SOURCE: Bennett, Stuart. “Jacob Tonson: An Early Editor of Paradise Lost?” The Library 10, no. 3 (September 1988): 247-52.

In the following essay, Bennett considers the textual evidence for the case that Tonson was involved in the publication of the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost.

Most of the evidence for Jacob Tonson's editorial involvement with the publication of the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost can be derived from two sources: variations, not previously remarked, between the text of the 1688 folio and the previous three editions of Paradise Lost, and the controversy some forty years later over Richard Bentley's 1732 version of the same poem. Bentley's edition claimed ‘to be the Truest and Correctest that has yet appear'd’,¹ and since both Jacob Tonson the elder and his nephew of the same name claimed perpetual copyright in Milton's texts, it was inevitable that Jacob Tonson, Junior should have had a major share in the...