Rare. OCLC records an example of this print at the British Museum only.
A detailed depiction of James Lackington’s grand bookshop in Finsbury Square - The Temple of the Muses“ - where books were sold cheaply and female readers were welcomed.
The etching shows the impressive four-story façade of the bookshop with arched shop-front windows divided by Corinthian pilasters. From the cupola flies a flag (which was flown when Lackington was at the shop) and chiselled into the stone above the entry – where two men stand talking – the shop advertises itself as the “Cheapest Booksellers in the World”.
James Lackington began his life as a shoemaker’s apprentice, but as his Memoirs of the First Forty-Five Years of the Life of James Lackington (1792) relate, upon inheriting ten pounds from his grandfather, he opened his first bookshop in Chiswell Street in London. By 1793 Lackington had amassed an inventory of books large enough to open The Temple of the Muses. The shop’s neo-classical architecture and name reflected its owner’s vision of bookselling not only as a trade, but as an educational project.
Lackington was determined to make books accessible to a wider audience. He wrote that: “Thousands […] have been effectually prevented from purchasing (though anxious so to do) whose circumstances in life would not permit them to pay the full price, and thus were totally excluded from the advantage of improving their understandings, and enjoying a rational entertainment.” He bought up remainder stock and took low margins: “I began by marking in every book the lowest price that I would take for it; which being much lower than the common market prices, I not only retained my former customers, but soon increased their number.”
At its peak The Temple of the Muses was supposed to have held 500,000 books. It earned success and fame beyond London, selling books to customers in America. Notably John Keats spent hours reading for free in the shop’s lounging rooms as a schoolboy. Two prints in the collection of the British museum show some of the interior of Lackington’ shop with rooms full of shelves lined with books (see BM. Heal, 17.86). Whilst giving an impression of the spaces in which a young Keats might have been discovered, they also show many female customers around the shop’s circular counter. Lackington records in his first Memoir that his wife Dorcas was an enthusiastic reader of novels. An essay published in 1796 decried that “women of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels […]. The depravity is universal” (Sylph no. 5, 1796) and the Gentleman’s Magazine declared that “Novels have been long and frequently regarded not as being merely useless to society, but even as pernicious from the very indifferent morality and ridiculous way of thinking which they almost generally inculcate” (1789). Lackington wrote: “I never could perceive that novels have done so much Mischief as some grave gentlemen have imagined” (Memoirs, p. 233). After expanding his stock to include novels alongside philosophy, history, poetry and pamphlets, Lackington commented that “[t]he Ladies in particular have been very encouraging to me in my new method of selling books” (Memoirs, p.235).
This print was published sometime after 1793 when Robert Allen became a partner to Lackington. The bookshop remained influential until it was destroyed by fire in 1841.
