CHAPTER FOUR

Evan Jones, Bookseller—The Jones-Bradford Laws of 1718—

The London Edition of Maryland Laws of 1723—

Trott's Laws of the Plantations

LITERARY history of colonial Maryland would have to
deal with a community peculiarly sterile in the produc-
tion of original works of literature. The reasons for this
condition are so many that it would be unwise to institute
a general discussion of them here. It is well to recall, how-
ever, that in Pennsylvania and in the northern colonies
the conflict of religious sects and of sects within sects kept
the presses busy with the publication of controversial matter, while in Mary-
land the firm establishment of the Church of England discouraged not only
the publication of works of controversy but controversy itself. Until the
years immediately preceding the American Revolution, religious specula-
tion was static in Maryland, a circumstance, we may believe, which did
not make for unhappiness among the people. Politics was always a matter
of interest to the Marylanders, but except in connection with certain im-
portant contentions which will be noticed later, discussion of affairs of state
rarely took the form of the printed word. There remained, in general, as
matter for the employment of the press only the publication of the laws
and legislative proceedings, and upon these, as the framework of Maryland
printing history, attention is mainly centered throughout the early part of
the period under discussion. Because of this close relationship between the
printing of Maryland laws and the history of Maryland printing, the pres-
ent chapter has importance in our narrative in spite of the fact that it has
nothing to do directly with the story of any Maryland press.

The death of Thomas Reading in the summer of 1713 left the Province
without a printer. In these early years of the century, printers in search of
employment were infrequently met with in the colonies. New York had only
one establishment at this time, and Pennsylvania, after the passage of sev-
eral years in which it had been without the services of a printer, had lately
induced Andrew Bradford to set up his press in the city where his father

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