JOHN DARBY AND THE WHIG CANON

Abstract

AbstractThrough a co-ordinated series of publications in the final years of the seventeenth century, a diverse set of commonwealth texts was entrenched into the canon of whig political thought. This article explores that canon through the lens of the history of the book. A key figure in the formation of this canon was the printer and bookseller John Darby. This article reconstructs Darby's role in the commonwealth opposition to the perceived failures of the Williamite revolution. Using bibliographical methods to establish his output, it shows that from the earliest days of the revolution Darby reprinted a broad range of historic whig texts, ranging from works of history and memoir to collections of poems. These texts provided a language, a rationale, and a model for opposition activity. He also manufactured pamphlets that adapted country principles to contemporary political circumstances. By shifting the focus from John Toland to his printer, the article suggests that the canonical whig texts were one part of a much broader and more ambitious programme to establish an historic canon of oppositional literature.