The Longman company is founded by Thomas…
1724 CE
The Longman company is founded by Thomas Longman (1699 – 18 June 1755), the son of Ezekiel Longman (died 1708), a gentleman of Bristol.
Thomas had been apprenticed in 1716 to John Osborn, a London bookseller, and at the expiration of his apprenticeship married Osborn's daughter.
In August 1724, he purchases the stock and household goods of William Taylor, the first publisher of Robinson Crusoe, for £2282 9s 6d.
Taylor’s two shops in Paternoster Row, London, are known respectively as the Black Swan and the Ship, and becomes the publishing house premises.
Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (full title: The Fortunate Mistress: Or, A History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards Called the Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany, Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II), a 1724 novel by Daniel Defoe, concerns the story of an unnamed "fallen woman", the second time Defoe created such a character (the first was a similar female character in Moll Flanders).
In Roxana, a woman who takes on various pseudonyms, including "Roxana," describes her fall from wealth thanks to abandonment by a "fool" of a husband and movement into prostitution upon his abandonment.
Roxana moves up and down through the social spectrum several times, by contracting an ersatz marriage to a jeweler, secretly courting a prince, being offered marriage by a Dutch merchant, and is finally able to afford her own freedom by accumulating wealth from these men.
The novel examines the possibility of eighteenth century women owning their own estate despite a patriarchal society.
The novel further draws attention to the incompatibility between sexual freedom and freedom from motherhood.
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, published in Britain in 1724, contains biographies of contemporary pirates.
Influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates, it is the prime source for the biographies of many well known pirates.
Its author uses the name Captain Charles Johnson, generally considered a pseudonym.
The author has remained unknown in spite of numerous attempts by historians to discover his or her identity.
Many scholars have suggested that the author could have been either Daniel Defoe or the publisher Nathaniel Mist (or somebody working for him).
A General History introduces many features which later become common in pirate literature, such as pirates with missing legs or eyes, the myth of pirates burying treasure, and the name of the pirates’ flag, the Jolly Roger.
The author specifically cites two pirates as having named their flag Jolly Roger; Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts in June, 1721, and English pirate Francis Spriggs in December 1723.
In giving an almost mythical status to the more colorful characters, such as the infamous English pirates Blackbeard and Calico Jack, the book provides the standard account of the lives of many people still famous in the twenty-first century, and influences the pirate literature of Robert Louis Stevenson and J.M.Barrie.