Restoration man

Given that he wrote and published some of the most stunningly handsome books of the 17th century, John Ogilby has not been served well by literary history. The Fables of Aesop (1651), the first complete English translation of Virgil (1654), a two-volume edition of the Authorised Version of the Bible (1660) plus vernacular versions of the Iliad (1660) and Odyssey (1665) were all magisterial folios, produced with the clearest of type, the widest of margins and on the heaviest of paper. Ogilby wrote specifically for those with deep pockets and fine libraries, an elite book-buying public who could afford translations illustrated with copious and expensive engravings. He would have been particularly nettled, then, by John Dryden’s influential assessment of his legacy in the verse satire ‘Mac Flecknoe’ (1676), written in the year of Ogilby’s death. Listing him among a handful of ‘neglected authors’, Dryden described Ogilby’s works as ‘Martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum’.

It is extremely unlikely that anyone would have wiped their backside or lined a cake tin with an expensive page of Ogilby. Indeed, when Dryden himself recycled Ogilby he only did so to enhance the appeal of his own poetry, reprinting 101 of Ogilby’s engravings to accompany his magnificent new translation of The Works of Virgil in 1697. Dryden’s hostile swipe, then, was actually designed to define the critical response to an eminent rather than a ‘neglected’ author, someone he rightly regarded as his inferior (as both poet and Latinist) but who had somehow managed to position himself at the very centre of Restoration culture.

Alan Ereira’s book tells the fascinating story of Ogilby’s journey to that centre. Ogilby ended his life having been, variously, a tailor, a dancing master, a soldier, a theatre manager and impresario (he established the first Restoration theatre in Dublin), a translator, a poet, a publisher, a pioneer of subscription publication and the man who devised the civic pageantry for Charles II’s coronation.