Abel Roper

Abel Roper (1665–1726) was an English journalist, who wrote in the Tory interest.

A younger son of Isaac Roper, he was born at Atherstone in Warwickshire, and baptised on 13 September 1665. He was adopted in 1677 by his uncle, Abel Roper, who published books from 1638 at the Spread Eagle, opposite St. Dunstan's Church, Fleet Street, and was master of the Stationers' Company in that year. When he was fourteen, young Roper was apprenticed to his uncle, but on the latter's death, in 1680, he was turned over to the printer Christopher Wilkinson. Under his uncle's will he received £100. on the completion of his apprenticeship, with all the elder Roper's copyrights; and having married, when he was 30, the widow of his last master, he set up business in one side of a saddler's shop near Bell Yard, opposite Middle Temple Gate. Later he moved next door to the Devil tavern, at the sign of the Black Dog.

Roper is said to have worked for the Glorious Revolution, and to have been the first printer of Lilliburlero. The preface to The Life of William Fuller, the pretended evidence, 1692, is signed by Roper. A warrant was issued for his arrest in May 1696, on an information that, under the name of John Chaplin, he had printed a paper, on the Jacobite assassination plot of George Barclay and others, called An Account of a most horrid Conspiracy against the Life of his most sacred Majesty, with intent to give notice to the people mentioned in it to fly from justice. He had been committed to prison on 18 April, but was released soon afterwards.

Roper sided with Tom Brown in his quarrel with Richard Kingston, and after 1700 he undertook the publication of Brown's works. Brown subsequently assisted Roper in The Auction of Ladies, a series of lampoons which ran to eight or nine numbers. Roper got into trouble: for his Newsletters into the Country, and with Secretary William Trumbull for printing a play without license. He was summoned before the lord mayor and court of aldermen for reflecting upon the Society for the Reformation of Manners. A Frenchman named Fontive, who wrote the Postman, was Roper's assistant, and afterwards his partner.

...
Wikipedia