Nathaniel Crouch (born c. 1632) was an English

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and bookseller, and under the pseudonym Robert or Richard Burton (sometimes, R.B.) wrote historical books as well. As a historian, he is considered a hack, borrowing material from other books and rewriting them under his pseudonym, then publishing and marketing them under the Crouch imprint. Though he was the type of writer/publisher denounced in the following century by writers such as Samuel Butler (''Prose Observations'') and

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...

(''

The Dunciad ''The Dunciad'' is a landmark, mock-heroic, narrative poem by Alexander Pope published in three different versions at different times from 1728 to 1743. The poem celebrates a goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring ...

''), more recent assessments of his life and career see him as an important figure in the development of

historiography Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians ha ...

, especially in the popularization of a hitherto high-culture genre of discourse. Crouch was one of the authors who covered the 1655

Whitehall Conference {{onesource, date=October 2008 The Whitehall Conference was a gathering of prominent English merchants, clergymen, and lawyers convened by Oliver Cromwell for the purpose of debating whether Jews should be readmitted to England. The conference la ...

to consider the

resettlement of the Jews in England The resettlement of the Jews in England was an informal arrangement during the Commonwealth of England in the mid-1650s, which allowed Jews to practise their faith openly. It forms a prominent part of the history of the Jews in England. It hap ...

(the other being

Henry Jessey Henry Jessey or Jacie (1603 in West Rowton, Yorkshire – 1663) was one of many English Dissenters. He was a founding member of the Puritan religious sect, the Jacobites. Jessey was considered a Hebrew and a rabbinical scholar. His active phi ...

). The report is found in the 1719 edition of his ''Two Journeys to Jerusalem''. It is different from Jessey's version in two respects: firstly it actually names the participants and secondly it includes some anti-Semitic additions to the conclusions of the conference. Around the date September 30, 1681, an unlikely forerunner of ''Reader's Digest'', called ''Historical Rarities in London and Westminster'' was first published by Crouch. Robert Chambers' '' Book of Days'' (1864) elaborated: "With probably little education, but something of a natural gift for writing, Crouch had the sagacity to see that the works of the learned, from their form and price, were kept within a narrow circle of readers, while there was a vast multitude outside who were able and willing to read, provided that a literature suited to their means and capacities was supplied to them. He accordingly set himself the task of transfusing large and pompous books into a series of small, cheap volumes, modestly concealing his authorship under his ''nom de plume''. Thus, he produced ''Surprising Miracles of Nature and Art'', and many other treatises on very plain paper, and sold

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at an exceedingly reasonable rate. His enterprise and diligence were rewarded by large sales and considerable wealth."

References

1630s births English printers English booksellers Date of birth unknown Year of death unknown 17th-century printers 17th-century English historians {{UK-historian-stub