‘Can anything new be said of Caxton?’ When William Blades began his monumental Life and Typography of William Caxton (1861–3) with this question, the state of Caxton scholarship had largely been determined by the panegyrics of nationalist biography and the appreciations of antiquarian bibliophilia. Such writings had, by the mid-nineteenth century, distilled Caxton’s legacy into a myth of culture: a tale of individual entrepreneurship and technological innovation, of literary taste and economic savvy, that fit well into the Victorian vision of the scholar-craftsman. Blades did much to enhance this portrait of England’s ‘arch-typographer’ – a portrait limned out of the middle-class conviction of the power of technology and the artisan’s nostalgia for the handmade craft – and he had an immense impact on Caxton’s modern appreciation. He was a great enthusiast, republishing his researches in several popular volumes and overseeing the quatercentenary exhibitions of 1877 that influenced, among other things, the Arts and Crafts revival of fine book-making. But he was also an acute historian, whose studies established Caxton scholarship on firm positivist grounds. By examining in detail Caxton’s typography, by organizing a descriptive history of all his products, and by uncovering relations between English and Low Countries printing in the late fifteenth century, Blades set the modern lines of enquiry into the history of English printing.

Blades also set the major lines of enquiry into Caxton’s life, and the contours of that life remain as clear – or as blurry – as they did a century ago. Born sometime between the mid-1410s and the mid-1420s to a Kentish family, Caxton first appears in the public record as an apprentice to the Mercers’ Company in 1438. By the late 1440s, he was in Bruges, the centre of the cloth trade, and in 1452 he returned to London to take the livery of the Mercers’ Company (a ritual symbolizing the passage out of apprenticeship).