Dissenting printers: the intractable men and women of a seventeenth-century Quaker press

by Sally Jeffery

Andrew Sowle was a secret printer. He learned his trade during Cromwell’s commonwealth, and practised it under the Stuart restoration. On a hidden press he printed Quaker tracts, illicitly. He survived repeated raids and became the Friends’ chief printer and a friend of William Penn. He raised a new generation of printers, most of whom became caught up in the politics of their time. His first apprentice fled to Amsterdam after printing the manifesto of the Duke of Monmouth’s doomed rebellion against James II, and may have been William of Orange’s campaign printer three years later. One daughter married another apprentice and became notorious for press piracy. Another emigrated to America with her husband, also an ex-apprentice, where they set up the first press in Philadelphia and then fell out with the Quaker leadership there. Andrew’s third daughter was herself apprenticed to him as a practical printer, and ran the press in London for over fifty years. A thread of stubborn independence runs through this tribe of printers, who can be tracked through what they published and also in the traces of their collisions with authority.

“Sally Jeffery sets out in the introduction to explore ‘the turbulent lives of some seventeenth-century printers. This modest claim belies the astonishing level of research, knowledge and insight that Jeffery brings to this slim volume … to have such a wealth of primary-source documents listed, explored and connected is a gift … Dissenting printers is a most welcome contribution to scholarly discussions of early printers’ lives, and Jeffery’s scholarship provides a solid foundation for further enquiry into the complicated networks of influence, obligation and favour among early printers.”
(Kaley Kramer, Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 3rd series, no. 2, 2021)

“This handsomely produced and meticulously researched book expands our knowledge of the Quaker printer Andrew Sowle and his extended family … The Sowle family were indeed ‘dissenting printers’ in more ways than one and this book gives a vivid account of these ‘intractable’ men and women”
(Gil Skidmore, Journal of the Friends Historical Society, vol. 71, 2021)

128 pp hardback, 43 colour illustrations, 5 black and white illustrations
ISBN 978-1-9162221-2-0
Published March 2020 by Turnedup Press. £15.00

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