In this nine-volume work, published between 1812 and 1815, the author and publisher John Nichols (1745-1826) provides biographical notes on publishers, writers and artists of the eighteenth century, and also gives 'an incidental view of the progress and advancement of literature in this kingdom during the last century'. (A shorter version had been published in 1782.) His subjects range from the publisher William Bowyer to Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, and also include histories of individual publishing houses and of genres such as lexicography. The work remains a useful source of biographical material on authors and publishers at a period when many of the literary genres we take for granted, such as the novel, the autobiography and the analytical history, were first being developed. Volume 8 contains anecdotes of the ex-slave Ignatius Sancho, the botanist William Curtis and the antiquarian Samuel Pegge, among many others.
