The Arts In Berwick -- Other Narratives
Battle of the Books




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Printing was an important industry from the mid 18th.Century. Robert Taylor was the first of a number of printers to set up, opening first a library in 1739. Then in 1753 he issued the first books printed in Berwick:- Samuel Jackson's "A Thought on Creation:- A Poem" touching some of the Liberal Sciences with a reference to the usefulness of the art of Printing and Andrew Michael Ramsay's "Plans of Education for a Young Prince", first published in 1732. The young Prince was 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', which perhaps showed Taylor had some Jacobite sympathies, in addition to moralistic purposes, in choosing what to print.

By 1771 Taylor had a rival in William Phorson who was a printer and bookseller, ran a larger circulating library and issued Berwick's first periodical "The Berwick Museum, or Monthly Literary Intelligencer", with poems like "The Midnight Student, or the Curate's Wife served".

There are more novels listed in the catalogue of Phorson's library than Taylors. It included titles like The Penitant Prostitute and Memoirs of Maria, a Persian Slave. Perhaps you went to Taylor for moral instruction and useful reading, and to Phorson's for jolly poems and salacious novels.

The novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-71) lodged in a house in Tweedmouth. His opinions are recorded in the satirical "Humphrey Clinker" (1771): -
"Had I not been in Wales I would have been more struck by the manifest difference in appearance between the peasant community on the different sides of the Tweed. The boors of Northumberland are lusty fellows..Fresh complexioned, cleanly and well clothed' but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled and shabby.