Theatrical Figures (and Others) as Book Subscribers for Sterne and Derrick

The investigation of the subscriber lists of eighteenth-century books is a relatively new subgenre in the scholarly world, in part because quite often the names appearing in such lists are now obscure. But subscribers were hardly unknown when they subscribed, and a recovery of their identities can often be useful to other scholarly pursuits. This essay focusses on the subscribers to the works of Laurence Sterne and Samuel Derrick, one author well known today and one little known. A relatively large number of the subscribers in both were members of the eighteenth-century theatrical world. Furthermore, the essay looks at eighteenth-century annotations of the subscription list in Derrick’s Works (1755) with an eye toward using them to provide further information about the evolving relationship between Derrick and a far more famous figure of the time, Samuel Johnson.