ABSTRACT
Thomas Dawks was indeed born in 1636, appropriately enough in Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, the son of Thomas Dawks (d. 1670), a bookseller and later Rector of St. Michael Queenhithe (Morison, 1931: 1-2). Dawks attended the Merchant Taylors' School, under the headmaster William Dugard who subsequently employed him as a printer from 1651-2, possibly on a French translation of Milton's Eikonoklastes (Morison, 1931: 1-2). Thereafter he worked as a journeyman printer in London, employed, variously, as a compositor on Walton's polyglot Bible, at John Darby's printing house, and, with his eldest son Ichabod (1661-1731), by John Dunton, Mrs. Maxwell and Mrs. Flesher, until eventually he became a master printer at Blackfriars in 1674 (Morison, 1931: 7; P1omer, 1922: 101). He decided to establish himself as the authorized printer of Welsh texts, and was appointed in 1676 'King's Printer for the British Language' (Morison, 1931: 10). In addition to books in Welsh, Dawks was involved in the printing of a wide range of material, including anti-popery broadsides at the height of the Titus Oates affair (Morison, 1931: 10-11), treatises like William Salmon's Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1678) (Wing, 1948: S 437, 438, 439), Horae Mathematicae (mentioned above), and Doran Medicum (1683) (Wing, 1948: S 426,427), manuals like John Joiner's The Cook's Delight, or The Art of seasoning Pastry; making it delightful and pleasant to the Tast, as well as cheap to the Purse (1679) (Arber, 1903-6: I, 375), and, most significantly for the present purpose, Guy Miege's A New Dictionary French and English (1677) (Wing, 1948: M2016).
