he put through the press the first book printed in the English tongue, the “Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,” a translation of Raoul le Fevre’s work. The “Game and Playe of the Chesse” was another of Caxton’s earliest publications; but the “Dictes and Notable Wise Sayings of the Philosophers,” published in 1477, is the first book which can with certainty be maintained to have been printed in England. All the eight founts of type from which Caxton printed may be called black letter…. In 1877, the printer and his work were fittingly commemorated by a typographical exhibition in London.

Personal

  If it plese ony man spirituel or temporel to bye ony pyes of two or thre comemoracious of Salisburi use enpryntid after the forme of this preset lettre whiche ben wel and truly correct—late hym come to westmonester in to the almonesrye at the reed pale and he shall have them good chepe

  Mr. Caxton appears to have been a very humble, modest, and virtuous man. He often styles himself a rude and simple person, confesses his ignorance, and humbly beseeches the pardon of his readers, and the patience to correct his works; and expresses himself in other terms so submissive and self-abasing as are very uncommon, and more easily admired than imitated…. He was a man of no more learning than, as he ingeniously confessed, he had by his knowledge of the English and French languages, in which he modestly acknowledged, he remembered himself of his rudeness and unperfitness. By the account which he has given of his printed books, it sufficiently appears in how great favour and request he was with the princes and great men of his own time.

  That the end of Caxton was a good end we have little doubt. We have a testimony … that he worked to the end. He worked upon a book of pious instruction to the last day of his life. He was not slumbering when his call came. He was still labouring at the work for which he was born.

  As we write the name of CAXTON, a grave and beardless face, with an expression somewhat akin to sadness, rises from the past, looking calmly out from the descending lappets of the hood, which was the fashionable head-dress of his day. All honour to the memory of the Father of the English Press!… He united in himself nearly all the occupations connected with the production and sale of books; for in the infancy of printing there was no division of labour. Author, inkmaker, compositor, pressman, corrector, binder, publisher, bookseller,—Caxton was all these.

  There is no extant portrait of England’s first printer. That accepted as his by Lord Orford is based on the small defaced vignette in the manuscript of “The Dictes and Sayings” at Lambeth Palace. King Edward the Fourth is represented on his throne, with the young Prince of Wales—to whom Lord Rivers was tutor—standing by his side; there are two kneeling figures, one of which, Lord Rivers, is presenting to the king a copy of his own translation. The other, assumed by Lord Orford to be Caxton, is the portrait of an ecclesiastic, with evident tonsure, and probably represents Haywarde the scribe, who certainly engrossed the copy, and perhaps executed both the illumination and its accompanying rhythmical dedication. The portrait commonly assigned to Caxton, which first appeared in his life by the Rev. Mr. Lewis, of Margate, is like a large percentage of historical portraits—a picture of somebody else, if of anybody in particular. A portrait of Burchiello, an Italian poet, from a small octavo edition of his work on Tuscan poetry, of the date of 1554—wherein it is introduced merely as an illustration of a Florentine with the “capuchin” and “becca,” the turban cap with a streamer—was copied by Faithhorn for Sir Hans Sloane as the portrait of Caxton; one more proof that a demand will generally create a supply. Lewis improved upon his predecessor by adding a thick beard to Burchiello’s chin, and otherwise altering his character, and in this form the Italian poet made his appearance upon copper as Caxton.

General

  William Caxton … was a menial servant, for thirty years together, to Margaret Duchess of Burgundy, sister to our King Edward IV. in Flanders. He afterwards returned into England; where finding, as he says, an imperfect history, begun by one of the monks of St. Albans, says John Pits very unadvisedly, he continued it in English, giving it only the Latin title of Fructus Temporum. How small a portion of this work is owing to this author, has been observed before; but he now usually bears the name of the whole, which begins with the first inhabiting of this island, and ends (the last year of Edward IV.) A.D. 1483. The opportunities he had of being acquainted with the court transactions of his own time, would encourage his readers to hope for great matters from him; but his fancy seems to have led him into an undertaking above his strength.

  Whoever turns over Caxton’s printed works must contract a respect for him, and be convinced that he preserved the same character through life, of an honest, modest man: greatly industrious to do good to his country, to the best of his abilities, by spreading among the people such books as he thought useful to religion and good manners, which were chiefly translated from the French.

  In the choice of his authors, that liberal and industrious artist was reduced to comply with the vicious taste of his readers; to gratify the nobles with treatises on heraldry, hawking, and the game of chess, and to amuse the popular credulity with romances of fabulous knights, and legends of more fabulous saints. The father of printing expresses a laudable desire to elucidate the history of his country; but instead of publishing the Latin chronicle of Radulphus Higden, he could only venture on the English version by John de Trevisa; and his complaint of the difficulty of finding materials for his own continuation of that work, sufficiently attests that even the writers, which we now possess, of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had not yet emerged from the darkness of the cloister. His successors, with less skill and ability, were content to tread in the footsteps of Caxton; almost a century elapsed without producing one original edition of any old English historian.

  Exclusively of the labours attached to the working of his press as a new art, our typographer contrived, though well stricken in years, to translate not fewer than five thousand closely printed folio pages. As a translator, therefore, he ranks among the most laborious, and, I would hope, not the least successful, of his tribe. The foregoing conclusion is the result of a careful enumeration of all the books translated as well as printed by him; which, (the translated books,) if published in the modern fashion, would extend to nearly twenty-five octavo volumes!

  Venerable shade of Caxton! the award of the tribunal of posterity is a severe decision, but an imprescriptible law. Men who appear at certain eras of society, however they be lauded for what they have done, are still liable to be censured for not doing what they ought to have done. Patriarch of the printing press, who to thy last and dying day withdrew not thy hand from thy work! it is hard that thou shouldst be amenable to a law which thy faculties were not adequate to comprehend: surely thou mayst triumph, thou simple man! amid the echoes of thy “Caxtonians” rejoicing over thy Gothic leaves; but the historian of the human mind is not the historian of typography.

  As a linguist, Caxton undoubtedly excelled. In his native tongue, notwithstanding his self-depreciation, he seems to have been a master. His writings, and the style of his translations, will bear comparison with Lydgate, with Gower, with Earl Rivers, the Earl of Worcester, and other contemporaneous writers. Many of his readers, indeed, thought him too “ornate” and “over curious” in his diction, and desired him to use more homely terms; but, since others found fault with him for not using polished and courtly phrases, we may fairly presume that he attained the happy medium, “ne over rude, ne over curious,” at which he aimed. When excited by a favourite subject, as the “Order of Chivalry,” he waxed quite eloquent; and the appeal of Caxton to the knighthood of England has been often quoted as a remarkable specimen of fifteenth-century declamation. With the French tongue he was thoroughly conversant, although he had never been in France; but Bruges was almost French, and in the Court of Burgundy, as well as in that of England, French was the chief medium of conversation. With Flemish he was also well acquainted, as shown by his translation of “Reynart;” indeed, this language, after so long a residence in Bruges, must have become almost his mother-tongue. Caxton’s knowledge of Latin has often been denied or underrated; but as governor of the English nation in Bruges, and as ambassador, he must have been able to read the treaties he assisted to conclude, and the correspondence with the king’s council. Moreover, he printed books entirely in the Latin tongue, some of which were full of contractions, and could only have been undertaken by one well acquainted with that language…. As translator, editor, and author, Caxton has not received his due meed of praise. The works which he undertook at the suggestion of his patrons, as well as those selected by himself, are honestly translated, and, considering the age in which he lived, are well chosen…. As to Caxton’s industry, it was marvellous; at an age when most men begin to take life easily, he not only embarked in an entirely new trade, but added to the duties of its general supervision and management, which could never have been light, the task of supplying his workmen with copy from his own pen.

  His own style is full of Gallicisms in vocabulary and phrase.

  Caxton cannot be said to have creative power or literary invention of his own. But it is a mistake to conceive of him as only a diligent and humble translator, content to spread abroad the work of others, and without discernment or judgment of his own. His own translations, if we may give the name to his free paraphrase of French books of romance and chivalry, and to his compilations from the tales then floating about Europe, are unambitious and of no great interest in matter. They are filled with the usual tedious moralisings, and show no great power of selection or force of narrative. But they have the essential element of literary power in a style of admirable clearness, in a certain easy and polished grace of language, and in a bold adoption of words of foreign origin which were fitted to enrich the storehouse of English, and to give to our tongue the most valuable quality of facility and variety of expression. It is for this that Caxton deserves not only the praise due to a pioneer in his craft, but also that due to a weighty contributor to the development of our literary style.

  The work he did was of great importance in his age; he was its representative man of letters.

  Caxton, without any very great genius for writing, was at least vivid and amusing. When he excuses himself for scribbling, unauthorised, an epilogue to Lord Rivers’s “Dictes,” saying that “peradventure the wind had blown over the leaf,” Caxton introduces a playfulness, a lightness of touch that had been hitherto unknown in English prose. He was a man, not of genius, but of industry and taste, born at a fruitful moment.

  Take him with Pecock, who was probably not twenty years his senior, and we see that his form, if not quite so interesting to the historian, is far more adapted for general literature; take him with Malory, who was probably of his own age, and we find from a different point of comparison the same result. It is clear that Caxton was in at least two senses a man of letters, that he had the secret of literary craftsmanship.

  In 1496 the church wardens of St. Margaret, Westminster, were possessed of fifteen copies of “The Golden Legend,” bequeathed by Caxton. Ten of these took five years to sell. In 1496 one copy was sold for 6s. 8d., and in 1500 the price had gone down to 5s. In 1510 R. Johnson, M.D., bought five Caxtons (“Godefroy of Boleyn,” “Eneydos,” “Faytes of Arms,” “Chastising,” and “Book of Fame”) for a total expenditure of 6s. 8d. These are now in the University Library, Cambridge. In the sale of 1678, to which the name of Voetius is attached, three Caxtons sold for 7s. 10d. At the sale of Secondary Richard Smith’s library (1682) eleven Caxtons realised £3, 4s. 2d.; at Dr. Francis Bernard’s sale (1697), ten for £1, 15s. 4d. There were a considerable number of Caxtons in the Harleian Library, and several of these were duplicates. They do not appear to have sold very readily, and they occur in several of Osborne’s catalogues at a fairly uniform price of one guinea for the folios and 15s. for the quartos. At the Hon. Bryan Fairfax’s sale (1756) nine Caxtons sold for £33, 4s. At James West’s sale (1773) the price had considerably advanced, and thirty-four Caxtons realised £361, 4s. 6d. John Ratcliffe’s forty-eight Caxtons brought £236, 5s. 6d. At Dr. Richard Farmer’s sale (1798) five sold for £19, 11s. 6d. An astonishing advance in price is found at the Duke of Roxburghe’s sale (1812), where fourteen fine Caxtons brought £3002, 1s. At the sale of Stanesby Alchorne’s library in 1813 nine fetched £666, 15s. Ralph Willett’s seven brought in 1813 £1319, 16s. John Towneley’s nine sold in 1814 for £1127. The Marquis of Blandford’s (White Knights) eighteen Caxtons brought in 1819 £1316, 12s. 6d. At Watson Taylor’s sale in 1823 nine brought £319, 14s. 6d.; John Inglis (1826), thirteen for £431, 15s. 6d.; John Dent (1827), four for £162, 16s. 6d.; George Hibbert (1829), five for £339, 13s. 6d.; P. A. Hanrott (1833), six for £180, 16s.; R. Heber (1834), six for £219, 16s.; Thomas Jolley (1843–51), six for £325, 15s.; E. V. Utterson (1852), three for £116; J. D. Gardner (1854), seven for £739. It will be seen from these totals that the present high prices did not rule at the sales in the middle of the present century. In 1897 the total for the ten Caxtons in the first portion of the Ashburnham library reached £5622, and the six in the second portion fetched £4264.