Correspondence

Sirs, In his ‘Unpaid Debts to London Booksellers: John Harrison the Elder’s Lawsuit against Two Chapmen in 1585’ (The Library, VII, 24 (2023), 332–42), Jonathan McGovern has provided a useful appendix: an annotated list of the books involved and their values. Although only eight of the 114 books at issue are known to have been printed for John the Elder (and only one for John the Younger) there can be no serious doubt about which John Harrison was the plaintiff. It is therefore unfortunate that McGovern’s attempt to distinguish among the Harrisons (and to identify his in-laws and his partners in the Flower syndicate) is somewhat muddled. In volume 3 of the revised STC (1991) the four best-known of the Stationers’ Elizabethan John Harrisons are helpfully numbered 1–4 on pages 77–78.1 John 1 is there described as ‘Possibly the son of Richard Harrison; son-in-law of Reyner Wolfe. Half-brother of John Harrison 2; father of John 3 and Joseph Harrison’. ‘Half-brother’, however, is an unsupported Victorian guess. In his will John 1 describes his former apprentice John 2 as ‘my brother’ more than once.2 The idea that a father would choose to give two of his sons the same name evidently troubled E. Gordon Duff,3 to whom the only plausible excuse seemed to be that the two Johns perhaps had different mothers—as if that would somehow make it clearer which John was being either summoned or referred to. But in an age when it was not uncommon for a son to be given the same Christian name as his godfather, the desire to compliment two godfathers who happened to share a conspicuously common forename (or to gratify an especially respected candidate twice) might easily outweigh the potential for domestic confusion.

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