How-to Booke

It’s 1631, and the latest edition of best-selling author Gervase Markham’s A Way to Get Wealth is hot off the press. The sixth edition promises “certaine, easie, and cheap” techniques of husbandry. It divulges “knowledge…of all the recreations meete for a Gentleman” and “conceited Secrets” for a lady. It also represents Markham’s own tireless effort to make ends meet, and to get a bit of wealth for himself.¹

Get-rich-quick books may seem uniquely modern, but works such as A Way to Get Wealth played an important role in the flourishing how-to book market between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. Books of this sort offered hands-on experience, in English, to established readers and new readers alike. They tackled daily issues. They made reading a physical activity, and they connected books to the possibility of improving one’s social condition.

Line engraving of Gervase Markham by Burnet Reading (Wikimedia Commons)

Gervase Markham was a particularly prolific “how-to” writer. The third son of a relatively well-to-do gentry family, Markham described himself as “a piece… scholar, a piece soldier, and all horseman.” He also remarked that he “lived most happily [as] a husbandman, amongst husbandmen.” This showed in his how-to books about land, animals, and food. His 1593 book A Discourse of Horsemanship established his reputation as an author who wrote from experience. Agricultural historian Joan Thirsk considers him “a bridge between the older generation of landowners, who kept up a lively interest in agricultural improvement at an exalted social level, and the new generation which wished to extend the influence of books lower down the social scale to yeomen and husbandmen.”² For historian and biographer F.N.L. Poynter, Markham’s writing style demonstrated this wish, because Markham “seemed always aware that the readers for whom he was writing were not accustomed to receiving instructions from books but by word of mouth.”³

But Markham was a younger son in a society where the first son inherited much or all of a family’s wealth. When he could no longer soldier, he found it hard to live on only what he got from his books. As a remedy, Markham and his publishers started tweaking and republishing his material. By 1617, with five similar animal husbandry books on the market, frustrated London book sellers made him sign the following oath: “That I, Gervase Markam, of London, gent., do hereby promise hereafter never to write any more book or bookes to be printed of the diseases of any cattle, horse, ox or cow, sheep, swine or goats, in witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand the 24th daie of July, 1617.”⁴

The oath, however, did not stop Markham from recycling content, though it did encourage him to find new marketing techniques, like grouping together previously published books under the catchy title A Way to Get Wealth. Sections of the book have inviting titles, like “Cheap and Good Husbandry” and “The English Housewifes Skill in Cookery.” He added glossaries of “all the hard words in this Booke,” like “Patch-grease…that tallow which is gotten from the boyling of Shoomakers threads,” “Assafœtida, a stinking strong gumme to bee bought at the Pothecaries,” and “Lettice … a common fallet herbe in every garden.”⁵

Markham shared horsemanship techniques in particular as if they were secrets, suggesting they could raise “our English Husbandman…whom I seeke to make exact and perfect in all things” from merely riding horses like “our English Gentry” to actually “by his owne practice bring his horse… to the best skill.”⁶

A Way to Get Wealth was immensely popular. It was published at least ten times between 1623 and 1695, and according to Poynter it was “one of the most successful and profitable books (for its publishers) throughout the century.”⁷ It appeared in libraries across England and the American colonies, from middling to monied households. In an age when literacy levels were rising and people admired hands-on self-sufficiency, the book offered ways to improve one’s social condition. The key to it working, of course, was following “what good I have found out…by long triall and experience.”⁸

Despite its optimistic title, A Way to Get Wealth was sadly not Markham’s way to wealth. Though he was one of the most prolific English writers of the seventeenth century, he died impoverished in London in 1637.

1. G[ervase] M[arkham] and W[illiam] L[awson], A Way to Get Wealth: Containing sixe Principall Vocations or Callings, in which every good Husband or House-wife may lawfully imploy themselves… (London : Printed by E.G. for J. Harison, 1638 [1631–38]), quotations from general title page and Book I title page.
2. Joan Thirsk, “Agricultural Innovations and Their Diffusion, 1640–1750,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., Chapters from the Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1750, vol. 3, Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 265.
3. F.N.L. Poynter, A Bibliography of Gervase Markham, 1568?–1637 (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1962), 27, 29–30. Poynter was a curious combination—a librarian and medical historian who wrote primarily about the history of hospitals but also produced a biography of Markham. Historians lauded his biography because of the effort required to find the multiple editions of Markham’s works.
4. G. E. Fussel, The Old English Farming Books from Fitzherbert to Tull, 1523 to 1730 (London : Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1947; reprint, Read Books Ltd., 2013), chap. 3.
5. Markham, Way to Get Wealth, 24, 45–46.
6. Markham, Way to Get Wealth, 59–60.
7. Jennifer Munroe, ed., Making Gardens of Their Own: Advice for Women, 1550–1750, vol. 1 of Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott, general eds., The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Fascimile Library of Essential Works, ser. 3, Essential Works for the Study of Early Modern Woman: Part 3 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), xxvi; Poynter, Bibliography of Gervase Markham, 27.
8. Markham, Way to Get Wealth, 858.