Stephen Bernard is an internationally award-winning essayist, editor, bibliographer, and historian of the book, particularly interested in the publishing house of the Tonsons and its publications from the 1670s to the 1760s. His work on the Tonson publishing house is supported by the Katherine F Pantzer Jr. Research Fellowship in Bibliography from the Bibliographical Society.
His first book The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons (Oxford University Press, 2015) won the international, biennial, MLA Morton N Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters; it is now available on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. He has also edited The Letters of Jacob Tonson in Bodleian MS. Eng. lett. c.129 (Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2019 [2020]).
His latest edition is The correspondence of John Dryden, with the assistance of John McTague (Manchester University Press, 2022).
He is editing the correspondences and legal documents of the Churchill brothers - distant cousins of John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough - who published expensive fine editions. Contemporaneously, Tonson published both popular and fine editions of literature. Each of these publishers was a prominent Whig and he works more generally on what is known as Whig literary culture.
He is the general editor of The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe, five vols. (Pickering Masters, 2018), in which he edited the English, Latin, and Greek poems (vol. IV).
He also wrote the controversial experimental Paper Cuts a memoir (Jonathan Cape, 2018).
Other interests include: Thomas Creech; James Joyce; P G Wodehouse; Evelyn Waugh; Samuel Beckett; B S Johnson; quotations, allusions, annotations, and citations in literary texts and scholarly editions; style; and the contemporary novel.
He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Higher Education Academy.
Please direct academic inquiries via University College Oxford OX1 4BH and non-academic inquiries to Caroline Dawnay and Sophie Scard at United Agents, 12-26 Lexington Street, Soho, London W1F 0LE
