Some two hundred years ago, the University began to develop OUP’s present site in what is today Great Clarendon Street. The buildings either side of the main quadrangle came to house printing presses and hundreds of staff, producing bibles, prayer books, and academic titles. Supervising their work was the Printer to the University Thomas Combe, born in 1796 and who died on this day in 1872. Combe played a major part in the social and artistic life of Oxford and the Press.
The son of a Leicester bookseller, Combe worked briefly in London before his appointment at the Press in 1837. He also took over the running – and profits – of the paper mill which OUP ran near Oxford, at Wolvercote. As a result, he became the wealthiest member of the Press, if not the most skilled: a later Printer, Charles Batey, could find no Combe title which represented first-class work, and dubbed him “the successful mercenary” for the fortune Combe amassed during his long career.
Which is slightly unjust. Combe was rich, but he was also extremely generous. Living in the main quadrangle at what is now known as Printer’s House, he and his wife Martha put their wealth to good use, drawing several social families into their orbit. As the suburb of Jericho grew up around the Press, Combe funded various ventures which placed OUP at the heart of its community. He established a night school for his employees, helped organize holiday groups, a Press band, and sports’ clubs, and even set up an in-house fire brigade. He also endowed St. Barnabas, the nearby church that became possibly the most singular place of worship in Victorian Oxford, and a great favourite with Press staff.
The Combes had other claims to fame. They befriended and supported a small group of young British artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which included Millais, Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt. The Brotherhood aimed to avoid artificiality by painting from life, and – scandalously for the time – depicted biblical subjects with sharp realism. Holman Hunt used the Combes’ garden as background for one painting, Convent Thoughts, while another, The Hireling Shepherd, took its landscape detail from Wolvercote. The Combes bought many other works by the group, notably Holman Hunt’s study of Jesus, The Light of the World, which attracted huge attention and controversy when exhibited in public. Combe advised on publicity for the painting, and it’s thanks to him that it’s become such a familiar image. Holman Hunt himself grew especially close to Thomas and Martha, and was often a guest at Printer’s House, along with the Combes’ friends such as Cardinal Newman and Charles Dodgson.
It was Dodgson, under his pen name “Lewis Carroll,” who secured Combe’s place in literary history. Combe oversaw the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was printed at the Press in 1865. As Charles Batey might have noted, the edition was poor work, and the book was eventually published by Macmillan. Yet few printers, in Oxford or elsewhere, have ever produced a title guaranteed to be enjoyed for as long as stories are read anywhere in the world.
