From the Koran to Orlando, via toy theatres

George Sale's translation of the Koran was first published in 1734, and was the first scholarly translation of the Koran into English (the only earlier English version was by Alexander Ross, chaplain to Charles I, and was a translation of a French translation). Sale was by profession a solicitor; how he came to be an Arabic scholar is unclear, and a certain amount of his knowledge probably came second-hand from French and Latin sources, but his 'Preliminary discourse' to the Koran, in which he set forth all that was known at that time about the religion of Islam, was significant enough to be translated separately into several European languages.

Somerville's copy was printed in London by Orlando Hodgson, but has no date. St Peter's has a copy which matches it exactly as to title, edition and pagination, also lacking a date but conjectured to be eighteenth century. I think it's very unlikely that Somerville's is eighteenth century, however, as the type of paper used isn't right -- it's wood-pulp rather than rag paper. A search for Orlando Hodgson as publisher in Olis gives a date range of roughly 1820-1840 (and a very distracting selection of titles: Hodgson's British naval songster ; The Whole of the dreadful confessions of Joseph Hunt, relative to the horrid murder of Mr. Weare ... ; Pretty sights in Brighton ; The life of Richard Turpin, a notorious highwayman ; The Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and London railway guide : containing a description of the Birmingham Grand junction and Manchester & Liverpool railways, and of every interesting object on either line ... ); a quick search in Google turns up a webpage which at first sight seems unpromising, as the address is www.toytheatre.net, but it proves to be some interesting nuggets about the man I'm looking for, including his marriage certificate, and the information that he's listed in the London Commercial Directory for 1843 as a bookseller and publisher but couldn't be traced thereafter, the connection with toy theatres being that his printing output included sheets for the scenery and characters to be used in the plays for toy theatres which he also published. So (to get back to the rather different subject of Sale's Koran), having discovered (again thanks to Google) that wood-pulp paper didn't come into commercial use until around the 1840s, I've put down a conjectural date of 1840ish for Somerville's copy.

One further distraction - how common was the name Orlando in early Victorian times? A quick search of the 1841 census throws up 300 results, almost all with very English-looking surnames. Could they be named after the character in Shakespeare's As you like it? I tried Lysander (from A midsummer night's dream, and also a famous Spartan general) but found only two. Was there a famous British Orlando who might account for the name's relative popularity (there were 1,284 Horatios in the 1841 census)? So I tried the Oxford DNB - only two Orlandos, both 'also known as': John Mitchell (1785-1859), army officer and writer, aka Captain Orlando Sabretache, and Louis Stanley Jast (1868-1944), aka Orlando Furioso - and a librarian. How very intriguing ... but this particular librarian is straying rather far from what she is supposed to be doing, which is cataloguing books, and had better get back to it! (Anyone else wanting further distraction is recommended to investigate how the city of Orlando, Florida, got its name ...)