A. Moore (pseud.) (fl. 1722 – ca. 1759)

Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
April 2025

There were not many more prolific publishers in the first half of the eighteenth century, to judge from imprints. Between 1713 and 1759, A. Moor[e] and his equally suspect brother, J. Moor[e], were responsible for almost 600 items, if we count multiple editions of the same text. Until the 1970s he (or possibly she, on occasion) was regarded as a real, if dodgy, operator. Thus, he appears in standard sources such the Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers by H.R. Plomer in 1932. A high point in Moore’s productivity was reached in 1714 and 1715, at one of the most inflammatory phases of the entire period, with 45 and 24 works respectively. However, after a lull in the early 1720s, the total shot up to as high as 50 to 60 annually. (The figures are those of Evan C. Davis: for his explanation, see below.)

It now seems that Moore was a flag of convenience hoisted at various times by any one of a number of members of the book trade. Indeed, his name often appears between 1714 and 1731 in the formula, “printed for A. Moore, and sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster,” where the last clause is a regular get-out expression used by pirates who had no claim to the rights of a book. His almost invariable address is “near St. Paul’s” (occasionally “Churchyard” added), which is found more than 200 times. Vague as this looks, it locates his nonexistent shop at the heart of the London book trade.

An important article by Andrew Benjamin Brooker from 1716 uses printers’ ornaments such as factotums and headpieces to identify two of the most habitual users of the code name. One was Henry Woodfall (1686–1747), a printer apprenticed to John Darby who worked mainly in Whitefriars: Brooker (194) traces his attribution to Moore in the 1720s and 1730s. The other was Thomas Read, who inherited the successful business of his father James Read, well known for his strongly Whig Weekly Journal. Both Reads, senior and junior, were based in the Fleet Street and Alsatia district. Brooker (211) canvasses the possibility that Read (and potentially others) “perhaps also had a dedicated set of ornaments he used only for illicit publications featuring false or misleading imprints.”

We learn several relevant things, too, from the significant essay by Davis. He is centrally concerned with the appearance of “the phantom Moore” in the second book of The Dunciad, an issue clouded by a possible reference to the dunce James Moore Smythe. Among other things, Davis notes that “Manyproductions by Moore exploited theauthorial fame bothof Popeand also of Swift,Gay, and Arbuthnot. Some …exploit the popularity of Scriblerianworks, including Memoirs Concerning the Life and Manners of Captain Mackheath, Polly Peachum on Fire, and the Memoirs of the Life of [Timothy] Scriblerus, by D. S-T, which preempted the Scriblerians'own biographyof Martinus bytwo decades.” He goes on to show how deeply involved the phantom publisher was with the whole Scriblerus enterprise:

An entire branch of the Moore family is devoted to works that attack the Scriblerians, especially Pope, including The Life of Mother Wybourn, which recounts the story of a young lady whose unrequited love for Pope leads her first to escape to a convent and then to suicide; A Popp upon Pope, a short pamphlet about Pope being beaten with a broomstick in retaliation for his satire; and A Compleat Collection of all the Verses, Essays, Letters and Advertisements.... Occasioned by the Publication of Three Volumes of Miscellanies by Pope and Company, many of whose reprinted pieces Pope incorporated to the notes of The Dunciad Variorum.

It is this phenomenon that goes some way to explains the sudden boost in Moore titles.

The discussion by Davis leads on to a suggestion regarding the origins of the name:

Arbuthnot more than any other writer can be credited with inspiring the Moore imprint. Of the forty-eight Moore imprints (including reprints) of 1713–14, seventeen are sequels to John Bull. It is a concentration that perhaps explains the mystery of Moore’s name. By far the most common initial for Moore’s name is A, but almost all the first imprints appeared with the initial J… Given that J. Moore is dominated by the John Bull sequels, all of which bore the imprint of the trade publisher John Morphew, it may be that J. Moore was originally intended as an altered version of J. Morphew, much as A Dob on the piracies of the 1729 suggested the real A. Dodd (196–97).

We can add to this that Dr. Arbuthnot used Moore on occasion for some of his anonymous pamphlets, some of them unjustly expunged from his canon on highly dubious grounds. A good example is A Devil to Pay at St. James’s (1727), which uses a somewhat scattergun approach to aspects of London life, such as opera and the Wild Boy from the German woods, in which the doctor had an immediate interest. From Swift came a Satire on Dr. Delany (1730). Davis refers to A Supplement to Dean SW—T’s Miscellanies as spurious, but there very strong reasons to believe it came from Arbuthnot’s hand. He also mentions a work by Richard Savage, an ally of the Scriblerians, An Author to be Lett (1729), that runs through the Grub Street villains favoured by Pope and his friends, as “the unique instance in which A. Moore is given a voice” (210–11).

By 1730, Henry Fielding could have his fictional Bookweight in The Author’s Farce confidently inform a “Scribbler” named Scarecrow that “as the Lawyers have John-a-Nokes and Tom a-Stiles, so we [the booksellers] have Messieurs Moore near St. Paul’s, and Smith near the Royal Exchange” (23). In fact Elizabeth Smith may well have been a real trade publisher or mercury along with Anne Dodd.

Moore, says Davis, “is always unmoored” (205). Together with Brooker, he has opened a fuller vista of insights into A. Moore. In particular, we can explore the wide range of works that bore this imprint. It is probably the most important of the obfuscations that Michael Treadwell uncovered in his pioneering article “On False Imprints,” which covers the case of Moore near the end. We have indeed more to find out. As Treadwell says, “One can never be too careful with false imprints” (44).