The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

T h e A ppe a r a nc e of Pr i n t i n E igh t e e n t h- C e n t u ry F ic t ion

Eighteenth-century fiction holds an unusual place in the history of modern print culture. The novel gained prominence largely because of advances in publishing, but, as a popular genre, it also helped shape those very developments. Authors in the period manipulated the appearance of the page and print technology more deliberately than has been supposed, prompting new forms of reception among readers. Christopher Flint’s book explores works both by obscure “scribblers” and by canonical figures, such as Swift, Haywood, Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, and Austen, that interrogated the complex interactions between the book’s material aspects and its producers and consumers. Flint links historical shifts in how authors addressed their profession to how books were manufactured and how readers consumed texts. He argues that writers exploited typographic media to augment other crucial developments in prose fiction, from formal realism and free indirect discourse to accounts of how “the novel” defined itself as a genre. C h r i s t op h e r F l i n t is Associate Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio.

Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Syntax and the Bookseller (1877).

T h e A ppe a r a nce of PRIN T IN EIGH T EEN T H- CEN T URY FIC T ION C h r istoph e r F l i n t Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107008397 © Christopher Flint 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Flint, Christopher, 1957– The appearance of print in eighteenth-century fiction / Christopher Flint. p.â•… cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. i s b n 978-1-107-00839-7 1.╇English fiction–18th century–History and criticism.â•… 2.╇Fiction–Publishing– Great Britain–History–18th century.â•… 3.╇Publishers and publishing–Great Britain– History–18th century.â•… 4.╇Printing–Great Britain–History–18th century.â•… 5.╇ Books–Great Britain–History–18th century.â•… 6.╇ Authors and publishers–Great Britain–History– 18th century.â•… 7.╇ Authors and readers–Great Britain–History–18th century.â•… 8.╇Fiction–Appreciation–Great Britain–History–18th century.â•… 9.╇ Books and reading– Great Britain–History–18th century.â•…I.╇ Title. pr858.p78f58â•… 2011 823′.509–dc23 2011026306 ISBN 978-1-107-00839-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

’Tis an unpardonable Presumption in any Man, either to answer, or censure, what He has thought fit to publish.

(Anon., “An Essay on the Pride of Authors,” 1718)

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments

page viii x

Introduction: prose fiction and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain

1

Pa r t on e : au t hor b o ok r e a de r

25

1 Pre-scripts: the contexts of literary production

27

2 Post scripts: the fate of the page in Charles Gildon’s epistolary fiction

61

Pa r t t wo: r e a de r b o ok au t hor

103

3 Dark matters: printer’s ornaments and the substitution of text

105

4 Inanimate fiction: circulating stories in object narratives

154

5 Only a female pen: women writers and fictions of the page

189

6 After words

223

Notes Bibliography Index

238 255 274

vii

Figures

Frontispiece: Thomas Rowlandson, Doctor Syntax and the Bookseller (1877). Courtesy of Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, The Kate and Maurice R. Seiden Special Purchase Fund in honor of Charles Ryskamp. 1 The End of Lusorium (1798), final page. Courtesy of the British Library Board. page 11 2 William Beckford, Modern Novel Writing (1796), i, title page. Courtesy of the British Library Board. 17 3 Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books in A Tale of a Tub (1727), 153. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 30 4 Thomas Rowlandson, The Author and the Bookseller (1780). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 33 5 Isaac Cruikshank, The Circulating Library (1800). Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 35 6 Book label for Thomas Wright’s Circulating Library in Westminster. Courtesy of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 36 7 William Donaldson, The Life and Adventures of Sir Bartholomew Sapskull, Baronet (1768), i, frontispiece and title page. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. 54 8 Charles Gildon, The Post-Boy Robb’ d of His Mail (1706), 2nd edn., 11. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. 68 9 Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1756), 28. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 107 10 Thomas Cogan, John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman (1776), title page. Courtesy of the British Library Board. 109 11 The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), 58. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. 113 viii

List of figures 12 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1724), 6th edn., 10. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 13 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of Tub (1724), 6th edn., 135. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 14 Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous, in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1728), 2nd edn., ii, 125. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. 15 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1751), 4th edn., iv, 203. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. 16 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1751), 4th edn., v, 201. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. 17 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1751), 4th edn., iii, 153. Courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago. 18 George Stayley, Life and Opinions of an Actor (1762), i, 208–9. Courtesy of the British Library Board. 19 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67), vi, 62. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 20 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67), ix, 97. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 21 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67), ix, 70–1. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 22 John Kidgell, The Card (1755), i, frontispiece and title page. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 23 John Kidgell, The Card (1755), between pages 12 and 13. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 24 Travells of a Shilling (1728), A2. Courtesy of the British Library Board. 25 Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1693), i, 110–11. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 26 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion (1818), i, title page. Courtesy of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. 27 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), 286–7. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

ix

117 122 124 128 131 132 143 144 145 146 156 157 162 194 205 232

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to colleagues of two sorts: those fit though few who, by their insight, helped refine my thinking (they know who they are and can find themselves in the index), and those who, by misunderstanding me, have helped to make this book clearer (some of whom can find themselves in the index). I am indebted to the William Ready Division of Archives & Research Collections at McMaster University for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Fellowship summer grant they provided (and Rick and Colleen, who put me up and then put up with me), the Newberry Library for granting me a wonderful year-long National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship in Chicago, the English Department at Case Western Reserve University for a sane academic harbor, the anonymous readers and the editors at EighteenthCentury Fiction and PMLA who approved publication of articles upon which portions of this book are based, Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia for taking an interest in an earlier version of Chapter 1 that appears in their Blackwell Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, my editor at Cambridge University Press, Linda Bree, who thought my manuscript interesting enough to bring before the Syndicate and reminded me that this book, like most, was not exempt from sober pragmatic publishing considerations, and the two anonymous readers for Cambridge who recommended publication of the manuscript. I am indebted to Audrey Cotterell for her eagle-eyed copy-editing and to Jodie Barnes and Maartje Scheltens for handling the various production difficulties that necessarily arise in seeing a book to print. I am grateful to Blackwell Publishers, ECF, and PMLA for permission to include revised portions of the following: “The Novel and Print Culture: A Proposed Modesty,” The Blackwell Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, Blackwell, 2005, 343–64 (for Chapter 1); “In Other Words: EighteenthCentury Authorship and the Ornaments of Print,” Eighteenth-Century x

Acknowledgments

xi

Fiction 14. 3–4 (April–July 2002): 627–72 (for Chapter 3); and “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction,” PMLA 113 (March 1998): 212–26 (for Chapter 4). My family has always been supportive and patient during the years I have spent on this project. They will be happy not to hear about print technology for a while, and my son, Gray, can now stop pestering me about when the book will appear in print. As ever, the bulk of my thanks goes to Athena Vrettos, who has steadfastly advised me to be less prolix. I hope I have disappointed her less and less over the years.

Introduction: prose fiction and print culture in eighteenth-century Britain

I do not think altogether the worse for a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living. (William Hazlitt, “On Reading Old Books,” 1821)

This work opens with the simple proposition that eighteenth-century British prose fiction, what Hazlitt largely means by “old books” (xii, 220), focused considerable attention on the material appearance of the printed book and connected that scrutiny to the appearance of a seemingly new type of popular fiction. Such awareness, I contend, assumed a wide variety of forms. It included experimentation with the physical layout of the page and the deployment of different fonts and typographical marks. It similarly involved representations and descriptions of printed or handwritten matter within a text€– such as letters, found manuscripts, legal documents, sermons, lists, books, pamphlets, newspapers, and so on. More generally, this fascination with the physical properties of books extended to the public circulation of texts themselves. In The Appearance of Print I confront the seeming paradox that a genre supposedly invented to make mundane reality transparent, visibly recorded the self-conscious manipulation of its typographical nature. As a collective effort to reproduce everyday experience, what made a great deal of eighteenth-century fiction culturally effective was its capacity to circulate intimacy and affect without appearing to be a self-conscious or self-consciously public artifice. I stress the word “appearing” because, in fact, popular fiction, customarily about private lives, was inevitably a highly public form of discourse. That is, “the novel” was not so much a record of privacy and individualism as a vehicle by which such elusive concepts could be publicly mediated. As Robinson Crusoe’s “Editor” notes, “If ever the story of any private man’s adventures in the world were worth making publick, and were acceptable when published, the editor of this account thinks this will be so” (i). Implicit in Defoe’s authorial self-effacement as “Editor” of 1

2

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) is the complementary erasure of “private” experience when made “acceptable” as “published” work. The Appearance of Print argues that a determining cause for that paradoxical state was a coalescence of historical shifts in how authors sought a living, how books were made, and how readers learned to consume texts. It focuses on the period between the lapse of government licensing of printed works in 1695 and the advent of industrialized book production in the early nineteenth century, tracing the establishment of publishing as a specialist commercial undertaking. As I will be claiming in later chapters, many of the noted features of eighteenth-century fiction, such as the evolution of free indirect discourse, anti-romance rhetoric, modern gender assumptions, and pretenses to ordinariness and realism, were intricately related to the particular status of the book in the Hanoverian period. In Britain (as in Europe generally) the advent of print coincided with new conceptions of psychological introspection and national consciousness that became enshrined in popular fiction. Ultimately, I address how Hazlitt’s “old books” integrated formal, thematic, and material elements, mapping the connections between the various producers, distributors, and consumers that contributed to prose fiction’s effectiveness as a commodified form of literature. The period between 1640 and 1740 provided a hospitable medium for the growth of a literary genre that appeared distinctive enough for subsequent readers, publishers, and writers to ascribe the rediscovered name “novel” to it as a means of converting prose fiction into a marketable genre for a print-dominated culture. Perhaps more than other genres or modes of discourse, “the novel” has been closely allied with print, an observation especially current as a source of study, perhaps because of the belief that conventional books are rapidly headed for obsolescence. The increased popularity of eighteenth-century fiction, I allege, cannot be adequately understood without confronting the direct and indirect ways in which producers, distributors, and consumers materially shaped the spread of fictional texts. To a large extent, this book approaches the study of printed fiction as a topic belonging largely to literary history and genre studies. At the same time, the dynamic interplay among authors, book producers, and readers in eighteenth-century fiction reflects more general historical conditions in the nature of technological communications. As Roger Chartier has argued, the history of the book necessitates investigation of the reciprocal relations among three basic categories: the creation of the text (how authors shape the book’s written content); the nature of the reader (what

Introduction

3

skills, access, and modes of reading are brought to the printed text); and the material state of the book (such as its scribal or printed forms, or means of distribution) (Order, 18). The interrelation of these categories creates what Robert Darnton calls a “communications circuit” (Kiss, 111) and Friedrich Kittler identifies as a “discourse network” or “information networks” (Discourse, 2, 370). According to Kittler, discursive technologies become viable forms of media only when a society distinguishes them as interventions in the circuit of material representation. The appearance of new media, he claims, modifies the overall means of communication, or “chain of chains” (Gramophone, 4), within a particular culture. This transformation alters not only the niches occupied by prior media, diversifying those modes of reproduction even when they are ostensibly unrelated to the new media, but also the various relations among producers, distributors, and consumers.1 Adapting these observations about media technology, The Appearance of Print couples its focus on genre with historical analysis of print culture, arguing that genre and technology are often mutually constitutive. After Johann Gutenberg in the mid fifteenth century, and more pointedly William Caxton at the end of it, British familiarity with print grew exponentially and revealed how effectively new communications technology could alter the chains of thought. But scholars differ widely in postulating when the “advent of print” reached critical mass. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, editors of The Renaissance Computer, report that “it has been calculated that 20 million individual books were in circulation in Europe by 1500. Irrespective of whether or not they could actually read the products of the presses, few Europeans at that time could have been unaware of the flood of printed material flowing out of urban centers” (1). While such numbers may rely on liberal assessments of the book trade, and fail to account for variables in the distribution and audience for such output, they indicate a substantial cultural transformation in Western discursive practice. On the surface, such a view appears to contradict the claim by Terry Belanger that “England in the 1790s was a well-developed print society; in the 1690s, especially once we leave London, we find relatively little evidence for one” (6). Regarding the years between 1727 and 1783, Paul Langford similarly declares: “the sheer volume of printed Â�matter produced in the period is striking testimony to the extent of the reading market” (91). Despite the notable presence of books in Renaissance Europe, it would appear that English culture did not embrace bookishness until much later. As H. J. Jackson claims, “At the end of the eighteenth century, to state the obvious, print media monopolized education

4

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

and communications and had a dominant share of what we now call the entertainment industry” (9). Appearances can be deceiving: the assessments of early modern print culture become only murkier if we accept the claim by scholars of nineteenth-century Britain that the “advent” of print culture started in the last two to three decades of the eighteenth century, but culminated in the third decade of the nineteenth when, as Clifford Siskin maintains, “the basic printing processes, from papermaking to typesetting to the press itself, are fully mechanized€– a point reached by roughly 1830 after decades of largely British innovations that were then followed, with the start of the railroads during that same decade, by the mechanization of the distribution network” (11–12).2 All these factual claims are essentially accurate, but by isolating quantitative measures from qualitative ones, such accounts hold the fluctuating development of print society to a model of acculturation that discounts the myriad, and occasionally competing, forces that, over time, shape dominant forms of media. Even the most trenchant modern scholarship on eighteenth-century British book history varies widely about whether, when, and where print culture in any identifiable sense arose. Adrian Johns’ The Nature of the Book, for example, not only rejects claims such as Elizabeth Eisenstein’s that a printing revolution occurred in the sixteenth century, but also challenges the companion argument that typographic fixity then helped generate a relatively uniform and dependable “print culture.”3 According to Johns, “print culture of the eighteenth century could be perceived by contemporaries, not as a realization of the rationalizing effects so often ascribed to the press, but as destabilizing and threatening to civility” (28). Like Johns, Richard Sher emphasizes how individuals in particular locations and cultural contexts affect cultural processes, but his concentration in The Enlightenment and the Book on collaborative, and often beneficent, relationships between authors and publishers yields a more sanguine assessment of print culture. Acknowledging the “tense and strained, even hostile” partnerships that could arise between authors and publishers (Enlightenment, 7), Sher nonetheless stresses the intricate personal, economic, and national interests that unified eighteenthcentury Scottish publishing. His focus allows for the examination of a highly integrated local set of practices as if these were stable and consistent patterns of production and exchange. His work, like Johns’, thus prompts a highly polarized view of early modern book culture, that, I would argue, has repeatedly energized but also at times constricted the history of the book.

Introduction

5

Examples of this polarization can be elaborated almost without end. William St. Clair’s influential The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, for instance, dates the “reading nation” in Britain to the Romantic period. Focusing mainly on readers, St. Clair posits that the modern notion of a mass audience emerged as authors escaped the booksellers’ earlier controls and bargained for better terms. Only after effective annulment in 1774 of the 1710 Copyright Act (8, c.19), which had enabled London booksellers to control authorial rights and maintain prices at artificially profitable levels, were there enough cheaper books for readers to become a decisive cultural force. St. Clair calls this “the most decisive event in the history of reading in England since the arrival of printing 300 years before” (109). The result of this change was an “explosion of reading” (355), not only in urban centers but also “at the boundaries of the reading nation” as provincial readers, reprints, and circulating libraries multiplied, thus fostering a surge in Romantic creativity and literacy (347–56). Jan Fergus reveals, however, that the nature of books frequently proves elusive (243–4). Whereas St. Clair’s account assumes that reading follows legal and economic influences, Fergus highlights the shaping practices of consumers themselves. Because St. Clair concentrates mostly on the legal context of copyright and publishers’ archives to characterize the book trade, he implies that book cost and accessibility drive consumption. Subject to market concerns and juridical constraints, readers themselves seem to have limited agency. Restricting her data to the purchase of fiction, Fergus, in contrast, portrays active readers whose demands may have influenced the publication of works as much as and perhaps more than copyright decisions or insider trading. As she observes, “canonicity is not produced by what the market makes available or advertises or keeps reprinting but by what customers choose to purchase” (76). Sher similarly postulates that the 1774 copyright ruling hardly affected the actions of authors, booksellers, or readers in the English-speaking world. Using private correspondence, memoirs, and account ledgers, he divulges that the book trade had long relied on “honorary copyright,” a tacit agreement between authors and publishers (Enlightenment, 30).4 Scrutinizing exactly what actual readers bought allows Fergus to similarly question if not entirely dispel several persistent assertions about eighteenth-century fiction’s role in fostering a reading revolution, among them that novels were a particularly influential form of literature. One sign of the volatile history of print is that St. Clair substantiates his claims about the reading explosion that followed Donaldson v. Beckett by focusing, as he openly admits, on book production (14), even though books were just one prominent element in the eighteenth-century

6

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

print landscape. It might, however, be as feasible to argue, pace Michael Harris (Suarez and Turner, 413–23), that the 1695 lapsing of the Licensing Act in conjunction with innovations in distribution prompted the documented flood of periodicals that must also have galvanized a new and larger readership, echoing, in turn, the pamphlet war that accompanied the earlier Revolutionary period, and anticipating later reading explosions. Moreover, given the amalgam of fact and fiction in periodical, and often serial, literature, readers were being acclimated to imaginative prose of a distinctive modern cast well before the late eighteenth-century period favored by such scholars as Leah Price, St. Clair, and Clifford Siskin. Books continued to be expensive items in the eighteenth century; it may therefore be as likely that demotic growth in reading began with more modest forms of both printed and scripted discourse. Explanations for disparate assessments of the advent of print culture (as distinct from the advent of print) include biases of period scholars, changes in our knowledge over time, contrary notions of evidence, differences between urban and provincial perspectives, and varying definitions of culture, Europeans, and readership. This book is concerned not with adjudicating these disputes, but rather with determining how quantitative changes in publishing induced qualitative changes in how producers and consumers approached texts. Scholars often claim that printed books added significantly to the late sixteenth-century discourse network, but, as Wendy Wall contends, they still largely urged consumers to “read according to manuscript principles€– to reassemble printed material within their commonplace books and produce collaborative work” (59). That inclination largely disappears by the eighteenth century, probably because of new habituations to reading printed texts. Re-mediating unity, temporality, and spatiality, new technologies frequently endorse particular embodiments of discursive exchange. These re-mediations, in turn, modify how individuals perceive themselves as social agents. Such developments constitute neither a sudden metamorphosis in subjectivity nor a mere extension of pre-existing norms but what might be called a series of conversions, often unpredictable and uneven in their effects. As David Zaret puts it, “novel developments in print culture can be understood only if we grant equal importance to social and technical aspects of printing” (134). Moreover, while new media provide the framework for re-imagined modes of communication, old technologies often die hard. For instance, just as printed texts still bear the traces of manuscript forms, digital text customarily borrows from print culture, and, in fact, abets the proliferation of conventional books.

Introduction

7

Moveable type has long been considered a key media technology that contributed to the rise of modern Western consciousness, in which prose fiction also conventionally played a vital role. As Walter Benjamin observes: The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing. (87)

Although past critics have noted overt displays of textual features in eighteenth-century fiction, the study of imaginative works as material objects has only recently received concentrated attention. Both Ian Watt and Lennard Davis assert that “the novel” owed its particular existence to print technologies, and George Justice calls it “the first overwhelmingly commodified type of writing” (Manufacturers, 153). While these may be overstatements, they underscore the links between forms of fiction and the materiality of books. As Thomas Keymer remarks, eighteenth-century fiction shows “the readiness of novelists to explore the impact of print technology and publishing format on literary meaning and the reading experience” (Sterne, 67). Indeed, since the revival of interest in the history of the book in the last two decades, studies of prose fiction have frequently granted “the early novel” a crucial and representative role in the communications revolution of the period. Several of these scholars consider the matter of the page and what lies on it principally in terms of the authorial act or, at the very least, the function of the author in relation to the print industry (Catherine Gallagher and George Justice). Those who focus primarily on the reader, such as Ellen Gardiner or William Warner, prioritize the consumption of texts. Few scholars attend closely to the print industry’s production of prose fiction, but those who do often pursue some other issue€– character development (Deidre Lynch), modernism (Thomas Keymer), graphic arts (Janine Barchas)€ – to which print culture is then annexed. Lynch’s study of the double significance of character as typographical mark and as personality, for example, links the acceleration of the market in printed literature to developments in the construction of a relatively modern notion of deeply textured subjectivity. All of these studies indicate a salutary tendency in linking the “rise of the novel” to “the history of the book,” which can, in many instances, be traced to landmark studies by Eisenstein, Jürgen Habermas, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Watt. It is implicit, as well, in several important theories of the rise

8

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

of the novel since Watt, such as those by Davis, Michael McKeon, and Nancy Armstrong. The Appearance of Print amplifies this topic by relating a broad spectrum of changes in eighteenth-century culture, such as advances in paper-making or new modes of literacy, to innovations in how authors, publishers, distributors, and readers manipulated printed literature, and fiction specifically, in order to make typographical expression seem natural and familiar; the book seeks, in other words, to provide an integrative perspective on textual and cultural agency. It thus complements recent work of Keymer, Barchas, Fergus, and Harold Weber but focuses more particularly on the temporal and material intersections of writing, printing, distributing, and reading from the end of the seventeenth century to the opening of the nineteenth. My central claims are: (1) that eighteenthcentury fiction assumes particular forms and popularity largely as a result of the distinctive and rapid dispersion of printing technology; and (2) that complex attitudes toward the resources of print are shaped in part by the way in which literary artifacts like “the novel” confront their own textual nature. As David McKitterick suggests, “eighteenth-century authors took an increasingly informed interest in the appearance of their books” (193). In prose fiction, for instance, Jonathan Swift’s asterisks and glosses in A Tale of a Tub (1704) or Samuel Richardson’s typographical effects in Clarissa (1748), such as fragmented text printed diagonally and upside down, and creative italics, florets, bullets, and indices, reveal distinct responses to the possible uses of print. Similarly, varied lengths of dashes in Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7) or satiric footnotes in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) show that eighteenth-century novelists of all sorts exploited the expressive function of print. It is a scholarly axiom that recognizably modern structures of thought could not have developed without access to the various printed texts that shaped such thinking. Because moveable type increased the circulation of books, which in turn impelled modern methodologies, Gutenberg’s “invention” has come to symbolize Western intellectual destiny.5 Underwriting this assumption is the notion that technological innovation produces particular and defining types of cognitive behavior. That is, seeing print culture as effecting rather than the effect of a revolution in mentalité, such an approach, valuable in the main, nevertheless seeks to provide an organiscist theory of cultural change that, paradoxically, removes print as an organic element from the very culture it ostensibly produces. But, as McKitterick asserts, the eighteenth century “witnessed

Introduction

9

changes in attitude which in fundamental ways prefigured the subsequent long-term technological changes” (166). The Appearance of Print similarly argues that eighteenth-century prose fiction writers responded to innovations in printing in ways that contributed to a further re-imagining of what print could do. I suggest, in other words, that we temper the argument that typography produced modernity by recalling other historical developments, such as those in reading, the dissemination of goods, and the organization of labor. To a large extent, nevertheless, the correlation between eighteenthÂ�century fiction and print does reflect transformations in the production and circulation of texts generally. Chartier has recently observed that literary authors in the past frequently “transformed the material realities of writing and publication into an aesthetic resource, which they used to achieve poetic, dramatic, or narrative effects. The processes that bestowed existence on writing in its various forms, public or private, ephemeral or durable, thus became the very ground of literary invention” (Inscription, x–xi). According to Carey McIntosh, predominant elements of style, such as “polysyllabic vocabulary, periodic sentences, a nominal style that delights in abstraction, and the studied rhetoricity of parallel structures, series, and self-conscious musicalities” verify that after 1770 eighteenthcentury prose “is the prose of a print culture,” whereas “what was published in the first quarter of the century was more closely affiliated to the world of speech” (117–18). Certainly, in this period Britain experienced a dramatic consolidation of print technology and dissemination that included passage of modern copyright law; taxation of printed material; advances in domestic paper-making; the emergence of wholesale marketing, copy-owning congers, and trade sales; the establishment of the modern library system; the appearance of large-scale printing firms; dramatically increased production by provincial presses; the institution of serialized publication and advertising lists in books and periodicals; the accelerated growth of newspapers, journals, and magazines; the professionalization of authorship; and the start of a fully mechanized printing industry.6 These and other innovations unquestionably produced new conceptions of literary expression so that by the eighteenth century the link between enlightenment and print appeared fully established. As the anonymous author of An Essay on the Original, Use, and Excellency, of the Noble Art and Mystery of Printing (1752) typically noted, “Erudition and Learning, the Improvement of all the Works of Nature, and the Perfection of all Arts and Sciences, are the genuine Effects of this Noble Mystery, and an evident Demonstration of its Use and Excellency” (9). Here, the hyperbole

10

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

matches Swift’s or Jane Austen’s ardor in defending the unadorned nobility of books or the dignity of the author while acknowledging the new power of the medium. At the same time, throughout the innovations in both the technological and literary spheres ran a desire to create an intimate connection of reader, author, bookmaker, and publisher not only to each other but also to the material production and dissemination of texts as well. It mattered to writers, publishers, and readers that books retain intensely personal and feeling relations to the world. As John Dunlop argued in The History of Fiction (1814), whereas “real history disgusts us with a familiar and constant similitude of things, Fiction relieves us by unexpected turns and changes, and thus not only delights, but inculcates morality and nobleness of soul. It raises the mind by accommodating the images of things to our desires, and not, like history and reason, subjecting the mind to things” (8). While Dunlop implicitly recognizes that print fosters reason, he emphasizes its power to move. Eighteenth-century fiction provides particularly strong evidence for the assumption that newness, modernity, intimacy, and print were common bedfellows. As John Paul Hunter observes, “New readers, new modes of literary production, changing tastes, and a growing belief that traditional forms and conventions were too constricted and rigid to represent modern reality or reach modern readers collaborated to mean€– in the eyes of both proponents and critics€ – that much modern writing was taking radical new directions” (11). This desire to reach readers often assumed pronounced modes of personal address. A complicated and highly idiosyncratic example of this appears, for example, in the pseudonymously authored The End of Lusorium (1798). As if to simultaneously outperform Sterne, who popularized extensive use of fragments, incomplete sentences, and suggestive spacing, and Richardson, who used inverted blocks of text and a typeface called Grover’s Scriptorial to mimic Clarissa’s handwriting and signature, Lusus presents his entire book in the form of engraved reproductions purportedly of the original disarrayed manuscript (Figure 1).7 Other writers such as Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood, and Henry Mackenzie use more moderate effects, such as comic and self-reflexive chapter headings, overly elaborate tables of contents, and parodic prefatory materials, but they also intimate a writer’s awareness that authorship derives as much from the material processes of print culture as from his or her own labor. As James Raven notes, the success of a work of fiction often depended on a “critical reception that included analysis of typography and materials” (Raven et al., English Novel, i, 104). Even the title page evolved significantly, according to James

Introduction

11

Figure 1╇ The End of Lusorium (1798), final page.

McLaverty, such that the “eighteenth century can be validly claimed as a point of transition” when “something slimmer, more elegant, more defiantly textual (and symbolic), emerged” (“Questions,” 177). Authorial interest in what the Monthly Review called “the manufacture of novels” (August 1790) stemmed partly from a widespread reflection on modern communication that print technology prompted. Late Â�seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century prognostications about “the Press” in England frequently display an almost missionary zeal over the impact of print technology. Scores of verse, such as the anonymous “Poem

12

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

on the Invention of Printing,” extolled the capacity of “the Press” to “occupy its pow’rs in virtue’s cause; / Chaste erudition freely to impart, / And improve, but ne’er corrupt, the reader’s heart” (156). Print histories of the period routinely praised the rationalizing force of the medium, regarding it as the means to create history and instill public-mindedness, but ascribed theological significance as well. In The Originall and Growth of Printing (1664), Richard Atkyns claims that “Printing is of so Divine a Nature, that it makes a Thousand years but as yesterday … and so Spirituall withall, that it flyes into all parts of the World without Wearines … [where] it hastens Virtue and dispells Ignorance” (2). Such formulations have their roots in the traditional conception of God as author€– of one’s being, and of the two books, nature and the Bible€– that links all words to the Word. In Jacques Derrida’s evocative phrase, “the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God” (Grammatology, 13). As A Supplement to Dr. Harris’s Dictionary of Arts and Science (1744) similarly insists, without books “God is silent, Justice dormant, Physic at a stand, Philosophy lame, Letters dumb, and all Things involved in Cimerian darkness” (s.v. “Books”). Even printers’ manuals, ostensibly intended to be neutrally descriptive, praised printing as the “Science of Sciences” (Moxon, ii, 5). To a large degree the history of reading, as John Brewer suggests, confirms the pervasive impact if not the moral efficacy that these reports attribute to print: “Books, print and readers were everywhere. Not everyone was a reader, but even those who could not read lived to an unprecedented degree in a culture of print, for the impact of the publishing revolution extended beyond the literate” (187). The period’s fulsome praise of print as a transformative medium not only suggests that England was, at that time, witnessing dramatic innovations in print technology and dissemination, it also appears, on the surface, to corroborate Eisenstein’s seminal argument that the “advent of print” promoted rational models of discourse that radically changed habits of thought (Printing, 225–302). The Copernican Revolution, she claims, occurred because “the flow of information had been reoriented to make possible an unprecedented cumulative cognitive advance” (628). Ostensibly, the eighteenth-century admiration for print could be seen as the late acknowledgment of that collective process. Similarly, the contemporary encomiums about the power of print also appear to imply that, as Habermas speculates, a relatively uniform expression of public opinion developed in eighteenth-century Britain as a result of “the commercialization of cultural production” (Transformation, 38), particularly through the dissemination of printed matter. According to this line of argument, a variety of advances in

Introduction

13

the production and circulation of printed literature coupled with the rise of venues, such as the coffee house, where published work could be effectively shared and discussed, prodded Europeans to think in terms of a public opinion that could shape civil society: “The privatized individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted” (Transformation, 51). Faith in the integrative force of print culture also stimulated, as Benedict Anderson has shown, the growth of modern nationalism by the end of the eighteenth century (3–43). The effect of rationalizing and consensus-building modes of communication was supposed to create a national unity in which the “reader” as much as the “author” was circulated as a paradigmatic voice that could help generate public awareness and reasoned debate.8 As critics of Habermas’ theory of the public sphere have frequently noted, however, his assumption of normalizing public opinion derives from historical examples that already manifest idealized or exclusionary practices which counteract its purported democratizing and rationalizing effects. “A different view of the early public sphere,” Zaret claims, “arises when its history is developed empirically, in terms of concrete communicative developments in popular as well as elite cultures” (33). If public opinion emerged as an influential form of political pressure in the latter half of the seventeenth century, it did so, in part, through a highly selective definition of the public sphere. According to Nancy Fraser, for example, “the problem is not only that Habermas idealizes the bourgeois public sphere but also that he fails to examine other, nonliberal, publics, counterpublics, and the promise of democracy in nonbourgeois, competing public spheres. Or rather, it is precisely because he fails to examine these other public spheres that he ends up idealizing the bourgeois public sphere” (60–1). Accentuating what she calls “subaltern counterpublics,” Fraser admonishes Habermas for his neglect of “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (67).9 Anthony Pollock has similarly argued that Habermas fails to recognize the “limits of the period’s predominant image of itself as open, tolerant, rational, and inconclusive,” but he also instructively situates eighteenth-century “alternative publics” against “what Habermas calls the hegemonic eighteenthcentury public’s self-interpretation” (7). Habermas has responded to such critiques by further defining the public sphere as a dominant but permeable discursive field, insofar as it is a

14

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

mode of consciousness in which neglected groups can shape public opinion from within. The bourgeois public sphere, he maintains, is a mode of civic engagement that provided areas of common ground not only for the labor movement but also for the excluded other, that is, the feminist movement. Contact with these movements in turn transformed these discourses and the structures of the Â�public sphere itself from within. From the very beginning, the universalistic discourses of the bourgeois public sphere were based on self-referential premises; they did not remain unaffected by a criticism from within because they differ from Foucaultian discourses by virtue of their potential for self-transformation. (“Reflections,” 429)

In a sense, whereas Fraser regards civic engagement as a contestatory engagement between a dominant and subaltern publics in which the Â�latter must continually struggle against the former, Habermas perceives a dynamic sphere in which that struggle consistently reshapes what a public’s self-image is. Without diminishing the critical differences between these two positions, one can infer that they both conceive of the public (the root from which “publication” derives) as a rhetorical as much as a practical concept, an imaginary field in which various competing models of civic engagement can be postulated.10 Such a conceptualization is not far removed from Hazlitt’s historical explanation in “On the English Novelists” (1819) for the notable superiority of fiction from Richardson to Sterne: “the reign of George II … [provided] a security of person and property, and a freedom of opinion … [as well as] a general spirit of sturdiness and independence, which made the English character more truly English than perhaps at any other period€– that is more tenacious of its own opinions and purposes” (vi, 121–2). This accords with his view in “The Influence of Books on the Progress of Manners” (1828) that “Public opinion … is the atmosphere of liberal sentiment and equitable conclusions; books are the scale in which right and wrong are fairly tried … The reading public€– laugh at it as we will, abuse it as we will€ – is after all (depend upon it), a very rational animal, compared with a feudal lord and his horde of vassals” (ix, 326). Many broad historical appraisals of the public sphere and print culture are effective, in part, because they depict print as a primary originative agent rather than show how the medium came to be regarded as so charged and potent a force in the first place. Their broadness can erase tensions that persisted from manuscript practices and also attended continual advances in technologies of communication. Defoe, for example, could, in his capacity as a defender of print culture, promote the press in

Introduction

15

An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704) as “the most useful Invention ever found out, in order to polish the Learned World, make men Polite, and encrease the Knowledge of Letters, and thereby all useful Arts and Sciences,” and yet derogate in equally vocal terms the “Licentiousness of the Press” as an “ill Use of Liberty” (3, 8). Such individual instances remind us that print’s historical impact is not the product simply of its technology but also of cultural assumptions about the proper uses of Â�publishing and its constituent elements, or, in Johns’ words, how “print culture was constructed and constituted” by accounts of “the invention of the press itself” (326). This process of print acculturation was not immediate, and therefore not a fortiori an inherent aspect of the technology. In both their positive and negative formulations these historical and contemporaneous assessments postulate the author as an effect, as much as an agent, of technological processes. Most work on eighteenth-century writing, however, has focused primarily on economic, philosophical, and legal determinations of authorship to identify a particular modern conception that attributes originality, authority, autonomy, and genius to the author.11 This work tends to privilege poetic discourse (such as that by Alexander Pope or William Blake), exceptional circumstances (court cases such as Donaldson v. Becket), and contemporary literary theory (like that of Edward Young or Johann Fichte) in fleshing out a rarefied image of the writer as a romantic artist rebelling against the constricting financial and material practices of the print industry. Though often materialist from a theoretical standpoint, such explanations tend to downplay the material nature of authorship upon which their claims are based. In contrast, this book focuses on how the physical properties of eighteenth-century fiction not only helped underwrite the modern Romantic ideal but generated alternative concepts of authorship as well. Extended prose fiction reaches at least as far back as the Greeks in Western culture and The Tale of Genji in Asian literary history, but scholars of, and contemporary observers within, eighteenth-century British culture have repeatedly noted the period’s particular fascination with “the novel.” It has become a truism that because a critical discourse which promoted the use of the term “novel” to denote a particular kind of realistic and popular fiction emerged roughly in the 1740s or 1750s, eighteenthcentury fiction manifested a set of features that defined a new genre, despite the irony that an old term implying originality was borrowed to nominate an apparently new form of writing. The conditions that allowed for the emergence of a post-dated form like “the novel,” however, do not follow a smooth trajectory. Such factors as improvements in the print

16

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

industry, loosened governmental restrictions, intermittent growth in literacy, advanced means of delivery, and the professionalization of authorship all promoted market growth in eighteenth-century fiction, but only in fits and starts.12 In addition, lengthy prose fiction aimed at a popular audience was a relatively modest part of the period’s publishing revolution. That is, its cultural impact seems to have outweighed its strictly numerical presence in literate society. Thomas Holcroft’s sniffy declaration in his preface to Alwyn: or The Gentleman Comedian (1780) that “the legitimate Novel is a work much more difficult than the Romance, and justly deserves to be ranked with those dramatic pieces whose utility is generally allowed” appears to confirm the genre’s pre-eminence, but his clarification that in such a work “a combination of incidents, entertaining in themselves, are made to form a whole: and an unnecessary circumstance becomes a blemish, by detaching from the simplicity which is requisite to exhibit that whole to advantage” also narrows considerably the range of texts that might legitimately count (possibly even his own). Among the works discounted as “Romances,” he includes Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (ironically a work loosely based on the author’s own life) since it presents “a fictitious history of detached and independent adventures.” Such distinctions tend to blur on close inspection and often function Â�simply to distinguish the new “Novel” from “the endless pages of endless volumes” of all “Romances” and their related “species” in a competitive print marketplace (i, vi–vii). Holcroft’s definition would exile Dickens as much as Smollett from what we call “the history of the novel.” Despite notable declarations of its ascendancy by Holcroft, Clara Reeve, and Walter Scott,13 not all eighteenth- and early nineteenthÂ�century readers even regarded “the novel” as so markedly distinct a genre that it deserved its nomenclature. Edward Mangin, for example, concluded as late as 1808 that “The word novel is a generical term; of which romances, histories, memoirs, letters, tales, lives, and adventures, are the species” (5). Similarly, William Beckford subtitled his novel Modern Novel Writing (1796) as “A Rhapsodical Romance; Interspersed with Poetry,” ironically setting the regularity of roman type in the phrase “a rhapsodical romance” against the traditional but fanciful blackletter press for both “modern novel writing” and “poetry” (Figure 2). Publishing, moreover, under the pseudonym of Harriet Marlow, Beckford outlines the elements of a novel in a preface that parodically confirms Mangin’s thesis: “I have, indeed, endeavored to unite correct, delicate, and vivid imagery to an animated moral sensibility, and at the same time to enrich it by various incident, lively sallies, fashionable intrigue, picturesque description, and,

Introduction

17

Figure 2╇ William Beckford, Modern Novel Writing (1796), i, title page.

in fine, to mark it with the striking features of a bold originality, without which, no daughter of the Muses can ever expect to produce that phœnix of literary zoology€– a perfect novel” (i, ii). Both Mangin’s and Beckford’s remarks imply that opposing “romance” and “novel” was something of a red herring. In his Eloge de Richardson (1762), Denis Diderot complained: By a novel, we have understood up till now a tissue of frivolous and imaginary events the perusal of which was dangerous to both taste and morals. I wish we could find another name for the works of Richardson, works that elevate the mind and move the soul, touch the heart, are permeated with a love for what is good, and are also called novels. (150)

18

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century histories of the form express discomfort with the word itself, offering such alternatives as “fictitious histories,” “natural fictions,” “fictitious adventures,” and “fictitious narratives.”14 Perhaps the most surprising version of this debate is the relatively complex discussion of the terms “romantic fictions,” “told romance,” and “modern novel” in Letters From a Father to His Son, On Various Topics Relative to Literature and the Conduct of Life (1793). The author, John Aiken, argues that romances should be exalted despite “the preference now so universally given to novels” because the former Â�“furnished matter so much newer and more marvelous … a world of wonders, peopled with inhabitants expressly formed for the scene” (81). In an unusual twist, Aiken accuses “the writings styled novels” of an “artificial” pretense at “real occurrences” and “familiar acquaintance” that in fact “depends upon a kind of illusion” (82). The “ordinary run of novels,” he adds, “exhibit pictures which are little more than old faces new dressed and grouped” (83). “The novel” is thus denounced for its lack of novelty. Even Reeve’s 1785 polemic in favor of distinguishing the two forms of fiction was prompted in part by her own recognition that novels and romances “have lately been confounded together and are frequently mistaken for each other” (i, vii). Walter Scott himself often observed the blurring of such modes: “novels are often romantic, not indeed by the relation of what is obviously miraculous or impossible, but by deviating, though perhaps insensibly, beyond the bounds of probability or consistency” (Allott, 50). Nor, despite some hysteria about their widespread and disastrous influence, were works of prose fiction particularly numerous. Why, then, were figures such as Reeve and Holcroft anxious to label the difference between the “Novel” and the “Romance”? As I argue later in this book, “novels” appeared to manifest perturbing social changes not because they in fact dominated the print marketplace or appeared sui Â�generis but because the relative rapidity of their niche growth as a specially marketed commodity made them seem a threat. “The novel” was perhaps not as new as its authors frequently insisted, but it could be useful for writers and publishers to think it was. The belief that fiction of a particular “species” ushered in a new textual economy prompted broader attempts in the book trade to professionalize authors, consolidate bookselling, and mobilize a nationwide readership. That is, the naming of novels as such helped ensure that fiction, in some ways the most economical form of literary production, could be codified and employed for a set of writers and publishers interested in sustaining the market share of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the field of cultural production” (29–73).

Introduction

19

Reasons for this activity partly entailed the media format that enabled the fabled “rise of the novel.” “The novel” seemed a relatively unique means by which print culture could be made a normal and universal medium for communication. As Davis has shown, the word itself bespeaks the newness that belongs both to the novelty of fictional works that sought to reproduce everyday verisimilitude and the rise of printed “news” or newspapers whose advent in the seventeenth century was enabled by the advanced efficiency of the printing press. Davis notes that when romances appear in print they maintain their allegiance to manuscript and oral modes of communication (27–30). To the extent that “the novel” arose largely as a category of printed artifacts€– unlike tragic drama, epic poetry, or even the romance, it was written to be published€– it also abetted what Ong calls the “sight-dominance” of a culture orientated toward the alphabetic letterpress (121). Reading was increasingly attuned to visual rather than oral or aural communication, unlike oral storytelling or manuscripts, which, according to Ong, still encoded and activated a listening attitude in the consumer.15 That is, despite modest numbers, fictional works contributed to Enlightenment views of personal identity, modernity, and material reality in part because of their association with the modernizing force of print. While “romances” retained an aura borrowed from an earlier period of coterie writing and found manuscripts, “novels” proclaimed their modernity through a definitional dependence on the print trades. To the extent that books had become commodities, insofar as buyers purchased ready-made and mechanically reproducible texts from a large stock of volumes at pre-determined prices that allowed the seller a profit over the capital outlay for securing, printing, and distributing manuscripts, agents in the eighteenth-century book industry felt the need to create the aura of exclusive, crafted objects made to order. This condition lends printed books a material dimension that often belies the dematerialization that they seem to promise when a reader consumes them. As an object of purchase, the printed book has long held an ambiguous relationship to the market forces that make it possible and thus seems to anticipate some of the features that Karl Marx later attributed to capitalist goods. Zaret calls early modern printing “a capitalist enterprise that sold its products to a market of readers and depended less than did manuscript production on patrons” (135); to Peter Stallybrass it is a “great early capitalist industry” that “depended upon large capital investments” and helped form “a new monetary economy” (306–7). A commodity of sorts, an eighteenth-century book experienced a number of stages and sites of production, from garret to bookshop. Its labor was mystified by problems

20

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

of ownership (principally intellectual) and legal determination. Its use value was thus often less clear to consumers than other products. As the commodity form of “the novel” advanced, and as authors and publishers became increasingly distanced from their audience, many in the book trade sought to offset potentially alienating consequences by intensifying a work’s apparently personal and emotive force. The question of long prose fiction’s status as a commodity, then, is of crucial importance to media studies, and it underlies a fairly significant rift in various approaches to textuality. Ong notes, for example, that alphabet letterpress printing, in which each letter was cast on a separate piece of metal, or type, marked a psychological breakthrough of the first order. It embedded the word itself deeply in the manufacturing process and made it into a kind of commodity. The first assembly line, a technique of manufacture which in a series of set steps produces identical complex objects made up of replaceable parts, was not one which produced stoves or shoes or weaponry but one which produced the printed book. In the late 1700s, the industrial revolution applied to other manufacturing the replaceable-part techniques which printers had worked with for three hundred years. (118–19)

While weapons manufacture actually adopted some of the processes Ong describes here, the book was, nonetheless, one of the first and most popular products to reflect marketing strategies customarily associated with industrialization and capitalism. When distribution and affordability made eighteenth-century popular fiction generally available, publishing became a force of economic innovation and rationalization. Such changes signal ongoing adaptations in the print marketplace to the personal needs of customers, yet, at the same time, they prompted concern among many observers. As print’s influence spread, criticisms arose about its supposed tendency to atomize the word, isolate readers, commercialize society, champion ephemerality, multiply error, and erode authority. Tracking how particularities of a text relate to economies in the overall book trade, The Appearance of Print examines how words traverse the space between writers, publishers, and readers. It is organized according to variables that made eighteenth-century fiction as much a product of print culture as one of the crucial means by which print culture emerged. I have divided the book into two main sections, each of which is, in turn, partitioned into subdivisions that follow distinct methodological practices. Part One, entitled “Author Book Reader,” consists of two chapters that inspect various textual and sociological conditions that framed prose fiction’s relation to the book industry, from concerns over the author and

Introduction

21

reader’s function to the material nature of printed books and the consequent development of national sentiment. Chapter 1 thus situates prose fiction in a cultural landscape in which literary works compete with other kinds of printed artifacts. It contends that at no point has the book form been a transparent or natural feature of Western culture. As part of this analysis, I argue that the common perception€ – then and now€ – that “novels” dominated middle-class leisured reading, actually signals rapid growth in a niche market but not an ascendant presence in the print marketplace. Chapter 2 essentially reverses the model used in Chapter 1 by correlating the same chief elements of book culture€ – writing, reading, and publishing€– to a specific literary product, switching from an approach to printed fiction that stresses its relative scale in a crowded field of cultural production to one that highlights its distinctiveness. I therefore shift from mapping the ways in which print culture works down to individual cases to charting how a single fictional work extends out into the print context that engenders it. In essence, I switch from a Lilliputian view that situates prose fiction as a modest form of cultural production to a Brobdignagian perspective on the book, which celebrates the monumental capacities of the printed text. The chapter examines the work of Charles Gildon, a hostile contemporary of Defoe’s, to show that writing, reading, and bookmaking are already constitutive forces before pen meets paper. Starting with The Post-Boy Robb’ d of His Mail: or, The Pacquet Broke Open (1692) and following its revision in the second edition of 1706, and a sequel, The Post-Man Robb’ d of His Mail: or, The Packet Broke Open (1719), I link Gildon’s work to the book’s shifting nature as an object. Part Two, entitled “Reader Book Author,” focuses consecutively on the book’s three main conceptual units: readership, the book trade, and the author function. At the same time, each of its three chapters traces the selected concept as it relates to the other two categories, successively using a different methodology. Chapter 3, for example, closely reads one particular feature€– the printer’s ornament€– in A Tale of a Tub, Clarissa, and Tristram Shandy (1759–67). It discusses how readers were expected to interpret the inked symbols that constitute a text by examining nonÂ�verbal elements. Chapter 4 examines a distinctive fictional genre€ – the object narrative€– in which inanimate narrators, such as corkscrews, coats, and especially coins, displace human agents as the producers of discourse, literally objectifying the circulated book in eighteenth-century culture. Its main categorical analogue is the book trade itself. The final chapter is a biographical and bibliographical study of a single author, Jane Austen,

22

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

that relates one of her first written books, Northanger Abbey (1818), to her last completed work, Persuasion (1818), both having been printed together as a multi-volume edition a year after Austen’s death. I use this pairing to show how anonymity offered a model of self-authorization that exploited the obscurity of the “female pen” and the intoxicating effect that comes through the “mechanical reproduction” of one’s words. Like many other “female pens,” Austen represented her activity in print through metaphors of writing that center on documents never intended for publication. Though not directly “material” in the manner of Swift, Fielding, or Sterne, such allusiveness still testifies to the material text’s mobility within a social discursive context. The organization of the second half of the book, then, deliberately reverses what might be regarded as the natural sequence of events in the life of printed material. I begin with how print affected the reader’s habits of consumption, turn then to how fiction internalized matters of production and circulation, and lastly address how authors self-consciously manipulated print. While featuring one of the three main agents of publication (author, producer/distributor, reader), each chapter also foregrounds the inter-involvement of these and other contributors. The point of this organization is to show the difficulty of assessing exactly what force prompts the activity of any agent in the book-making process. The author, for example, may be responding to books already circulating in the marketplace (as in A Tale of a Tub or Joseph Andrews [1742]), or writing to order at the behest of a publisher or “bookseller” (as in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield [1766]). In turn, the writer and bookseller may themselves be reacting to an existing need that they perceive among a demanding readership or, even more precisely, meeting the specific requests of readers for a certain kind of literature (early eighteenth-century scandal chronicles and later gothic novels frequently share this tendency). Alternatively, a writer such as Richardson or Horace Walpole may perform all three functions€– that is, be author, reader, and publisher. Such intricacies as the writer’s interaction with the public, the publisher’s interest in manufacturing fabricated stories, and the reader’s convictions about what original acts of writing a printed work presented, thus form the material of this book. And because it probes the particular relation of prose fiction to print media, a central theme of The Appearance of Print is the ambivalent reaction of those involved in the literary sphere toward the powerful opportunities that a fully developed print culture afforded. Relations among authors and other producers of the printed text modified how readers consumed the fiction they were reading. By re-mediating the reader’s experience of unity,

Introduction

23

temporality, and spatiality, the chain of material relations that loop from the consumer to the producer (or vice versa) repeatedly showed the radical indeterminacy of eighteenth-century literary property. As I go on to show, eighteenth-century fiction attempts both to distance itself from and operate within a communications network, often by fashioning a particular mimetic domain that simultaneously reports and distorts competing modes of imagining a self, community, nation, or world. These contrary urges suggest that we should attend more to the complex ways in which literatures and marketplaces intersect, tracking the various individual agents who were engaged in the conflicting and conflicted activities of eighteenth-century print media. This involves assessing the intricate and highly personal decision-making that authors, booksellers, and printers made to get their products into print, that distributors considered in ensuring wide circulation of their goods, and that readers enacted when purchasing those products. Insofar as a period’s Â�fiction binds the book’s matter to particular generic practices we ought to seek a better understanding of how the media and the messages mix.

PA R T ON E

Author book reader Authors are generally pretty well satisfi’d, if they have the Money without the Fame.

(John Oldmixion, The History of Addresses, 1709)

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

(Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791)

I will not allow books to prove anything.

(Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818)

c h apter 1

Pre-scripts: the contexts of literary production

B ook s Horses and asses, flies and devils do Their labour in the printing art bestow; No wonder, thence such loads of lumber rise Dulness and maggots, calumny and lies.

(“On Printing,” prize epigram in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1735)

Like most other published work in eighteenth-century Britain, prose Â�fiction had to compete actively for a sustaining audience within what was considered a saturated print marketplace, “loads of lumber,” as the prize epigram above puts it. As distinct from printed sermons, for example, fiction went through sporadic periods of popularity until the 1790s, after which it achieved a secure presence in the print marketplace (to the point that many people now regard “literature” primarily as “novels”). The recurring claim that fiction dominated the leisured reading of the eighteenth-century middle classes (and women in particular) should be adjusted, in other words, to accommodate the fact that it was part of a rapid but volatile niche business rather than a hegemonic force in the print market. According to Michael Suarez, “literature, as traditionally conceived, constitutes a relatively small percentage of the books printed in the eighteenth century. In 1753, for example, literary works in English from all genres comprised about 11 percent of all surviving published titles” (150). More specifically, the share of “novels” in the total print output of England probably never reached more than 4 percent, likely less in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, or America.1 The “rise of the novel,” then, should be properly calibrated to the overall production of books, which was equally exponential, as evidenced by Lee Erickson’s estimate of an increase from 1,800 to 3,000 articles of all genres between 1740 and 1780, followed by a spike in 1792 to 6,000 items (7). 27

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Yet despite its relatively modest and inconstant contribution, many commentators denounced fiction’s influence, from Mary Astell’s 1694 lament in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies that “since the French Tongue is understood by most Ladies, methinks they may much better improve it by the study of Philosophy (as I hear the French Ladies do) Des Cartes, Malebranche, and others, than by reading idle Novels and Romances” (86–7) to the more strenuous accusation by William Davy in A System of Divinity (1795–1807) that the “wretched Trash of Plays, Novels, and Romances with which the World is overrun, hath done infinite Mischief to the Morals of young People. It hath corrupted the Principles, enflamed the Imagination, and vitiated the Taste of thousands” (xviii, 322). In “On Novel Reading” Vicesimus Knox concluded, “If it be true, that the present age is more corrupt than the preceeding, the great multiplication of Novels has probably contributed to its degeneracy” (i, 68). Hannah More laments in “On the Effects of Influence” (1799), “Novels, which used to be dangerous in one respect, are now become mischievous in a thousand. They are continually shifting their ground and enlarging their sphere, and are daily becoming vehicles of wide mischief ” (i, 33). While the extent and intensity of adverse reactions to novel reading may not, in fact, have been commensurate with the relatively small output of fiction, they do reflect the concerns that novel reading triggered and the variety of strategies, from proscription to monitoring, that were offered to constrain what many regarded as readers’ unregulated habits. The uneven development of eighteenth-century fiction does not mean then that the “novelism” of literate culture only occurs when imaginary prose reaches a relatively consistent growth pattern or dominant presence.2 Bursts of economic activity may herald structural modifications in a society as much as sustained activity. Long before 1770, for instance, readers were acclimated to the association between fiction and the naturalization of print as a dominant linguistic medium. Although a coterie manuscript society, still prominent in the early seventeenth century, does not disappear in the eighteenth, the manuscript’s status as a primary means of literary communication distinctly changes. No longer the privileged agent of the res publica litteraria, it begins to gain its aura as a pretext for printed work or as a self-consciously elitist return to pre-print dominance (or even in some cases as a political gesture of dissent as when Royalists expressed their defiance of the Interregnum regime by pointedly using private manuscript exchange to critique Commonwealth policies as well as to evade government surveillance).3

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This transformation indicates a reordering in attitudes toward printing that had, as Curt Bühler long ago asserted, “viewed the new invention … as simply another form of writing” (16). No longer supplemented by print, manuscripts instead become the supplement to printed works, representing a peculiar form of re-mediation in which the media form does not materially alter. While interrelations among oral, chirographic, and print domains, as Ong claims, persisted, cultural assumptions about each medium shifted as the balance among them changed (78–138).4 Writers of all kinds were worried enough about the growth in typographical reproduction to represent it as a “collision between the manuscript and print media” (Wall, 58). By the eighteenth century, the manuscript mode permanently lost its competitive edge although it remained a durable craft and often ghosted innovations in book-making. It is telling, for instance, that whereas the published sonnet sequence was, according to Wall, an adaptation of manuscript to book form, eighteenth-century popular fiction, while not sui generis, is a genre seemingly constituted by its printedness, even when composed initially as handwritten manuscripts. That change in habituation explains, in part, the particular anxiety over lower-class access not only to printed Bibles but also to purportedly corrupting works like Robinson Crusoe. In The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D-----. de F--, of London, Hosier, who has Liv’ d above Fifty Years by Himself (1719) Charles Gildon, Defoe’s nemesis, complained that “There is not an old Woman that can go to the Price of it, but buys thy Life and Adventures, and leaves it as a Legacy, with the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Practice of Piety, and God’s Revenge Against Murther, to her Posterity” (ix-x). But anxieties about fiction’s adverse influence derived as much from uneasiness about a print-dominated culture as from the moral tendencies of imaginative literature. In Defoe’s most famous publication, Crusoe is presumed to be writing for publication; the elusive author appears merely as “the Editor,” a voice that barely penetrates the text. As so often in eighteenth-century fiction, the author adopts an editorial persona in order to mask the text’s direct-toprint composition. Such works, unlike sixteenth-century sonnet cycles, are marked by the intention to print rather than the desire to publish versions of scripted texts once circulated privately. Yet, at the same time, fearing the loss of the written word’s authenticating mystique, they fabricate an “original” document. From Defoe (and Behn before him) to Richardson and Sterne, this meshing of public expression and private intercourse, of apparent facticity and published fiction, becomes a driving force in imaginative prose.

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Figure 3╇ Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books in A Tale of a Tub (1727), 153.

One way of understanding eighteenth-century fiction’s connections to print, then, is to link its self-conscious printedness to pressures exerted on writers more than simply to their own intuitive and creative innovation. On an immediate level, we can see this condition of publication in visual prints dramatizing authorial relations both to the printing trade and diverse readers. The engagement of texts pictured in Swift’s Battle of the Books (Figure 3), for example, postulates that authors, even those of classical pedigree, exist because of textual embodiment. While various authors appear in the picture, they descend from printed books cascading from the rapidly emptying shelves of the library. Their weapons, lances and scimitars, are analogues for “a sort of Engine called a Quill ” that conveys “the great missive Weapon in all Battles of the

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Learned … [or] malignant Liquor” identified as ink (Tale, 162). Mixing temporal and ontological registers, the image blurs the author function with its objective status as a text€– each book reverts to an author, anachronistically arrayed as a medieval knight whether he is “Ancient” or “Modern.” The “Intellectual State” or “Commonwealth of Learning”€– a king’s “public” library€– becomes a battleground that reproduces the nation’s culture wars (Tale, 160). The embodied authors, twice removed from the publications they represent, are released from the prison house of books, their intellectual activity converted into allegorical battle. Freed from specific volumes, authors reappear to defend the primal text first penned in the original manuscripts, from which the printed books apparently sprang. To some extent this restoration of the author’s spirit, brandishing a quill in order to inscribe a manuscript, confirms the standard notion of artistic genius that Swift himself derides when he challenges the “common Opinion” that in books “is wonderfully instilled and preserved the Spirit of each Warrior, while he is alive, and after his Death his Soul transmigrates there, to inform them” (Tale, 163). That is, the engraver’s image is engaged in its own battle with Swift’s words. In “The Bookseller to the Reader” that prefaces the main text, Swift ironically impersonates a member of the print trade in order to stipulate that the contestants are merely printed texts, not emanations of the author: I must warn the Reader, to beware of applying to Persons what is here meant only of Books in the most literal Sense. So, when Virgil is mention’d, we are not to understand the Person of a famous Poet call’d by that Name; but only certain Sheets of Paper, bound up in Leather, containing in Print, the Works of the said Poet: and so of the rest. (Tale, 156)

Swift encourages readers to recall their immediate reactions to the physical text, rather than the spirit of the author, as part of their appropriate interpretive behavior. Indeed, Swift’s refutation of the “common Opinion” presages a grim fate for those authors who cannot survive as printed objects in a competitive textual environment: “I believe, it is with Libraries, as with other Cemeteries, where some Philosophers affirm, that a certain spirit, which they call Brutum hominis, hovers over the Monument, till the Body is corrupted, and turns to Dust, or to Worms, but then vanishes or dissolves” (Tale, 163). For all the references to quills and manuscripts, Swift’s parable emphasizes the author’s reduction to a printed book, which, by the logic of the print marketplace, becomes subjected to the multiple incarnations of the book industry and manifold readings of a far-flung public.

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The allegory here suggests that modern systems of information storage such as printed books, public libraries, and literary criticism make even traditional works capable of fundamental reinvention. Indeed, the textual gaps marking supposedly lost portions of Swift’s manuscript highlight the radical indeterminacy between the author’s script and the printed book’s testament. While it is typically impossible to ascertain Swift’s attitude about authorial intent (elsewhere, as in A Letter to a Young Clergyman, he affirms the “spirit” that authors instill in their books [Miscellanies, 4th edn., 22–3]), he seemed compulsively drawn to collaborative textual effects that in a different historical context might make him seem on the side of the moderns.5 Ironically, the objective collaborative status of the work that Swift appears to defend against the cult of modern individualized authorship has since become the innovative model of writing that many contemporary theorists use to offset the conservative notion of the author as an “original genius.” But Swift’s satires on homo typographus alter the ancient trope of the struggling cacoethes scribendi; he recognized that the author’s secondary status, long a cliché in literary history, assumed a different position in the context of the eighteenth-century print industry. As the century progressed, popular prints as well as book illustrations confirmed Swift’s ironic estimation of the modern writer. In Thomas Rowlandson’s 1780 depiction of a needy author’s encounter with a bookseller (Figure 4) the visible dependency of the writer on the print industry takes alarming form. In the picture the printed book’s particular conditions of deliverance shape the attitudes of the various agents in the media circuit, displacing the author as the central figure in cultural production. The corpulent bookseller conveys the disdainful power he exerts over the lanky author, whose posture and expression manifest his suppliant condition. Clutching the kind of manuscript that constitutes one of the books ranged around them, the author pleads his cause. The quill in his drooping pocket, contrasted with the prosperous pockets flaring from the bookseller’s belly, indicates that the writer is always ready to accommodate the needs of the bookselling trade. The bookseller, his quill lodged idly behind his ear and glasses perched atop his head, seems inclined neither to edit nor even read the proffered manuscript. The author effectively reproduces the patronized subject that Samuel Johnson hoped modern professional writers had finally escaped.6 Jammed against the bookseller’s writing desk, presumably set there to sign contracts and write business letters, the author’s location testifies to his diminished status. The quill pen and inkstand behind him serve not as tools that advance learning but as the means an overbearing marketplace employs to subject intellectual

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Figure 4╇ Thomas Rowlandson, The Author and the Bookseller (1780).

labor. In Rowlandson’s view, the average author gained little from what historians often consider a key moment in securing authorial rights, the challenge to permanent copyright upheld by Donaldson v. Beckett. The print suggests that bookseller and author are locked permanently in an unequal contest that handicaps the latter, making his work less original the more it seeks a place on the nation’s bookshelves. Ironically, neither principal figure in Rowlandson’s etching notices another individual carefully inserted into the scene, the reader at the far left, a clergyman by appearance, who is examining a book intently, his back turned to both bookseller and author. Ignoring the exchange between writer and businessman, he is there to remind them that their work depends on a chain of agents (including consumers). Three prominent images of open books in the picture, each associated with one of the figures, further imply this textual circuit: the author’s manuscript, the two carelessly strewn books lying under a stack of tomes at the bookseller’s feet, and the volume held open by the one reader in the scene. The

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bookseller, as middleman, stands visually at the center of the room, and the author gains some proximity to that centrality, but the reader is the one whose body essentially moderates the extremes of excess and scarcity that the other two embody; not accidentally, he is the only one engaged in the proper use of books. Historically, the image of the haughty bookseller is a nonce figure; as Brewer notes: most members of the trade were prudent, honest and conservative men of business who faced problems that many authors were eager to avoid. The bookseller bore the risk of publication and needed to make a profit. He was inundated with manuscripts, many of which lacked merit or commercial value. The sheer volume of material made it hard for him to discriminate, to pick out the work that would prove a success. (155)

Though a caricature, Rowlandson’s picture expresses a common eighteenthcentury perception of the impact of trade functions on the still idealized personal connection between author and reader. Increasingly, the book came to be a thing in and of itself, divorced from what had earlier been perceived as an intimate set of relations. As the prize epigram at the head of this chapter suggests, textual corruption emanates not only from the author or compositor, but also from myriad agents seemingly sprung into existence by the mechanical means of producing published matter. These printing-house figures become unsavory anonymous creatures whose work both creates and destroys: the horses (or pressmen), asses (or compositors), flies (or sheet removers) and devils (or errand boys) all contribute to the lumber (or excess of books) that spread “Dulness and maggots, calumny and lies.” The nicknames themselves suggest a dehumanizing process that infects the literary work with a kind of satanic self-destruction; maggots were both the creatures that ate their way through books and a term for moldy ideas€– what we now call clichés. The medium is not so much a message as a memento mori. The book, literalized as a maggot-ridden carcass that invokes the dead hide that binds printed texts, and plagued by asses and devils, is, in this dystopic view of print culture, already obsolete.7 The authorial alienation one glimpses in The Battle of the Books and Rowlandson’s print appears as invisibility in later pictures. An image from 1800 by Isaac Cruikshank of the purported, and often vilified, popularity of “novels” in circulating libraries implies that fiction in particular had disrupted the order of books (Figure 5). Authors’ names and titles succumb to generic labels. On the one hand, the empty shelf that once held the “Novels,” “Romances,” and “Tales” appears to signal their newfound cultural pre-eminence. On the other hand, that void convicts those

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Figure 5╇ Isaac Cruikshank, The Circulating Library (1800).

particular genres of a vacant consumer appeal, in service to the drifting female readers who leave the shop without bothering to consider alternative reading matter such as the untouched sermons, travel literature, and plays. The popularity of fiction stands in inverse relation to the moral or informational value of religion and geography and the lapsed social value of the theater. Gendering the new readership as a frivolous body of consumers, Cruikshank’s image transforms the relations between producers, distributors, and consumers that helped organize Rowlandson’s picture. Cruikshank’s middleman is only a vendor. Sporting the obligatory quill behind his ear to tabulate payments, he has become a passive smiling figure who scrutinizes his consumers for the flicker of interest that might lead to a sale. Even a celebratory image of this new dispensation, a book label for Thomas Wright’s Circulating Library in Westminster (Figure 6), aligns fashionable readers with works of fiction and moral readers with serious unspecified tomes. The author, popular or serious, has no significant

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Figure 6╇ Book label for Thomas Wright’s Circulating Library in Westminster.

place in such a scene. Instead, pleasure-seeking readers dominate the space, discussing the merits of prose fiction in octavo (if the unauthored titles€ – Astrea and Celia€ – are any indication), while, “Lock,” “Boyle,” “Bacon,” and “Wood” stare down magisterially in folio from inaccessible upper shelves. That is, printed fiction appears to produce institutions that sublimate writers as nameless books passed between buyers and purveyors who no longer see the author as a powerful entity. While it would be reckless to draw conclusions from four disparate images, two of them satirical, spread over a century, the pictures do intimate the increasing role that a numerous readership played in altering the status and fortunes of writers, printers, and booksellers. In general, images of libraries and bookstores from later in the century show groups of public

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readers engaged in the absorbing act of handling texts; the center of Cruikshank’s design emphasizes how the reader literally traces the words on the page in the midst of a bland commodity transaction. Such displays of authorial alienation in Rowlandson’s and Cruikshank’s pictures indicate correspondences between writing and print production, as they emphasize the author’s relationship to the publishing and bookselling industries. The effect of print on imaginative prose was extensive, but not all of eighteenth-century fiction’s attention to its artifactual condition involved paratextual matter, or even the physical layout of the page. The narratives themselves often provide elaborate reflections upon the material effects of print. In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, whose very appearance in print some thought an assault on convention, Tristram describes the interplay between typographical and narrative content in one particularly vivid scene (iv, 168–89), when a hot chestnut drops into a “hiatus” in the “breeches” of Phutatorius. Seeking relief for the pain, he is advised by Eugenius to “send to the next printer, and trust your cure to such a simple thing as a soft sheet of paper just come off the press.” As Sterne elaborates the conceit, Yorick and Gastripheres join Eugenius in discussing the variables at work in the application of printed paper to Phutatorius’ genital wound. They argue whether the dampness of the paper or the “oil and lamp-black with which the paper is so strongly impregnated, does the business,” and whether it is better to spread the latter “thick upon a rag, and clap it on directly” or “so infinitely thin and with such mathematical equality (fresh paragraphs and large capitals excepted) as no art or management of the spatula can come up to.” They consider whether the “type” used should be large or small, and whether the text’s content Â�contributes to the remedy (Yorick urges them not to employ a text that contains “bawdry,” such as Phutatorius’ own treatise, which “is at this instant in the press”). The puns here, mixing references to the printing shop and its tools, to masculine virility and size, to textual, sartorial, and somatic hiatuses, and to the instruments and consequences of illicit sex, reinforce Sterne’s complex integration of social, sexual, and print subjects. Perhaps the most recondite allusion occurs when Yorick complains that spreading the lamp-black too thickly “would make a very devil of it,” as it calls to mind both the notorious black page eulogizing Yorick himself in Sterne’s own book, and the errand boys known as “printer’s devils” who handled the recently inked sheets and thus came to be covered in black. These references, especially those governing the printing house, reveal how extensively Sterne indulged his fascination with publishing.

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For Sterne, the writer, not unlike Phutatorius or Swift’s Modern, is threatened by an economy that haunts his own writing in unexpected ways. The anonymous Adventures of an Author (1767), exploiting the popularity of Sterne, makes the point even more explicitly. Like Johnson’s hack, “an Author” routinely sees himself as the recipient rather than provider of literary work and fashions an existence from the pressures and demands of the trade, as the following typical remark demonstrates: though it frequently happens among the brethren of the quill, that many are starved into writing, I believe it will be found upon examination that full as many are starved out of it: for what with the tyranny of patentees and booksellers, the additional taxes upon paper and publication, and the little attention of the town to works of genius, not to say merit, it is fifty to one, if an author does not happen to start at the change of a ministry, the breaking out of war, or the shooting of an admiral, that he does not go nine months with an empty belly. (i, 2)

The only time the author resists writing by command simply reinforces the customary subjection of the author to the trade that he notes above: “neither his bookseller, his printer, or all the devils that were let loose upon him, could prevail with him to write a line, or correct a single proof” (i, 228). The impish reference to printer’s devils as agents in the author’s bedevilment indicates his subservience to the smallest details in the book-making process. Like Tristram Shandy, The Adventures of an Author collapses the subject of the book with its creator, linking knowledge of the print trade to the fictive writer’s autobiography. Such books often follow particular generic patterns, fashioning a Künstlerroman that highlights the peculiar relation of writers to the commodity form they use in shaping a professional life in which they have no authorial identity. Such moments of effacement as these mark the intersection of the writer’s discourse with the specific material practices that governed both the aesthetic and economic productions of texts. They also suggest that writing does not necessarily precede but is often coterminous with the printing process.8 On a broader level, then, books that parody the writer’s dependence on the bookselling establishment also manifest the printing house’s role in the production of literature. When Swift secretly sent the unattributed manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels to the bookseller Benjamin Motte, he gave Motte full latitude in how to publish it. Later, Swift seemed to complain disingenuously about the license taken with his manuscript and sought to ensure corrected versions in subsequent editions (Mullan, 9–14). Nonetheless, Gulliver’s narrative still bears witness to those initial textual decisions, whether by the bookseller, editor, compositor, or pressman, or

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wholly invented by Swift himself. As the elaborate history of editions and editorial decisions testifies, books invariably are highly mediated versions of given texts, retaining the history of contributions made in the print room, regardless of whether writers considered this desirable. Authors have, as a result, long complained about their loss of status during production, often in class terms. According to Johns, “the stigma of print” was compounded by the treatment of even an established writer as “just one participant in a collective of craft operatives,” a practice that challenged the “fundamental elements”€– such as “freedom,” “pleasure,” “power,” and “name”€– that supposedly defined “genteel identity” (176). George Wither famously proclaimed in the aptly named Schollars Purgatory, Discovered in the Stationers Commonwealth (1617), that if a bookseller got any copy “likely to be vendible,” he would publish “whether the Author be willing or no … And it shall be continued and named alsoe, according to his owne pleasure” (121). In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) Robert Burton inveighed, “These men here [have become] my masters” (i, xliv). Similarly, in 1732 a writer in the Gentleman’s Magazine commented wryly that the “Chief Rule in buying Books” was no longer “the Author’s name” since “Booksellers have usurp’d the making Names as well as Titles” (ii, 1099– 100). At times this fact of printing even enters narrative content: as early as William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (1570), we see the setting of tales within print shops, a narrative trope in turn adopted in Don Quixote.9 Circumstances obtaining between authors and various figures of the printing trade thus add to the dense social nature of published fiction. The print industry, however, also depended extensively on the affective responses of readers to books themselves. Many of the industry’s material decisions about portability, availability, and uniformity were based on maximizing contact between texts and suitable audiences. These aims reflected new forms of distribution encouraged by a regularized postal system, new turnpikes, and commercial lending libraries. Such socioeconomic changes promoted commodified literary forms such as “the novel” whose content followed “proven formulas” intended to “win new purchases” and increase “the speed of cultural exchange” (Warner, 125–6). However, although hasty or commercially instituted, these formats also intensified the immediacy and personal tone of eighteenth-century fiction. The small octavo and duodecimo formats favored by booksellers for the production of novels not only manifested a particular market attitude toward such literature, they also fostered, as Brewer shows, a companionate attitude toward books (189–90). Smaller volumes could be slipped into a pocket, carried easily to favorite reading locations, and retrieved

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quickly for immediate reference. As a result, more and more people felt personally attached to the books they owned. Hester Piozzi calls them “our Leather-coated Friends upon the Shelves; who give good Advice, and yet are never arrogant and assuming” (Letters, iv, 221).10 Furthermore, throughout much of the period, consumers recognized printed fiction by the publisher’s rather than author’s name (confirming Wither’s and Burton’s fears). Popular gothic narratives from William Lane’s Minerva Press, for instance, aligned their status with the publishing house and the venues at which such works were sold (like Lane’s own circulating library) more than the author, perhaps because of how many were anonymous (Blakey, 48–53). One of the sobering insights into eighteenth-century culture, then, is that most works of fiction in the period reflect the author’s diminishing prestige. Many scholars now affirm, for example, that copyright changes did not, in actuality, fortify authorial rights.11 As Eleanor Shevlin suggests, “from the Act of 1710 until the last quarter of the eighteenth century (and often beyond) the development of copyright resembles a tale of trade regulation as much as it does an account of authorial rights” (xxx). Even after Donaldson v. Beckett, many authors chose not to exercise the new copyright system. John Trusler believed that “if a Writer cannot sell his first manuscript as soon as he has completed it, he had better burn it … it is better to sell it outright than have the trouble (if it be attended with success) of printing & reprinting, binding advertizing & vending it” (Jackson, 16–17). Even successful authors like Sir Walter Scott protested that liberal agreements with booksellers, such as private arrangements by which booksellers paid expenses and then shared profits with authors, still gave the publisher “the lion’s share of the booty” (Letters, vi, 45). Perhaps most threatening was the possibility that authors were merely products of market forces. John Feather argues that the demand for new books increased the need for writers, and notes that the growing book trade so impacted “literary” authors that many soon acknowledged pecuniary motives for writing (History, 102). As Raven observes, “the idea of novel writing being a trade underpinned even complimentary verdicts” among readers and critics (Raven et al., English Novel, i, 50). Despite the demand, the writing of popular fiction was still mostly characterized by obscure toil, paltry remuneration, and mishandling by the bookselling establishment (50–6). Simultaneously, Brewer notes, booksellers were not exclusively motivated by profit, often assuming they were contributing to the “republic of letters” in a supportive, ideological, and moral fashion. Many of them, moreover, fared as badly as the authors they supposedly

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exploited (155–6). Their occasional indifference to the gentleman scholar who chased his manuscript into the printing house may very well have been elicited by the gentleman’s genteel snobbery. These and other trade concerns necessarily complicate notions of where “composing” occurs. Books, in fact, frequently reveal the interrelatedness of writers, publishers, and readers. Often, they undermine conventional assumptions about reading or writing, exposing the underlying material and technological conditions of discourse, and challenging received notions about literary exchange. Joseph Loewenstein argues, for instance, that the fragmenting of once-unified press regulations combined with increased granting of printing patents and lawful monopolies hastened the shift in rhetorical conceptions of writing from “recovery” and “adaptation” to “invention” and “originality,” the elimination, as it were, of “discovery” in the classical meaning of “inventio” (113–70). At the same time, however, books also encode the rich and varied means by which writers, publishers, distributors, and readers were able to produce, disseminate, consume, and evaluate new varieties of fiction. The behavior of such agents was not simply determined by technology; it also manifested the inventive and unpredictable nature of encounters between people and books. The physicality of “the novel” relates, then, not only to the textual condition of a work, but also to its use and movement in the cultural landscape. Intersecting with a series of events that modified its status as a material possession, it became a culturally sanctioned and institutionalized force that participated widely in a public sphere fostered by developments in print technology. As a cultural technology enabling individuals to reconcile personal and civic experience through rhetorical incorporation of the public, it also retained traces of disjunction. The circulation of such textual objects highlights the dispersion as much as consolidation of people and things. Indeed, fiction in the period reveals an obsession with unreaderly uses of text, including curling hair, wadding a gun, lining a trunk, wrapping cheese, butter, and fish, and wiping bums (what goes in has to come out). In Advice to the Grub Street Verse-writers (1726) Swift ironically supplicates Grub Street publications “to scorn to wrap up spice” (Miscellanies, v, 100). The “Editor” in Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal: or, the Adventures of a Guinea (1765) observes, while visiting a poor cottage, “a piece of written paper, that served instead of a plate to hold their butter” (i, x). In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland mistakes a laundry receipt for a gothic narrative. The durability of this trope indicates that waste paper routinely served as a metaphor for wayward texts, pointing to larger

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breakdowns in the relationship between authorial intention and readers’ consumption. R ea der s I have a Trick of writing in the Margins of my Books, it is not a good Trick, but one longs to say something … (Hester Piozzi, Thraliana, 1790)

One interesting aspect of eighteenth-century fiction is how consciously it stages collaborative reading by directly seeking the consumer’s good will, whether in genuine or mock solicitude. This personal hailing of a singular reader at a time when readership was becoming larger and more anonymous partly reflects the growing desire throughout the century to engage in extensive and social reading, perhaps in direct proportion to print’s seeming impersonality. While readers may frequently have suspended disbelief, the historical record shows that they also resisted, rewrote, appropriated, and ignored texts in ways that shaped what authors produced and how publishers disseminated printed matter. In 1741 Isaac Watts was encouraging readers to write in the margins not only to learn but also to ferret out and correct authorial errors or supply a working index if one was not provided (Jackson, 61). When Johnson used the term “common reader” to describe public consumers of print who demanded “engagement and entertainment” he established a modern designation for the reader which both displaced and reconciled the cloistered scholar and the closeted reader of romances (DeMaria, 16). This is not to say that readers wholly unfettered themselves from the alternately criminal and policing activity that books encouraged. The reader that Johnson and many current scholars extol was not an entirely free agent. Jackson’s study of marginalia from the romantic era suggests that readers interacted with texts using a complex mix of critical intervention, personal intellectual improvement, and self-conscious public performance; because books were routinely shared, marginalia were not “the almost wholly unregulated things they have become, but exercises in a known mode, destined sooner or later to be seen by other eyes than the writer’s. There were tacit incentives to perform as well” (301). Readers were also, of course, hectored, bullied, cajoled, and persuaded by authors and booksellers alike. Just as the cultural function of the author may be considered a feedback loop of production and consumption, so too may the reader be best understood as both authorizing and conforming to given texts. Printed fiction, in other words, does not stand in proximate relation to culture; rather, it is embedded in the

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culture. It works changes upon culture, certainly, but it is also determined by political, economic, and social conditions that constitute the cultural sphere. “Print culture,” in this sense, is a misnomer, insofar as “culture” refers to the shifting network of ethnological relations that proscribes print and thus enables the reader.12 The tendency in many eighteenth-century fictions to aggregate various generic forms, internalized stories, and essayistic subject matter reveals that the “reader” they often directly address is, more evidently, a composite set of readers with enormously varying interests, a point Sterne teasingly makes when he invites some readers of Tristram Shandy to tarry with him while others may skip ahead to more engrossing bits. This gesture also shapes the work of authors such as Swift, Fielding, and late Haywood, to varying degrees of comprehensiveness and subtlety. Such diversity required supple forms of address. As Sterne intimates by calling his book a “Conversation” (ii, 179) we cannot be certain how many consumers embraced the non-oral qualities of print, and how many still sought a “voice.” Most research has assumed that silent reading became the primary mode of consumption for eighteenth-century fiction.13 Lately, however, as Barbara Benedict, Jackson, Cecile Jagodzinski, Patricia Michaelson, and others have shown, print reinforced the social mediations in published texts despite long-standing historical claims that print isolates readers in a sphere of private and silent reading. Whether silent reading is really so solitary or readers actually regarded authorial “voice” as disembodied can be a complicated issue that blurs distinctions frequently drawn between silent and oral reading. As Jackson observes, “reading has always had both social and solitary aspects to it: emphasizing one does not eliminate the other” (305). Nicholas Hudson similarly notes that eighteenth-century literary criticism frequently commended the reader’s ability to amplify a writer’s expressions with what Lord Kames called “a ready command of the tones suited to those expressions,” or what Priestley regarded as the ordinary reader’s natural sensitivity: “if we feel the sentiment, we unavoidably do give the language the assistance we can from pronunciation” (Writing, 112). Naomi Tadmor argues, moreover, that eighteenth-century reading often coalesced with other social transactions involving various civic networks. From purchasing, lending, and borrowing books to reading in company or to groups engaged in household or workplace labor, the consumption of texts was often anything but solitary, idle, or frivolous (167). Raven similarly notes the sociability that public and private libraries fostered. The larger libraries, he argues, “provided space or books for the individual, silent reader, and

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yet supported, in different ways, the social celebration of books and the communal reading performance”; almost all libraries nourished, he adds, “selection, browsing and the part-reading of a variety of books, but also encouraged concentrated reading, either silently or, as in the case of many domestic libraries, aloud to company” (“Promotion,” 176). In reconstructing eighteenth-century readership of extended fiction, we should therefore acknowledge its communal aspects. In Britain, it had long been thought that conversation abetted reading. If, as Margaret Ezell has documented, vibrant forms of social authorship persisted in the eighteenth century (141), an extensive social readership also probably existed. For instance, there appears to have been considerable reading aloud (though how often long fiction was orated requires further scouring of memoirs). Frances Burney records that her aspiring family routinely read aloud literature (including novels), and she continues to remark on this practice in relation to her domestic life with her husband and son (Michaelson, 137–79). In his Memoir of Jane Austen (1869), James Austen-Leigh praises Austen’s skill at reading aloud her own as well as other works to members of her family (43). The mercer and draper, Thomas Turner, and his wife Peggy, daily read to one another, including extensive though intermittent progress through Clarissa. As Tadmor observes, the reading was shared between the Turners during arduous workdays in the house and the shop adjoining (166). Part of a disciplined religious life, it eventually included family, friends, and servants (activities that, in fact, parallel the reading of books in Samuel Richardson’s household). Do such acts as these challenge long-standing assumptions that intensive reading (the deep rereading of a select number of texts) gradually replaced extensive reading (the rapid reading of a broad selection) over the course of the eighteenth century?14 One might question whether it is useful, in fact, to separate intensive and extensive reading. Johnson, while admittedly an extraordinary reader, was, according to Robert DeMaria, constantly shifting between different modes of reading that he himself termed “study” or “hard reading,” “perusal,” “mere reading,” and “curious reading”; among the texts he read, those Johnson describes as “captivating” were fictional, but he may have read them in any number of ways (4, 181). Given such accounts of habitual reading aloud, John Tinnon Taylor’s claim that “the appeal of this new form, the novel … [arose because it] found its root in one of the oldest of social customs” (4) blunts the charge of dangerous solipsism often applied in the eighteenth century to consuming fictional works. The records of individual eighteenth-century readers imply not only a wide range of reading modes but also extensive variety in what they

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chose to read. While reading fiction increased, it still constituted a small portion of overall reading. Brewer notes that an avid reader like Anna Larpent was not particularly engrossed by novels. Of over 440 titles she read between 1773 and 1783, 68 (or 15 percent) consisted of English and French novels. While sizeable, it only equals what she read in history, biography, and political economy, and does not approximate the time she spent studying the Bible, sermons, and pious tracts (194). Likewise, Stephen Colclough tabulates that the fifteen-year-old Sheffield apprentice, Joseph Hunter, read in the space of one year (1798) roughly comparable amounts of fiction, travel, divinity, history, and reference works, but much more largely in periodicals and newspapers, in addition to “consumption of sermons at the chapel” (“Procuring,” 30). Reading fiction should therefore be regarded as a highly contingent form of consumption. Extracts from published material in such records as diaries, logs, memoirs, and autobiographies indicate, for instance, that readers were constantly making strategic decisions about what and how they read. Jackson notes that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the “high status of books, assisted perhaps by the high price of paper during the war years, made the social exchange of books especially popular” (301). Even where readers obtained and consumed texts probably affected the kind of reading to which they subjected a work. The purported “rage” for reading fictional works from circulating libraries, for instance, must be understood in relation to how such volumes were presented to the public as a shared body of texts. While circulating libraries popularized “the novel,” authors and historians of prose fiction alike frequently condemned them, somewhat disingenuously, because they diluted the status such writers were trying to achieve. Henry Mackenzie, a successful author of popular fiction whose work appeared in the libraries frequently, clamored that “the common herd of Novels” were “the wretched offspring of circulating libraries” (Lounger 20 (June 18, 1785), 188); Barbauld thought they encouraged “a great deal of trash” (i, 58). Often anonymous, hastily produced, and loaned for only short periods of time, such library fiction was regarded as largely dispensable reading. A variety of sources, from moral tracts to fire insurance advertisements, complained of hair powder and candle wax in borrowed books, signs of the slovenly and combustible habits associated with bedroom or boudoir reading (Raven, “Promotion,” 180). Fergus notes that anonymously authored books dropped much more rapidly in popularity after initial publication than texts whose authorship can be ascertained (79–80), perhaps because they too were considered inessential. That is, attributing to the avid consumption of light reading

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profound cultural implications simply reverses the equally overstated denunciations of fictional material by eighteenth-century moral commentators.15 Social reading in itself was, then, a highly variable activity, at times unifying forms of consumption, at other times prodding individuals into unique kinds of textual appropriation. As at other times, eighteenth-century consumers often proved volatile. Reading was, for instance, intimately connected to writing, as the famous examples of Lady Bradshaigh’s and Lady Echlin’s separate rewritings of the ending to Clarissa demonstrate. In such cases as these, reading becomes a resistant act of writing by which consumers could be both reactive and proactive figures. At the same time, given that Richardson invited written responses to drafts of his work, the circuit also worked in the other direction. Clearly, as Richardson wrote, he was also watching readers read the text, and writing in light of those responses. He was, in fact, still revising his fiction in reaction to reader response up until his death. Similarly, the robust market in spurious sequels to Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne’s fiction, which, in turn, incited sequels by those writers, signals the interplay of reception and conception that characterizes the novel’s economics. Readers and publishers, moreover, routinely forced fiction to migrate into other forms of writing€– a kind of transtextual operation that turned fiction into other genres such as aphorism, moral essay, magazine article, character sketch, political disquisition, and so on. Anthologies such as The Beauties of English Prose (1772) or The British Prose Miscellany (1799) effectively subordinated the reading of fiction to prose instruction, so that a reader might be excused for regarding Sterne’s often reprinted episode of “The Starling” from A Sentimental Journey (1768) as an independent essay. These titles appeared in the last quarter of the century, but as early as the 1720s a work like The Oxford Miscellany was mixing essays, sketches, poetry, and “novels” without clear distinctions among them as to which were factual and which were fictional. Much of the periodical literature of this sort also invited readers to submit their own writing as if consumption and production were nearly synonymous (Klancher, 39). Shevelow’s observation that such engagement “represented an attempt to establish a continuity between readers’ lives and the medium of print, between extra-textual experience and textual expression” (43) applies also to the period’s fiction. Increasingly, the spheres of authorship and reading merged. Clifford Siskin maintains that because “unprecedented numbers of people learned both the skills and€– that crucial component of modern literacy€– the belief in their transformative power” print culture had by the nineteenth century effectively made readers into writers (6). Jackson

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notes as well that the range of common marginalia by century’s end was “wide,” spanning “the perceived value of extracts, the constructions of networks of information by systems of cross-reference, and the revealing license to ‘illustrate’ more or less ad lib”; interestingly, however, although readers “passed judgment” on books, they “did not analyze them” in the modern sense (303). The nature of this evidence about various acts, spaces, and habits of reading indicates that a monolithic assessment of book consumption is probably untenable. As Jan Fergus has cautioned, the access we have to reading practices is very limited and often inconclusive (202); for every story of the liberating capacity of reading there is a story of the Foucaldian disciplining of the subject through literary consumption. From carefully tabulated data, Fergus suggests that, despite attempts to regulate reader response, “texts were plural” and “readers could adopt different subject positions as they read them, crossing generational and gender lines” (244). Despite the conventional assumption that women were the predominant consumers of fiction, she reports a “very great preponderance of men as consumers of fiction” that “cannot be easily dismissed”; admitting it is “more difficult to study the male reading public,” she nevertheless concludes that the “ways in which eighteenth-century men’s subjectivities were shaped through such fiction deserve at least equal consideration” (71). Attending to the full range of reading tactics in the historical record necessarily broadens our understanding of the variable responses of readers within a probable range of practices. Sterne’s (or Fielding’s) characteristic addresses to the reader (at once personal, and yet comprehending a wide range of possible readers) are, one could argue, the flip side of Austen’s frequent last-chapter personalizations of the author–reader relationship. Such textual moments alert us to how eighteenth-century novelists cultivated a wide readership and struggled with the seeming paradox of making intimate a relationship that was, in fact, the product of an increasingly anonymous and unpredictable exchange between writer and reader. This complex range of reading both confirms and complicates a major strain in print culture studies based on the work of Habermas. Nowhere, perhaps, has the instrumental function of the reader been more visible than in discussions of the public sphere. Scholars routinely confront Habermas’ argument that commercialized methods of cultural production, such as the advanced circulation of printed matter, fostered a uniform public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain and Europe generally (Transformation, 38). The popularity of “the novel,” the increased

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influence of the press, and advances in the circulation of printed literature in such discourse networks as the coffee house, the library, the music hall, and the theater, fueled public opinion, which became effectively a media event. This activity, in turn, helped create modern nationalism by the end of the century. According to Benedict Anderson, “print-capitalism” enables the “imagined political communities” necessary to create a unified national identity (40). As he argues, “fellow-readers” were made aware “via print and paper” that there were “hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged” (47). The unifying and rationalizing effects that Habermas and Benedict Anderson describe were, of course, regarded as complementary; their enlightenment force derived from the conviction that an individual’s active cultivation of reason would necessarily benefit the social welfare of the state. The effect of rationalizing and consensus-building modes of communication was to create a national unity in which readers could help generate public awareness and reasoned debate. While many authors have been credited with shaping eighteenthÂ�century national consciousness, public opinion is, in fact, most often allied with readers. Some of the successful marketing of eighteenth-century fiction resulted, in part, from the mobilization of different mechanisms for distributing published work to readers. These significantly increased means of circulating printed material then constituted forms of “cultural technology” that enabled productive social exchange. For Habermas, fiction (especially in epistolary form) played a significant role in fostering personal critical reasoning among readers that helped them participate in the governance of their society: “the subjectivity that had become fit to print, had in fact become the literature appealing to a wide public of readers” (Transformation, 50–1). The media circuit that Habermas describes here, in which a reader’s affect both duplicates and shapes the printed word’s reproduction of private feeling, resembles Kittler’s discourse network but, unlike the latter, it limits itself by relying essentially on an ideal reader. The rationalist assumption that the consumer empathizes with a text’s avatars, and returns the favor by enhancing the overall emotive effect of books by giving life to them, presupposes the predictable behavior of readers. It overlooks the concern of authors that their words will not, as Charles Gildon puts it, “remove all Prejudice which usually attends an unknown Author” (Post-Man, ix). The narrative that Habermas constructs appears powerful because it does in fact conform to a conviction held by many in the eighteenth

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century€– that rational and critical debate in the world of letters manifested a unified national state. But appearances can be deceiving. By the 1790s Condorcet would be arguing that works “multiplied indefinitely at little cost” made knowledge “the subject of a brisk and universal trade” and created in readers “a new sort of tribunal” that allowed “the same tyrannical empire to be exercised over men’s passions but ensured a more certain and more durable power over their minds” (98–123).16 As Richard Coyne observes, “narratives can invoke concepts of agreement, without appeal to reason: as a confluence between modes of practice, as the fusion of horizons, as conformity to the norms of a community, as the recognition of difference, and as the construction of appropriate narratives”; these amount to discursive practices “in which the preoccupation with reason is usurped by other concerns, such as power, technology, and the body” (42). Thus a number of scholars have lately complicated the terms “public sphere” and “nationalism” in relation to eighteenth-century fiction. Many, for instance, have added the concept of the “counter public sphere” or “publics” to offset the hegemonic force of Habermas’ conceptualization of the public sphere.17 Nor has the timing of Habermas’ origins of public opinion or his selection of the most influential discursive forms of democratizing thought been accepted as historical fact. Zaret, for example, states that the “invention” of public opinion was a practical accomplishment, propelled by the economic and technical aspects of printing, respectively, its relentless commercialism and its potential for efficient reproduction of texts. This occurred in the mid-seventeenth-century revolution, when contending elites used the medium of print to appeal to a mass audience, and activist members of that audience invoked the authority of opinion to lobby those elites. (10)

Habermas himself, reflecting on his earlier work, has conceded that his “diagnosis of a unilinear development” from a “culture-debating to a Â�culture-consuming public” was “too simplistic,” and he goes on to acknowledge that reception trends are always uneven and powerfully creative (“Reflections,” 438). Nonetheless, he, and a number of his critics even, despite their attention to class, gender, and counterpublics, tend to, as Judith Stoddart observes, “leave nearly intact the link between print culture and the rational-critical public sphere” (182). The insistence, then, on a single public sphere (rather than multiple spheres of public opinion), and a dependence on the distinction between it and a counter public sphere, only partly explains the complexity of the literary marketplace. The similar claim that “literature” or “the novel”

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constituted a counter public sphere also needs some adjustment. A more adequate approach might construe literature as the range of products created by a loose body of actors (authors, publishers, printers, readers, Â�distributors, commentators, etc.) who are themselves at various points active, to various degrees, in sundry public spheres that intersect, often temporarily, and that function sometimes in agreement, sometimes in contention, and sometimes simply coincidentally. Complementing the narrative that Habermas proposes, Bourdieu’s elaborate analysis of the cultural field, in which different public activities (from the literary and artistic to the economic and political) occupy different fields of production, offers a flexible model that accommodates both public dissension and oligarchic consent.18 It suggests that the popularity of a work did not, in all instances, confirm that it was perceived as a culturally central document, and a thoroughgoing analysis of its mode of cultural production might yield a sophisticated explanation of how marketing, reception, and judgment interrelated. In terms of fiction, relations among authors and the other producers of the printed text also modify how readers might have consumed what they were reading. Bookseller relations, both in terms of how writers regarded printers and publishers and how the publishing profession managed an author’s status, represent one key element in the cultural production of novels. Most of this history is retrieved by examining the fate of authorship as described within novels or by a novelist’s written record, but it can also be perceived in how other producers, distributors, and handlers€– from printers and booksellers to reviewers and readers€– processed works of fiction. Readers, in turn, responded to texts according to what Bourdieu calls “habitus”€– propensities that motivate specific classes to favor distinct cultural practices (64). Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol go so far as to claim that “the Â�habitus of becoming well-informed about what was going on” helped propel advances in technology and communication (24). Sterne’s incorporation not only of such readers as “Dear Sir,” “Madam,” or “Your Worships” throughout the work, but also of “You Messrs. the monthly Reviewers” who “cut and slash my jerkin,” testify to the writer’s market awareness in eighteenth-century literary spheres (iii, 275). But Sterne is only the most overt example of how an author internalizes a whole apparatus of reading, and anticipates a text’s dynamic literary reception. As readers come to publish remarks about writers, authors begin to write about their own reading of how readers wrote about them. Professionalized reading becomes a model (or, at times, anti-model) for how to read that is reintegrated in the author’s text. Mary Wollstonecraft’s reviews of fiction

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in The Analytical Review, for instance, or Tobias Smollett’s in The Critical Review indicate not only their reading of other writers but their own literary practice.19 Similarly, as Barbara Benedict and Leah Price have shown, the interplay between anthologies and fiction contributed to the myriad ways in which readers repossessed an author’s work. Less often studied in detail, though frequently noted, is the mass of redacted and original short fiction, sometimes presented serially, that appeared throughout the era in such outlets as periodicals, chapbooks, and other so-called ephemera that shaped what value readers accorded novels and novelists.20 These other forms of fiction constitute a field of cultural production that is more extensive and diverse than conventional studies of “the novel” incorporate and that challenges many of the definitional boundaries of the form itself. Ultimately, these wide-ranging responses to fiction in eighteenth-century Britain attest to the dialectical energy of print as a medium. Prose fiction often endorsed the Enlightenment rationality that seemed implicit in printing technology and yet continuously revealed how communication exceeded the boundaries of rational, reproducible, standardized, and commodified discourse. Au t hor s In a word, an author is a perfect phenomenon, in many respects incomprehensible and unaccountable€– he should therefore be studied with much attention by any philosopher or lexicographist who would chuse to define him. (The Adventures of an Author, 1767)

Of all the agents in the communications circuit, authors have probably inherited the most complicated philosophical or lexicographical history. Over time various theoretical approaches have progressively redefined the instrumental role of the writer in print culture. When, in the 1960s, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes famously announced the “disappearance” or “death” of the author, they meant that it was preferable to conceive of the published writer as fulfilling an “author-function,” the concept by which a given culture draws historically bound assumptions about writing, authority, and originality. This reconfiguration developed, in part, because structuralism, formalism, and new criticism had shifted attention from biographical analysis of the authored text to examinations of the “objective” features of the work itself. In the 1970s, Derrida claimed that the author’s role could only be understood effectively as a discursive attribute deciphered through the process of reading. More recently, as

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critics increasingly consider authorship a collaborative social, legal, and marketplace enterprise, questioning the equation between the author and “original genius” has risen to a familiar dispute.21 Lately, however, the individual author has reappeared, though in chastened form, as a figure whose identity is to be measured in relation to a particular form of modernity. This has been especially true of recent work that recovers and claims the (often female) writer as one of the first real emanations of a modern authorial sensibility. The novelist, that is, becomes an avatar of a new but complex articulation of intellectual property, commodification, and modern sensibility.22 Like the Romantic poets, with whom they share credit for fashioning modern authorship, eighteenth-century novelists supposedly embodied the ideal of the author as a self-sufficient original genius who disdains the market forces that constrain literary production. Studies of this Romantic mode have been effective in both explaining and critiquing the cult of the author that arose in the late eighteenth century. Nonetheless, they tend to produce a limited construction of the author function by seeking too definitive a time frame and too narrow a set of historical causes in order to pinpoint the emergence of the “modern author.” Central to arguments about the rise of modern Romantic authorship is the presumption that a particular definition of “author,” rooted in the emergence of a professional class, commodity culture, and notions of originality, ultimately trumped other definitions. That a widespread print culture would manifest different modes of authorship seems likely, but to claim from print’s impact that one sense of authorship became dominant ignores the various forms that eighteenth-century authorship assumed. As various critics have shown, amateur, patronized, polemical, educational, collaborative, oral, coterie, and manuscript forms of authorship persisted into the nineteenth century.23 Mark Phip contends that the popular impression of Romantic writers as solitary creators does not always tally with their practice; they were not, he says, “the isolated heroes and heroines of Romanticism pursuing a lonely course of discovery; they were people who worked out their ideas in company and who articulated the aspirations and fears of their social group” in such venues as “clubs, associations, debating societies, salons, taverns, coffee houses, bookshops, publishing houses and in the street” (127). Eighteenth-century writers themselves knew, as The Adventures of an Author observes, that the concept of authorship was “incomprehensible and unaccountable” (i, 5). Sterne’s experimental work, drawing equally on classic literary prototypes and contemporary print culture and its imitations, appeared before the

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Romantic assessment of authorial genius and textual autonomy and before the “watershed” decision in Donaldson v. Beckett that strategically disentangled authorial property claims from the booksellers’ control of copyrights in order to expand marketplace interests in printed works. Instead of settling quandaries about how authors might relate to their work, such developments may have made assertions of authorship even more perplexing. One of the more piquant ironies surrounding Milton’s “authoriality” in the eighteenth century, as Loewenstein notes, is that the quarrels among booksellers in Parliament and Chancery over proprietary rights to his work vindicated “the deathlessness of Milton’s proprietary claims,” but only insofar as the author’s posthumous “mystique” inhered in the particular text that a bookseller hoped to protect as his own (236–7). If writers wanted to insist on professional or legal claims to what they wrote they had to be willing to risk losing the aura of disinterested genius and textual autonomy that was proving to be an effective consumer enticement. They may even have been persuaded to relinquish Milton’s plaintive vision of textual immortality in Areopagitica (1644): “For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are” (4). In eighteenth-century fiction specifically the author’s disappearance appears in ways that are often comic and forlorn at the same time. The Life and Adventures of Sir Bartholomew Sapskull, Baronet (1768), for example, playfully deconstructs authorial notoriety but acknowledges the author’s defensive attitude toward his own work. The book appeared anonymously (though is now ascribed to William Donaldson) and its paratext dwells on the writer’s status, beginning with a frontispiece graphically representing him as a nebulous entity (Figure 7). Reduced to a few contour lines, the figure turns his back on the reader, perhaps imitating the consumer’s relative position toward the text. Identified as “The Reverse of Somebody,” he sports an odd toupee mounted on a periwig to further obstruct his identity. The image suggests that the self-effacing writer, like the reader, peers into the text; but unlike the reader, he is fixed permanently in space and time. Were the image of “Somebody” a singular event in Donaldson’s book little more might be said, but the text elaborates this odd trope in a number of ways. The ensuing title page confirms that the book is unattributable; while Sapskull is “Nearly allied to most of the Great Men in the three Kingdoms,” the book is only written “By Somebody.” As if to emphasize such ghostwriting, a prefatorial item entitled “Thoughts upon the Frontispiece” asserts, “The reverse of Somebody can be the likeness of

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Figure 7╇ William Donaldson, The Life and Adventures of Sir Bartholomew Sapskull, Baronet (1768), i, frontispiece and title page.

Nobody” (i, ii). Mocking class pretensions, Donaldson blurs “Somebody” and “Nobody” to indicate the strangeness of authorship: whether figures of presence or absence, authors submit to a disembodying process that makes their invisibility a staged act. On one hand, the narrator celebrates his refusal to inhabit the text, using the language of the book to suggest that unlike other writers he does not put himself forward; of the portrait he states, “the artist cannot be charg’d with copying the manner of those important authors who make themselves the pre-face to their work” (i, ii). The image is thus notably unlike the conventional authorial frontispiece, which invites readers to examine the author’s face as if they were observing the text’s visage, implying that a reader will encounter the characteristic mind of the writer within. “Somebody’s” portrait instead anticipates the late eighteenth-century fiction of textual autonomy, which, like

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free indirect discourse, simultaneously ennobles the author’s work (by releasing it as pure idea from its material constraints) and devalues that work (by severing intellectual property from empirical evidence of its existence). On the other hand, “Nobody” who is “Somebody” also insists on his authority as privileged creator, a claim seemingly confirmed by the cursive type in the frontispiece linking the writer’s “hand” to the withholding of both name and face. “Somebody” uses the portrait to register disdain for his critics, turning self-effacement into an aggressive act: “He intimates his contempt for those people by turning his back upon them” (i, ii). This permits him to reassert his authorial stature: “Somebody, beyond a doubt, must be a person of genius and politeness, as the elevation of his toupet (in the back front) at once demonstrates the height of fashion, and the altitude of understanding” (i, ii). Throughout, the third-person voice further occludes authorial presence insofar as the “Thoughts,” customarily containing an author’s public reflections, communicate private knowledge at a distance. The expressive italics alone suggest a highly personal tone. Yet the distanced voice also allows for the mocking appraisal of “Somebody’s” self-aggrandizement. By the time the author speaks in propria persona, in the ensuing six-page dedication “To Somebody,” matters of voice, authorship, print conventions, and audience have been deliberately confused: “I have observ’d, in the language of most dedications, the same indirect turn of mind .… which convinces me, that authors have ever, figuratively, the same object in view as I have .… for they seem to swell the praises of their patron, only to compliment themselves, by making the world believe they have inscrib’d their work to Somebody” (i, iii; ellipses in original). With the patron’s name withheld, “Somebody” could be either a wealthy benefactor or merely the reader. This cycle of mis-identification concludes in a mystification that both insists on and denies the writer’s narcissism: “Somebody will be offended at this dedication, because I dissent from the establish’d doctrine of dedicators, and substitute myself the object of my idolatry! For in the vanity of my heart I have been led imperceptibly from my first view of inscribing this volume to some distant person, and brought the compliment home to myself, because in the writing of it I have all along consider’d myself SOMEBODY” (i, viii). The distant somebody who might read the text and the distant somebody who might have patronized it are momentarily circumvented by the return of the writer’s self-assertion. But what could be more distancing than an author forced to call himself merely “somebody”? The various graphic representations of the author in Sir Bartholomew Sapskull (who turns out to be

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the narrator’s noodle-headed father) indicate that printed works erase as much as inscribe the modern professional writer.24 A print-based analysis may help calibrate, if not resolve, the multiple meanings of such concepts as writer, author, and novelist. Since the 1980s, work on eighteenth-century writing has concentrated especially on Â�economic, legal, and philosophical assessments of the “author” in order to explain (and often critique) the Romantic model that prizes originality, autonomy, and genius. Such work has customarily focused on canonical literature (such as that by Pope or Johnson). It has often privileged unique historical events, in particular legal decisions such as the Copyright Act in 1710, Tonson v. Collins in 1760, or Donaldson v. Beckett in 1774. It has, further, mined theories of authorship published in the eighteenth century, as well as theories of intellectual property and the novel (by, for instance, Catharine Macauley, James Ralph, Clara Reeve, or Edward Young) in order to flesh out historical ideas about the “modern” writer. Summarizing this process, Mark Rose notes that the legal, critical, social, and marketplace conceptions of authorship that arose after the 1740s made a literary work seem the “objectification of a writer’s self” (121). Given, however, that the most striking feature of new novels published between 1770 and 1799 is that “the overwhelming majority of them were published without attribution of authorship” (Raven et al., English Novel, i, 41), it may be that neither high culture nor the legal domain provided much actual self-determining power to writers of popular fiction. In particular, the so-called Grub Street author, hardly matching the “modern” ideal, was frequently ranged against writers like Fielding, Sterne, Burney, or Austen. Despite the impact of legal and professional conceptualizations of literary agency, most professional writers still operated within a literary system that protected and rewarded publishers more than authors (Sher, “Corporatism,” 79–82). Booksellers, in practical terms, did not lose monopoly benefits until after 1800. “Authors were,” Raven protests, “the very last participants to benefit from the eighteenth-century book bonanza” (Judging, 60)€ – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. There may have been what Suarez calls a “de facto culture of ‘intellectual property’” (158), but writers constantly witnessed their own diminution. Furthermore, eighteenth-century copyright controversies rarely involved prose fiction. Though eventually aiding the Romantic model, fiction also fortified competing conceptions of authorship, like those produced by “Grub Street.” The specific forms of alienation that authors frequently expressed in eighteenth-century fiction exposed the complex tensions that were generated by the gradual promotion from the seventeenth to nineteenth

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centuries of the professional or romanticized writer and, simultaneously, the increased market penetration of printed literature, which tended, in many instances, to diminish the value and authority of books. As often as the combination of these tendencies made publication exhilarating, it also could make appearing in print mortifying. The anxiety of authors, that is, was frequently the result of what occasioned their professional identity. Similarly, the definition of “the novel” has proved as complex as “the author.” They are, in fact, crucially related, since the author’s status depended on the status of popular fiction itself. Current scholarship generally agrees that a “novel culture” arises in Britain at mid-century, though there are several dissenters, such as J. Hunter, Cheryl Turner, and Warner. Others refine the dates or challenge the regularity of cultural change. Arguing for a cyclical model of literary production based on quantitative analysis, Franco Moretti has recently suggested a tripartite chronology for the “multiple rise of the novel” in Britain: 1720–70, 1770–1820, 1820 forward (7–8). But the predominant view maintains that 1740–50 were watershed years. Two main factors have shaped this claim: a fully established commodity economy, and a new market in professional commentators on popular fiction (particularly in periodical reviews). Moretti himself ultimately claims that “as long as only a handful of new titles are published each year … novels remain unreliable products, that disappear for long stretches of time, and cannot really command the loyalty of the reading public; they are commodities, yes€– but commodities still waiting for a fully developed market” (5). The production number he cites for a developed market is “a new novel per week” (5), a level achieved in Britain by 1740. According to Miranda Burgess, “The notion of a distinct and autonomous ‘species’ of prose fiction was of mid-eighteenth-century provenance” (14), suggesting that twentieth-century criticism now tends to accept the period’s own late self-determination in this regard. But, as the eighteenth century amply demonstrates, the volatility and variability of the print marketplace was matched by the variety of prose fiction that appeared. If, to identify a point of origin, we must drop or add Behn and Defoe (alternately called early and proto-novelists), how do we avoid a self-fulfilling model of history? In his 1692 preface to Incognita William Congreve privileges “Novels” over “Romances” in terms that agree with later eighteenth-century critics, but his use of the term referred to what many would now call “novellas.” How defining is length? At what point does a novella lose its concluding la? Richardson and Fielding never called themselves novelists, yet they, along with late Haywood, routinely fulfill both eighteenth- and twentieth-century definitions of the

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term. Delarivier Manley distinguishes her work from French romances and “Historical Novels” in her 1705 preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians. All these are examples of published fiction. Though access to print may have altered the forms of eighteenth-century fiction in significant ways, is print therefore a necessary condition of “the novel”? Can a novel be a novel without ever appearing in print? Were the manuscripts that Burney and Austen read aloud, or gave to their families to read, novels before or after they were published? Couldn’t one simply identify various types of eighteenth-century authorship or different forms of fiction in the period? To say that eighteenth-century British readers, writers, and publishers preferred realist fiction might be, if true, less presumptuous (if less handy) than to proclaim the rise, or appearance, or origins of the novel in the early, middle, or late part of the century. Individual authorial cases only complicate matters. If Defoe is a novelist, he is an odd one insofar as he published long fictional works only late in life (and for just five years). These were narratives he refused to call fiction and to which he never assigned his own authorship. His poetry, polemical works, and non-fiction far outweigh his fictional output. Like many other “novelists” in the period, such as Behn, Fielding, or Elizabeth Inchbald, he published a variety of literary and non-literary works, and pursued a number of different professions. Similar issues arise with other authors. Does Haywood become a novelist only in the middle of the century, when she stops publishing short narratives and begins composing long multi-volume affairs like The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1752)? Do market demands at that point dictate her professional identity? Richardson continued to work avidly as a master printer, even when he was both writing and publishing those monuments of eighteenth-century print, Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4). He then raided these texts to create A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (1755), which was effectively a conduct manual, suggesting that such bits of fiction were something other than fiction. Do these activities make Richardson more or less a novelist? Does the Pamela media event (during which such items as fans, wax figurines, teacups, and paintings that depicted scenes from the novel were marketed)25 confer the status of novelist on Richardson because it suggests that writing had finally become so commodified as to be recognizably modern? Then what of the fact that there was a Crusoe media event too (produced through prints, broadsides, redactions for children, pictures, etc.); is it so

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radically different as to exclude Defoe from the same process Richardson undergoes? The pervasive critical need to narrow the definitions of “author” and “novel” shapes, in turn, discussion about the relation between gender and print culture. Over the last decade, scholars have debated the comparative amount of fiction published by male and female writers, often with markedly different results. According to one recent calculation, “Male writers (292) hugely outnumbered female writers (189) … yet the number of individual novels written by men was … slightly less than that by women (407 titles compared to 419)” (Raven et al., English Novel, i, 41 and 48). Reprints, repackaging, plagiarism, translations, anonymous authorship, and frequently questionable title page attributions to “young gentleman or young lady” further complicate this tabulation. The gentlemen, in fact, may have been ladies and the ladies gentlemen, and many were probably not that young. Reviewers at the time were themselves highly cautious about these claims to both age and gender. The re-examination of the relationship between gender and print culture has tended to elicit sociological conclusions, often supported by the selective use of statistical data or restrictive definitions of the novel, that merit some qualification. What may apply, for example, to circulating libraries€– that they indicate a surge in popular literature€– may not apply to book consumption generally. For one, religious discourse continued to be, by far, the most pervasive form of printed text. Moreover, there was a wide variety of means to acquire printed matter (including fiction). Book clubs, ranging from those that stocked mostly religious and political material to those that cultivated some interest in fiction, preceded the advent of circulating and subscription libraries. In these, male authors and patrons prevailed. Parish libraries, unlikely to carry novels and fashionable periodicals, served readers of both genders, though were probably relatively unused (Harris, History, 167). There were, furthermore, always a variety of places, from bookstalls and stationers to booksellers’ shops, to purchase printed volumes directly, and these texts were frequently, in turn, circulated among family members and acquaintances. Those without means often read clandestinely without buying. Describing his early years, Charles Lamb recounts in “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” (1823) how browsing a few pages each day in bookstalls permitted “poor gentry” to read without paying; he also recalls a “street-reader” who completed two volumes of Clarissa by using the same strategy (150). However, despite Lamb’s reference to Richardson’s work, it is difficult to conclude from such sources that those writing fiction in general, and

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women especially, had a particularly distinctive purchase on the reading public, especially as most book transactions were unrecorded. As Fergus notes, “when strictly male- and female-authored novels are compared, consumption of women’s fiction remains considerably lower than that of fiction by men” (81) and “consumers of novels constitute a small subset” of adult purchasers of printed works (224). Constituting only 4 percent of printed matter near the end of the period (McDowell, “Women,” 136), “the novel” can hardly claim to dominate or transform the culture. Similarly, while compilations of women authors, such as Cheryl Turner’s, reveal the impressive contributions of women writers, and their proportional advance in numbers over the period, they do not prove either dominance or the purported “feminization” of literate culture. The early eighteenthcentury cultural imaginary was shaped as much by fictional adventure, pirate, and criminal narratives (predominantly written by men) as by the now noteworthy novels of amorous intrigue written by Behn, Manley, and Haywood. Later novels ranged across an enormously broad range of types, from oriental narratives to stories supposedly told by inanimate objects, which were embraced equally by women and men. Adding to the confusion, only a few of these books saw many editions. That is, whether by a man or a woman, the large proportion of eighteenth-century fiction consisted of ephemeral, disposable, and hastily produced works. Attending to these pragmatic aspects of the period’s trade in books invariably reveals the multiple networks of meaning, ownership, and distribution that helped shape what an author was capable of performing. In the eighteenth century “the author,” like “the novel” or “the reader,” was configured in a variety of ways. The fiction that authors produced often projected models of writing and publication that were antithetical to the Romantic conception of authorship and, in some ways, closer to a current understanding of “authorship” as a highly mediated media concept. As the following chapters suggest, the full extent of authorial identity should be linked to how readers consumed the work of authors (and in doing so, helped define the latter) and how the print industry marketed works of fiction, reminding us that the writer depended on the literary marketplace as much as her or his own “originality.”

ch apter 2

Post scripts: the fate of the page in Charles Gildon’s epistolary fiction

C av e at s c r i p t or Authors, for certain, are but a sorry Race.

(Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author, 1710)

Shaftesbury directed his Soliloquy at all authors, including himself, as his title cleverly suggests, but to most readers the term “sorry” probably evoked the “hackney writer,” a phrase derived from the belief that needy authors, like hackney coaches, were put up only for hire. Lacking originality, they recycled works by other authors in the form of cliché, Â�paraphrase, imitation, and plagiarism. Never really owning their ideas, they nonetheless pretended to own up to them for personal gain or a middleman’s profit. Commonly associated with the “Grub Street” culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they stood at the brink of what many historians consider the advent of the modern author€– a professional writer who tactically denied his or her merely professional status. Although never granted the “genius” that supposedly distinguished modern authors, the hackney writer’s status remained ambiguous. Named for an object of both commerce and transport, hacks produced works tainted by mercenary and material motives. Because of close connection to the printing house and thus to the material embodiment of intellectual property, and as a consequence of their servile relation to readers, they became an uncomfortable reminder of how equally “sorry” all authors were. As such, other writers vilified them for confounding writing with its commodity forms or for making books opportune vehicles for a random mass of consumers (in vulgar language a hackney was also a prostitute). Hacks reminded those in the print trade of the permeability between various classes of writer, from the hireling or professional writer to the gentleman scholar and the high-minded author. Such “sorry” writers haunted those who thought themselves above the mass; 61

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hacks were at once necessary and dangerous to what Edward Young calls “the noble title of an Author” (Conjectures, 54). Most writers, even lowly ones, deplored Grub Street and defined themselves in antithesis to its denizens; but owning the aristocratic label of a “noble title” necessitated a strategic engagement with the plebian and near criminal activity of the hired author.1 While writers such as Dryden, Pope, and Johnson have been credited with establishing essential principles of modern authorship, hacks, many of them anonymous, also molded the complex attitudes toward writing for profit that characterize Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of disinterested literary production. In this chapter I use one of these notorious scribblers to address how fiction shaped and was shaped by the commercial culture industry. The work of Charles Gildon, a writer to whom Pope acidly assigns a “venal quill” in his Epistle to Arbuthnot (8), not only demonstrates that authorship, reading, and book-making interpenetrate at crucial moments in a text’s various incarnations, but also complicates the writer’s corresponding claims to intellectual property and social status. Admittedly, the hapless garreted writer that Samuel Johnson famously described as an “artificer” who “has not always the choice of his subject but is compelled to accept any task that is thrown before him” (Rambler, i, no. 21 [May 29, 1750], 188) is not by definition a significant figure. Yet as the debased form of all professional authors, the hack signifies how difficult it is for anyone to claim intellectual property, especially when the work is fictional. He (and frequently she) implies that the history of eighteenth-century authorship was largely one in which writers downplayed the market’s influence upon literary works. Hacks stood out, however, because they saw writing in predominantly instrumental terms. They were renowned principally for writing in any style, regardless of what content a work might demand. Poetry, drama, fiction, and essay were virtually interchangeable, as one fictional writer acknowledges when he describes a would-be author who is “compelled to lay aside the man of fashion, the writer of taste, fancy, and imagination, and commence the bookseller’s galley-slave” (The Adventures of an Author, i, 17–18); changed into a hack, he is “now poet, politician, biographer, essayist, and, by necessity, philosopher, all within the limits of a sixpenny monthly production” (i, 169). Because most writers were paid according to quantity or “certain number of sheets” (Haywood, Invisible Spy, ii, 117), factitious prose was inevitably the easiest of the forms for hack writers to produce. As Gildon caustically remarked about another scribbler’s output, prolific writers

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should have to consume their own words: “come, if you will make such large Compositions, you must take them for your Pains” (Life, xvii). Gildon’s punning attack here on the “Scribbler” Daniel Defoe (“composition” also refers to medicinal concoctions) is perversely critical: in the scenario he creates, Defoe’s own fictional characters “have cram’d … one Volume” of Robinson Crusoe, an object they call a “Bolus for the bigness of it,” down his throat in order to make the author “swallow his own Vomit” (Life, 31). One of Gildon’s intentions was to disclose Crusoe’s story as an allegorical biography of the author that “swell[s] the Bulk of your Treatise up to a five Shilling Book” (31), so Defoe, in effect, is being forced to swallow his own “Life.” Yet Gildon also wanted to deride the patent fictitiousness of a “true narrative” by revealing its “factual” errors. That is, Gildon exposes a difficult epistemic trap for the writer of fiction. Such work gains market value by seeming authentic; yet it incites a particular desire to expose the real author as an egocentric and mercenary figure. At the same time, Gildon suggests, the large dimensions of the work could, through the author’s inattention to consistent detail, reveal the fictitiousness of a text otherwise credible in its length. Gildon here accuses a competitor of a practice that he calls “inartificial Fiction” (39), but as we shall see in this chapter, Gildon himself was perfectly willing to profit from just such a practice. Like Defoe he wrote fiction under the guise of authentic documents that he was merely presenting to the public as an editor. But he also yearned for the acknowledgment and gain that would come from owning up to those documents as author, and therefore owning them. Gildon’s remarks on Robinson Crusoe suggest that fiction was particularly prone to accusations of false consciousness. Whereas drama and poetry are generically bound to reveal their artifice, novelistic works such as Defoe’s or Gildon’s exploited the latent capacity of prose to seem unmediated. It may be this particular “truthiness” that contributed to the popularity of “the novel” as a literary form and suited it to the Enlightenment’s self-proclaimed allegiance to unmediated empirical observation.2 A great deal of eighteenth-century fiction succeeded because it deliberately masked its artifice as constructed public discourse. This chapter argues that eighteenth-century fiction’s paradoxical state as a literary form that denied its own “making” derived from historical developments in how authors sought a living, how books were made, and how readers learned to consume books. Using these three points of reference, I focus on a peculiar body of fictional work by Gildon that demonstrates how these aspects necessarily intersect at a text’s inception, inevitably qualifying any individual claim to ownership. The first edition

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of The Post-Boy Robb’ d of His Mail: or, The Pacquet Broke Open appeared in 1692. It was successful enough to elicit a second volume in the following year, a revised second edition of the two volumes in a single-volume work in 1706, and a sequel, The Post-Man Robb’ d of His Mail: or, The Packet Broke Open, in 1719. As a whole, this body of texts exemplifies the complex object status of a literary work€ – not only because it concerns stolen texts but also because its provenance reveals the unstable parameters of a book’s physical form. While a sound understanding of eighteenth-century fiction’s engagement with print culture requires an intra-textual analysis (as Chapter 1 showed), even a single work like The Post-Boy confirms a text’s undeniable corporate identity. As Gildon’s titular reference to stolen mail suggests, to call any piece of writing “a book,” “a text,” or “a work” already poses a significant problem: where does writing begin and end? Because Gildon’s work figuratively breaks open a “pacquet” of letters, it mystifies its status as a discrete original work even before the reader has turned the first page. In Gildon’s paradoxical terms, it seeks not to appear “inartificial.” Gildon’s work thus presents a particularly effective template for revealing the close association between print features and the dissembling habits of modern fiction. As a whole, the various pieces of The Post-Boy comprise a long and complicated drama about alienated and repossessed writing in which publication mirrors the breaking open of private documents for public consumption. Exploiting this metaphor, Gildon’s work, like many eighteenth-century narratives that followed, expresses both the delights and adversities of appearing in print, linking epistolary fiction to the nation’s systems of exchange. As Gildon insists, in a different context, his publications contribute to those “concern’d in the forming the Manners, and refining the Spirit of your [King George I’s] People” (Complete Art of Poetry, “Dedication”). At the same time, voicing a typical prejudice, he admits elsewhere that “the Press” has made England “the Africa of Wit, where only Monsters thrive and domineer” (New Metamorphosis, “Preface”, A5). Like the printed page itself, Gildon’s view of “the Press” alternates black and white: it promises the hope of Enlightenment transparency but frequently explores a dark continent of words. As an attempt to reproduce everyday correspondence, The Post-Boy participates in a ritual that typifies early eighteenth-century fiction. A “Club” of drinking companions, having accidentally acquired and read a misdirected letter, decide to rob the post in order to read more purloined letters. The anonymous narrator, “a Gentleman concern’d in this frolick,”

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decides to mail copies of the original epistles along with transcriptions of the group’s “observations upon each letter” to a morally upright friend before ultimately publishing them. Apparently guilty about appropriating private correspondence, the narrator tries to justify his “Crime” by affirming that only those who deserve it are harmed: “ev’ry Man ought to live so, as not to be asham’d of his most secret Actions, and deserves to be expos’d when he deserts that Justice or Wisdom, which he stickles so much for in the Action of others” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 4). Writers, he implies, should recognize the public implications of what they produce. In the first edition, Gildon even announces the act of corporate theft in gothic script as if to boast of print’s power to expose secrecy (5).3 Indeed, the group decides to add their own “Conversation” as models for how consumers might ethically read material that has been retrieved by questionable means, repackaging a self-admitted crime as a noble purpose. The narrator, blurring the original letters, the gentlemen’s clubhouse conversations, and the private letter to his “Friend,” with the book that publishes these various discourses “to the World,” prides himself on the morality of his crime, archly observing “what Letters we found of that Nature, that had an Honest End in the speed they requir’d, we took Care to send as directed; the others I now by Common Consent make publick, to save them the Trouble of Writing again on the same Subject” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 4).4 The original publisher of The Post-Boy, John Dunton, either unaware that Gildon has probably fabricated many of the letters or merely pretending ignorance, similarly defends exposure of private correspondence “for the Benefit and Pleasure of the Publick” (Post-Boy, 1st edn., A6), but adds a further consideration. One should never trust the mail: “the Post has too often here in England (as is evident from the Gazette) been robb’d, and ’tis to be wish’d with no worse design than these Gentlemen did it” (Post-Boy, 1st edn., A6). One should be cautious of any personal communication in a culture equipped to publish words by other means, unless one’s private life matches one’s public values. Dunton, who was himself a highly prolific writer as well as a bookseller (and therefore, presumably, an avid reader), could not have been better situated to understand the gains and losses in the kind of project he and Gildon produced.5 Complex aspects of publishing thus converge in Gildon’s parable of writing, from relationships between author, publisher, and reader to matters governing the conversion of handwritten and oral communication into printed form or the unpredictable consequences of disseminating information in the public sphere.6 Both Gildon and Dunton, key figures

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in the tumultuous print market of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (who were themselves pilloried by Pope in the Dunciad (1728)), recognized both the advantages and dangers of an effective print culture. To them, vagaries in the postal system seemed akin to, or even blurred with, the vagaries of printing works of fiction. Handwritten discourse becomes a corollary to another form of dissemination, printed books, both exposing primal forms of human communication: a child demanding attention from a parent; a lover moaning over a memento; a victim begging mercy; a prisoner raging against injustice; a madman demanding freedom; an old man railing against death. As various scholars have shown, the audience for such stories increased noticeably when print technology, advertising and disseminating techniques, a sufficiently literate readership, cost-effect business mechanisms, and loosened government restrictions on publishing fueled an expanding marketing of fiction (the so called “rise of the novel”).7 It is perhaps no coincidence that Gildon chose the post as his emblematic form of circulation, since the advent of the modern postal system at the end of the seventeenth century provided one of the crucial mechanisms that allowed fiction to reach so large an audience that a new meaning for an old term, “the novel,” eventually emerged to identify an apparently new genre. Gildon’s “Post” texts (Post scripts one might call them) thus constitute a familiar tendency in eighteenth-century fiction, the desire to collect and authorize disparate narratives. Noting the demand for entertainment and the belief that unpublished writing guarantees authenticity, Gildon appears to validate the theft of what we now call intellectual property by noting its value as entertainment, moral evidence, and authentic uncensored data. As one of the gentlemen notes, “there may be much Use and Instruction, as well as Diversion, in this Frolick” (Post-Man, 5). Public use, Gildon suggests, trumps the right to privacy in the pursuit of universal ethical instruction. The confidentiality of the correspondence ensures their utility because those who write “private Letters are more free of their Minds than in any publick Discourses” (Post-Man, 5). But, like a roman à clef, the conventional claim of documentary realism here serves a somewhat contradictory purpose since many of the letters have no real private intent; Gildon and his publisher were, in fact, challenging their readers’ assumptions about the reliability of “private” discourse, cautioning them to regard a new and powerful circuit of communication warily. As veiled moral essays, satires on Gildon’s own contemporaries, or pretexts to offer literary criticism and exercise self-promotion, the letters were meant for

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direct publication even though they dramatize the strange mediation between “private Letters” and “publick Discourses.” These self-reflexive tendencies coalesce in the sequel, where a Â�letter discussing Gildon’s own Complete Art of Poetry, published in 1718, is addressed to “Charles Gildon” (Post-Man, 269). As the author penetrates his fiction, the fiction, bolstered by the epistolary form itself, appears real. Story propagates story; fact becomes a pretext for fiction. Generically, Gildon’s work belongs to the prose fictional miscellany; it draws on Gildon’s prior experience as the “editor” of Dunton’s influential periodical The Athenian Mercury. The Mercury itself anticipated The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (Gildon’s later friend and patron), and it, along with Gildon’s initial work, may have been the model for a weekly Tory magazine that appeared in 1695 called The Post-Boy. The subtitle of Gildon’s Post-Boy refers explicitly to “Miscellaneous Subjects: In which are Discover’d Vertues, Vices, Follies, Humours and Intrigues of Mankind.” Many of the letters are barely disguised moral essays or exempla on subjects ranging from religion and marriage to justice and politics, and the tendencies of epistolary writing are often used as an excuse to justify the cursory examination of a given subject: “To repeat the Particulars,” one correspondent notes, “would swell to a Volume” (Post-Man, 32). In fact, the swelling second “Book” of The Post-Man Robb’ d consists largely of a packet of letters sent in the “Post” by a writer named Charles Dickson (as Gildon’s first name was Charles and he was, in fact the son of a Richard Gildon, the moniker Charles Dickson [or son of Dick] may be yet another cryptic allusion to Gildon’s authorship). The narrator here calls attention to the packet’s daunting bulk, yet “the whole Company cry’d out, let us hear it” (74). Such a reaction presumably echoes the demand of readers for more fiction and emphasizes the appetite for the long works that characterize eighteenth-century prose literature. At the same time, it capitalizes on another growing outlet for fiction in its echoes of periodical literature.8 As the “Preface” to The Post-Man brags, “the following Book … consists of so great a Variety of Matter, as well as Manner, that I think there is something in some of them that will please you all” (xiv). Following the pattern of popular periodicals like the Athenian Mercury or Addison and Steele’s bestselling work, Gildon anticipates, in a manner typically attributed to the hackney writer, the need to attract as many readers as possible and enlarge the subject to profitable length. A multitude of narrative pieces tethered together by an account of how a group of readers interpret them also models the social intent of Gildon’s book. As Figure 8 from the second edition of The Post-Boy shows, the

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Figure 8╇ Charles Gildon, The Post-Boy Robb’ d of His Mail (1706), 2nd edn., 11.

page layout, conventional though it is, physically reinforces the public dynamic at work in the narrative, insofar as text from a personal letter alternates with a transcription of its critical interpretation by a cross-section of readers, and the narrator’s discourse. In Gildon’s text, the miscellaneous parts thus work to create multivocal effects that match the social sphere from which they emanate€– one characterized by a greater licensing and intertwining of public voices. As a reminder of that heterogeneity, the Post scripts repeatedly emphasize the complex interleaving of various penned and typeset sources. The letters of Book iii in The Post-Man, for instance, are mostly taken up by what amounts to a narrative of amorous intrigue or “Secret History” (192) purportedly taken from a “Latin

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Book,” that comes with its own Latin title page, immediately followed by an English translation entitled The Lover’s Sighs: or, the Letters of the most Beautiful Stremunia to Alphonso the Wise (169). The whole is preceded by an independent letter containing “Advice to a young Gentleman, who was going to turn Author” (160). As it turns out, The Lover’s Sighs breaks off before it is finished because the correspondent, Phillip Anecdot, who is transliterating the text for his “Friend,” has only a “defective” copy of the original “Book” and can only provide the story that his “Scraps” allow him, though he has “some Assurances” that “another Copy” can be procured (177–8). Ironically, the text of the story ends mid-line as Stremunia, overcome by “Agonies” at the indifference of Alphonso, writes “I am able to write no more€–€–” (177). Here, the reversal that Gildon’s work dramatizes, the conversion of private handwritten documents into a printed book, becomes re-reversed, as a published book turns into fodder for the letters we are to imagine the sequel’s editor, Sir Roger de Whimsey, collecting and then publishing for “the Benefit and Pleasure of the Public” (Post-Boy, 1st edn., A7). A strange media circuit thus emerges in which the printed text ostensibly becomes handwritten in order to be republished. Indeed, the letters in all of the Post texts repeatedly allude to their uneasy relation with the print industry to which their potentially voluminous matter seems more suited. As one of the letter writers speculates when he observes that “my Paper denies me Room for more,” he can easily have the rest printed: “why write on as long as you can find Booksellers to print your Copies” (Post-Man, 151). Even the personal letters, in other words, already seem vaguely aware of their public use. Thus, the various correspondences that the post boy loses and which never reach their intended fictional audience have already undergone radical displacement. The theft grants them a new value, one that shifts their worth from an economy protected by the postal system to an economy that trades in illicit uses of writing. Through a set of correlations, character, narrator, editor, and author come to resemble thieves. The criminalized letters thus advance the act of robbery through the actions of all the subsequent agents in the work’s transmission, from compositors and booksellers to readers and reviewers. As Dunton cautiously observes, “I … ought to undergo no Censure for printing them as they came to my Hands, both regarding the Truth of Matter of Fact, and the exposing the (secret) Villanies of Mankind as they were, than to change them to what we desired they should be” (Post-Boy, 1st edn., A7). Hedging his language throughout, Dunton so blurs actual and assumed anxieties about the valid provenance of the text, the moral censure it might occasion, and the lawfulness

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of printing private discourse obtained illegally as to render anxiety and confidence indistinguishable aspects of the bookseller’s craft. Titled “The Bookseller’s Advertisement to the Reader,” his address is equal parts selfprotection and bravura, a match to Gildon’s meshing of fact and fiction. The symbiosis between written texts and published work has ostensibly transformed the letters into multiply alienated and criminalized works. That Gildon felt puzzled by the legal overtones in his “frolick” is revealed by the gradual reshaping of the narrative frame that explains the acquisition of the book’s source material. The sequel, The Post-Man, Robb’ d of His Mail, assumes an increasingly cautious tone as befits an older and more mature text (even the courier has aged from a “Boy” to a “Man”). Where the theft in The Post-Boy had been deliberately planned by the nameless editor and his drinking companions, the sequel’s editor, Sir Roger de Whimsey, offers a more moderate case of appropriation. While traveling a “publick Road” (2) with several companions, including two French aristocrats, Whimsey acquires two packets of letters that his servant Jeoffrey discovers abandoned in a ditch by thieves who have earlier robbed the post-man. The gentlemen retire to Whimsey’s estate to read and comment on the letters (including one addressed to “dear Whim himself” [179]). This time, however, the narrator “communicates” the work directly to the reading “Publick” (6), his acquisition of the packet legally abated to a degree by his being “Justice of the Peace and Quorum of this County, that Magistratical Authority wou’d bear us out” (3). “As for the Letters of Business,” Whimsey magnanimously continues, “we will immediately dispatch them to the Post, that no Body may be a Sufferer for our Pleasure” (5). Like the anonymous narrator of the Post-Boy, he distinguishes the right to do business from the right to personal communication. The latter may be subjected to public inquisition, even though many of the letters themselves depend on how, as one of the contributors declares, “a Letter secures me from the Censure of the Malicious” (7). Business here seems to have greater guarantees to privacy than personal correspondence. Just as suggestive of this interchange between public discourse and private correspondence is the culminating series of essays that present Gildon’s own proposals for an official academy that would regulate English letters, written as if they were merely the epistolary musings of a fictional character. Capturing Gildon’s lifelong interest in the subject, the proposals show that his Grub Street credentials mask a genuine scholarly and utilitarian intent. As G. L. Anderson notes, “Gildon’s academy is a ‘total’ academy, elaborate and extremely authoritarian, which seeks

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to regulate all phases of literary life, not merely language; and secondly, Gildon’s academy is part of his continuing war on the new spirit in NeoClassicism that characterizes the works of Rowe and Pope and distinguishes this classicism from that of the age of Dryden” (247–8). The letters in the Post scripts, then, ultimately constitute a regulated public sphere in which fiction, polemical treatise, and immodest proposal enter self-referentially into policing eighteenth-century culture wars. To different extents, the “editors” of Gildon’s Post scripts (one anonymous, the other fictively named) thus make the private writing they discover “publick,” profiting from either a criminal assault or illegal claim on the correspondence they publish. But the later version of the parable, published after the Copyright Act of 1710, which simultaneously established authors (or the “Purchasers of the Copies”) as protected proprietors of their work and designated them more clearly as punishable legal entities, demonstrates a nuanced awareness of the feedback loop between legal and criminal constructions of authorship. This time the narrator reveals his name, however whimsically, just as the Copyright Act sought to link published work to an identifiable legal subject, either to protect writers or hold them liable. In fact the older Whimsey acknowledges himself as the unnamed editor of the initial narrative; once a frolicking young gentleman, he has now become a responsible, though eccentric, adjudicator. And because Whimsey is a magistrate, the text he oversees submits almost instantly to legal codification. At the same time, these revisions finally prompt the author to offer a quasi-legal remedy to the criminal correspondence that has generated his own art. Gildon first invents a named persona, an alias that incorporates him into the text as a lawgiver; he then proposes, under another name, a radically systematic body of regulations by which letters are to be policed; and then, finally, he uses the initials to his real name (C. G.) in the dedicatory epistle that fronts the text. Starting with the necessity of founding his writing as a criminal act, he ends up securing its legal status. The author is both revealed and hidden, a criminal and a lawful citizen. Since Foucault argues that modern authorship emerged when a writer could be held responsible for a work (124–7), it is tempting to see Gildon’s Post scripts as haunted by criminal liability. But, as Jody Greene has recently shown, until a proprietary system arose by which authors of even potentially scandalous texts could be induced to claim responsibility for their writing, the state continued to be unable to locate what one Â�seventeenth-century government censor called “the Fountain of Our Troubles” (25). That is, the 1710 Act indicates that the state seemed willing

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to grant authors certain proprietary rights in order to render them visible and thus maintain some control over them. As is so often the case, the court, the legal system, the publishing trade, and the authors themselves read in the various acts of legislation different meanings and opportunities. Writers could choose to record their proprietary interest in a work and gain the protection of copyright but also make themselves vulnerable to the law, or they could disavow authorship but lose the legal protections that could enforce their privilege over the text. Contrary to the common assertion that the Act of Anne divorced copyright from censorship, the two were deliberately united. As Greene asserts, historians “have been resistant to recognizing the persistence of ideological regulation in authorship’s new proprietary formation” (4). Greene’s argument derives from Foucault’s claim that modern authorship developed when writers first became liable to punishment for their work’s content and then only later became a proprietary concept. Modifying Foucault’s claim, Greene shows that, in fact, the early period of authorial proprietorship also retained the older punitive meaning. The Act was less an attempt to make the author the “actual productive center of the history of the book” than to articulate how the author “came to be understood to occupy that cultural role in the first place” (8). Such a formulation implicitly recognizes that the author is not the sole producer of a text so much as its sanctioned representative. Gildon’s work shows that he repeatedly grappled with the peculiar nature of writing imaginative literature and pondered the gains and losses of revealing his authorship. His was a dilemma that persisted throughout eighteenth-century fiction and appears not simply as an extratextual concern but also as a shaping narrative element. C av e at l é c t or Gentle Reader, For so I hope to find thee. But whether gentle or ungentle, I have a few Words to say to thee, before thou dost proceed to the Perusal of my Book; first, because it is the Mode, and who wou’d be out of Fashion, when he may so easily avoid it, as at the Expence of a little perishable Paper? Next, that I may pre-engage thy good Will, or at least remove all Prejudice which usually attends an unknown Author. (Charles Gildon, The Post-Man Robb’ d of his Mail, 1719)

Our Nation would have afforded the politest Heads in the World, if they were not murder’d with so many Books. (An Essay Against Too Much Reading, 1728)

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The writer’s encounter with the law is not the only story in “the sociology of the text.” While this study acknowledges the effects of liability on the construction of authorship, it seeks to integrate that history with other vital aspects of book-making: non-legalistic attitudes toward authorship, the production values of the book trade, and the reader’s implied sense of book ownership. Focusing on the legal status of the author has tended, I suggest, to foreclose a diverse history of authorship, and the myriad ways in which readers repossess an author’s work. While authors such as Pope, and booksellers such as Thomas Beckett, were toiling in court to protect what they regarded as their property from piratical booksellers, countless other writers and publishers were producing literary texts in which specified ownership mattered very little. Most of the time, in fact, books appeared (and disappeared) without much concern about their legal Â�status. Frequently addressed to the “Gentle Reader,” they effectively disappeared into the hands of countless anonymous consumers, some of them likely to be “ungentle.” While The Post-Man Robb’ d of His Mail certainly dramatizes the criminal and illicit practice that may underscore literary publication, it also manifests this accidental, anonymous, and untidy exchange of print; perhaps more importantly, it also captures the fervor behind many of the publishing ventures that hoped to exploit the burgeoning market in eighteenth-century fiction. Meeting in a “full House” on a regular basis, the ten male readers in the The Post-Man Robb’ d are not a coffee house gathering but a men’s club, reading not news periodicals but fabricated letters purporting to be real, or real letters disguised as fiction. Whimsey’s companions, nonetheless, express the progressive attitudes toward public opinion that coffee houses purportedly fostered. The narrator refers to them as a commonwealth, a “society,” and a collective that surpasses the nine muses in both number and diversity of interest (5). That is, they are a cross-section of sorts (though typically excluding women, lower classes, and different races) who form opinion through the act of collective oral reading. Indeed, they pride themselves on their democratic and republican nature€– the club’s presidency rotates every evening€– although from a modern perspective they, in fact, comprise an oligarchy, sharing power “for fear Ambition shou’d creep even into our Breasts, and so aiming at Tyranny, disturb our Repose and Tranquility” (4–5). For all the talk of tyranny, the quiet stress on “even” and the concern that “our” repose might be harmed implies the group’s self-interest and presumed elitism, thus qualifying them as privileged arbiters of literary culture, of, quite literally, the world of letters. Nonetheless, the collaborative interpretation they perform, as Whimsey’s

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comments attest, seeks to transform solitary reading into socially productive behavior : “it polishes that imperfect Model of a fine Gentleman, which Books but begin, and generally leave very rough, and unfinish’d. Conversation does not only give us a better Taste in Reading, but also improves our Thoughts” (2). While conventional, the plural pronouns in this pronouncement even mimic the collective act of compensatory conversing it extols, in stark contrast to the readers “murder’d” by “so many Books” that An Essay Against Too Much Reading regards as a national danger. Gildon’s fascination with these interpretive acts in the Post scripts reflects the surge in new forms of readership in post-Revolutionary Britain that transformed the author’s own conception of audience. While his intimation that books traffic in “real” words may be belied by his ruse€– the pretense of robbery that frames the presentation of letters he actually wrote himself under the veil of illicit textual transmission€– Gildon may have collated genuine documents from other sources (actual correspondence, on one hand, and the French original from which some material was drawn). The “Epistle Dedicatory” to the Post-Boy is signed C. G. for Charles Gildon, so authorship is only partly hidden, a supposition later confirmed by the letter addressed to Gildon that extols his Art of Poetry. It is, however, likely that he farmed out some of the work to others, who have anonymously provided him with the letters. That is, Gildon resembles his own fictive editor, reading texts by others to repackage them, ostensibly as his own; he thus demonstrates Walter Benjamin’s adage that “At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer” (232). While it may seem exploitative, such appropriations could have been a strategy accepted by all participants. Many of the editors or booksellers who outsourced writing to available and often needy hack writers were themselves needy.9 In his prefaces Gildon repeatedly highlights the demand that has occasioned successive editions; of the second version of The Post-Boy, for instance, he asserts, “It consists of two Parts, which were very well receiv’d on their first Impression, and being much and long enquir’d after, the present Publishers thought fit to undertake it” (vi). The same impulse appears in “The Bookseller’s Advertisement to the Reader,” which Dunton added to the first edition. A “Second Volume,” he asserts, is guaranteed “if this find that Encouragement from the Ingenious as is expected” (A7). These assurances simultaneously parade both the author and bookseller’s confidence in the work and apprehensions they feel toward a mercurial readership. It is understandable, then, that many eighteenth-century authors, like Gildon, chose to write anonymously. Anonymity provided some

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protection, at least initially, from a volatile public reaction. For one, it shielded the writer from undesired notoriety, accusations of libel, or exposure to direct criticism. At the same time, anonymity emphasized the universalistic appeal of Enlightenment rhetoric by seeming to privilege the characters (some of them configured as writers themselves) who Â�peopled, and often “voiced,” the narrative.10 While an author like Swift may have addressed this impulse by parodying its excesses, it is in writers such as Gildon that we see a more straightforward identification of print with the power to reproduce common experience. His suggestive reservation of his name, while protecting him as he tested the public’s initial response to his work, also served, through editorial obfuscation, to maintain the pretense of the correspondence’s authenticity and utility. Unlike Swift, who always maintained a public disdain for the printing house, Gildon’s attitude toward the trade veered between defending and correcting it in his public hailing of his readers. What may seem novel about eighteenth-century publishing, then, is the degree to which the print industry, like the “republic of authors,” was beholden to readers. From quasi-fictional techniques in The Spectator to deliberate niche marketing in later prose fiction, writers and publishers were addressing newly literate and diverse reading populations. The acclimation of readers to prose fictional narrative in printed form occurred over stretches of time and involved not only bound books, but pamphlets, newspapers, and broadsheets, which helped shape receptiveness to the spread of apparently true histories of ordinary private lives in public form. The popular technique of petitioning readers to provide material for later publication, in such works as The Spectator or Tatler and a myriad of other periodicals and magazines, indicates that from the late 1600s the book industry was as obsessed with the indeterminacy of writer and reader as with the equally blurred lines between bookseller and writer. In Gildon’s narratives, readers are invited to help write the text as if it was an ongoing serial like The Spectator or Tatler, both of which Gildon extols ex post facto in The PostMan. While the invitation to the “Ladies” and the “Gentlemen” to send him “any thing in the Epistolary Way” via “my Bookseller’s” (Post-Man, xv) may be facetious, it nonetheless commingles authentic and fabricated letters. In The Post-Boy Dunton also participates in the pretext of asking readers to become writers. He shares the work of garnering (or simply postulating) readers as writers, mediating the author function and readers’ responses. Considered a penniless hack for much of his professional life, Gildon may have been more sensitive to the shades of literary authority than others, but the Post texts acknowledge as much as mystify collaborative discourse.

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One sign of this doctrine of co-authorship in The Post-Boy and The PostMan is the form they take. Although epistolary fictions, they are unusual in presenting themselves as collections of letters in which, for the most part, no letter writer is repeated and no intended respondents are represented (for obvious reasons, since the letters have been misdirected). The intended reader is exiled from the communication circuit and replaced by a corporate readership. The gentlemen who intercept the letters stand in for the recipients, but they are not the intended ones (though for a brief moment the group reads one letter addressed to one of its members, making him simultaneously a public and private reader). The men are, in turn, a representative group of readers that consume, for the benefit of the public, the work of a representative group of letter writers. As Whimsey admits, they are engaged in “some sort of Diversion by the different Manners, Ways, Sentiments, Opinions, and the like, of the several Writers” (Post-Man, 5). Gildon’s reader, in turn, may feel positioned as a clandestine consumer of illicit material engaged in crimes of reading, yet assume a gentlemanly status nonetheless. Forging a conspiratorial link between writer and reader was, in fact, not an unusual gesture in eighteenth-century fiction. In The Invisible Spy, Haywood, publishing appropriately enough under the doubly pseudonymous signature of a male writer named “Explorabilis,” scorns readers who do not concede the criminal taint in reading. Having previously stated that “the Author confesses having been guilty of petty larceny,” Explorabilis cautions, If there be any reader, in this very pious and religious age, that may happen to have too tender and scrupulous a conscience to benefit himself by the receipt of stolen goods, the Author thinks it highly necessary to give him this timely notice, that it will be best for his peace of mind to avoid looking into this or some of the succeeding chapters. (“Contents”, xxx)

Capitalizing “Author” but not “reader” (as she does throughout the book), Haywood distinguishes writer from reader only to conjoin them through their shared larceny. The same interchange persists in Gildon’s work; the narrator in The Post-Boy admonishes his interlocutor not to “condemn our Frolick of a Fault in prying into the Secrets of our Neighbours, and in doing them some Damage” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 4). Borrowing from the popular “Secret Histories” that flooded the early eighteenth-century market, the Post scripts simultaneously lament and exploit their illicit tendencies. In the process, they position the reader as an accomplice. Like the epistolary texts themselves, which function as an ongoing collaboratory

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over the course of successive editions, the reader of Gildon’s stolen letters is both modeled in the story and urged to use it as a model. Gildon’s texts thus operate like the public sphere that Habermas and Benedict Anderson document, but his features more than just the coming together of private persons to render collective opinion on material circulated in the public domain. It also dramatizes the violent arrest of one intended transmission (a private correspondence) to produce another kind (a criminal, yet critical, mass reading of the original texts). This collective practice, in turn, duplicates itself at another level when the book passes into the hands of readers. While Gildon recognizes their value, he also wants to reform the habits of his readers, curbing their accustomed methods of consuming textual matter. Because authors conventionally relied on the presumed rationality of their readers, the device of postulating a particular reader, though not new in general, was increasingly allied to concerns about defending the publication of fiction in a widening market. Authors such as Gildon addressed their readers compulsively, as if one could imagine them in the singular, a recognizable entity with whom you could reason. When Whimsey addresses the “Gentle Reader” in his “Preface” to the Post-Man he uses direct emotional appeal to a single reader. But his ensuing caveat immediately betrays his suspicion of the collective indeterminacy of his public: “For so I hope to find thee. But whether gentle or ungentle, I have a few Words to say to thee, before thou dost proceed to the Perusal of my Book” (ix). Gildon’s de-authorizing strategies may be best understood then in relation to the demands of an unruly readership and the author’s need to limit vagrant readings. That is to say, the lawlessness of the writer reaches a limit at the reader’s capacity to abscond with the text. The author paradoxically invites his audience to play an active role and then worries about its willfulness. At the same time that Gildon celebrates the success of his work in the second edition of The Post-Boy, he admonishes his audience not to read too much against the grain: “the Book needs no Directions to the Readers Judgment, since they [the letters] are either Witty, Amorous, or Satyric; and what I am pretty secure, a good Judge must pass a favourable Sentence upon” (viii). Yet the need to predetermine the book’s reception, in language that resonates with “Magistratical Authority,” signals concerns about the unpredictability of the reader’s response. Ironically, Gildon, perhaps most famous for authoring the acrimonious Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Mr. D[aniel] D[efoe] in which he ignores Defoe’s stated intentions

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and castigates Robinson Crusoe for allegorizing the writer’s life, defends his own authorial right to pre-judge the reader and control “allegorick” interpretations while yet admitting allegorical intent and metaphoric play in his own work. Engaged in the process of creating a public sphere, writers such as Gildon hoped to prevent misguided reception of their books while yet celebrating acts of illicit reading within the text. This suggests that their “original” acts of writing are already constituted by expected kinds of reception; the readers are, in a sense, already writing the author’s text before they have even read it. C av e at e m p t or When these Books were first admitted into the Publick Libraries, I remember to have said upon Occasion, to several Persons concerned, how I was sure, they would create Broyls wherever they came, unless a World of Care were taken.

(Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1704)

If authors, as Gildon’s work suggests, routinely feel ambivalent about their published work, readers are no less susceptible. When they purchase books, readers are usually seeking to possess at least two varieties of property, one that is intellectual (the ideas expressed by the text) and one that is material (the textual object itself). In eighteenth-century fiction, that impulse amounts to a reflexive engagement with characters or types within the narrative and the characters and type affixed to the page. It is significant in the case of the Post scripts, for example, that in order to produce the book, the fictive editor must collect individual handwritten pages, read and then collate them, record the comments of his friends, write a prefatory epistle that explains the genesis of the letters, rewrite the text(s) in manuscript form, and then find a printer and bookseller to publish and distribute the work as printed “Sheets.” That is, Gildon ensures the reader’s awareness of the material process of the work both within the fictional framework and in its paratext. This prodding of the reader’s appreciation for a book’s production value is not an unusual gesture in the period. Eighteenth-century literature, in fact, devotes a striking amount of attention to the relation between writing and publishing. Authors often detail their encounters with printers, booksellers, and readers both in the paratext they add to works and in their narrative content. Booksellers themselves repeatedly comment on the printing of a work or the public reception of an earlier edition, no doubt intensifying an alert reader’s consciousness of the work’s implied

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textual history. Gildon’s work, for instance, accentuates the disparity between the handwritten “Sheets” it purportedly reproduces and its own printed pages. Early eighteenth-century books were still novel enough to make this awareness of their materiality palpable, yet prevalent enough to make it culturally meaningful. Over the course of the century, printed books attained a distinctive and pervasive hold on the cultural imaginary and an aura of inevitable dominance, not only in London but also in provincial towns throughout the British Isles. As Gildon’s work reveals, the psychological, social, and material dimensions of invention create a complex interplay of forces. A significant part of Gildon’s effort, for example, lies in dramatizing the relationship between paper and ink, or, in more abstract terms, surface and inscription. An important consequence to the letter writing mode, and perhaps all epistolary fiction, is that readers continuously experience texts purportedly deriving from authentic, handwritten pieces of paper that convey an emotional residue. At the same time, printed letters may easily manipulate their evidentiary status. One considerable advantage of epistolary fiction (or any biographical form) is that the author can appear as an editor who selects material from a body of pre-existing texts that can, as needed, be “restored,” thus guaranteeing an evolving text for further editions or corrections to readers’ misinterpretations. Additional letters seem pre-emptive, since the new texts address audience reactions while pretending to precede them.11 As Gildon perhaps disingenuously notes in his Preface to the second edition of The Post-Boy, “I confess if it had been in my Election some Letters shou’d have been left out, but considering the Additions, the Reflections; and those of the Second Volume, it is hop’d that the Entertainment will not be disagreeable to the Reader” (vii). It may be that eighteenth-century epistolary formats were popular because readers and writers alike were grappling with a cultural shift that put new pressure on the printed word to reveal its link to personal utterance or inscription while capitalizing on its economic utility and its apparent cultural authority. Gildon’s recursive technique was merely a prelude to Samuel Richardson’s more elaborate system, by which the latter produced four distinct editions of Clarissa, but both authors pretend to work backwards from the first edition to authoritative documents that anticipate readers’ criticisms. In other words, the pretense of authentic private documents succumbs to an artifice by which the printed work maintains its authority retroactively and continuously. Far from guaranteeing that print was a neutral and authentic medium, such books as Gildon’s constantly invoked oral and scribal modes of

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communication to justify their existence and thus mark their distinct embodiment. That play of sameness and difference occurs, in part, because books are special commodities whose representational force depends on the same essential materials as the handwritten documents they reproduce, thus appearing natural and personal. What readers purchase is not unlike what they can produce themselves, yet it is, at the same time, sufficiently mediated by technology as to make the semblance ineffable. Published discourse, moreover, converts the reader’s potential ability to reply (by talking or writing) into the act of reading critically, that is, of constituting a public sphere largely by word of mouth that then shapes the writer’s subsequent work. The text in the reader’s hand and the text described or reproduced in the narrative itself seem to merge. This closeness between the typographer’s art and the reader’s ability to write in pen and ink shows up in small editorial features that drop from view in later centuries, such as when the “Errata” in the second edition of the Post-Boy invite readers to write their own corrections. By the nineteenth century the act of inserting errata is assumed to be a mental one that will not impact the text itself, like a library command not to write in the books one borrows. But The Post-Boy specifies the reader’s penmanship, recalling the particular interactive mode of manuscript culture; after noting several egregious errors, “The Reader is desir’d to Correct less considerable Faults with his Pen” (xxiv).12 In eighteenth-century Britain paper and ink€– as opposed to binding, stitching, or glue, for example€– served as primary symbols of a new form of subjectivity because they were the chief elements that constituted a printed text, especially given that books were frequently sold unbound to be covered later at the customer’s discretion. A page, whether empty or filled, became a powerful emblem of human potential, a surface to be imprinted by the defining characteristics that personal experience inscribed. For example, when John Locke adapts the classical concept of the tabula rasa or blank slate to compare the mind in its infancy to “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” (91), he imagines a page readied for printing, as his repeated use of the word “imprint” attests.13 Perhaps playing on the double signification of “character” as linguistic mark and personal trait, Locke depicts white paper as the psychic container for the “ideas” that shape human character.14 Similarly, the potential page becomes a recurring icon of personality formation in eighteenthcentury fiction, from the deliberate counterpoint of Oroonoko’s scripted black body€– this “inky form”€– in Aphra Behn’s tragic narrative of the “Royal Slave” to Sterne’s reservation of an empty page for the reader to

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create a fully embodied character, the amorous Widow Wadman. Perhaps the most striking expression of this trope comes from the character Alfred Eringham in Francis Lathom’s Men and Manners: “I talk incoherently, madly, I know I do; but my wild thoughts will not be restrained; my hand communicates them to the paper without the authority of my heart, but my heart is a secret accomplice, for it denies my hand the power to wipe them out when they are once written” (iv, 119). Bypassing any Â�mention of the pen, the direct inscription of thoughts upon the page here indicates the complex externalization of an interior self strangely divided between passionate intellect and reasonable emotion. By the end of The End of Lusorium this aim takes the extreme form of jumbled handwritten thoughts replicated in engraved form upon the page as if to fuse Â�mental, oral, chirographic, and typographic expression (see Figure 1). In these examples, inking the page parallels how matter, consciousness, or culture fix ideas upon the mind. The narrator of The Adventures of George Maitland, Esq. makes the Lockean reference explicit, punning on how the word “impression” can signal both a mental response and a typographical event: “Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally most permanent and powerful” (i, 9). Ink is not, of course, required to define a book, as a blank or penciled notebook often counts as one, but for most a book constitutes some combination of paper and ink (a blank notebook, in any event, is usually intended to be marked). Indeed, the distinct color contrast that black ink and white paper produce, particularly in standard printing, functions as a metaphor for the literary play of meaning and confusion, presence and absence, or object and thought. Even contrasting inks sometimes connoted this binary opposition; the black, or, more rarely, blue fluid from an inkwell was thought to represent a personal authenticity that the usually intenser viscous black paste used in typography either superseded or dramatically erased. For example, when one of the letters in The PostMan appears to be incorrectly addressed, the gentlemen reading it study variations in the ink to determine that the sender misdirected it: “That is plain, (said the Chevalier) the Ink is different; the Letter seems to have been written a good while, the Superscription [st]ill more” (264). None of this, of course, is plain to the book’s readers, who see only the uniform ink of the printed page, though they are perhaps made suddenly aware of the depersonalizing nature of printer’s ink by the comments of the internalized readers and the temporal disjunctions between the text’s original writing and its succeeding iterations.

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A particularly marked distinction also seems to have been drawn between a manuscript and a book, as if the latter somehow achieved consequence either through commercialization or parallel acts of production such as writing a manuscript in an already created book or assembling loose pages personally into a facsimile of a marketed book. Despite their resemblance, then, book and manuscript maintained a critical distinction. It was still common prior to the late seventeenth century to use the word “book” for handwritten documents such as coterie manuscripts, land deeds or charters, written accounts, records, play scripts, and registers. After 1700 most of these meanings fade. Even the type of ink in a document presumably differentiates modes of writing: printer’s ink was unlike that sold by a stationer.15 Because eighteenth-century fiction often simulated “true accounts,” its tendency to highlight the gap between written and printed text is as paradoxical as its efforts to conflate them. Not surprisingly, then, epistolary works, with their constant oscillation between the writing closet and the printing house, dominate long narrative fiction. Even in works that are not epistolary, authors, when they write in Â�propria persona, frequently resort to an “Epistolary Preface” or “Epistolary Dedication.” A fictional letter reproduced in printed form simulates the conversion of manuscripts into books€ – the printed page doubles as itself and the original material site of writing, or even, in some instances, the occasion for speaking. It often surprises modern readers, for instance, that eighteenth-century epistolary fiction presents verbatim conversations of such impossible lengths, well beyond the believable capacity of a character’s powers of recall, that the realistic force of the genre diminishes. The primacy of the handwritten or spoken word that print seeks to both replicate and transcend appears not only in paratext but in story elements as well. When characters in eighteenth-century fiction allude to their own writing, especially in epistolary narratives, they usually mention paper, pen, and ink as material and symbolic tools, though a few also discuss printed forms of their work. Aware of the reproduction of their experiences on paper, they ascribe to its fluids and surfaces their own emotional energies: ink blurs with their tears, traces the shakiness of their hands, or roughs up the paper from the anger of their strokes; the paper resembles a mental tabula rasa, as it becomes a record of emotional events, grows into a “Life,” or lies forgotten in a chest as if mimicking the writer’s death. Like Gildon’s letter writer who anxiously eyes the dwindling space on his stationery and exclaims, “my Paper denies me Room for more” (Post-Man, 151), numerous other characters emphasize

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the surfaces they inscribe. Some, like Swift’s hapless “Modern Author” in A Tale of a Tub, communicate the author’s suspicion about the power of the page to manifest lasting reality: “any mortal Ink and Paper of this Generation,” the modern notoriously declares, “are hurried so hastily off the Scene, that they escape our Memory, and delude our Sight … I enquired after them among Readers and Booksellers, but I enquired in vain” (3, 5); “What is then become of those immense Bales of Paper,” he mournfully continues, “which must needs have been employ’d in such Numbers of Books?” (6). Others, at the opposite extreme, validate the somatic resonance and permanence of paper. When Pamela, the heroine of Richardson’s first novel, refers to her cherished letters as items of dress and wears them in her stays as if they were protective undergarments, to the point that they swell her belly, she echoes a broader cultural awareness of the connection between clothing, text, and life. Sterne echoes this sentiment when Tristram Shandy compares his book to a “poor jerkin” that the “monthly Reviewers … cut and slash” without considering that they might be severing the “lining too”€– that is, a reader’s cutting remarks penetrate not only the body of the text (Tristram aligns the jerkin specifically with “a man’s body” and implicitly with the book he is writing) but also the authorial “mind” that lines it within (iii, 15–16). In fact, eighteenth-century paper-makers almost exclusively produced paper from cotton and linen, and rag shops could make a considerable profit in collecting cloth remnants for, among others, the printing industry.16 Richardson, a bookseller himself, would have appreciated the various implications of Pamela’s lettered dress. As these examples suggest, the fate of the page in eighteenth-century fiction paralleled a nexus of philosophical, economic, and practical concerns over the material subtext of literary expression. Paper and ink, of course, are not the only metaphoric correlatives for human identity in the period’s application of books to life. For example, various elements associated with the book’s cover have also served as expressive reference points for personal identity, from tooled and illuminated spines to leather-covered boards. In The Battle of the Books Swift personifies authors by animating their works. In Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, the burning of Parson Adams’ cherished bound transcription of Aeschylus assumes anthropomorphic dimensions: in a scene blurring human author and inanimate text, Adams casts his eyes to where “Aeschylus lay expiring; and immediately rescued the poor Remains, to-wit, the Sheepskin Covering of his dear Friend, which was the Work of his own Hands, and had been his inseparable Companion for upwards of thirty Years” (i, 256).

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Punning on the word “remains” to align the charred text with human remains (and calling up the specter of book-burnings), Fielding connects Aeschylus as an author and “Aeschylus” as a material object (eighteenthcentury book-makers coined the term “remainder” for impressions that had not sold, dead texts as it were). Fielding further intensifies the relation between reading and writing by emphasizing Adams’ quasi-sacred role in fabricating the book (“the Work of his own Hands”). The Parson’s powerful attachment to his book as a “dear Friend” and “inseparable Companion” derives in part from his own active role in transcribing the text; its destruction is, among other things, a self-immolation. That the book is a manuscript, rather than a printed work, and bound in sheepskin, associates it with the ancient book learning and intensive reading that Adams, named for the first of men, embodies. Perhaps resonating fears of a cultural decline in books, the burning of Adams’ text elicits powerful emotions. While Fielding here seems to be commemorating manuscript culture, the kind of feeling Adams displays toward his “dear Friend” characterized eighteenth-century attitudes toward printed books as well. As Warner, Johns, and Brewer variously note, changes in their texture, size, and portability, which involved not only paper but binding as well, enabled readers to feel close to the literature they consumed.17 The gradual elevation of the duodecimo format, for instance, enabled Sterne to personalize his text as “these little books, which I here put into thy hands” (Tristram Shandy, iv, 142); because they seemed small and familiar, he could project the commodity form of his writing, when it in effect ceased belonging to him, as if it were already always his. His insistence on publishing Tristram Shandy in such a format may very well have been compensation for the depersonalizing and dispossessing effects of publishing. Fictional readers, like Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote who, “Eyes sparkling with Delight,” pages through a stack of “voluminous Romances” brought to her by a servant “sinking” under their “Weight” (i, 70), similarly bond with the material appeal of the book. Such moments point to the feeling that readers as well as makers uniquely possessed their books even at a time when publishing methods tended to underscore the interchangeability of the final product. Nonetheless, inked paper was the principle means to signal analogies between humans and texts. Characters who deliberately note their own writing or reading highlight the specific material text they are manipulating. Many of these characters, in turn, underscore both the author’s work and the reader’s status. When a minuscule Gulliver stands before a Brobdignagian book as if seeing the grandeur of printed matter for the

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first time, he becomes the satirical means of targeting those who read a worthy book without sufficient awe or effort. As Gulliver implies, the book embodies the monumentality of the people who produce it: The Book I had a mind to read was put up leaning against the Wall: I first mounted to the upper Step of the Ladder, and turning my Face towards the Book, began at the Top of the Page, and so walking to the Right and Left about eight or ten Paces, according to the Length of the Lines, till I had gotten a little below the Level of mine Eyes, and then descending gradually till I came to the Bottom: After which I mounted again, and began the other Page in the same manner, and so turned over the Leaf, which I could do easily with both my Hands, for it was as thick and stiff as Paste-board, and in the largest Folio’s not above eighteen or twenty Foot long. (Travels, i, Part 2, 131–2)

Invoking a set of metaphors about reading€– traversing a text, laboring over a volume, and feeling the weight of an author’s words€– Swift dreams of a time when a select canon of authoritative texts ensured cultural stability. The reader need have only a strong pair of hands. Characteristically relying on understatement, Swift uses the giant book to emphasize that quality matters more than quantity, that reading is hard work, and that, paradoxically, extensive reading is really a matter of reading intensively (the Brobdignagian libraries house small collections, the largest€ – the King’s€– “doth not amount to above a thousand Volumes” [130–1]). Not only are the Brobdignagian texts colossal, their grandeur is matched by the authority of the language in them: “Their Stile is clear, masculine, and smooth, but not florid, for they avoid nothing more than multiplying unnecessary Words, or using various Expressions” (132). The present, Swift intimates, is an effeminate age whose literature multiplies words unnecessarily; the numberless productions of the press thus match the modern author’s vain prolixity. When Gulliver visits the Academy of Lagado he encounters a modern debasement of the Brobdignagian reading apparatus in the form of the incongruous writing machine (perhaps a parody of the printing press) that, as one eighteenth-century commentator jokes, might explain the mechanical nature of contemporary fiction: “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with very little bodily labour, might write books … without the least assistance from genius or from study” (Critical Review 44 [November 1791]: 397). The dream of the book, by contrast, is one in which you can judge the work by its cover, and recognize the grandeur of the words from their titanic austerity. The medium is the message. Swift does not reject print€– the Brobdignagian text is pointedly a printed book, not a manuscript, since the Brobdignagians “have had the Art of Printing, as well as the Chinese,

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Time out of mind” (110)€– but he does yearn for a time in which books carry their full weight. Similarly, even when authors strategically diminish their texts, their apparent modesty generally functions as a claim of distinction. Henry Mackenzie, for example, uses the pretext of missing pages in The Man of Feeling to reinforce the explosive power of sentimentality, dramatizing its tendency to produce feelings that cannot be contained by conventional forms of expression. While this gesture seems the converse of the Brobdignagian text, it too articulates a privileged space for the author’s work. Mackenzie’s fictionalized editor rescues the manuscript from being used as gun wadding by the local curate. This mistreatment is then Â�reproduced in print by the abrupt beginning and subsequent gaps in the published story. The editor serves as proxy for the greatness of a work that the public sphere neglects; he is both a reader and a book-maker, ensuring that the vagaries of the book market do not consign valuable texts to oblivion. Both Parson Adams’ self-inflicted book-burning and Mackenzie’s crumpled manuscripts dramatize the accidents that plague printed works in their itinerant progress toward readers. Eighteenth-century fiction dwells repeatedly on the unintended consumption of both printed and handwritten works€ – by fire, mildew, or water, in a jakes or a woman’s hair, as lining for a shelf or chest, or even, gun wadding. In these instances the use value of the ink (and the words or images it conjures) has been divorced from the paper’s applied use, sacrificed to chance or alternative applications. Paper was not merely the vehicle for ideas; it could also serve functions far removed from an author’s intellectual aims; its myriad uses demonstrates that one person’s book is not only someone else’s trash but another’s transformed commodity. As the crude characterization of hack writers in John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682) shows, printed paper had relative value. Anticipating Swift and Pope’s excremental visions of the print industry, Dryden specifically aligns market dross and human waste: “From dusty shops neglected authors come, / Martyrs of Pies and Reliques of the Bum” (8). Generally, these dystopic visions of the printed word satirize the unstable relationship between authors and consumers. To writers, potential readers could become mere consumers, with their own ideas about the proper use of books. These errant moments suggest that fiction was more deliberately concerned with its widespread public consumption than other comparable forms of communication, paintings or prints for instance. When Whimsey’s servant rescues the letters that comprise The Post-Man from the ditch where they have been tossed, he

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is saving them from a worse fate than interception; he is rescuing them from being unread. Like Swift and Mackenzie, Gildon’s epistolary fiction probes the material nature of communication. The paper scenes in the Post scripts€ – illicit readers holding letters up to inspection, writers switching ink or worrying about dwindling space on the page, editors pondering their responsibility to manuscripts€ – manifest the period’s widespread obsessions with the material intake of printed paper by a new and demanding consumer class. For some, usually moralists, this expanding book market threatened as much as it fostered social cohesion. As Vicesimus Knox sardonically noted, punning on the relative quality of inks and the double significance of alphabetic signs, “A tincture of letters, which was once rare and formed a shining character, has pervaded the mass of the people” (1, 368). Inferior modern ink, bad typography, and unrestrained dissemination appear to be nicely suited to the diminished intellect, morality, and status of the modern reading public. Ta bu l a r a s a I prayse the man that first did Paper make, The only thing that sets all virtues forth: It shooes new bookes, and keeps old workes awake, Much more of price than all the world is worth.

(Thomas Churchyard, An Ode to Paper, 1588)

What exactly was being consumed, however, when eighteenth-century readers leafed through the thousands of fictional works that were printed and reprinted in the period? Anxieties about the material fate of the page often concerned its intellectual and imaginative uses, but eighteenthÂ�century fiction also dwells on the itinerant progress of paper through human culture: letters continually pass into the wrong hands, impressionable youths pore over the pages of forbidden novels, and damaged manuscripts spill out of hidden recesses. From fictional allusions to Locke’s tabula rasa to the famous blank pages that populate Tristram Shandy, these sheets are not merely props in the narrative domain; they are also avatars of paper transactions that were happening everywhere. Like the postal system in the late seventeenth century or the rise of paper credit, the representation of posted letters as pieces of paper moving about the country in works like the Post-Boy naturalized the way in which British citizens increasingly mediated their social and economic relations.18 While eighteenth-century authors appear to be only tangentially concerned with the economic and proto-nationalist consequences of using

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paper, their personal obsessions crop up in references that litter their pages, ranging from fears that “THE Tax upon Paper does not lessen the Number of Scribblers” (Swift, Tale, 13) or the acid claim that “Paper also became so cheap, and Printers so numerous, that a Deluge of Authors covered the Land” (Pope, Dunciad, xxii) to a character’s concern that he has “wasted so many quires of paper in giving you the characters of people, many of whom deserved not to be drawn from the common croud of mortals” (Richardson, Grandison, i, 250) or a narrator’s frustration at how the physical limits of a book can curb speculation, as when Larry Lusus cries “plague take these ifs: they spoil many a fine closet hatch’d project€ – but if I€– oh no more ifs€ – how I am wasting paper!” (Lusorium, ii, 3). Such allusions hint at authorial concerns about the commodity history of paper. They reflect the particular consequence that paper, “the support on which virtually all printing depended” (McKitterick, 183), had in book-making. That is, of the primary elements constituting a book, paper, more than ink or typeface, required specialized mass production on a continuous basis for each individual printing establishment. From the first experiments with moveable metal type, paper was the focus of fierce economic competition between and within European countries. Paper, Peter Garside explains, “represented by far the largest cost in the production of books, accounting for two-thirds of the bill” even in cases where other costs were artificially inflated (in Raven et al., English Novel, ii, 44). Ink, on the other hand, was relatively easy and efficient to produce, while moveable type did not need to be repurchased on a regular basis. Neither ink nor type required much innovation as time went on, though type foundries and designers continually created new fonts for aesthetic and marketing reasons.19 Ink especially had always been a secondary issue because historically it did not dictate the kind of paper used in book manufacture; rather, paper dictated what kind of ink was used because the particular white paper used in printing presses required a new kind of viscous fluid that could sufficiently imprint the hard rag sheets used with printing presses. Dard Hunter, a standard authority on the history of paper, probably overreaches when he argues that the printing press was essentially a by-product of advances in paper making: “with the hard rag paper of Europe a method of printing that would give a much stronger impression had to be devised. It was this unyielding linen and cotton paper, made impervious to fluid writing ink by the application of animal gelatine, that made necessary the invention of the printing press” (36). Later historians have asserted, to the contrary, that cotton

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and linen rag paper needed to be reinforced before it could evolve from withstanding the force of quill pens to the even greater impact of metal type, a problem solved by adding a glutinous top layer.20 Both accounts, nevertheless, imply that paper’s distinguished history frequently made it a special case to those working with it. Moveable type, which certainly had a profounder effect in making the mass production of books possible, was, for all its innovating influence, more of an emotional subtext for writers and readers. A celebrated invention, it was still, like ink, not as palpable a presence as a book’s paper. It is notable, for instance, that Tristram Shandy bewails the impossibility of recording a sensitive topic by valuing the writing surface more than the fluid: “– My ink burns my fingers to try€– and when I have€– ’twill have a worse consequence€– it will burn (I fear) my paper” (vii, 47). Ultimately, typography and ink provided less metaphoric resonance in eighteenth-century fiction than paper in part because they were less a focus of state intervention and therefore did not make as powerful a socio-economic impression. In Britain, neither foundries nor ink producers faced as much taxation and restriction as paper production, once it became viable enough to compete with Continental suppliers. Indeed, when typographical reproduction became a dominant form of publishing at the end of the seventeenth century, it activated an international competition to produce the most effective printing paper. But the number of mills continued to grow slowly and intermittently in the first part of the seventeenth century, hindered in 1636–7 by an outbreak of plague which prompted official attempts to close rag shops and printing mills because the rags used in printing were considered contagious. Only towards the end of the seventeenth century were British manufacturers of paper sufficiently equipped to begin challenging the effective monopoly by the Continental trade. Much of the relatively rapid growth in domestic paper production in the mid 1600s may have been induced, in part, by the publication war that shadowed the kingdom’s civil wars between 1640 and 1660.21 From that point on the industry accelerated at a rapid rate. In 1690 there were approximately one hundred paper mills in England, about half of them concentrated around London (Coleman, 56). By 1712 this number had doubled, and then redoubled by 1800, finally reaching a historical peak in the 1820s at about 650. Historians uniformly agree that this period in England marks the establishment, particularly by 1740, of an independent paper industry and a noticeable increase in the efficiency and quality of paper production, partly as the result of the invention and ultimate spread of the Hollander, a machine developed in

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Holland in the seventeenth century to speed the shredding of raw materials into pulp and used extensively in England by 1750 (Jenkins, 14). As Alfred Shorter notes, “Up to the eighteenth century, French papers may be said to have dominated the market, but in that century the number of paper-mills in Britain greatly increased, the chief reasons being the growth of population and trade, and€– from various causes€– the rising costs of imports from France” (102). A principal reason for the decline in French imports, he later notes, was, in addition to “the greatly increased demand for paper arising from the development of printing, trade and industry, the cessation or interruption of supplies of paper during the wars with France, hitherto the great source of many kinds of paper, particularly white sorts” (133). These conditions helped offset the advantage the French received by using labor which cost only about half as much (3 to 4 shillings a week) as English labor (8 or 9 shillings). That is, the establishment of a national paper industry, which roughly parallels the dramatic increase in popularity of prose fiction, corroborated a historical tendency toward national self-identification precisely as a response to global economic dependencies. While a direct cause and effect seems unlikely, the numerical data suggest that the paper industry, and literary endeavors like the novel, which required cheap and widespread dissemination, at least performed complementary roles in fabricating nationalist sentiment. One need only follow the money to appraise how powerfully paper was coming to stand for cultural destiny in the eighteenth century. This was, as André Blum affirms, a period characterized by a substantial degree of official state interference in the paper trade (21). From early Georgian complaints by paper-makers over taxation on their craft to the efforts by the English Parliament towards the end of the century to encourage the use of wool for garments and burial dress and thereby save cotton rag for the print industry, eighteenth-century discourse on paper was necessarily and overtly political. A sequence of court petitions starting in 1715 repeatedly admonish the government in nationalist terms to ease sanctions on the trade that had been progressively accumulating since late in the prior century. A portion of an Act passed in 1678 that had aimed at “raising money by a poll and otherwise to enable His Majestie to enter into an actuall warr against the French King and for prohibiting severall French commodities” targeted paper as a “manufacture” whose French practices “hath much exhausted the treasure of this nation, lessened the value of the native commodities and manufactures thereof and caused great Â�detriment to this kingdome in generall” (Jenkins, 21–2). While

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there was an influx of French products after the repeal of the Act in 1685, the statute set in motion a characteristic oscillation between domestic and foreign taxation throughout the next century. Excise authorities had managed the duty on paper since 1712, a function they maintained well into the nineteenth century, and their charter seemed to have been established precisely to neutralize the contrary impulses not only of the trade but also of the government’s interest in it. Until roughly mid-century, the various prohibitions on French imports caused shortages that the domestic trade could not adequately fill. At the same time, British papermakers continuously petitioned Parliament to impose heavy duties on foreign imports while asking for reductions on domestic taxation. The state, torn between the effort to invigorate the domestic trade as part of its “warr” upon France and the need to finance that war through domestic as well as foreign duties, progressively increased duties abroad and at home.22 While they predictably favored the increased taxation on the French trade, English paper-makers repeatedly challenged state policy on domestic paper-making, often in intensely nationalistic terms. In 1688, the prohibition on French imports returned in force because of revolution at home and subsequent war with France, but, ironically, worsened the paper market. The impact on related trades, such as printing, bookbinding, and bookselling, was severe because the domestic market was not sufficient to supply the overall demand. In 1689 the printer Edmund Bohum wrote, “Paper became so deare, also, that all printing stopped, and the stationers did not care to undertake anything, and there was no help that way” (Jenkins, 22). A proposed Act in 1698 was aborted largely by the concentrated dissent of printers, bookbinders, and booksellers because of such national and economic pressures. Until Britain’s paper production finally started to compete viably with French output and quality around the 1740s, those in the print trade were repeatedly torn between a nationalist defense of home trade and the economic incentives associated with meeting the dramatic new demands for printed material. It is not until then, in the same period in which long prose fiction first began to acquire the modern designation of the word “novel,” that the domestic market could compensate for any declines in the foreign trade. As Addison observed, somewhat prematurely, in 1712, “the whole Nation is in great measure supplied with a Manufacture, for which formerly she was obliged to her Neighbours” (Spectator, no. 367, v, 288). We begin to see this shift toward domestic self-sufficiency in eighteenthcentury economic assessments as early as 1713; in that year The British

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Merchant, confirming the effects of the Glorious Revolution on the production of paper, observed that Before the Revolution there was hardly any other paper made in England than brown; but, the war ensuing, and duties being laid down from time to time on foreign paper, it gave such encouragement to the paper-makers, that most of them began to make white paper fit for writing and printing; and they have brought it by degrees to so great perfection, both for quantity and goodness, that they make now near two-thirds of what is consumed in Great Britain; and several of them make it as white and as well-bearing as any comes from abroad. (Jenkins, 27)

As in other ideological spheres at the time, aesthetic terms like smoothness and whiteness denoted not only the practical benefits of a product but resonated with claims to cultural purity as well. As early as 1588, Thomas Churchyard was waxing lyrical at paper “white as snow” that John Spilman’s mill was producing from “rotten ragges.” He was particularly impressed by the benefits of recycling: “Of drosse and rags, that serues no other meane, / and fowle bad shreds, comes Paper white and cleane” (Jenkins, 11). Addison later seconded these sentiments by approving how the “Paper Manufacture” harnessed “mean Materials which could be put to no other use” (Spectator, no. 367, v, 288). John Briscoe, targeting international relations, promoted his “true and proper art and way for making English paper for writing, printing and other uses” especially as it produced paper “as white as any French or Dutch paper … whereby much advantage will redound to the publick by that manufactures being made at home, and great numbers of poor people employed therupon” (Jenkins, 17). In truth domestic white paper was still inferior and, according to some accounts, England’s dependence on imported paper for printed books continued as late as 1740; Conyers Middleton, for example, writing in April of that year about his concerns over delays in the publishing of one of his works, mentions the “total cessation of the press, occasioned by the uncertain return of ships from Genoa since the commencement of the war, during which our large paper is exhausted and not a sheet of it to be had in London till a fresh cargo arrives, which is expected, however, every day” (Jenkins, 29). Only by 1775, according to most historians, had the British paper industry become almost fully independent, not only of the French but of the Dutch and Italians as well; the critical invention of the wove technique in paper processing, often credited to the Birmingham printer and typefounder John Baskerville but created in fact by James Whatman, marked the first time in which a substantial

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innovation in paper-making flowed from Britain to the Continent rather 23 than vice versa. Â� Even so, Hazlitt is still using the trope of the devalued page to signal both class erosion and artificial prose in the nineteenth century: “now the meanest mechanic can both read and write, and the only danger seems to be that every one, high and low, rich and poor, should turn author, and the whole world be converted into waste paper” (Complete Works, ix, 327). As the bookseller pictured in the Rowlandson print that adorns this book’s cover and title page tells Dr. Syntax, “So, if you please, you may retire, / And throw your book upon the fire: / You need not grin, my friend, nor vapour; / I would not buy it for waste paper!” (Combe, 205). These trends in the industry culminated in the establishment of the Company of White Paper-Makers, whose mission was a paradoxical mix of justification and dismissal of the domestic paper industry. James II’s Patent Roll granted the Company exclusive rights for producing “Printing Paper with the Impression of our Court of Armes or any other marke or markes that they shall thinke fitte … for the terme of fourteen years” (Jenkins, 19). Confirmed and prolonged in 1687 by “A PROCL A MATION For Encouraging and better Establishing the Manufacture of White Paper in England,” the group’s monopolistic empowerment paradoxically abetted French interests by limiting English industry and innovation. It is likely, in fact, that James sought to superintend the flow of paper from foreign and domestic sources as a means of censoring the press, and the granting of patents would, in any event, have reinforced other press controls such as stamp duties, paper taxation, and printing licenses. The grant’s restrictive language reveals the degree to which the government, voicing concerns about foreign competition, also sought control of the domestic paper market. The state’s rhetoric, in effect, was often at odds with its legislative practice. James’ divided loyalties to Britain and France, reaching a point of Â�crisis during the tense succession debates between 1685 and 1689, thus find expression in the curious justifications for privileging The Company of White Paper-Makers. On one hand, it was empowered because “the trade with France is found to be of pernicious consequence to this kingdom, much of the treasure of this nation having been exhausted by the importation of vast quantities of the commodities of the earth and manufactures of France, and particularly of white writing and printing paper” (Jenkins, 20). On the other hand, its protection under the government, as several competing paper-makers contended, operated as a drag upon the national independence of the industry. Owned and operated by transplanted

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Frenchmen but defending itself as a patriotic British endeavor, while simultaneously demanding protections that restricted competing domestic producers, the Company distilled the complex mix of national prejudice, international finance, and domestic competition that shaped the actions of the print industry in general. These ideological squabbles often degenerated into coarse arguments in which the quality of paper became a point not only of economic but also metaphoric dispute. The Company, for instance, scoffed at rivals who claimed they could compete with the French, questioning whether they could make “printing-paper in any quantity” and acidly noting that their product “although made of the finest rags, is used only by shopkeepers to wrap up thread, gloves and tobacco” (Jenkins, 20). Derisive references of this sort to the shopkeeping uses of white printing paper often betray both nationalistic and class-based presumptions. Judgments about inferior white paper implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, equated its manufacture to the utilitarian brown paper that initially distinguished lowly English paper-making from superior European manufacture. Such market posturings eventually extended to fictional evocations of the paper wars. The cheaper brown paper, for example, often incited excremental analogies. In one of Pope’s occasional satires, for instance, the infamous bookseller Edmund Curll overturns a “Close-stool” when a pile of essays suddenly falls on his head, causing him to “beshit the Essays,” which, the narrator caustically notes, “may probably occasion a second Edition” (Further Account, 20). Believing that all of his books have come alive, Curll then accosts them by reminding them of their lowly origins: “Did not you come before your Time into dirty Sheets of brown Paper?€– And have not I cloath’d you in double Royal? … Damn ye all, ye Wolves in Sheep’s Cloathing; Rags ye were, and to Rags ye shall return” (21). Pope, killing two birds with one stone, then makes his fictionalized Curll wipe his rear with “the unfinish’d Sheets of the Conduct of the E[arl] of N[ottingha]m” (22). Like respected authors’ obsessions with the cacoethes scribendi of Grub Street, white paper’s kinship to brown paper associated those who worked with paper€– from manufacturers and distributors to booksellers and authors€ – with bodily waste (“Reliques of the Bum,” in Dryden’s colorful phrase).24 Plied as a cheap means to wrap such items as food, money, clothing, hair, and other perishable items, and as an inexpensive aid in wadding or cleaning, brown paper also linked the various uses of printed sheets in the publishing industry to the crass everyday realm of exchange and disposal. Serving as a comic analogue for this depreciation, brown paper repeatedly symbolizes human vanity,

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frivolity, poverty, and frailty in eighteenth-century fiction. The most famous instance may be from Fielding’s Tom Jones when the dismissed maid Jenny packs all her earthly belongings in “a small Quantity of brown Paper” that denotes her destitute circumstances (i, 68). Similarly, in Fanny Burney’s Cecilia the ailing and unattractive hypochondriac, Mr. Briggs, appears with “a large patch of brown paper” on his nose and one cheek, which “as he entered the room, he held on with both of his hands” (ii, 13). In The Female Gamester “bits of brown paper” cover the broken glass in the window-frames of an old miser’s hovel (i, 146). When white paper, whether written or printed, becomes used in the manner of brown paper, as, for instance, when the “remarks” Tristram Shandy leaves in his postchaise are given by the chaise-vamper to his wife who then converts them to “papilliotes” for curling her hair, it manifests what Chartier refers to as “the manifold relationship between inscription and erasure, between the durable record and the ephemeral text” (Inscription, vii). After the woman removes the remarks, “twisted this way … [and] that,” Tristram, thinking of their eventual publication and review, simply muses, “They will be worse twisted still” (vii, 139–40). These paradoxical allusions to both the value and worthlessness of paper had broad consequences, but their impact on the Republic of Letters was especially significant. Swift may have mocked those modern hacks who added uselessly to the “Trash the Press swarms with” (Tale, 14) while they complain that the “tax upon paper” fails to discourage other “scribblers” (13), but his satire signaled a genuine crisis. In eighteenth-century fiction anxieties about the status of paper appear most directly in self-conscious works about the writer’s life, especially one passed in Grub Street. The Adventures of an Author, for instance, focuses on an impoverished writer who must, among other indignities, confront “the tyranny of patentees and booksellers, the additional taxes upon paper and publication, and the little attention of the town to works of genius” (i, 2). The author here links the economics of paper to the problems of copyright and the difficulties of defining “genius,” regarding them as associated causes of what occurs to “the brethren of the quill”: that many “are starved into writing” but “full as many are starved out of it” (i, 2). More common are the repeated instances of a fictional author either watching his “Papers” disappear into a bookseller’s hands without ever resurfacing or seeing them scatter in the public realm without profit. In another scene from Adventures of an Author a would-be writer named Mr. Hyper observes his bundle of paper literally fly off when his bookseller, Mr. Folio, gives them “a cant into the middle of the kennel [a street gutter]” where, “the string breaking,

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the wind dispersed them like Sibyl’s leaves.” “You wanted them published today,” Folio remarks, “and now I think they are made public enough, without the expence of advertising.” Previously identified as Hyper’s “perspective fortune,” the scattered leaves are a comic reminder that a hack’s work, whether published in conventional fashion or exposed accidentally in the street, generally suffers the same besmirched fate. Hyper does not hear Folio’s “bon mot” because he is “too busy in gathering up, as fast as he could, his literary estate” but the narrator extends the joke by noting that half of the sheets “were stolen, and almost all the rest in so muddy a condition, that they could not be vended” (i, 68). Scarce and yet easily devalued, paper comes to represent contradictions in authorship and publishing generally. Even Gildon’s private letter writers, whose work is also stolen, constantly measure the value of their words against the dwindling supply of paper at hand, which both enables and restricts expression: “my Paper denies me to tell the greater Obstacle, which yet remains” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 18); “My Paper won’t hold more” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 31); “you are more oblig’d to my Paper, than Moderation, for an End to my Letter now” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 219); “I have fill’d my Paper, and so adieu” (Post-Man, 43); “who wou’d be out of Fashion, when he may so easily avoid it, as at the Expence only of a little perishable Paper” (Post-Man, 7). These laments reappear throughout the eighteenth century. In Familiar Letters betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1720), Berina frequently notes that her “Zeal has carry’d me to the utmost confines of my Paper” (278), or, thinking on her correspondent, marvels at “what Rheams of Paper” she will “have laid at your feet, cringing for Protection” (283). By the end of the eighteenth century, the trope of diminishing paper could be used satirically as if it were an exhausted cliché, but its appearance nonetheless implies the continuing resonance of the metaphor. As the eponymous hero in Edward Du Bois’ St. Godwin: A Tale of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Century (1800) wryly observes about the compulsion to write, “I could dwell on with delight, but paper is so exceedingly dear, that I must be excused for thus briefly touching on the grand and sublime inventions of the fag-end of 1800” (167). As a metaphor, paper represented the human need to forge a selfÂ�expressive identity (only the pen perhaps has transcended it in this regard). It is a sign, for example, of the abject selfhood of various fictional characters in eighteenth-century literature that they are debarred pen, ink, and paper. Imprisoned male characters repeatedly suffer this ignominy, but one of the most telling examples occurs to the aptly named Thomas Page in the obscure Adventures of a Kidnapped Orphan (1767) when he

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is abducted to the West Indies, forced into the military, and prevented from seeking either release or solace by writing. The events lead the narrator to deplore restrictions on “pen and paper, which were forbidden all the recruits, that they might not have an opportunity of transmitting to their friends in England an account of the base manner in which they had been trepanned, and of publishing to the world the iniquity that is committed through the connivance of justice, and the sanction of wealth and power” (162). Freedom of speech is here literalized, extending from personal deprivation of letters to larger concerns about suppressed publication. In a similar vein, the one condition that comforts Sterne’s Yorick when he imagines his possible imprisonment in the Bastille is the belief that with “pen and ink and paper and patience, albeit a man can’t get out, he may do very well within” (Journey, ii, 22). Readers are continually reminded in such narratives, not only of thwarted desire, but also of the mental anguish that comes from being, in the words of Lewis de Montandre from Penelope Aubin’s The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1723), “deny’d Pen, Ink and Paper” (195). In eighteenth-century fiction, female characters are even more frequently withheld paper and the means to inscribe it, perhaps as a reflection of women’s greater restriction in the circuit of communication. Like the heroine in Judith Alexander’s The Young Lady of Fortune, or Her Lover Gained by Stratagem (1789), they repeatedly bemoan the power others, especially fathers, have “to refuse me even the privilege of pen, ink and paper” (ii, 7). In Alexander’s novel, the heroine, imprisoned like Clarissa by her “obdurate father” (ii, 11), must use a special sign language she has learned in order to relay to a lover her need for writing materials: “I spelt with my fingers, that he should convey me, pens, ink, and paper” (ii, 17). In a curious twist, she uses a non-verbal mode of transmission to acquire the textual means to overcome the loss of oral expression, a sequence that dramatically exposes both the complex integration of gestural, oral, and textual dissemination and the implicit hierarchy of value among such modes of communication. Moreover, given its rag content, paper almost always connoted a greater physical familiarity than ink or pens by its association with clothing. Long before Richardson made Pamela and Clarissa express their emotional intensity by drowning their words in tears upon the page, tearing them into pieces, or wearing them close to their bodies, Behn similarly equated distressed paper and female identity for dramatic and textual effect. In Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683), for instance, when Sylvia is agitated by an impending adulterous rendezvous with her sister’s husband, Philander, she rips up the letter she is writing

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him (though we realize it has been destroyed only after we have read it as an intact document). In a curious gesture, the unnamed editor appends an italicized comment in place of the usual adieu, indicating that “This letter was found torn into pieces” (i, 120). Only in the next letter, written by the maid, Melinda, do we learn that Sylvia’s maid has put “these pieces of paper” together “as well as [she] can” and secretly sent them to Philander (i, 121). In her own letter to the pining lover, Melinda describes Sylvia’s vexed relationship to the mutilated text: “she rose in rage from her seat, tore first the paper, and then her robes and hair” (i, 121). Here, the parallel “violence” to text, clothing, and body marks a discursive circuit from the writer’s hand to the written page and back to the disordered head of the writer. This completes a series of displacements reenacted and revised in rationalized form through the corrective acts of the letter’s intermediary (Melinda), its addressee (Philander), and a publishing agent (the anonymous editor). Behn’s text reproduces several of the transformations by which the perishable word is consigned first to a less perishable handwritten form and then to its presumably least perishable form, the printed page. In such moments, Love-Letters anticipates the material embodiments of handwritten paper that Richardson uses to signal the interplay between manuscript and typographical expression in his fiction, from the visual rendering of Clarissa’s torn letters to her embroidered meditation in black silk on the paper of a cruel letter from her Uncle John (vii, 100) or the Preamble to her will, which, “written on a separate paper,” is “stitched with black silk” (viii, 96). All of these acts indicate the differing value of words on manuscript and printed pages and signal the importance of their rationalization and preservation in printed form, particularly as they communicate the emotional value of fictional characters and their verbal afterlives.25 An inverse fate was reserved for the author who had to overvalue his words in order to satisfy the bookseller’s desire to exploit the expense of paper by publishing expensive editions. As one of the fictional booksellers that John Buncle, Junior approaches, declares, a “young Author” should “imitate the modern mode, and have each single thought elegantly set in the centre of a duodecimo page … Suppose it a trifling one, the Pomposity of the frame will give it an air of consequence” (Cogan, 19). Here, the page’s frame€– that is, the empty margins that surround the text€– not only rescues the author’s words but pads the book’s price. Ignoring Buncle’s manuscript and the value of “its contents” the bookseller focuses only on the work’s material platform, “the beauty of Elziver editions, large types, neat picas, royal paper, the peculiar grace of broad margins, and

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distant lines” (18–19). When Buncle complains that such a method was “a most arbitrary and nasty tax upon men of letters; who in general can least afford to pay it” (19–20), he subtly recalls the similar burden that the tax on paper imposes on writers. The bookseller’s response only confirms how inessential the author is: “MEN of letters, (quoth he) are so few in number, that they cannot reasonably expect particular attention should be paid them; and entre nous, they seldom concern themselves with books of this class: but for the public at large, it is the most kindly tax imaginable” (20). A writer’s lot is not a happy one. Buncle’s bookseller tries to sell him certain advantages to the proposed edition: it makes “a few thoughts valuable”; an “elegant type and superfine paper, is imperceptibly ascribed to the beauty of the sentiment”; and “every thought has full justice done it” (20). But the real benefits are clearly reserved for the consumer: “it is more gratifying to the pride of the Reader. He sets himself down before a pompous Quarto, or Folio, with all the dignity of a professor”; at worst, “he lolls upon the sopha, with his toothpick in his hand [and] has the satisfaction to find that even in his indolent moments€– he can soon become a very voluminous reader” (21). “What a glorious interest this,” adds the bookseller, “for the extraordinary consumption of paper” (22). Rendering the author a mere “tradesman,” the bookseller measures the value of the book by the size of the page, the amount of sheets, the appearance of superfine paper uncluttered by words and thoughts, and ultimately the “increase” in the number rather than the “class” of his “customers” (22). The consumption of paper overrides the various needs of the writer. These paradoxical relations between the word and the page deepen when we consider the interaction between writing, social reading, and authorial dispensation in Gildon’s work. Both The Post-Boy and The PostMan describe a process of publication that figures communication as the conversion of private written documents, whose pages limit the utterances of each constituent writer, into printed matter, whose pages enable widespread public consumption and collaborative interpretation. The history of eighteenth-century paper, as taxation and patent laws suggest, indicates that such communication was bound up in a complex debate over nationhood and the public sphere that strained accepted notions of the nation state and invoked legal prescription. Gildon ultimately makes the correlation between these two levels of signification explicit in the culminating pages of The Post-Man when he proposes his “total” academy to “spread the Glory of the English Name, Wit, Learning, Language and Happiness farther, than the Roman Arms spread theirs” (317). Here, the distinctions between private fiction and real-life declamation that have

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shaped the book all along reach an apogee. Masking himself as one of his own correspondents, Charles Dickson, Gildon charts out his empirebuilding proposal for an academy that would serve the national interests of British letters by preserving the classical principles that he championed and that he believed were threatened by modern neo-classical writers like Swift, Pope, and Rowe. Dickson considers his “total” academy an alternative to an enfeebled Royal Society, “much fallen from its Primitive vigour” (306), and a superior advancement over the French Academy, which “is but a distant Help to Virtue” because its aim is only “to polish the Language, improve Eloquence, and supervise and adjust the Correctness of Stile” (309). Legitimized by a “Charter pass’d by Act of Parliament” (312), it would authorize all literary composition, regulating English writing through a variety of means. The types of control that Gildon proposes for the academy are extensive and startling in their detail. They range from licensing and censoring creative works, to providing authoritative publication of its works and rewarding them with national prizes, to producing a “Book wrote on the Excellence of the English Language, Laws, Constitution, Country, Learning, &c. in all the chief European Tongues” (317), and finally to creating an independent library for the preservation of its exclusively canonical texts. Under the rubric of “their Royal Protector” and governed by a “Chancellor,” an elected board would constitute a corporation of authors, scholars, booksellers, printers, secretaries, lawyers, tradesmen, and ministers, all of whom must provide “substantial Proof of their being born in England, or of English Parents” (311). An “inferior Writer” is even to be retained for composing “the Penny-Books, &c. that spread among the Vulgar” by which “Stories” that instill “Virtue, the Love of their Country, and attempting great Actions” may be “recommended” (317).26 Gildon defended his academy on patriotic as well as practical grounds, like others who advocated similar institutions, including enemies such as Swift, Defoe, John Oldmixion, and Charles Mainwaring. As G. L. Anderson observes, the academy’s purpose was to “restore literature to its proper function in English life” and turn men “from avarice and private interest to a public-spirited attitude toward politics because the love of fame, which writers dispense, will create a suitable reward for public virtue” (248). “The Design of this Proposal,” Dickson avers, would “secure a perpetual Happiness to ourselves, and unspeakable Glory to the English Name” (Post-Man, 305). Unlike other proposals, however, Gildon’s attends specifically to the close monitoring of intellectual property by establishing a “Library-Keeper” to “take care of the Impressions of

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the Academy’s Books” and be “Superintendent of the Press” (314); in addition, it deputes an “Overseer of the Press, a Printer by Education” to purchase and care for “the fairest Letters of all Sorts to make the Impressions the more beautiful” (314). The particulars of Gildon’s proposal reveal a writer who sought to integrate himself not only into the book and paper trades but into social policy making as well. A parody of this vision appears in John Hawkesworth’s The Adventurer (1752–4) when Spinbrain promotes a “design” to “open a NEW LITER ARY WAR EHOUSE, or UNIVERSAL R EGISTER OFFICE FOR WIT AND LEARNING” only to beg the narrator “in the mean time” to “advance him a trifle, to buy paper” for his next work (i, 36). Nearly Borgesian in its desire to compress all knowledge into its own sphere of power, Gildon’s Academy at once protects English authors from market depredations and locks them into both ideological and material practices. It is not surprising then that Gildon’s Academy grants books nearly the same totemic force that Swift attributes to the tomes that Gulliver reads in Brobdignag. Indeed, Gildon emphasizes that fine printing of books is critical to his character Dickson’s enterprise and so Dickson pays particular attention to the paper on which they were to be printed. Echoing the language used by the petitioners, patentees, and members of the Company of White Paper-Makers in their various contributions about the paper trade, Gildon stipulates That the Academy pay no Duties nor Customs for Paper either foreign or English, which will be a Trifle to the Revenue, and will enable them to print on the best Paper cheaper than others on the worst, buying it in at the best hand from the Maker; and that severe Penalties be laid on those that dispose or sell the Academy Papers to others, or under the Name of the Academy import and buy up Paper for any but the Academy: This will in some measure secure the Academy Copies from being pirated on, that is, printed by others. (Post-Man, 315)

Such utilitarian concerns shaped the literary endeavors of other writers as well. Tracing a “bundle of Rags to a Quire of Spectators,” Addison claimed that his “Speculations” served both “Material” and “Formal” ends by virtue of being printed on paper, benefitting the “Publick” because they not only improve the “Minds” of his “Readers” but also “consume a considerable quantity of our Paper Manufacture, employ our Artisans in Printing, and find Business for great Numbers of Indigent Persons” (Spectator, no. 367, v, 287–9). Literature, he suggests, is an equal opportunity employer. Like Addison, Gildon also considered paper both the most humble and the most vital element in the writer’s craft. We see, in other words, the same paradoxical concoction of trade pragmatism, propaganda, cultural

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hegemony, and international competition that shapes the print industry as a whole. In effect, having complicated authorship of his own fiction by submitting himself to the letters of others and raising ample concerns about the potential crimes of writing, he goes on to reassert his command by projecting himself into an organization of institutional authority, a “total” academy, that is meant to stabilize national literary identity. Bearing the traces of Gildon’s nationalistic and authenticating program is the white paper that underlies the text. While Gildon’s Post scripts do not elsewhere allude to paper-making directly, their pervasive self-consciousness about the material conditions of writing and publishing repeatedly alert us to the stationery on which his characters compose their letters. There is, in other words, a paper trail that links fictional representations of the material aspects of writing to the cultural history that made the material available. If authors like Gildon (or Swift, Richardson, Sterne, and Mackenzie) are representative, they show that writers not only detail the incorporation of paper in everyday life; they participate in the cultural turning of the page at all levels. When Gildon’s various writers exclaim “My Paper won’t hold more” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 31) or “you are more oblig’d to my Paper, than Moderation, for an End to my Letter now” (Post-Boy, 2nd edn., 219), they are suggesting that paper works on them as much as they work on it. The potential properties of the author’s intellectual labor, the intricacies of textual reproduction, and the vagaries of transmission and consumption are all contained and suggested by the blank pages they go on to fill.

PA R T T WO

Reader book author One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

(Samuel Johnson, Idler 30, 1758)

I hate books: they only teach people to talk about what they don’t understand. (Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia, 1762)

’Till authors hear at length, one gen’ral cry, Tickle and entertain us, or we die. The loud demand from year to year the same, Beggars invention and makes fancy lame.

(William Cowper, “Retirement,” 1782)

c h apt e r 3

Dark matters: printer’s ornaments and the substitution of text

… it was print, not writing, that effectively reified the word.

(Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, 1982)

I n troduc tion **** *** *** ******

(Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1762)

In the post-Shandean period of eighteenth-century British fiction, books commonly joked about the disappearance of the author, though the jokes themselves frequently made the author a visible function of the text, as the frontispiece of “Somebody” in Bartholomew Sapskull comically suggests. Sterne himself notoriously merged the characters Tristram Shandy and Yorick with his own, as if he did not know which was more imaginary. Tristram Shandy similarly blurs its own identity as a book, not only interleaving Sterne’s fiction and his non-fiction (particularly Yorick’s Sermons) but also borrowing text liberally from prior writers, and mixing visual elements such as the black, marbled, and white pages, with verbal ones.1 Various invitations to the reader to construct the text, as when Tristram offers the reader a blank page to draw the Widow Wadman or dashes off a group of asterisks to be decoded, further make the writer seem part of a collaborative process by which authors, printers, publishers, and consumers constitute “reading matter.” Social and legal pressures often necessitated such deliberate authorial masking, but Sterne (and many other eighteenth-century writers) also used techniques of disavowal to prompt readers to reflect on their own interpretive efforts. In this chapter I examine how Sterne’s work and earlier fiction, such as that by Swift, Richardson, and Thomas Amory, sponsored the reader’s interpretation by turning the text into what seemed an independent object. These moments in which eighteenth-century authors signal the disappearance of their voice ultimately prompt new systems of reading 105

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that intensify rather than diminish the author function. Hiding what is in plain sight, the writer who makes a point of foregrounding a text’s objective status is simultaneously advertising the labor that goes into making it and the significant role that the author plays in its manufacture. If print reified the word, those writers who deliberately exploited print’s capacities were also reifying themselves. Tristram Shandy has long been considered sui generis. But other works of fiction were already beginning to explore the textual effects that helped make Sterne’s book famous. And like Tristram Shandy, they artfully engage the reader’s explicit awareness of the text’s material embodiment. A lesser known work of fiction such as Thomas Amory’s 1756 narrative The Life of John Buncle, Esq, for example, adopts as eccentric an approach to the author–text function as Sterne’s work. Amory’s fiction, which probably influenced Sterne,2 is, in fact, one of the most overtly metaliterary Künstlerromane in the period. Its narrating protagonist refers to himself repeatedly as “the author” and to his audience as “the Reader,” and frequently describes his development as a writer in marginal glosses, inserts, and footnotes, organizing the main story as numbered “memorandums,” perhaps in imitation of the numerical system in his favorite book, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (Figure 9). Throughout, dashes of five different lengths, like Sterne’s, signal the different cognitive and emotional responses demanded of the reader, and manifest Buncle’s experimental blending not only of text and paratext but also of the verbal and non-verbal. Amory, like writers before and after him, recognized the particularly effective manner in which fiction could harness the material properties of printed text to shape his relationship with his readers. By expanding on Fielding’s self-conscious chapter divisions and anticipating Sterne’s digressive technique (as well as the latter’s wry fascination with Locke), Buncle turns the writer’s life into a fictional model for how readers might embrace “tender stories” and “miscellany thoughts upon several subjects,” but also learn how to participate critically in “the advancement of valuable Learning” (2). More importantly, he tries to precondition the reception of his book by fashioning readers as sympathetic amateurs, in contrast to the professional critics he attacks with false flattery in his “Preface by Way of Dedication.” Exploiting and condensing the period’s ongoing satirization of paratext, Amory not only addresses his critics in the dedicatory “Preface,” but also dedicates the book to them on a separate page before they have even had a chance to review it: “to the criticks, this jour nal Is most humbly dedicated, by

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Figure 9╇ Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq (1756), 28.

Their most humble Servant, The author” (i, iv). Using capitalization strategically, Buncle inflates the critics and, tongue in cheek, derogates the twice-humbled writer (with only slight elevation of his generic name, “the author,” at the adieux). The point of these addresses is to damn the critics with excessive praise; when Buncle declares, “I wish you all happiness; that your heads may lack no ointment, and your garments be always white and odiferous” (ix), he ridicules the saintly self-importance of the professional critic. By attacking one of the increasingly crucial mechanisms by which books reached the attention of potential consumers (reviewing), the preface works strategically against its own apparent interests. Trying to control the public response to a text before it appears in print, Amory expresses the growing need for fiction to anticipate its reception and cull desirable sentimentally educated readers from within an increasingly mediated system of distribution. (These petitions to the reader were learned perhaps

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from drama’s long-standing practice of preparing an audience for a play in spoken prologues€– and, later, printed ones€– where actors briefly step into meta-critical roles that both qualify the distinction between character and performer and collapse the authorial voice with the star appeal of a leading man or woman.) Amory’s assertion that “Things in print must stand by their own worth” (iv), masks fears that writers had to carefully situate themselves in a field of cultural production that made the author an increasingly tautological concept. As he puts it, “the volumes” of his “work, which are to be published, would be quite dark, and not so grateful as intended, without a previous account of the author’s life” (vi). Ironically, Amory’s insinuation about the mercenary character of critics and the plainness of the book’s intentions only netted corresponding criticism of his own pedantic excesses.3 Indeed, “Buncle” became a catchword for the self-styled academic, as the anonymous Adventures of Oxymel Classic, Esq; Once an Oxford Scholar (1768) implies when its writer sardonically calls his own work as inferior to Roman standards as “the stile of John Buncle is to that of Cicero” (i,€iv). Buncle’s studied cultivation of a proper reader ultimately depended on an explicit accounting of his consumers, from the antagonistic and critical to the sympathetic and learned, which, in turn, subjected him to the same accusations of artificiality he directed at his reviewers. That John Buncle, Esq shaped subsequent attitudes toward prose Â�fiction’s physical form is indicated not only by Tristram Shandy but also by Thomas Cogan’s derivative fiction John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman (1776). If Amory’s modest impact on later writers indicates that his preoccupation with the material exchanges among writers, critics, and readers was more than a simple aberration, Cogan’s work shows that the preoccupation included how authors conceived their own textual embodiment. Presented as the progeny of Buncle, Esq, Buncle, Junior deliberately extends the authorial self-presentation of its predecessor. It too makes the author’s concerns so visibly a part of the narrative that, rather than simply exalting the writer’s craft, it emphatically foregrounds the reader’s Â�relationship to the physical text. First published anonymously in Dublin in a one-volume edition, Cogan’s work underlines the author’s self-consciousness about how texts become commodities. The contents page alone forces the reader to confront the book’s constitutive parts because Buncle assigns recursive titles such as “Title Pages,” “Editions,” “Dedications,” and “Sentimental Writing” to chapters on these very subjects as he attempts to find a publisher for his own work. The initial chapters, in turn, show that textual properties (“Title Pages,” and “Dedications”), genre (“Sentimental

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Figure 10╇ Thomas Cogan, John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman (1776), title page.

Writing”), and subject matter (topics such as “London,” “Elections,” and “Talkative Woman”) are purposely interlinked. Unlike later editions, moreover, the Dublin title page adds a set of printer’s ornaments in the place where either Cogan’s name or a suitable illustration would normally have appeared, indicating the printer’s or bookseller’s complicity in the fiction (Figure 10). The bare simplicity of the initial title page, carrying only “John Buncle, Jun,” the ornaments, and minimal publisher’s information, was evidently deliberate. In the chapter entitled “Title Pages,” which has its own extra title page, the narrator describes the various motivations that booksellers ascribe to the title page. According to the first “dealer” to whom Buncle applies, a man named “Mr. Editor,” an elaborate title serves as a commercial means to manipulate sales. Countering Buncle’s assumption that a “simple” title will “distinguish” his book from “every

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other publication” and allow his work’s “merits” to “do the rest” (3–4), Mr. Editor asks, “can the merits of a book ooze themselves into the first page, or sweat thro’ the binding?” (4). He reads the elements of the book, that is, in purely materialist terms. For him, a book must manufacture its value: “The title-page now becomes a downright chapter of contents; exhibiting, like a broker’s shop, such a variety of articles to the view of the spectator, that the deuce is in it if none of them will catch him” (11). Creating a mise en abyme out of a basic mise en page, “Title Pages” effectively mimics the book’s status as a perpetually reproducible object of trade meant to replicate readers endlessly. All the other professionals that Buncle, Junior encounters in his attempt to publish his “MSS.” (3) essentially reiterate Mr. Editor’s materialist Â�position. One “bibliopolist” assures Buncle that “the beauty of Elziver editions, large types, neat picas, royal paper, the peculiar grace of broad margins, and distant lines” (18–19) will be “imperceptibly ascribed to the beauty of sentiment, clearness of expression in the work itself” (20). In contrast, the “choicest ideas of the greatest Wit, huddled together in narrow lines, with a misty letter-press, and on spungy paper, lose all their brilliancy, and absolutely sink in with the ink” (21). Ultimately, the purpose is to deceive a gullible readership: “a flattering edition excites every one’s curiosity. It is naturally supposed a work must have some extrinsic merit, or the editor would not have had the presumption to have been at such an extraordinary expence: and the whole impression stands a chance of being sold off, before the public are aware of their mistake” (23). Caveat lector. The bookseller who advises Buncle, Junior to write a “handsome dedication” and “look out for some one to whom you may inscribe it” (38) echoes the same belief that business and writing are synonymous when he advises Buncle to “learn, tradesman like, to sacrifice every other passion to the shrine of your own emolument” (34). In all of these representative encounters with the book trade, Cogan emphasizes a standard collusive practice between writer and bookseller at the expense of the reader’s interests that suggests a more complex relationship between authorship and publishing than Rowlandson, for example, portrays in his depiction of the needy author’s encounter with a bookseller (Figure 4). Even though Buncle rejects all temptations by presenting his succinctly self-titled book, in an unadorned pocket-sized form, with a dedication inscribed to “R ELIGION, VIRTUE, AND PLEASANTRY” (39), the inference is that he is unique among the generality of needy authors. Like John Buncle, Esq and Tristram Shandy, John Buncle, Junior proposes that the writer’s craft involves both a series of encounters with the

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book-making profession and a new emphasis on the process of reading. What in conventional works would constitute the preliminaries have become fully fledged chapters that present a litany of unscrupulous bookselling tactics meant to alert writers and readers alike to the contingencies of printed literature. If the fictional booksellers assume authors are potential partners in crime, they also presume that readers lack the ability to consume prudently. As Mr. Editor disdainfully observes, “You must know that the generality of purchasers never trust to their own judgment in the books they buy” (14). Cogan’s satiric anatomy of the book industry not only exposes the trade, it demands that readers pay attention to how the material text (including its paratext) could be used to control their interpretive activity. In a manuscript society the material nature of the text is, presumably, as apparent to the reader as in a print culture, but unlike the illuminated or handwritten works of an earlier era, Tristram Shandy, Bartholomew Sapskull, the two generations of John Buncle, and Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (perhaps the inspiration for the later texts) deliberately picture themselves as textual machines that banish the author in order to encourage an objective readership. They thus tend to divide a naturalized concept of authorship from the reader’s awareness of the automatized and autonomous text, making the author appear to disappear. Such authorial claims to neutrality have often been considered preludes to the operations of an omniscient narrator in late eighteenth-century works by writers such as Burney and Austen. The sentimental and selfconscious narrators that appear in British fiction from the 1760s onward frequently use the narrator’s exemplary affect as a means to objectify for the reader ideal states of emotional responsiveness. But experiments in neutralizing the author, usually to preserve a semblance of the objective status of the text, appear in prose fiction long before Amory, Sterne, or Cogan and often assume a decidedly textual form. The aim behind these overt demonstrations of invisible authorship appears to be the cultivation of proactive readers, figures who do “trust to their own judgment.” The more that works like the two Buncles exaggerate the reader’s Â�capacity to constitute a text with heightened visual elements such as variable dashes, asterisks, florets, indices, footnoting symbols, brackets, parentheses, and white space, the more they also denote authorial presence. Similarly, the references to the “dear Reader” that begin to populate Â�narratives in the wake of Sterne’s ostentatiously playful addresses to his audience have been construed as part of the strategic development in prose fiction toward entrusting the reader, a shift from the Age of the

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Author to the Age of the Reader.4 By the nineteenth century such idiosyncratic textual play had diminished perhaps because it finally reminded readers, critics, and booksellers too much of the writer’s intrusive hand. Indeed, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction has often been celebrated for the way in which it uses free indirect discourse, omniscience, and psychological depth to make author and narrator less obtrusive agents in the reader’s enjoyment of and education by a text. Nonetheless, in eighteenth-century fiction, the author’s deliberate reference to the reading matter in the consumer’s hand could seem a self-promoting form of de-authorization that, however paradoxically, asserted the writer’s proprietary interest in the material. As this chapter goes on to demonstrate, the strategic foregrounding of textual autonomy and hidden authorial manipulation affected some of the minutest aspects of layout and design. While I focus on certain typographical marks, often called “printer’s ornaments,” a variety of elements, from punctuation to white space, could betray an author’s encroachment upon and control of printing-house responsibilities. Printer’s ornaments, however, had a peculiar semantic charge, especially as employed in prose fiction. Named for the trade figure that owned them as typeface, their deliberate use by authors reveals a collaborative urge that veers toward craft appropriation. A playful row of asterisks signaling mysteriously omitted language on various pages in The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), another of Tristram Shandy’s precursor texts (Figure 11), would likely have prompted different associations in the eighteenth century than in either a manuscript era or a late print culture like our own. Similarly, when Mr. Editor, in Cogan’s John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman, proclaims that booksellers use “little puffing arts” to exploit “public credulity” by “prudently reserving our ornaments for those who stand more in need of them” (8), he alludes not only to the general techniques of publishers but also to the methods of a book like the one in which he appears, where an intensely self-referential title page employs exactly such ornaments to fill the space ordinarily occupied by the actual author’s name. Perpetually standing in for names of all sorts, printed flowers, stars, and dashes in this period denote not only concerns about libelous matter but also, in many instances, the intention to activate the reader’s participation in a modern textual economy (to the point where fictional texts about fictional people concoct asterisks in order to make the story appear real). At the same time, asterisks and flowers are also notable for their inertness, as marks that the reader may choose to ignore. Printer’s ornaments, in other words, belong to the printed matter of a

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Figure 11╇ The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), 58.

text, and, as such, they manifest both historical and ideological effects, and, simultaneously, incite and defer the reader’s interpretive skill. S wi f t ’s c h as m s Alas! Who can pass over his Impudence and Scurrility without remarking it with an Asterism of Wonder and Destruction.

(A Cat May Look upon a King [1720?])

Asterism (*) guides to some Remark in the Margin, or at the Foot of the Page. Several of ’em set together signify that there is something wanting, defective, or immodest in that Passage of the Author.

(Thomas Dyche, A Guide to the English Tongue, 1710)

A Tale of a Tub experiments with the creative exploitation of traditional forms of paratext for a particularly acerbic moral purpose, offering a

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striking visual parody that exposes the practices of what Swift disparagingly calls “Modern Authors” (79). Like his notorious use of narrative persona, Swift’s inventive juxtaposition of printed elements€ – the body of the text as opposed to its footnotes, for example€– tends to multiply points of view rather than resolve them dialectically. That is, print, as a medium, tends to subsume rather than establish authority.5 Its tendency to sanction the proliferation of words at the expense of assentable meaning propels A Tale’s repeated reduction of the modern author to the status of an object. In the text the author’s spiraling loss of control is reproduced in the editorial paraphernalia that repeatedly defers the narrator’s tale (itself a rambling set of incoherent digressions) and situates Swift increasingly further outside the narrative. A Tale erects so many visible obstructions to orderly reading that it challenges the reader to confront not only the speaker’s modes of obfuscation but the misdirections of the printing process as well. Such verbal excess reflects, according to Swift, a society saturated by print. A Tale’s modern writer, having noted that “Fate has flung me into so blessed an Age for the mutual Felicity of Booksellers and Authors, whom I may safely affirm to be at this day the two only satisfy’d Parties in England ” (127), finally admits that this self-serving state of the “trade” culminates in the writer’s total self-absorption (even the twinning of “Booksellers” and “Authors” through italicization suggests the medium’s tendency to collapse the two). At the conclusion the narrator declares: “I am now trying an Experiment very frequent among Modern Authors; which is, to write upon Nothing: When the Subject is utterly exhausted, to let the Pen still move on; by some called, the Ghost of Wit, delighting to walk after the Death of its Body” (150). Here, the nothingness of the writer’s discourse aptly parallels the modern’s anonymity. That the narrator of A Tale is unnamed in the text mirrors not only the emptiness of his rhetoric or the mechanical productions of his pen but also the vacuity of his public status as an author. Though perfectly willing to boast about his fame, the modern is, ironically, never identified in the course of his own work, correlating the situations of both the projected and real author. Swift himself was apparently chary of his public fame as an author€ – to the extent that he often kept his authorship hidden from his own bookseller and printer. Perhaps even more impressive was his tendency in private correspondence to refer to A Tale not by title but as “&c.” (a habit he carries over into the “Apology,” whose full title is “AN APOLOGY For the, &c.”). This circumlocution likely served as a private joke about A Tale’s redundancy, anonymity, publicity, and reliance on

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print, even as it safeguarded Swift’s reputation. But it required a sacrifice. As Irvin Ehrenpreis claims, “Swift hated to admit in public (though he did in private) how frantically he desired fame. From the time of his earliest preserved letters and poems we see Swift yearning to be widely known as a literary genius” (Swift, i, 331). This suggests a strong psychological division in Swift that might stem from, among other things, his conflict over being a powerful ecclesiastical figure and a more secular or profane author. Objecting in a letter to his publisher Benjamin Tooke that “there is no book, however so vile, which may not be fastened on me,” Swift, despite his concerns elsewhere, appears “nettled,” Loewenstein remarks, as much by “attribution” of other works to him as “misattribution” of his own: “Swift longs for a law of attribution, at the same time resisting the climate of compulsory authorship, a climate that not only heated the market in books but had heated Swift’s own imagination” (229). Apart from inverting Swift’s concerns about publicly acknowledging A Tale, the narrator’s namelessness highlights the very ephemerality and unreliability of modern publishing he hopes to redress; the more Swift evades compulsory authorship, the more he creates an autonomous book with a life of its own. This condition of alienation, where objects assume narration while the writer is “sunk in the Abyss of Things” (Tale, 3), parallels the contradictory relation between the modernist’s words and the textual apparatus that surrounds them. A Tale bristles with supplementary discourses and typographical effects, from the prefatory material and explanatory footnotes to section breaks and marginal commentary, that repeatedly call into question the power of printed text to provide meaning, even as it compulsively supplies meanings. Swift stakes a place for the legitimate author, not directly in the text, but as an unarticulated effect of the satiric text. One purpose of these devices is to erode not only the narrator’s discreteness as an authorized voice but also the putative editor’s or bookseller’s professional status. Swift specifically identifies and derides the authority that contemporary publishing automatically provides; the modern can write because of the “Preferment and Sanction in Print” and the “Liberty and Encouragement of the Press” (152). In this instance, the joke extends even to the modern’s dependence on the medium to convey his message. That “Print” is italicized suggests an undue importance. As the narrator points out, “THER E are certain common Privileges of a Writer,” and he uses them for a singular, if ultimately, empty purpose: “where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couch’d underneath” (15). In particular, he enlists the minute

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conventions of print, including capitalization and italicization, to create an air of profundity: “whatever Word or Sentence is printed in a different Character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either of Wit or Sublime” (22). The narrator not only employs the technique he is explaining by italicizing “Wit” and “Sublime,” he may be choosing to Â�capitalize “Word,” “Sentence” and “Character” but not “something” (a noun as well) to suggest distinctions in their particular material nature.6 A Tale explicitly dramatizes print’s capacity to justify an author’s “elaborate” discourse (16). It is one of the earliest fictional grapplings with the relationship between text and paratext. Robert Phiddian has characterized Swift’s work as an attempt by the narrator to “justify his utterance with flawed and poorly fabricated tropes of authority” (35). In A Tale the tropes to which Phiddian refers regularly assume textual form, usually as dramatic ellipses marked by asterisks; indeed, Swift may be among the first British writers to exploit the asterisk for an extended fictional purpose. It is thus not only figuratively but also in a material or visual way that the speaker’s discursive authority is challenged (Figure 12). Moreover, it is not the narrator alone but the book industry that is guilty of producing meaningless discourse. The gaps in Swift’s narrative certainly represent points of strain in the modernist’s ideology where his contradictions reach an irresolvable impasse. But a significant aspect of this poorly manufactured authority is the printed matter that ostensibly stands apart from the narrator’s discourse (like the marginal notes beside and the footnotes below the text). Criticism of A Tale frequently addresses print culture’s relevance to Swift’s depiction of Grub Street writers; but it has yet to systematically analyze the typographic elements of the text in relation to the theme of publishing.7 Many of Swift’s interventions target one crucial consequence of publishing: as print seemed to authorize the written word, it simultaneously depleted the author’s language of its uniqueness and affective force. By supplementing ironic discourse with physical representations of selfdestructive text, Swift produced an authorial figure that both embodied print culture and resisted it passionately, producing fame through the mechanics of the print industry while emphatically reserving the imprimatur of an authorial name. His penchant in A Tale for inserting rows of asterisks to mark startling gaps in his modern persona’s logic€– what he called, borrowing from the printer’s lexicon, “Chasms” (xvii, xxi, 125)€ – signals the slippages between his hidden art, the modern writer’s loquaciousness, and the printer’s craft. These are moments when the narrator’s heightened rhetoric, written but silently disavowed by Swift, becomes

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Figure 12╇ Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1724), 6th edn., 10.

unsustainable€– when modern enthusiasm leads him to the brink of incoherence. Swift’s art, in contrast, remains whole by, in essence, floating free of the printed page, though it is enabled by the crude excesses of modernity. By the fifth edition of A Tale, when Swift added parodic footnotes and an author’s “Apology,” the blame for narrative gaps falls increasingly on the print industry’s careless treatment of manuscripts. The “Apology,” for instance, complains, “In the Authors Original Copy there were not so many Chasms as appear in the Book; and why some of them were left he knows not; had the Publication been trusted to him, he should have made several Corrections of Passages, against which nothing hath been ever objected ” (xvii). This grievance contradicts the narrator’s euphoric descriptions of the relations between authors and booksellers, which appear later in the text but were, purportedly, written earlier. The reader’s understanding of

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the grievance may be complicated, moreover, by the uncertainty of whose voice(s) it indicates. If the word “author” signifies the narrator of, then the “Apology” prepares us for his eventual inconsistency. If “author” means Swift, then the “true” author is also creating fabrications about himself, since Swift certainly supplied the “chasms” in the first place (though their appearance was likely prompted by mishaps to his manuscripts). Even if we accept the Apology’s complaint that the printer caused the gaps and assume that Swift’s original copy was indeed so mangled, Swift’s continued exploitation of this “error” in the fifth edition when he had ample opportunity to make corrections reinforces how fully he reproduced the complicity between author and printer in the modern fabrication of texts. The asterisks, as conspicuous material points on the page whose authorization is unclear, repeatedly denote this blurred relationship between printer and author. The modern’s own objections about scholarly commentators thus extend to the printing process as well; in the “Republic of dark Authors,” he notes, “numberless Commentators,” employing “Scholiastick Midwifery” to plumb profound texts, “hath deliver’d them of Meanings, that the Authors themselves, perhaps, never conceived, and yet may very justly be allowed the Lawful Parents of them: The Words of such Writers being like Seed, which, however scattered at random, when they light upon a fruitful Ground, will multiply far beyond either the Hopes or Imagination of the Sower” (130–1). Along with mordant references to husbandry and childbearing, the calculated hedging of “perhaps” and the deliberate vagueness of the first “them” intensify confusion over who conceives, owns, and profits from the published text. Moreover, playing on the shaded meanings of darkness and illumination, Swift seems to call up the very “stars” he uses to obscure the modern’s text elsewhere (the word asterisk, after all, derives from the Latin root for star). As the narrator notes, commentators are numberless because “Night being the universal Mother of Things, wise Philosophers hold all Writings to be fruitful in the Proportion they are dark” and thus interpretation falls to the “true illuminated (that is to say, the Darkest of all)” (130). This assessment, in turn, anticipates the modern’s famous metaphor on obscure authors: I have one Word to say upon the Subject of Profound Writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and, I know very well, the judicious World is resolved to list me in that Number. I conceive therefore, as to the Business of being Profound, that it is with Writers, as with Wells; A Person with good Eyes may see to the Bottom of the deepest, provided any Water be there; and that often, when there is nothing in the World at the Bottom, besides Dryness and Dirt, tho’ it be but a

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Yard and a half under Ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous Deep, upon no wiser a Reason than because it is wondrous Dark. (150)

The puns on birthing and scatology continue here, but the emphasis on profundity also activates another of Swift’s repeated metaphors€ – the abyss. Chasms, in other words, highlight for the text’s putative and real author tensions between authentic and unreliable modes of production and public dissemination. The asterisks that constitute the chasms reflect, in turn, the paradox of paratext, insofar as, like stars, they symbolize light but, as a printer’s device, they stand as dark matter on the page. The black stars on the page might, therefore, be construed as images of inversion, and thus, Luciferan. They paradoxically embody that moment when the print industry colludes with the author in reproducing incoherence, or in Swift’s language, “Darkness.”8 Swift exploits this tendency vengefully as a means to display the alienation of the writer at the same time that he tries to sustain his own absolute control over such material. The minutia of the asterisks matches the “author’s” obsession with trivial matters as well as the modern publisher’s willingness to hurry works into the market that are both incomplete and trade upon the interchangeability of words and symbols, meaning and incoherence, or writing and authorship. There are, of course, many typographical, as well as thematic, instances of rupture in Swift’s work. The asterisk, however, as a signal of a manuscript hiatus, is one of his most paradoxical indications of the author’s vexed relation to publication.9 Literally, the asterisks represent nothing. Yet they are visible emblems themselves. They reproduce, in other words, the problematic issue that A Tale repeats thematically and discursively. They suggest that the narrator’s concluding remarks are redundant€ – he has already been, in critical places, literally writing nothing. Indeed, the patent absence of words within the modernist’s discourse is simply the obverse of the tale’s continual deferment by a sequence of apologies, prefaces, dedications, introductions, advertisements, and addresses from the bookseller. The under-representation of the word in the body of A Tale thus mirrors the over-preparation of the word in its surrounding apparatus, inverting the customary proportions between text and paratext. The asterisks are particularly significant, however, because they embody not the imagined reality of a lost manuscript but the pretense of that absence. As Swift’s fictional editor explains in a footnote to the first major break (which is itself marked by an asterisk), Here is pretended a Defect in the Manuscript, and this is very frequent with our Author, either when he thinks he cannot say any thing worth Reading, or when he

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has no mind to enter on the Subject, or when it is a Matter of little Moment, or perhaps to amuse his Reader (whereof he is frequently very fond) or, lastly, with some Satyrical Intention. (27)

In swift succession, the editor articulates the various possible causes for such a ruse€– the worthlessness of modernist discourse, the madness of the writer (if we accept the phrase “he has no mind” as a pun), or his mental vacuity (if we do not), the frivolity of the writing, the book’s role as pure entertainment, and finally the meaningful satiric aim of such gestures. But the footnote itself suggests that attempts to assign stable meaning to text parallel the reading of unmeaning textual signs like the asterisks; the either/or structure of the sentence founders rhetorically as the annotator wrestles with the modernist’s impenetrable text, suggesting that the publishing establishment itself, even when it adopts a critical perspective, cooperates in the production of meaninglessness.10 Later, the usually speculative editor will, in an act of faith, simply acknowledge, “I cannot guess the Author’s meaning here, which I would be very glad to know, because it seems of Importance” (136). Swift finds the asterisk, marginal note, and footnote suspect because they shift attention (literally and conceptually) from the primary text, which is already dangerously distanced by being printed in the first place. A Tale’s paratext seems to alert us to gaps in the discourse, but, in effect, even as they mark the narrator’s lapses, they serve as the means to divert the reader from his visible failures. Elaborate scholarly procedures thus tend to reproduce the logical confusions they set out to elucidate. In the fifth edition of A Tale Swift extended this critique by parodying the unauthorized annotations to the first edition that William Wotton published separately in 1705 as Observations Upon the Tale of a Tub (which both criticized and explicated Swift’s work). Swift simply inserted these annotations, marked by Wotton’s name, into the new edition. Even when Wotton’s footnotes correctly gloss Swift’s material, they are inevitably usurped of their authority simply by being jumbled with the other signed and unsigned footnotes. Original paratext in the first edition, glossed by another form of paratext, the marginal note, becomes glossed further in the fifth edition by an additional and relatively recent type of paratext, the footnote, suggesting a parallel historical corruption in writing, scholarly exegesis, and the art of book-making. “Fools in my opinion,” Swift once wrote to Pope, “are as necessary for a good writer, as pen, ink, and paper” (Correspondence, i, 390–1). A vacant discourse that nonetheless articulates, or at least symbolizes, meaning results from such authorial practice. Asterisks and their attending footnotes speak, ironically, to the

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larger cultural rifts that Swift’s satire addresses, including the “Rupture” in theological tenets and biblical textual authority that the Reformation promulgated (Swift even uses an asterisk to explain that very word in a footnote: “By this Rupture is meant the Reformation” [76]). Such aporia complicate the modern author’s relation not only to his own writing, or published versions of it, but also to the print industry’s role in the ongoing creation of the text. The shifting of voice here, like the oscillation between the fictional author and imaginary bookseller, or the narrator and Swift, in the introductory matter, blurs the professional boundaries of the two, suggesting that print is both a suitable medium for the modern’s demented rhetoric and the incitement of such incoherence. In a footnote, appropriately marked by a dagger, the editor counters the claim that interpreters are “Lawful Parents” of “Meanings” that “Authors themselves, perhaps, never conceived” by observing, “Nothing is more frequent than for Commentators to force Interpretation, which the Author never meant” (Tale, 130). Alluding to himself, other critics and, implicitly, all readers, his “Nothing” confirms a separation of reading from textual constraints. The book’s production thus reflects a mode of reproduction that could, in a sense, precede as well as inform the author’s “original” or anterior production.11 In Swift, then, major internal breaks in the text, almost always accompanied by scholarly annotation that querulously notes their obfuscation, signal confrontations between the author and the conventions of the printed book. Oddly enough, however, attempts to clarify asterisks and expose their emptiness endow them with meaning, particularly in relation to problems of intentionality. For example, given the presence of asterisks, and footnotes speculating on what they represent, how do we imagine the manuscript that the editor describes as having pretended defects? Has the modernist intentionally disfigured the paper, misnumbered pages to make it seem as if some are missing, or intentionally supplied an imperfect original copy (presumably marking the printer’s copy with asterisks that stand for gaps which never existed)? Or did the lost passages result from pirating and tampering of the manuscript copy by another agent? If so, were the asterisks provided by that intermediary, the editor, or the printer? And, if one of these, how would the annotator then know the hiatuses were “pretended”? Other significant breaks only intensify problems of interpretation. At the next large one the annotator recedes as authoritative commentator, offering no range of possible meanings: “the Matter which thus strained his Faculties, was not worth a Solution; and it were well if all Metaphysical

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Figure 13╇ Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1724), 6th edn., 135.

Cobweb Problems were no otherwise answered ” (117). Unlike earlier footnotes, this one reinforces the modern’s vacancy by shrugging away a solution; the footnote is no better than the missing text (Figure 13). Indeed, the Latin marginal note, which appears also in earlier unannotated editions, conveys a more complex attitude toward the absent text than in the first “Hiatus in MS” (117). The conventional phrase “Hic multa desiderantur” (a great deal is wanting here), which may be attributable to the modernist or a subsequent annotator, articulates both a customary acknowledgment of a defective manuscript and an ambiguous critical response to the work, either “we wish the text were here” or “much is to be desired in the writer’s mode of argument.” If the Latin should be ascribed to the “Author,” it reflects an equally complex attitude about seeking to say more than one is intellectually equipped to offer or recall. Such succinct Latin glosses serve as miniature versions of the large-scale

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warfare between ancient and modern discourse that occupies The Battle of the Books, and that, elsewhere in A Tale, frames the modernist’s authority.12 Reversing precedent, the dismissive footnote becomes less explanatory as the hiatus and its original marginal comment become more intricately enmeshed. At the final major break, the annotator simply disappears, letting the original marginal notation speak for itself (144). This note is, in fact, preceded by a transitional footnote that portends the annotator’s final abrogation. Marked by dashes rather than asterisks, the attending note merely states, “I cannot conjecture what the Author means here, or how this Chasm could be fill’ d, tho’ it is capable of more than one Interpretation” (125). The inability to conjecture at this point indicates that the annotator has become hopeless. At the final major chasm, precisely where we expect a routine gloss, none appears. The marginal “Desunt nonnulla” (or, not a few words are missing) stands alone, perhaps the most concise but evocative of A Tale’s involuted demonstrations of nothingness (144). Swift’s irony is calculated; as the original notes become increasingly cryptic and suffused by eighteenth-century culture wars, the footnotes become less explanatory until, like the narrator’s concluding allusion to writing “Nothing,” they themselves have nothing to say. A Tale’s asterisks had a durable influence on later writers, mostly in the form of prose fiction. Although poetry also explored the same typographic play, the relationship between its historic status and the advent of print follows a different arc. Even when Swift writes poetry that matches A Tale’s experimentalism, he rarely, if ever, resorts to masking a break in the text with rows of asterisks. Similarly, Pope’s Dunciad mostly eschews such aposiopetic effects.13 It is in prose, and in Peri Bathous most notably, that Pope first demands the particular kind of mock erudition, probably learned from Swift, that interpreting a long sequence of asterisks requires (Figure 14). Describing the vulgar “Stile” of the “double Entendre” among “Persons of the first Quality,” in which “Images of the Genital Parts of Men or Women” permeate fashionable conversation “Alamode,” Pope censors his “PRURIENT” text by inserting rows of asterisks designated as a “Hiatus Magnus lachrymabilis” (ii, 125). These stars purportedly replace “Metaphors drawn from two most fruitful Sources or Springs, the very Bathos of the human Body”€– that is, Pope identifies what is, in reality, hardly a lamentable loss of words, anticipating Sterne’s use of grouped asterisks to denote the language that the chambermaid employs to exhort Tristram to “piss out the window” (see the asterisks of the second Â�epigraph at the head of this chapter).

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Figure 14╇ Alexander Pope, Peri Bathous, in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, (1728), 2nd edn., ii, 125.

Similarly, in Spectator 568, Addison manipulates the conventions of the asterisk in an essay that typically blurs fictional recreation and factual reporting. Parodying a reader who does not know that “Asterisks” and “Stars” are synonymous, Addison imagines overhearing coffee-house conversations by a “gross Tribe of Fools” who “construe” a “Chasm, that … looks Â�modest enough” into “private Satyr and personal Reflection” (Spectator, no. 568, viii, 67–9). Adopting a newspaper tactic in which dashes and asterisks indicate un-nameable figures, Addison produces obviously invented, easily decodable, or purposely mystifying examples of such words (“Lady Q-p-t-s,” “Ch-rch,” “P-dd-ng,” “B€– y,” and “T€– t”) that the men attempt to construe. In a fine comic turn, he then introduces an “Overwise” gentleman who complains about such use of typographical marks; quoting the man, Addison employs the very “two Dashes” that

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the speaker finds offensive: “What is the world come to? Must every Body be allowed to€– ?” On the verge of hearing a phrase such as “use a dash,” we instead encounter a real dash (the result, as we soon learn, of the speaker’s having cut short his words in order to smoke his pipe with “so much Rage and Trepidation that he almost stifled the whole Company”). Figure, gesture and emotion dwindle in an instant to a short epithetical line of ink. Readers of eighteenth-century fiction repeatedly confronted such moments when words appear to evaporate and unspoken feelings or bodily presence occupy the non-verbal elements of the printed page. In Peri Bathous the “Bathos of the human Body” mirrors the lowly asterisks (or mere “Marks”) as symbols of absence that paradoxically duplicate the body’s corporeality. Spectator 568 traps the overwise reader in a typographical cul-de-sac where visible text paradoxically masks the embodied word. Swift’s asterisks are conspicuous, then, because they reveal the arbitrary (if necessary) conditions of modern writing in a print culture: they serve a thematic purpose only if we ourselves thematize them; they signify, in the manner of words, only if we let them stand for words that are not only absent but are supposed never to have existed; they convey symbolic meaning only if we treat them as symbols, and symbols of an existential void at that. Ultimately, they signal a discursive problem for the contemporary reader, in which the illusion of a reflective public that cultivated Habermas’ “mutual enlightenment” (Transformation, 42) or that embraced what Eisenstein calls “a new esprit de système” among authors and readers (Printing, 88, 106) required disavowal of the authorized word. Swift must have known that the print effects he used belonged to the larger culture he derides. That is, not only must he inhabit, to some degree, the modern subject he seeks to discredit, he must also adopt the very technological means of production that reinforce the particular modernism he opposes. Attracted either to an exemplary past or a correctable future, this kind of typographic expression is inexorably circumscribed by the present; it both defeats and surrenders to mechanisms used by those it targets. Swift regards himself as an outsider to a public (and publishing) sphere that is characterized not by Habermas’ “mutual enlightenment” (Transformation, 42) but by the “Press” of a “filthy Crowd ” (Tale, 14), but he is nonetheless defined by it as an absent sign.14 In fact, the “Trash the Press swarms with” (Tale, 14) helps validate the author’s work by virtue of its difference from his. Swift thus depicts the modern “Republic of Letters” as a false model of national uniformity from which he seeks to segregate himself. His modern narrator, in contrast, embraces “the wonderful Civilities that have passed of late Years, between the Nation of

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Authors, and that of Readers.” Appropriately, an asterisk marks this comment and leads to a note that observes, “This is literally true” (Tale, 126). Though only minimally prefiguring Romantic beliefs, Swift (and likeminded writers such as Pope or Arbuthnot) helped establish a critical dialogue about the individual writer’s relationship to the public sphere that eventually enabled later validations of original genius. Richardson’s flowers … the cause of Literature, and of Authors in general, is concerned in this transaction. (Samuel Richardson, An Address to the Public, on the Treatment which the Editor of the History of Sir Charles Grandison has met with from Certain Booksellers and Printers, 1754)

In a substantially different way, the erasure of the author that Swift finally ponders applies to typographical symbols that mark discursive breaks in Samuel Richardson’s fiction. In Clarissa, for example, Richardson uses them to mark states of mental distress or physical absence. Unlike Swift’s asterisk, footnote, or section break, Richardson’s paratext alludes to an implied material, as well as discursive, realm beyond that directly described in the narrative. Rather than a mise en abyme, these typographical moments signify the plenitude of the world, its unrepresentable fullness, the promise of mise en page. Indeed, the text often reports in the language that precedes or follows the writer’s suspended discourse what has occasioned the breaks: “Here again comes my bustling, jealous Mother” (iii, 34) or “I Have just now dismissed the sniveling toad Dorcas” (v, 27). Such moments of withdrawal are thus given both printed and unprinted existence, as if the representational and the non-representational were interlinked rather than tragically divided from one another (even when tragedy is the subject of the discourse). If Swift’s modernist both disappears into his words and seems to have no existence beyond them, Richardson’s characters, for all their obsessive writing to the moment, constantly refer to the unwritten spaces in their lives. Whereas the gaps in Swift’s Tale invariably signal a failure of writing or intellection, in Richardson, they symbolize the interconnection of Â�written and lived experience. Richardson’s typography constantly makes us aware of this extraÂ�textual experience. The ubiquitous dates, internal line breaks, the mesmerizing repetition of adieux (and particularly their symbols for “etcetera”), the signaling of enclosed documents, and the overlaying of one character’s

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letter by the notational marks of another repeatedly emphasize the act of departure from the scene of writing. Comparison to A Tale reveals that Clarissa is no less complicated by the author’s inventive juxtaposition of textual and paratextual material or the parallel pretensions of an editor’s annotation and the public presentation of putatively real manuscripts. Because of the sheer volume (and number of volumes), Richardson’s work tends to scatter its typographical innovations: letter fragments printed diagonally and upside down, a fold-out sheet of music, cursive print, italics, capitalization, coffin inscriptions, indices, footnotes, bullets, appendices, letter numbering, and various printer’s devices. These hiatuses remind the reader of the presumed experiences lived by the characters between the acts of writing, experiences that then are often described in the ensuing writing. Richardson, in other words, constantly reminds us that the writing is indeed a supplement to lived experience even if the effect of the letters is to suggest that the characters live principally through their writing. Yet the marks also double as reminders of how a public form of discourse has intervened to present the lives of these characters in both their represented and unrepresented plenitude. John Carroll has noted the care with which Richardson attended to the visual aspects of the printed page in his fictional work: “Nothing was too minute to escape his attention€– not even the typography. As the printer of his own works, Richardson was unique in his ability not only to get what he wanted on the page but also to determine how it looked” (54). It is reasonable to conclude, then, that Richardson was aware of the impact of the “unwritten” parts of his text. Unlike Swift, whose gaps require the reader to engage in a critical and philosophical assessment of printed discourse, Richardson uses blank space and non-verbal matter principally to invite the reader’s emotional, as well as reflective, response to the printed word.15 One of the most notorious instances in Clarissa of a character’s exploitation of print convention€– Lovelace’s use of indices€– signals the degree to which the fiction is enmeshed in its mode of production. Writing about an intercepted letter from Anna Howe to Clarissa that he has enclosed to a fellow libertine, Lovelace points out his use of paratext as an emotional register. “Thou wilt see the margin of this cursed Letter crouded with indices,” he observes, and then draws an example in brackets of a small hand with its index finger extended (iv, 200). “I put them,” he continues, “to mark the places which call for vengeance upon the vixen writer, or which require animadversion.” The letter that follows is one of the few instances in which Lovelace forwards Clarissa’s correspondence to his Â�fellow rake instead of sending a transcript, and it contains ninety-two of

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Figure 15╇ Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1751), 4th edn., iv, 203.

these marginal supplements (Figure 15). Lovelace here converts a conventional element of print into an intensely emotional mark. Indeed, one of the extraordinary aspects of this letter is that we are to imagine Lovelace methodically drawing in each hand to symbolize his repeated outrage at what “Miss Howe” has written. Before he adds the signs he describes his initial reaction to the letter as “justly-excited rage” and tells Belford “It is a miracle that I fell not into fits” (iv, 199). The indices, in other words, embody contrary states: on the one hand, they are supposed to signal Lovelace’s spontaneous anger and the radical transferability of that rage, as he dares Belford to “avoid trembling for me, if thou canst” (iv, 200); on the other hand, they reveal his calculated inscription of his own emotions, painstakingly laid out on the page. Such discursive interventions are, of course, signs of Lovelace’s obsessive need to impose his will on others (women in particular) and graphic

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equivalents of the physical violation he resorts to when persuasion fails. The image of Lovelace’s accusative finger is, then, as much an emblem of his physical actions as his emotional reactions. Like other devices he uses to control someone else’s language, such as inserting bracketed comments, footnoting text, forging supplementary language, or enclosing and redirecting correspondence, the indices manifest Lovelace’s ceaseless exploitation of the very material conditions of communication. Though employing a conventional symbol, Lovelace uses the index finger to authorize his “justly-excited rage” and, at the same time, demonstrate his unique ability to channel such disruptive emotions into strategic Â�behavior.16 Lovelace’s compulsion here, however, is not only a mark of a particular character’s psychosexual condition or discursive aggression; it is also a means by which Richardson signals the complex interplay of personal voice and public media that suffuses the novel. In printed form, Lovelace’s display of emotional, physical, and discursive mastery is itself undermined by the very conventionality he exploits. Unlike the indices Belford presumably reads, the indices we encounter are the mechanically reproduced versions of Lovelace’s “hands.”17 They symbolize the character’s private handwriting and the transformation of his cursive into published (and public) form. Reversing the textual appropriation to which Lovelace subjects Clarissa’s or Anna’s discourse, the indices submit his writing to print’s rationalized duplication of personal marks. In using such paratext to signal Lovelace’s “encroaching ways” (Clarissa’s phrase for her adversary’s behavior€– iii, 296), Richardson asserts both the libertine’s power of intrusion and that figure’s ultimately marginal status. The sequence is an apposite figuration for the editor’s public role as explicator in the margins of the editorial notes that increasingly punctuate the novel through the first four editions. Like the imprisonment, misprision, and rape he later commits, Lovelace’s aggressive typographical acts only accentuate his failure to possess the objects of his desire or to control the significance of his writing in the public sphere.18 Lovelace’s indices literally point to the significance that paratext plays in Richardson’s text, and the complex relation that develops between fictional representations of emotion and the print technology that enables them. What these textual interruptions indicate about Richardson’s relation to print is, then, critically distinct from Swift’s. Swift sought to discredit the printing establishment to which he was ineluctably linked by fictionalizing its most standard forms of objective interpolation. Richardson strives to integrate the fictional text and its typographical setting, humanizing conventional print techniques by making them objectify the fiction and give documentary

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weight to the fictional world he is constructing. Furthermore, by making such mute signs interpretable, he emphasizes the visual nature of reading, perhaps to offset the tendency in silent isolated reading to ignore the material aspect of the text or the social nature of the discourse. The difference in attitude between Swift and Richardson appears in the diegetic status that each assigns to his editorial persona. While Swift purposefully satirizes the degree to which Jonathan Swift can be blurred with A Tale’s editorial persona and the presumptive author and narrator of the text, Richardson leaves such doubling much more ambiguous. This is not to say that Swift’s act of mimicry is easy to decode, only that its difficulty is meant to emphasize the distinctions he wants to draw between his own performance and that of the modern author encumbered by print culture. Like Pope’s Dunciad, itself heavily informed by Swift’s experiments in material self-consciousness, A Tale reveals an ambivalence about the author’s reliance on print, but one that is historically situated in the earlier period of eighteenth-century literary accommodations of print culture’s transforming power over literary production. Richardson, on the other hand, uses the allusion to the “Editor of Pamela” on the title page of Clarissa to indicate the nearly seamless passing of Samuel Richardson into the guise of the fictional editor that amasses Clarissa’s letters. Indeed, the use of fictionalized editors in these prose fictions reflects the powerful tropic effect of the editorial function in the burgeoning print market for long fiction. A mysterious and largely effaced presence in the creation of the text who speaks sometimes as and sometimes against the author (whether in the fictional frame or the real life one), the “editor” usually appears intermittently as a paratextual figure serving a reality function that is itself often phantomic. An ally of sorts, the editor is frequently treated by the author as an aversive force. The bookseller serves a similar function, but unlike the editor (even if the same person), only customarily appears at the outset of the text. It is the marginal persistence of the editor that gives that role its subtle undermining force; it may remind readers of the extra-diegetic nature of the book in their hands and just as quickly occludes that distinction. In Clarissa, this desire to collapse real and fictionalized production of text is nowhere more apparent than in the symbols Richardson uses, like present-day emoticons, to mark a correspondent’s interruption of his or her own writing.19 Instead of simple asterisks, Richardson employs a coded system of florets (or printer’s devices) to signal those critical moments in which a correspondent unexpectedly suspends the act of writing, whether because of some external distraction€– a servant arriving with a letter€– or

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Figure 16╇ Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1751), 4th edn., v, 201.

an intense emotional reaction. Unlike the undifferentiated asterisk, these printer’s devices can be used in such a manner as to mark the suspension of a character’s discourse in fundamentally characteristic ways. The silences of Clarissa or Lovelace, quite literally the white spaces between sections in their letters, become an expressive medium, branded in very particular ways as a supplement to the verbal transcriptions of the letters. Indeed, the point of these marked spaces is that their unrepresentableness can be represented. In the editions published by Richardson during his lifetime, individual types of florets mark the discursive breaks of particular characters: twin rosettes for Clarissa (Figure 16); an inverted asterism€– three asterisks in an upside-down triangle€– for Lovelace (Figure 17); arabesques for Anna Howe (Figure 15); vine leaves for Belford, opposed acorns for Mrs. Harlowe, banded laurel for Mrs. Norton. This feature disappears in editions published after those in which Richardson himself

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Figure 17╇ Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1751), 4th edn., iii, 153.

had a hand, and has until recently been ignored by Richardson criticism. It is likely that their modest and perhaps seemingly routine function as asterisks encouraged their being overlooked. That all the other printer’s effects employed by Richardson, a man clearly absorbed by the subtlest visual details of the text, can be reasonably connected to the story itself, urges us, however, to consider the florets as equally emblematic features of the work. As has been often noted, Richardson took great pains to work out the symbolic effect of such details as the lily that adorns Clarissa’s coffin, and critics have routinely noted the emblem tradition that Richardson relied on to develop much of his imagery.20 While the system of florets in the first edition is uneven, insofar as a few appear interchangeable, the fact that Richardson published the first two volumes of that edition to gauge the reaction of readers and determine whether he should proceed with

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the rest explains the irregularity. Moreover, despite the popularity of the first edition, Richardson could not have predicted the novel’s eventual canonical status in his own lifetime. It seems unlikely, therefore, that many pains would be taken with the completed first edition. Several of the letter breaks are, in fact, filled generally by bubbles, and it takes a while before Lovelace’s florets stabilize (in vol. iv, he employs eglantines; in vol. v he even briefly uses Clarissa’s rosettes). Even so, a rudimentary system is evident from the very beginning, and comparison to later editions shows (with only a few exceptions that, in fact, prove the rule) an increasingly rigorous principle of usage. From the latter volumes of the first edition to the third edition there is a discernible pattern of corrections and improvements to ensure that the individual florets match up as precisely as possible with specific characters.21 Thus, while there are some early inconsistencies, such as the use of eglantines instead of asterisms for Lovelace’s hiatuses, these are eventually corrected to conform to a system of separate florets for separate characters (almost none of which are commingled in the third edition; the erroneous bubbles in volume vii of the first edition, as it turns out, are corrected partly in the second edition and fully by the third edition). Given that Clarissa was a constantly evolving text it should be no surprise that the system of florets developed over the course of the four editions Richardson oversaw. There are indeed hundreds of examples that suggest Richardson’s care in this matter but the easiest ones to point to appear in the second of Lovelace’s long letters of June 8 in the third edition (v, 29–50). The version in this edition corrects misapplied ornaments in the letter of Lovelace’s that encloses a letter that he has intercepted and copied from Anna Howe (the same letter mentioned above that he has “crouded with indices”) and that in turn encloses a letter purportedly written by Clarissa but actually forged by Lovelace. Given the complicated provenance of the letter it is perhaps not surprising that in the second edition the florets (asterisms, arabesques, and rosettes) are accidentally mixed. In the third edition, however, the errors are corrected. It can be concluded that such a correction (and it is only one of many) indicates an effort to regularize a meaningful typographical system in which particular florets signal particular characters and traits (especially as Richardson did not use coded florets in any of the editions of Pamela or Sir Charles Grandison). In the printer’s lexicon, such devices traditionally symbolized particular values: a rosette indicated purity; an arabesque, boldness; an asterisk, brilliance; a vine leaf, support; an acorn, fortitude; a band of laurel, fame.22 By the eighteenth century, at least in England, such representational value

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had, as now, fallen into disuse, but most printers were probably aware of the tradition. Rowe More’s Dissertation Upon English Typographical Founders and Foundries (published in 1788) notes that “such devices originally carried with them certain meanings” (118). Francis Meynell and Stanley Morison conclude that they were imported to the West from Arabic textile and manuscript conventions but acknowledge More’s assertion of emblematic significance (3). Harold Bayley claims that various members of the printing trade used them as secret signs (181–96), though Meynell and Morison challenge this theory. As a printer and bookseller himself, Richardson thus exploits a specialized aspect of his craft; he uses his professional knowledge of publishing to supplement his procedures as an author, signaling, as it were, his embodiment of the complicity between authorship and publishing.23 While he probably did not expect his readers to know the tradition, he likely presumed that an attentive reader would notice some sort of code involving a rough equivalence between typographical symbol and characteristic trait. Otherwise, why differentiate the marks or why maintain a specific set for each character? He appears, at the every least, to rely on the reader’s general knowledge of the symbolic significance of the images. Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, for example, which was translated into English for the first time in 1709, constituted one of the most popular examples of the emblem book in Europe from its original publication in 1593 to the end of the eighteenth century (seeing three major English editions in that time). It glosses all but one of the images (the arabesque) that Richardson uses for his ornaments.24 Clarissa’s typographical allusions also accentuate print’s complex function in an epistolary narrative.25 Again, as with Swift’s asterisks, Richardson’s florets destabilize the relations between words and their physical manifestation. In Richardson’s case, the uncertainty about who has made these marks may be even more pronounced. Are we supposed to imagine the letter writer laboriously drawing in such effects? This seems a rather remarkable supposition in the case of the arabesques used by “impetuous” Anna Howe (iii, 345) or the laurel bands employed by the “dear worthy and maternal” Mrs. Norton (vi, 113); yet such a possibility exists given Lovelace’s admission of drawing in the ninety-two hands he uses as indices in his transcription of one letter from Anna to Clarissa.26 If, on the other hand, the editor, or at a further remove, the printer, has inserted the florets, then they are relatively ornate interpretive additions that such intermediaries usually do not provide. Unless unconscious on his part, the introduction of florets suggests that Richardson introduced something resembling subliminal seduction for his less observant readers.

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Once more, the author seems to inject the conventions of print with his particular personal and professional concerns about the printing establishment while simultaneously integrating them in the fully realized fictional world of the text, a gesture akin to Richardson’s own maintenance of the fiction that, as the title page dictates, the editor of Clarissa is the same one who edited Pamela. As if to credential himself, Richardson creates a neutral professional voice that is still capable of moral and emotional expressiveness. Indeed, as the editor and printer of his own novels, Richardson, though also the author, could in fact maintain both the truthful claim that he had edited the letters and the simultaneous fiction that an editor belonging to the world inhabited by Pamela and Clarissa was publishing their correspondence. The florets, insofar as they double as reminders of an editor within the fictional world and as evidence of Richardson’s control of the text’s actual production, similarly conflate authorship as both the sign of a socially, legally, and professionally constructed function (a cultural fiction) and the activity of a specific human agent. Such integration, perhaps, served to ameliorate the ideological rift in Richardson’s decision to frame his moral intentions in the form of letters published ostensibly against the wishes of their original owners, since neither Clarissa nor Lovelace ever indicates the desire to have their correspondence published. But the textual self-consciousness about the print medium in Clarissa principally expresses Richardson’s own complex attitude toward the factitiousness of his art. They reveal his awareness of authorship as a “produced” and “edited” effect, while, like Swift’s asterisks, they manage to maintain a fiction of individual, original control. Employed in Clarissa’s letters, the florets tend mostly to mark moments when she has been unwillingly interrupted, when she seeks knowledge that is being intentionally withheld from her, or when she lays down her pen as the result of a powerful emotion, in the most extreme case her fear that she has lost her wits as the result of violations to her chastity. In moments of anguish or heightened self-awareness, she also often uses what appears to us as a textual hiatus for the purpose of reflection: these moments are sometimes for her own consideration, as in “I Broke off here€– I was so excessively uneasy, that I durst not trust myself with my own reflections: I therefore went down to the garden, to try to calm my mind” (ii, 234–5); at other times they are for the letter’s addressee€– “I lay down my pen here, that you may consider of it a little, if you please” (i, 277). These are moments, of course, when the reader is simultaneously asked to reflect not only on Clarissa’s unarticulated reflections but perhaps also on reflections that the preceding text implies but that Clarissa

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never states€– that she is secretly in love with Lovelace, for example. In one particularly complicated instance, Clarissa, in a letter to Mrs. Norton, even seems to make a pun (though it is perhaps also Richardson himself) on the “chasms” that need to be filled in her correspondence. Worried that her death might prevent her from completing her story, she either conceives Mrs. Norton as her mother or imagines writing to her mother in order to ask another to complete her text: “Mamma, I would have wrote€– is the word distinct?€– my eyes are so misty!€– If, when I apply to you, I break off in half-words, do you supply them€– The kindest are your due.€– Be sure take the kindest, to fill up chasms with, if any chasms there be€ –” (vii, 372). Here the text plays on the distinctions between Clarissa’s indistinct writing, both from physical ailment and profound emotion, and the distinctly printed words on the page. It manipulates the shifts in authority over Clarissa’s “history” that such typographical display portends. The means of representing variations in the speaker’s tone, or the fragmentation of her word by way of italics and dashes, thus advertises the printed nature of the language. Moreover, by inviting “Mamma” to fill in the chasms, Clarissa sets up a complex exchange of authority between herself and Mrs. Harlowe (by way of Mrs. Norton). At the typographical level, the shift is from Clarissa to the editor and printer, and, on the meta-textual level, Richardson himself. The “chasms,” then, especially as a blank space filled with rosettes that immediately follows Clarissa’s offer to “Mamma” to fill them, change from signifying broken language, to missing story, to the invented absence on the page that the compositor provides. Yet, as usual, in the chasm itself we are finally left with symbols that, on some level, show Clarissa filling her own empty space. The symbols, the two florets, are at once a return to her pre-verbal authority and yet another condensation of all authority€– whether character or author€– into printed iconic form. Dutiful readers may thus be expected to engage in a doubly reflexive moment during these textual hiatuses, in which their reflections both coincide with and stand apart from Clarissa’s. We are to treat reading as the act of sympathetic fusion and of critical distance. Given, however, that the florets typifying these instances of reflection or imaginative play are specifically printer’s icons, we are also being asked to consider how our adjudication of a character’s unwritten reflections corresponds to the editor’s or printer’s visible interpretive interventions in the process. The paratext here serves as a means of both inviting and controlling interpretation and reception. In the emblematic tradition, the rose conveyed a host of meanings from purity to loss; Clarissa’s particular ornament

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thus adds a further dimension of interpretation and textual intervention to the supposedly authentic letters.27 Indeed, the florets evoke the same interplay of authority that characterizes the “editor’s” footnotes, which Richardson expanded substantially after the first edition. In using the florets, the author-printer is fashioning moments that simultaneously alert readers to their participation in the production of literary meaning and to the editorial constraints that guide (or limit) interpretation. Unlike Clarissa, the editor appears to be substantially in command of the flow of information. In Lovelace’s letters, florets usually signal one of three things: his need to call upon various agents to further his designs upon Clarissa; his devious interception of someone’s (usually Clarissa’s) correspondence, which he then must read; or excessive passions aroused by his frustration at being unable to possess Clarissa, which at their intensest become fits of madness. When Lovelace lays down his pen in moments of frustration or passion he invariably uses the pause not to reflect but, as he puts it, to “banish Reflection” (iv, 311). The following text then usually represents the sometimes playful, sometimes deranged means by which he actively resists a conscientious reading of his own script: “Well, but now let’s try for’t€– Hoy€– Hoy€– Hoy! Confound me for a gaping puppy, how I yawn!” (vii, 116). Lovelace’s characteristic cursive habits thus make the asterisk, symbol of brilliance, particularly suitable as a mark of his behavior since they have to do with the flair, manipulativeness, and unpredictability that define his behavior. They also serve to characterize the flickering nature of his and Clarissa’s characters, and their volatile relationship, described by Lovelace as the constant revolution of “Darkness, light; Light, darkness” (iii, 139).28 Indeed, some of the more minute decisions on Richardson’s part that the florets indicate are reflected in his use for Lovelace of an inverted asterism, where the single star that customarily serves as the apex appears below the two other lineated stars, so that, in effect, the triangle points down. J. E. Cirlot notes that “in its normal position” the triangle “symbolizes fire and the aspiration of all things towards the higher unity” (351). The reversal of the normal position in Lovelace’s asterism suggests his betrayal of those values and his downward impulses. Throughout Richardson’s novel, Clarissa’s moments of heightened, disruptive emotion center on matters of integrity, and the interruption of her writing by the demands of others signals her generally reactive and often victimized position. Lovelace’s outbursts tend to involve mastery; his asterisks highlight a compulsive need to command events, language, and feeling, but the lapses themselves frequently manifest a fracturing

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of that control. During his breaks, moreover, we are perhaps reminded of the reader’s duplicitous engagement with the text, taking pleasure in the rakish freedoms Lovelace embraces while measuring him with the moral insight provided by an external perspective. All of the instances of paratext in Clarissa establish a complex interplay between written and printed discourse that supplements the text’s fascination with the physical conditions of correspondence, such as those occasions in which a character reminds us of the material embodiment of the letter writer. At these times the character emphasizes the scene of writing while we are reading the printed version of the account, and thus, perhaps, are made even more aware of the difference. Lovelace, for instance, commenting on Dorcas’ emotional, and probably guilty, reaction to Clarissa’s plight, notes the condition of the paper that the servant has used: “The paper, thou’lt see, is blister’d with the tears even of the harden’d transcriber; which has made her ink run here-and-there” (v, 314). The water marks that Lovelace describes here open up a breach between the imaginary epistolary text and the printed “letter,” which reveals none of the characteristics that Lovelace describes. In this instance, the transcriber of the described letter, Dorcas, does not herself note the effect of her tears on the page, which further emphasizes their lack in Lovelace and, in an even more pronounced way, the printed form of it in the published text. Typically, in the reverse situation, Lovelace tends to stage his moments of epistolary embodiment: “How shall I support this disappointment!€ – No new cause!€ – On one knee, kneeling with the other, I write!€ – My feet benumbed with midnight wanderings thro’ the heaviest dews, that ever fell: My wig and my linen dripping with the hoar-frost dissolving on them!” (ii, 122). (Another professed lover might have settled for “on one knee” over the exactitude of the additional “kneeling with the other”; “heavy” instead of the “heaviest dews, that ever fell”; and simply “frost” rather than the pitiable “hoarfrost.”) Clarissa, depending on how one interprets her character, is also capable of such self-dramatizing acts; to Anna she writes: My trembling writing will shew you, my dear impetuous creature, what a trembling heart you have given to â•…â•…â•…â•… Your ever obliged, Or, if you take so rash a step, Your for-ever disobliged, Clarissa Harlowe. (iii, 345)

Here, the self-conscious attention to the handwriting, the somewhat stylized and unconventional use of the adieu, the alternating italicization, and the capitalization accentuate the intermixing of the world of the

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character and the printed page. As with the florets or indices, we are constantly being reminded of both the relatively embodied script the character has presumably written and the disembodied effect of its translation into printed form (if anything, it is the compositor’s hand we should, logically, be reminded of throughout). The meaningful exchange between text and its typographic setting thus elicits productive tensions between verbal play, emotional states, physical gestures, and moral significance that sharpen Richardson’s deployment of printed matter. Among other aspects, these printerly effects may have provoked a reader like Barbauld to conclude that Richardson chose “the least probable way of telling a story” (i, xxvi–xxvii). Clarissa has repeatedly been celebrated for its psychological realism, its intensive treatment of privacy, and its effective reproduction of the personal. Ian Watt, referring principally to Richardson’s work, has suggested that the eighteenth-century novel, specifically its realistic forms, acquired distinction largely because it, unlike other genres, was able to exploit print’s double capacity to convey “impersonal authority” and yet also, by virtue of its universality and mechanical uniformity, make the text appear intimate and subjective. The reader ceases to be “conscious of the printed page” and surrenders to the “illusion which the printed novel describes” (198). In Ong’s more general formulation, “[p]rint encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space” (132).29 But in the case of those editions Richardson oversaw, the text does not so easily make us unconscious of the printing press; indeed, it conspicuously announces itself as the mechanically reproduced version of what we are to imagine as original handwritten letters. The paradox of Richardson’s technique is not that he enhances the story’s realism by making us forget its printed nature but that he underscores the printed nature of the text as part of its documentary realism and its manufactured artifice within the public realm. The visual cues constitute a public reflection upon a “uniform” and objectified text that is based upon the works of various private hands. Richardson’s use of paratext is unlike Swift’s because he regarded print as a progressive instrument in the shaping of the kind of modern discourse that would become enshrined in the novel, perhaps the literary genre most allied with the development of print culture. To a large extent, this difference in Richardson’s use of paratext from Swift’s can be attributed to professional and historical differences between the two. Richardson was both an author and printer€– he therefore wrote, published, and printed Clarissa himself. The “mutual felicity” between

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author and bookseller that Swift satirically pilloried in A Tale is intensively and positively melded in Richardson. Indeed, that the professions of writer and printer could coalesce in Richardson is a sign that an English readership in the mid eighteenth century was prepared to accept the collusion that Swift targeted in A Tale. For Richardson, the art of print is the means of redeeming human experience, not another inevitable extension of its corruption. Clarissa is not only a celebration of “writing to the moment”; it is also an homage to what we might call, fully acknowledging the impossibility of the phrase, “printing to the moment.”30 Nonetheless, like Swift, Richardson’s manipulation of paratext reveals the contradictory force of distinctive public anonymity and it signals the complex relation between artifice and verisimilitude that shapes Richardson’s work. In selectively featuring the novel’s textuality, Richardson evokes both the anonymous print realism he sought and the mark of inspired authorship he needed to mask. Indeed, the long-lasting critical argument about who should arbitrate the text or the problem of how far Richardson was capable of ceding interpretive power to the reader may be answered, in part, or further complicated, by the role he ceded to the cultural power of print itself. Perhaps fueled by the same optimism that infuses the period’s encomiums to print, Richardson seems to have been aware that the public consumption, circulation, and discussion of the text in printed form would help adjudicate the matter of authoritative interpretation. He appears, in addition, to have alerted us to that dimension by his particular concern with not only the editor’s function but also with how the visual print elements functioned on the page of his book. He may not have appreciated all the interpretive readings of his characters but he may very well have acknowledged that they were engaged in a process that we might now associate with Habermas’ and Benedict Anderson’s analyses of the “public sphere,” “imagined communities,” and “print capitalism.” In many ways, then, Richardson stands as the reverse of Swift. Whereas the earlier writer registered his modern manipulation of print, despite his stated distaste for the medium, the later one, assured of the potent usefulness of print, often came to regard its deployment with alarm. Sterne’s stars _____Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read.

(Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1761)

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While Richardson’s various roles as writer, editor, printer, publisher, and even critic of his own work equipped him to interrogate how publishing processes affected literary expression, Sterne’s typographical experiments derived from a “non-professional” attitude. He was, undoubtedly, attentive to the production of Tristram Shandy, a need generated in part by his unconventional use of such elements as asterisks and dashes, but he approached the making of his book more as a dilettante than a tradesman. Writing to Robert Dodsley, the London bookseller who first rejected Sterne’s work and then published the first London edition of it, Sterne anticipates the book’s physical appearance: “I propose … to print a lean edition, in two small volumes, of the size of Rasselas, and on the same paper and type … The book shall be printed here, and the impression sent up to you; for as I live at York, and shall correct every proof myself, it shall go perfect into the world, and be printed in so creditable a way as to paper, type, &c., as to do no dishonour to you” (Letters, 80–1). This appears to have been a slight change from his earlier intention to “make a Volume in Oct vo of about the Size of the Essay upon ingenious Tormenting, by Millar€– that is, allowing the same Type & Margin” (Letters, 74). Geoffrey Day notes that Sterne effectively became his own “publisher” after the success of the first two volumes (93), but his involvement at this close level of textual production was still an extension of his authorship, and never vocational in any traditional sense of the word.31 Like Swift, Sterne regarded paratext as an opportune means of visualizing the paradoxes of authorship within a modern print context.32 His asterisks, for example, resemble Swift’s by signaling an absent discourse whose presumed existence is already a fabrication. But Sterne also uses asterisks in the expressive manner that Richardson employed ornaments, to imply a character’s moments of unwritten experience. In Tristram Shandy they are exceedingly flexible and emotive and imply a self-determination in the protagonist’s discourse that his entire life appears to deny. Tristram calls them “stars” or “lights,” which, as he puts it, “I hang up in some of the darkest passages” (vi, 131). Significantly, the substitution of asterisks for more than one word does not begin until volume iii; that is, after the first two volumes had been circulated, celebrated, and traduced in public. Moreover, it is with a discussion of how Slop’s forceps might damage Tristram “if the hip is mistaken for the head” that Sterne begins to employ such multi-word aposiopesis (iii, 73). From then on, emasculation and asterism seem perpetually conjoined, as the asterisks appear in increasing number and complexity. Of Sterne’s use of such aposiopesis John Traugott notes that, unlike its customary function, in Tristram

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Shandy it is usually “a device of festive irony” (123). But the sardonic wit is also suffused by an implicit melancholy. One of the book’s central ironies is that Sterne’s stars actually obscure rather than illuminate the suppressed words, offering antic symbols in place of rational discourse. The word “darkest” refers not only to the more impenetrable and unspeakable parts of his narrative, but also to the inked aspect of the asterisks, making them dark stars rather than points of light. Like Swift’s allusion to “Night” as “the universal Mother of Things” (a frequent Scriblerian analogue to dullness), Sterne’s omnipresent asterisms trigger associations with the black expanse of the night sky. In this way they, in turn, call to mind the infamous inked page, whose significance Tristram describes as “the dark veil of the black one” (iii, 168). The black page itself represents, at a minimum, the death of Yorick (and by allusion the death of the author Sterne who used that name as a pseudonym). But it also raises a variety of other connotations: the machinations of the devil, or “black one” (with perhaps even a glancing reference to printer’s boys, also called devils because of the ink that ended up covering their bodies by the end of the printing day); the dark abyss of language; the occult power of the imagination; and the physical matter on the page, ink, by which almost all the other pages of his “motley” (iii, 168) work are composed. Many of Sterne’s contemporaries understood these implications. George Stayley, for instance, parodies the connections between the black page, lunacy, imagination, ink, and asterisks in his Life and Opinions of an Actor (1762) when, falling asleep while reading Sterne’s book, he dreams up two night-steeped pages that he then reproduces in his own book (Figures 18a, 18b). As this curious parody suggests, the specific meanings for which the asterisks in Tristram Shandy stand are indeed extremely variable. For Sterne, they may represent specific words (a name or phrase that the verbal context supplies), such as Susannah’s disguised phrases, “******* ***” and “**** *** ** *** ******” (v, 79–80), which translate relatively easily as “chamber pot” and “piss out of the window.” Sometimes, as in Figure 19, they indicate a longer generalized text that can, nevertheless, be reasonably surmised€– in the first break, words to the effect that Tristram has lost his manhood, in the second that the window has crushed both its own and little Tristram’s parts (vi, 62). In many instances, exact phrasing cannot be confirmed without extraÂ�textual reference, as when Walter quotes an unidentified passage on circumcision (Figure 20) from a lengthy history of Hebrew law by John Spencer (v, 97–8). Finally, on several occasions the words cannot be deduced even approximately, as the asterisks preluding Toby’s decision

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(b)

Figure 18a╇ George Stayley, Life and Opinions of an Actor (1762), i, 208. Figure 18b╇ George Stayley, Life and Opinions of an Actor (1762), i, 209.

to show Mrs. Wadman “the very place” where he received his wound testify (Figure 21), though even here the missing text may very well be supplied by the narrative Tristram offers a few pages later concerning Mrs. Wadman’s questioning of Uncle Toby (ix, 70, 114–16). It is likely that eighteenth-century readers accepted this mise en page in stride, if the “editor” of The Humorous Life, Travels, and Adventures, of Christopher Wagstaff, Gentleman, Grandfather to Tristram Shandy is a representative interpreter. Citing Sterne, he explains that a “short train, or half a dozen lines of asterisks, as ***, or ************************ signifies, that an author’s meaning is not to be understood,” adding that “bawdy or blasphemy … must be entirely owing to the unhappy association of a man’s own ideas” (i, 13).33

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Figure 19╇ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67), vi, 62.

The point in all these cases is that Tristram is often unable to put into words those events surrounding the most scarring events of his life. The trauma is instead communicated, appropriately enough, through conventional printer’s symbols that mark some form of fragmentation, loss, or incommunicability. When the accident at the window occurs, Tristram tries immediately to diminish the pain and anguish of the event by assuring us “––’T WAS nothing,– I did not lose two drops of blood by it” (v, 79). But his words have the unhappy potential of reinforcing the evasion of the asterisks; indeed, the exact nature of what has happened to Tristram is never stated; the asterisks, as in Swift, often do literally represent nothing, foreshadowing the same displacement of absence that occupies the two “blank chapters” in the final volume of Tristram Shandy, each of which Tristram commends for having “only nothing in it” (ix, 99), using italics to emphasize his multi-layered evocation of substance

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Figure 20╇ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67), ix, 97.

and emptiness. Susannah the chambermaid, who is initially blamed for the accident, reinforces this complex revelation of eradication, both textual and physical, when she misleadingly cries out “Nothing is left.” (The full meaning of her words is delayed until the next line when she finally completes the sentence: “Nothing is left,€– cried Susannah,€– nothing is left€ – for me, but to run my country.–” [v, 80].) The marked gaps and evasions thus express an emotional condition that the text itself anxiously seeks to avoid, heightening the very feeling that the writer ostensibly tries to erase. Moreover, since the asterisks frequently allude to Tristram’s possible castration by the window sash, they serve, as emblems of absence, to connect the character’s castration to the castrating effects of printed Â�language.34 Because Tristram is the author of his own text and, at least partly, a substitute for Sterne, the asterisks constantly point to the consequences

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Figure 21╇ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–67), ix, 70–1.

of writing for publication.35 Just as Susannah must run from the country, Tristram must consider the effects of his verbal and physical marring from the other side of the window, beyond the domestic and private domain and out into the world of public representation. Or, more exactly, he must recognize that, like the window, terms such as “inside” and “out” or “private” and “public” are very thinly divided, much as the book itself merges personal and social reflections.36 Indeed, Tristram’s father recognizes the connection between private wounds and public words when he brings “a couple of folios under his arm” (v, 96) to salve Tristram, and then later when he puzzles out how to show “the world” his son’s integrity by putting Tristram into “breeches” (vi, 63–4). As usual, Uncle Toby is more blunt about the matter: “I would shew him publicly, said my uncle Toby, at the market cross” (vi, 64). But perhaps the most deliberate equation between distressing private matters and the ambiguous relief offered

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to them through printed matter involves not Tristram, but Phutatorius. Seeking relief for the pain caused by a hot chestnut that has dropped into the “hiatus” of his “breeches” (iv, 176), he is advised by Eugenius to “send to the next printer, and trust your cure to such a simple thing as a soft sheet of paper just come off the press” (iv, 186). In publishing a “Life,” then, Tristram and, by association, Sterne, are required to make public their personal deficiencies. Notably, by the time the text drops the issue of Tristram’s castration, just when we expect to be told the effect of his transition to “breeches” (a rite of masculine passage whose chief symbol seems to confirm, by way of a pun, that there are breaches in Tristram’s identity), he fantasizes about his own authorial erasure: “Let us leave, if possible, myself:€– But ’tis impossible,€– I must go along with you to the end of the work” (vi, 86). At which point Tristram turns our attention to his uncle’s hobbyhorse, the miniature replica of warfare on the land behind Toby’s house. This shift, of course, offers yet another reenactment of castrating “breaches” by recreating the military events that led to Uncle Toby’s own wounded groin. In a strange temporal disjunction, this simulacrum of traumatic experience is subsequently regulated by a print medium, the “daily papers” that Toby employs to calibrate his miniature world to ongoing global events (vi, 91). Sterne emphasizes the correspondence between emasculation and publishing by making his “author” consciously link the descriptions of the model fortifications both to Tristram’s incident at the window sash and the printing of the campaigns in book form: The campaigns themselves will take up as many books; and therefore I apprehend it would be hanging too great a weight of one kind of matter in so flimsy a performance as this, to rhapsodize them, as I once intended, into the body of the work€– surely they had better be printed apart,€– we’ll consider the affair€– so take the following sketch of them in the mean time. (vi, 91)

Here, the suggestive use of “apprehend,” “hanging,” “weight” and “so flimsy a performance as this” recalls the facts of Tristram’s accident and echoes his claim that “nothing was well hung” in his family (v, 80). The decodable asterisks that mask details about Tristram’s accident at the Â�window thus connect his equivocations to his uncle’s emasculation. It is probably no accident, therefore, that another infamous asterisked evasion in Tristram Shandy allows the modest and naïve Uncle Toby to utter a crude four-letter word signifying a woman’s “Backside” (ii, 49). The four asterisks used in this instance again reinforce what Tristram elsewhere calls “the unsteady uses of words” (ii, 15). As Walter insinuates,

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his brother should be using an even cruder word since the proper reference under the circumstances is to the woman’s frontside. This bit of “bawdry” was clearly grasped by some of Sterne’s early readers, as the clarification offered in Explanatory Remarks upon the Life and Opinions (1760) by the suspiciously named “Jeremiah Kunastrokius” attests: “– the third, the twentieth, the thirteenth, and the nineteenth letters of the English alphabet certainly compose the word, though it is not to be found in any Lexicon extant” (7). The psychosexual dimension of such “Aposiopesis,” as Tristram calls the various verbal substitutions he uses, intensifies when we consider that the subject under discussion is his own mother’s aversion to a male midwife (the alarmingly named Doctor Slop); that his apparent father Walter suggestively snaps his pipe in two from exasperation at Toby’s “total ignorance of the sex” (though Toby himself is often considered a candidate for Tristram’s actual progenitor); and that Toby is staring at a “small crevice, form’d by a bad joint in the chimney-piece” while he listens to Walter admonish him about distinguishing “the right end of a woman from the wrong” (ii, 52).37 These allusions acquire further metaphorical resonance when Walter must wait a year to be “deliver’d” of his opinion on the matter: “a rap at the door snapp’d my father’s definition (like his tobacco-pipe) in two,––and, at the same time, crushed the head of as notable and curious a dissertation as ever was engendered in the womb of speculation” (ii, 54). Such interrelated failures of communication bind the condition of male castration or impotence to female lack and then to the insufficiency of language itself, signaling fundamental affiliations between linguistic and somatic trauma. They mark, in turn, Sterne’s own complicated relationship to authorship and publicity. As René Bosch notes, “Of all the indecent jokes in Tristram Shandy, the one about Elizabeth’s **** was without doubt the most popular among writers of a questionable character”; speculating that Sterne “made a miscalculation” when he retained the asterisks for the published version of his manuscript, Bosch adds that Sterne “probably did not foresee that a covert four-letter word was to become his trademark” (101).38 “****” thus came to represent both Sterne’s successful management of fame and his vexing subjection to notoriety.39 Significantly, when Tristram vainly seeks to absent himself, his shift from “myself ” to an equally wounded counterpart, Uncle Toby, triggers the defensive transference of the problems of language onto the reader: IF the reader has not a clear conception of the rood and the half of ground which lay at the bottom of my uncle Toby’s kitchen garden, and which was the scene of so many of his delicious hours,€– the fault is not on me,€– but in his

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imagination;€– for I am sure I gave him so minute a description, I was almost ashamed of it. (vi, 86)

“Delicious” may seem an odd word to describe the remembrance of wounding, but it expresses the complex mingling of desire and anxiety that may attend all reproductions of description in which an author fails to give “a clear conception.” If the writer has indeed provided enough detail, then in what way could the reader’s “imagination” be employed to clarify the description? Tristram seems to be asserting the sufficiency of language while simultaneously acknowledging its impoverishment. Much like Tristram’s entire book, the excessive details, evasions, and deferrals of blame that characterize his treatment of his accident at the window convey his need to offset his lack of words. The public exposure of words that print culture incites has as much of a capacity to decreate as the offending sash that cuts short Tristram’s attempt to relieve himself. Of course, nearly every page of Sterne’s work exhibits some form of textual disruption that attempts to both heighten the immediacy of reading and render that process absurd. Like his attention to the physical format of his book, his manipulation of paratext conveys the pliability of such “extra-literary” moments. Sterne’s work displays neither the Augustan pessimism of Swift nor the Enlightenment optimism of Richardson, but rather aspects of what Barthes calls “jouissance,” as if the transformability of the author into printed effects were an end in itself (Pleasure, 4). Nonetheless, Tristram Shandy reveals the same pervasive awareness of the author’s subjection to print as A Tale of a Tub and Clarissa. Sterne’s “darkest passages” (vi, 131) are of a piece with Swift’s “dark Authors” (130), Richardson’s alternating “Darkness, light; Light, darkness” (iii, 139), and Amory’s “dark volumes” (vi). They all emphasize how the dark matter that black ink imparts assumes meaningful shape only in relation to the white surface on which it is composed. These texts also suggest that, despite long-standing historical claims that print isolates readers in a sphere of private and silent reading, the medium constantly reinforced the social mediations at work in the process of publishing and reading an author’s words. Asterisks, Sterne shows, provide a stellar example of this interdependence between representation and absence. On the surface, then, Sterne’s asterisks may seem to accentuate typography, but they draw as much attention to the unmarked page, the sleek promise that blank paper augurs. Like the varied dashes that Sterne uses liberally throughout Tristram Shandy, the asterisks serve iconically as an intermediary stage in the translation of thoughts upon the page. Neither fully articulate nor wholly inexpressive, they manifest Sterne’s ongoing

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fascination, from the very opening of the book, with how the white page, like Locke’s tabula rasa, represents both the unsocialized potentiality of individual human thought and the enmeshed social intercourse that permits the formulation of ideas. When Tristram accidentally tosses a fair page of his manuscript into the fire, threatens to rip out existing pages, or provides blank pages for chapters he has removed from one place in the text and repositioned elsewhere, he intensifies the reader’s awareness of how paper mediates the conceptualized, written, and printed word. His reply to those who might wonder about the blank chapters€– “how was it possible they should foresee the necessity I was under of writing the 25th chapter of my book, before the 18th, &tc.” (ix, 99–100)€– refines the material distinctions Sterne draws throughout Tristram Shandy between his book, Tristram’s book, and the reader’s book. As Sterne’s stars imply at a micro-structural level, the text as a whole may be similar from rendition to rendition but the pages differ radically in time and space. Typically, Sterne pretends to ignore the difference between what one is writing and what one has written or thought, and then between what one has written and what one has published. When Tristram calls the text “my book” he appears to regard it and the book in the reader’s hand as one and the same bundle of paper, but he still assumes proprietary interest in it. As he paradoxically boasts at the end of volume i, “if I thought you was able to form the least judgment or probable conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,€– I would tear it out of my book” (i, 179). This, however, is an impossibly retroactive threat. It comically implies both a deep-seated desire to collapse the space between writer and reader, and authorial anxieties over the reader’s disposition. Such a gesture simultaneously personalizes the text for the reader (author and reader touch it together) and alienates it (this is my book not yours, my thinking not yours). It also dematerializes the text at the point of its greatest material reproduction. If by the fact of widespread publication both writers and readers are eyeing the same text, though separated by time and space, then the text does not actually exist, or it has been unbound from its material state and circulates as mere cognitive activity, related to but not synonymous with the paper product each agent holds in his or her hands. Insofar as Sterne’s asterisks are marks of occulted authorial intent that, under the aegis of the printing house, invite speculative elucidation by the reader, they prompt the same complex circulation of responsibility. What separates a manuscript€– pages marked by ink and sometimes bound€– from a printed book€– pages marked by ink and usually bound€– is not merely the means by which the ink is applied€– a pen versus a press€– but

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the intervening stages by which the document reaches a reader. As an analogous sign of mediated meaning at the level of graphemes, the asterisk performs a comparable service, making and resisting meaning at the same time. Doing little good A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

(Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson [1763] 1791)

Signs of concern over the reader’s disposition toward text appear in Â�writers like Swift, Richardson, and Sterne, as I have tried to show, in the eccentric interruption and dividing of what would otherwise be a more uniform text. The range of reactions to the printing process in these three writers suggests the plural nature of print’s effects. Swift made a pretense of Â�disdaining hands-on contact with the printer’s shop. Richardson was professionally absorbed by it. Sterne, inspired by the resources of the printer’s shop, adopted a virtuoso’s proficiency over it. All of them, in several ways, attest to the dialectical energy of print as a medium. Indeed, often overlooked in the criticism of these writers, and eighteenth-century authors generally, is the complex interplay of positive and negative impressions about print. To varying degrees these little textual moments paradoxically enjoin the active participation of a crucial agent outside the text to participate in the fictional enterprise€– that is, the reader€– at the same time that they bar the reader from fully reading the text. Typically, such typographical effects force us into, minimally, a double posture that requires us to inhabit yet keep our distance from the narrator’s, let alone author’s, printed discourse. We are continuously invited to share in the mysteries surrounding these characters and yet are equally maneuvered into positions of ignorance by the narrator. (It probably should be noted as well that these moments occur most frequently in first-person narratives where there is a greater likelihood that the author’s and narrator’s voices will seem to collapse together.) In general, textual gaps marked provocatively by ornaments signal precisely what it is feared that conventional typography diminishes€– heightened, and sometimes, violent emotion. In other words, moveable print attempts to move the reader (both affectively and physically around the page). This emotional intent behind the ornaments is corroborated by the equally affective use of dashes in Sterne, often taken to expressive

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extremes in parodies of Sterne, where a very long dash represents a character’s weeping, or a sequence of dashes, each followed by an exclamation mark, signals the ardor of a lovers’ reunion (see Bosch, 162, 189). These ruptures in Sterne and his followers suggest how prose fiction endorsed the Enlightenment rationality that seemed implicit in printing technology and yet insisted that particular emotions exceeded the boundaries of rational, reproducible, standardized, and commodified discourse. They reveal, sometimes comically, how articulations of eighteenth-century reason required (perhaps desired) visual expressions of unreason, even when they intended to deride or analyze emotional excess. The insistent textuality of these works, moreover, highlights how the specific material practices conditioning the production of texts become the vehicle, the effect, and the limit of affective utterance. In Sterne, they signaled for some readers “a materialistic concept of man” that linked their author to philosophical materialism, deism, and libertinism (see Bosch, 223–6). Finally, ornaments offer particularly specific and stubbornly material incidents that raise a number of theoretical concerns embedded in the technology of writing. They indicate in a demonstrative way the collective nature of printed discourse. Since they are customarily planned by printers and added by compositors, ornaments that have been exploited self-consciously by the author pointedly reveal the more usual and ad hoc basis to the collective process of producing text. They mark the intersection of the writer’s discourse with both the aesthetics and economies of the book to suggest that writing does not necessarily precede but is often coterminous with the printing process. These paratextual events, in turn, complicate our notions of where “composing” takes place. Indeed, such forms of typography, perhaps more noticeably than letters, or even punctuation, trace a historical sequence of labor and reception. In some cases, the presence of printer’s devices also emphasizes problems associated with authorship and copyright. One can only imagine the difficulties of ascribing ownership to such apparently but rarely neutral marks. (Can one plagiarize an asterisk? A row of them? A paragraph of them?) These symbols further challenge the notion that writing is meant to approximate personal voice, though such an assumption certainly becomes complicated when the ornaments are used to indicate suppressed speech. Once readers begin to fill in asterisks, they shift from being mere “unwriterly Subjects,” according to Pope’s evocative phrase, to active agents in the production of discourse. Ornaments, in other words, can undermine conventional ways of reading by exposing the material and technological conditions for the production of discourse,

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offering at the very least a substantially different manner of close reading than that to which we are perhaps accustomed. They accentuate the ways in which eighteenth-century print culture constantly redefined such things as voice, feeling, language, typography, and intellectual property through various, and often conflicting, textual practices. In the period, print innovations and the increased sophistication in the circulation of texts became more than just agents in the widespread cultivation of new terms for imagining a “modern” self. They were also subjects of concern to prose writers as metaphoric expressions of authorial identity in relation to the public sphere, Enlightenment beliefs, and national imagining.

ch apter 4

Inanimate fiction: circulating stories in object narratives

Print suggests that words are things far more than writing ever did.

(Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, 1982)

I f t h i ng s c ou l d ta l k Things in print must stand by their own worth.

(Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle, Esq., 1756)

In 1755 John Kidgell circulated a privately published book entitled The Card, in which, paradoxically, cards seem to serve a rather peripheral role. The title suggests that a card will figure prominently in the story, or, in keeping with a genre in which objects tell stories, serve as narrative device, but the promise is never realized. The book’s title thus Â�echoes the throwaway quality of A Tale of a Tub. Additionally, like Swift’s work, and more especially that of Richardson, The Card also incorporates some of the typographic experimentation that characterizes Sterne’s subsequent exercises in meta-textual presentation. Kidgell, however, was much less interested in promoting the material text than in mocking the pretensions of those who made a book’s physical presence tantamount to meaning. In particular, as critics dating back to George Watson have noted, The Card burlesques Richardson’s works both for their style and their presentation (iii, 996). Mocking the contradictions between realism and artifice in Richardson’s “monuments to print,” The Card self-consciously parades the arbitrary connections between a book’s style and content. More importantly, like Richardson’s letters, the card to which the title refers exemplifies the physical circulation of words among people who cannot speak or who resist speaking in person. While Kidgell’s work is not actually an object narrative, his story occupies a middle ground between the works of Swift, Richardson, and Sterne and the talking things that are the main subject of this chapter. In the same way that Swift satirically draws attention to physical marks on the page or Richardson dramatizes the social migration 154

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of texts by reminding his readers of the particular materiality of individual letters, the object narratives accentuate the matter of narration. They communicate, in other words, the human urge to speak through things. Encouraging consumers to regard the narrator as a concrete alien entity that nonetheless has an intimate human voice, object narratives also dramatize the puzzle of reading things like books. In these stories, words are material vehicles imprinted on a specific object held in the hand that was produced by others; but they are also immaterial, or at least cognitive, signals activated in the reader’s mind. As if recognizing the commodity’s potent figuration of collective energy, object narratives mirror everyday forms of consumption in the guise of extraordinary products. In almost every one of the object narratives the act of storytelling is indissolubly linked to the movement of commodities and capital; they convey, in other words, an implicit theory of culture in which literary dissemination and economic exchange appear homologous. As principal narrators that represent authorship, the objects signal the wide-scale transference of text, the marketing of stories, various convolutions in the international book trade, and the mutations of narrative identity and authority that accompany circulation in the social sphere. They thus raise broad economic, social, and political issues, situating commodities in a complex signifying field that challenges international distinctions and complicates both nationhood and the public sphere. As a jeu d’esprit whose graphic tricks make a toy of printed narrative forms, Kidgell’s work plays on the associations between sport and chance that he attributed to the print industry.1 Self-consciously material, The Card both parades and derides the commodity fetishism that other writers had remarked in different ways. The book opens with a hand-colored frontispiece of a jack of knaves lampooning the portraits of writers that were routinely used to dignify published works (its textual gloss advertises the authorial persona as a “human Creature” renowned for “Artifice and Disguise”), while a later image of a folded card with “handwriting” printed on the reverse implies the serendipity that shaped publishing Â�ventures (Figures 22, 23). A further insertion of woodcut music in Â�volume ii highlights the intertextual play that structures the narrative (ii, 295–6). The music represents the tune of “The Card,” both in the Â�original Italian “LO CARTA” and as translated into English, to which characters from Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, Richardson’s Clarissa, and the Fieldings’ Tom Jones and David Simple dance. Oddly, the English version changes the title, style, and notation of the music. By the end

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Figure 22╇ John Kidgell, The Card (1755), i, frontispiece and title page.

of the book the word “card” has assumed a host of meanings that associate the text with playing cards, calling cards, dance cards, masquerade cards, scores, and a generally droll attitude (a “card” was also an odd or amusing person). Many of the work’s features, moreover, derive from Fielding’s burlesque style, as in the account of a rambling curate and the use of periodic section breaks entitled “A Digression.” Adding translations of Italian, French, and Greek sources and ranging over novel plots, characters, and styles, Kidgell deliberately pieced his work together from other works, as if shuffling a deck.2 In part a satire on scandalous reports about Edward Young and his housekeeper, here called “Dr. Elwes” and “Mrs. Fusby,” the narrative harnesses print technology, intertextual allusion, and literary backbiting to excoriate contemporary publishing ventures. Much of Kidgell’s narrative targets Sir Charles Grandison, particularly in the main plot tracing the amours of the English youth Archibald Evelyn

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Figure 23╇ John Kidgell, The Card (1755), between pages 12 and 13.

and his Italian inamorata, Tresa Sophia Andreini. But Clarissa is also the model for a long epistolary subplot involving Suky Paget that satirizes the tribulations of Richardson’s heroine. Indeed, most of the print effects in The Card, from the frontispiece or the folded-over card to the musical scores (which resemble one that appears in Clarissa), mock Richardson’s professional attention to the material details of his work. Even the title page claim, “Printed for the MAKER,” ridicules the pretensions of an author who, like Richardson in Pamela and Clarissa, used printer’s conventions to merge and even obfuscate authorship and bookselling. The capitalized word “MAKER,” echoing the Latin roots of “author,” “fiction,” and “poet,” all of which derive from Latin words meaning “to make,” inflates the importance of the text’s creator. At the same time, it suggests a blasphemous equation between the author and God.

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Kidgell and others were not simply sneering at Richardson’s success but at the trade ideology for which he stood. As the satirized author-turnedbookseller argues in John Buncle, Junior, books were frequently treated like any other piece of merchandise: “Will a tradesman be contented with having the choicest assortment of goods in his shop, without tempting the eye with an exhibition at the window? Do not our news-papers, and advertisements in every corner of the streets, abound with such descriptions of vendible commodities, as may best assure men to purchase?” (4–5). Drawing on the custom of posting title pages on street posts as a means of advertising new works,3 the bookseller presses the point that literature must market itself widely in order to survive: “In a word, is not every thing upon a large Scale?” (5). Buncle’s reply captures the attitude that highbrow writers adopted toward the kind of street corner logic that “Mr. Editor” here espouses: “But Literary productions, sir, are superior to such mean arts” (5). Kidgell’s book similarly links the commodity’s vagrant tendencies to the mass marketing of novels. A continuation of the battle between Richardson and Fielding but one that sharpens the typographical battles underlying the mid-century battle of the books, The Card situates the materialist strategies of the book industry against the reformist mode that Kidgell promoted. Despite the appearance that Kidgell’s ornamental title is a throwaway, it actually serves a multi-dimensional purpose. Most modern critics have simply concluded that the title is purposefully superfluous. Barchas, for example, states that “a definitive gloss of image, title, and text seems to come to a dead end” (55). But Kidgell, playing on several meanings of the title word, which is always carefully capitalized or italicized throughout the text, compares a printed book’s mobility as a discursive object to the way cards serve plural discursive and social functions in eighteenthcentury British society. The filigreed lettering of the words on the title page, like the printer’s ornaments that punctuate Swift’s and Richardson’s works, reminds readers of the exchange between the singular materiality of the book in their hands and the multiple effects that the text produces in the reader’s mind. Keymer calls The Card the most extended experiment in fictional form prior to Sterne (Sterne, 69). Much of that innovative aspect stems from its playful objectification of the publishing conventions of the period.4 But perhaps the most obvious allusion in Kidgell’s title is to a new genre of popular eighteenth-century fiction that employs an inanimate or non-human narrator, variously called it-narratives, object tales, and the novel of circulation. By first naming his book after a card and then depicting the figure of the author as jack of clubs, Kidgell

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capitalizes on the fascination with a text’s physical manifestations that object tales expressed. Even though no card in Kidgell’s story ever actually speaks, his book dramatizes the same connections that object narratives routinely drew between authorial and textual embodiment. Object tales, according to scholarly consensus, reflect the obsessions of an emerging commodity culture in eighteenth-century Britain, and critical accounts of The Card imply that it participated in the period’s sanguine assessment of materialism. While not an actual object narrative, Kidgell’s work shares that genre’s obsession with the particular ways in which words become things. The Card, and other experimental novels in the first half of the eighteenth century, especially those published around mid-century, thus serve as a link between the canonical novels of the period and one of the most curious narrative manias in popular fiction of the time. The popularity of object narratives has traditionally been treated as part of the history of a distinct but ephemeral subgenre, but it is also part of the novel’s history, indicating certain features shared across disparate kinds of fictional and cultural narratives. This chapter argues that the appearance of speaking objects in eighteenth-century fiction was linked to authorial concerns about disseminating books in the public sphere. I link these obsessions with circulated text, which tends to be overtly featured in narratives by speaking objects, to eighteenth-century fiction and the public sphere in general. T h e s ig ns of t h i ng s I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote. (Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)

Published in 1709, Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy: or, a Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments of War and Peace, and Love and Politics: Wherein are laid open, The Secret Miraculous Power and Progress of Gold, in the Courts of Europe initiated the popularity of the speaking object as a narrative device that was to extend into the next century. While inanimate storytellers can be traced back to Pythagoras (who recounted the oral capacities of rocks and trees) and later to Aesop, Ovid, and Apulieus, their double figuration as author and commodity

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expresses an acute fascination with the conditions of storytelling in an age of mechanical reproduction. In most instances, the speaking object is a product of manufacture rather than a part of nature and its satiric vision of the world arises from its particular experience of human commerce. Animal narrators inevitably carried a different charge than their object counterparts, perhaps because beasts had an ambiguous status as subjects worthy of sympathy. The objects, in contrast, routinely connect their economic status to their storytelling function. In Gildon’s work, for instance, a handful of quarrelsome gold coins from various countries narrate the story, priding themselves not only on their national origins but also on their special authorial perspective. “I have had such various transmigrations thro’ the World,” the French sovereign remarks, “and may justly say, that I know the Transactions in all the Climates of Europe, and Ages of the World” (13). This power to reveal human transactions of all sorts stems from the gold nugget’s conversion into an artifact; its mobility and anonymity as a manufactured object of exchange are precisely what endow it with the authority to tell tales.5 The object’s authority, however, is complicated by the very extemporaneous nature of its experience. Such narratives are invariably picaresque, the shifts in plot, subject, and locale serving to emphasize the indiscriminate changes of ownership that characterize its market value. Seeking a unified national identity, the objects are subject to a variety of dislocations that not only disrupt their storytelling but also complicate the very meaning of citizenry. While The Golden Spy is unusual in that several speaking objects recount the narrative, these works as a whole similarly align authorship, commodification, and national acculturation. A year after Gildon’s work, Addison published “The History of a Shilling” as No. 249 of The Tatler (Saturday, November 11, 1710) but credited as his inspiration John Philips’ often anthologized 1705 poem “The Splendid Shilling,” which is not, despite the title, an object narrative but rather a parody of Milton that focuses on the penury of a garreted writer who yearns for a “splendid shilling” to pay off his debts. In Addison’s story, as in Gildon’s, the human interlocutor dreams of talking currency, but his “Reverie” is triggered more directly by a friend’s prior opinion that if “a Twelvepenny-Piece” could give an “Account of his Life” it would shame the “the busie Men of the Age, who only valued themselves for being in Motion, and passing through a Series of trifling and insignificant Actions” (Lucubrations, iv, 261). The “Life of Business,” Addison implies, depreciates radically in light of the fantastic circulation of capital itself. The object’s story, he claims, strips the luster of the mere businessman’s account of himself.

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Ultimately, Addison’s dream assumes a peculiar epistemological status as it seems to channel real events; in a temporal Mobius strip, the shilling that the narrator dreams has a further adventure when it ends up in “a Poet’s Pocket, who was so taken with the Brightness and Novelty of my Appearance, that it gave Occasion to the finest Burlesque Poem in the British Language, Entitled from me, The Splendid Shilling” (Lucubrations, iv, 265). Celebrating Philips’ originality, Addison nonetheless attributes the work to an object that appears in a dream five years later and claims precedence as the story’s inventor. Inanimate narrators repeatedly express fears that printed words invest writers with a professional identity only at the expense of authorial erasure. These works relate the speaking object to the author’s position in a print culture in explicit (though not always systematic) ways, echoing Gildon’s observation that the author is both rewarded and threatened by the opportunities of print. Concerned with domestic and global pressures, they are part of national and international networks in which the function of authorship constantly shifts, altering the defining attributes of the “writer” with each alteration in the book’s public existence. Unlike Aesop’s Fables or Apulieus’ Golden Ass, nearly all eighteenth-century object tales are supplemented, usually in a preface, by an additional story that describes the convoluted process leading to their publication. The narrative frame in The Travells of a SHILLING, from Queen Elizabeth’s Reign, to K. GEORGE the IId’s Time (1728) acknowledges that “in AESOP’s Days inanimate Things were made to speak” (A2), and then presents the images of the coin’s two minted sides (Figure 24). The shilling’s “Account” is itself a pirated version of Addison’s story from Tatler 249 (the joke being that each Tatler was sold for a shilling). That the word “tatler” signifies the oral nature of the original printed text further links the inanimate speaking thing to the print context it inhabits. The object tales are, in other words, specifically linked to the circulation of the author’s imprinted work in a modern print economy. In the preface to The Golden Spy, entitled “Epistle Nuncupatory to the Author of A Tale of a Tub,” Gildon prepares the reader for the object tale by imagining his book manuscript being converted into printed form and gradually becoming detached from the history of its author. Rather than speak as writer, Gildon poses as a bookseller of an anonymous manuscript who rejects conventional explanations of how “the Author sent the following Sheets to Visit the World,” detailing instead his vexing search for a suitable patron, “my Author having sent me his Copy without inscribing it to any living Creature” (i). As the narrative itself is unattributed (The

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Figure 24╇ Travells of a Shilling (1728), A2.

Golden Spy did, in fact, appear anonymously), its double lack of naming signals an indeterminate textual authority that editorial interventions must offset. Gildon thus employs an imaginary bookseller more interested in the material, than intellectual, consequences of authorship. The preface’s situating of the professional writer within a mobile discursive field, moreover, intensifies the separation of author and text. Gildon’s bookseller not only uses the epistolary method to describe the effects of circulation on a manuscript that is itself about the “miraculous” circulation of a linguistic object (a speaking coin), he addresses the letter to another “Author,” Swift, whose own A Tale of a Tub refers obsessively to the published writer’s alienated identity. As Swift’s “modern” author complains, “Books, like Men their Authors, have no more than one Way of coming into the World, but there are ten Thousand to go out of it,

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and return no more” (Tale, 6). Just as Swift ponders the uncertainty of a work’s passage from author to printer and reader, Gildon speculates on the dangers of marketing one’s writing. He, too, looks for a “return,” but recognizes how easily his words spiral out of control once introduced into the public sphere; before the story even begins the book has assumed its autonomous role as a commodity. The fictive bookseller’s worry in The Golden Spy is that, without a dedication, the book will “look so naked and bare, as to fright all the modish Buyers,” though he admits that his “Customers” are satisfied by “a plausible Title Page (the Bookseller’s Art) and a good Gilt Back” (ii). Here, Gildon, aware of the resonance of his name (the word “gilden” being a common contemporary variant of “golden,” “gilded,” or “gilt”), subtly names himself as author through his titular subject (the golden spy) and the text’s material support (its gilded spine). But he regards authorship and book as compromised entities once the text enters the literary marketplace. As the bookseller notes, the “Catalogue” of his customers includes a variety of incompetent consumers from public and private domains such as “White’s Chocolate House, Tom’s and Will’s Coffee House, and the Temple … the Court, the Great Men’s Studies, and the Ladies’ Closets” (ii), The author’s work, moreover, is as subject to the degrading effects of other scribblers as it is to the vagaries of its readership. Like Swift, Gildon also knows that all manner of “Dulness” is enriched by false “Intimacy” with writers of distinction, and he sympathizes with Swift’s plight in which lesser works are “easily pas’d on the Town for your Productions.” Unlike others, Gildon’s editorial persona has “too much Modesty (tho’ a Bookseller), to palm the following Treatise” (vi) as Swift’s work Â�(managing, of course, to borrow Swift’s currency by simply speculating on the possibility). Employing monetary language, he distinguishes between genuine and counterfeit productions yet acknowledges how easily a consumer society blurs them, turning the writer’s activity into “but a Trade” and his words into things all “Light and Gaudy” (ix). What alarms Gildon is the slippage between author and word, or authority and possession that increases with each transference of the text through various stages from reproduction to distribution. Because of such circulation, the document loses much of its original value at the same time that it reaches a wider readership. This alienated authorship is exacerbated in The Golden Spy by the peculiar narrative process in which a handful of coins conveys the story to a human interlocutor who “writes” the book but does not “author” it. Gildon’s book displays the loss of individual storytelling power through images of its continual

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exchange, the foremost being the canting coin itself, a linguistic object that, like a book, depends on repeated handling. The force of this reiteration would have been especially pronounced at a time when legal right, originality, and literary ownership were remarkably fluid and yet ideologically compelling concepts (especially after the 1710 Copyright Act, which produced as much confusion over cases of literary property as clarification). The Golden Spy dramatizes the complex, often unpredictable, transmutation of text from manuscript (the author’s provenance) to book (the concern of publisher and printer) to literary commodity (as dictated by exchanges between bookseller and reader). Authors, editors, distributors, and readers in Gildon’s narrative are variously equated through acts of expenditure, in which the duplication and transferal of texts erodes the referential belief system, predicated on the evidential aura of an authentic manuscript, by which the fiction frames its empirical status. Conceding that, as a market agent, he is “speaking for another,” the bookseller concludes the preface to The Golden Spy by declaring that he will let the author “shift for himself” (x–xi). Indeed, the bookseller’s act of speaking for the absent author highlights the latter’s absorption into a print market. Gildon’s preface establishes a correlation between the modern author’s subservience to the bookselling industry and the commodity’s fluctuating status as a producer of signs and an object of consumption. Gildon’s concern with the economic, legal, and social disposition of texts in a fluid public sphere is not unique. The representation of books and papers that pass promiscuously between various readers and handlers in such disparate works of fiction as Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Richardson’s Clarissa, Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, and Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent indicates that eighteenth-century writers frequently associated the circulation of texts with the desirable yet troubling consequences of public exposure. Gildon’s work, however, and the object narratives it inspired, are particularly engrossed by the textual objectification that their inanimate narrators duplicate. Articulating the author’s complex disassociation from the text, the object stories literalize the disjunction between writer and written matter that was intensified by eighteenth-century bookselling practices. W h y obj e c t s spe a k It is indeed an Opinion strangely prevailing amongst Men, that Houses, Mountains, Rivers, and in a word all sensible Objects have

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an Existence Natural or Real, distinct from their being perceived by the Understanding.

(George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710)

A remarkably persistent feature in eighteenth-century fiction, the narrating object appears in a surprising number of satires published after 1709, manifesting a particular cultural obsession with stories as things. Gildon’s work seems to have initiated the vogue, and later writers show an often uncomfortable awareness of the similitude of their work. Gildon’s own endorsement of A Tale of a Tub, moreover, suggests that Swift’s conflation of story, object, and author in the title of his work provides a conceptual foundation for the later narratives, as did John Philips’ The Splendid Shilling. While Swift does not develop this trope, A Tale alludes repeatedly to the modern author’s transformation into idioglossic object, the result, according to Swift, of a society saturated by print. Swift’s modern writer, having noted that his is a “blessed Age” for “the mutual Felicity of Booksellers and Authors, whom I may safely affirm to be at this Day the two only satisfied Parties in England” (127), admits that this self-serving state is reflected in the writer’s ultimate self-absorption, “the Ghost of Wit, delighting to walk after the Death of its Body” (150). Such alienation, where things become narrators, is echoed in the titles of the object tales, among them: The Genuine and Most Surprizing Adventures of a Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill; Travels of Mons. le PosteChaise, Written by Himself; and The Adventures of a Pin, Supposed to be Related by Himself, Herself, or Itself. Other speaking objects include a settee, bedstead, pulpit, reading desk, mirror, old shoe, smock, waistcoat, watch, ring, umbrella, gold-headed cane, sedan, pincushion, thimble, top, kite, pen, old pocket Bible, and bank-note. Often of substantial length, they delineate the alarming way in which possessions inscribe the private experiences of their owners and then circulate them for public consumption. In 1781 the Critical Review observed that “This mode … is grown so fashionable, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection” (Critical Review 44 (November 1791): 397). By 1788, they were so numerous that writers apologized for adding more. As the narrator of The Adventures of a Watch rationalizes, “bank notes, guineas, nay even Birmingham halfpence, though of very roguish appearance, give the history of their lives … a watch is surely as intelligent as any of the above … Besides, ’tis no vulgar watch, but a watch of fashion! a gold Repeater, elegantly chased! Listen to it attentively!” (3). The quotation reveals how

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the narratives not only reflect self-consciously back on Gildon’s work, but often increase narrative authority by enhancing the object’s value. Like A Tale of a Tub, Clarissa, or Tristram Shandy, these stories reproduce the endless circulation of text in modern print culture. One of their repeated structural features, for instance, is the mediated transmission of the narrative. Initially spoken to a recent owner of the object, the narrative is transcribed by the interlocutor; the resulting manuscript passes to a family member or acquaintance, who, in turn, sells the work to an interested buyer; the latter then publishes the story, sometimes to aid the needy family member. In a particularly detailed example of this complex transferal of the text, the Adventures of a Cork-Screw, an “incorporeal substance” (3) that inhabits a bottle opener relates its story to a man whose wife then sells the manuscript (for the cost of burying her husband) to the fictional editor who finally publishes the text as a means to assist her. These narratives, in other words, signal the unprofitability of writing to the original writer despite their aim of redressing public inequities. They circulate in an overall system of self-interested, and frequently exploitative, social transactions that tend to make the original author disappear. Bookselling here is postulated€– in a manner increasingly characteristic of eighteenth-century print commerce€– as a social and economic system that erodes the status of authors precisely as it requires a greater supply of them for an increasingly voluminous market in printed literature.6 Literary criticism of object narratives has focused almost exclusively on their limited generic, moral, or commercial function, often connecting them to British imperialism.7 But the object tales also ponder economic, social, and political relations generally. The most satiric of them, such as Smollett’s History and Adventures of an Atom or Helenus Scott’s Adventures of a Rupee, not only disparage imperial economy but also blur exotic and British locales. Indeed, in most of the stories, a capricious mobility of animate and inanimate forms disrupts any coherent sense of social order. Often resisting historical specificity in favor of depicting the incessant movement of things across space and time, they disclose a notable degree of generality over the period. Many of them were published between 1770 and 1800, yet, despite the social ferment of this period, they tended to reject the distinct political allegory of earlier narratives such as Gildon’s, Johnstone’s, Smollett’s, and Scott’s. Indeed, the later resistance to political particularism is itself a significant, if evasive, response to the century’s closing decades. Relying on the conventional features of the form, writers instead turned a fascinated eye toward the disquieting fluency of objects in everyday life.

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As items of clothing, jewelry, furniture, transportation, currency, etc., the objects in these stories invariably evoke physicality, grounding their narratives in the experiences of vulnerable human bodies. The narrator’s effectiveness thus derives from its proximity to people, but, as every object eventually proclaims, human subjects rarely deserve their attention. The protagonist in Edward Philips’ The Adventures of a Black Coat complains, “When I contemplate the … vile schemes I have been obliged to countenance in those whose sole merit and reputation arose from my close attachment to them, my very threads blush at the indignity” (4). Though widening the public sphere to incorporate (in all senses of the word) personal, communal, national, and global relations, such narratives uncover a disorganized and venal world. Either passing through the hands of human subjects or serving to transport, protect, and furnish them, the objects ostensibly mediate social and material experience. But their Â�mediating function is always impeded by the Â�economic conditions that generate them. That the capacity to enhance the physical well-being of the human subject, which makes these commodities such ideal narrators, also incites the “owners” of the objects to trade them for profit, suggests a collusion between professional literary discourse and an acquisitive market economy. In The Adventures of a Cork-Screw, for example, the speaking object tries to merge its narrative function with its role as commodity. Thus it frequently defers stories of particular individuals at strategic moments of readerly concern: “in order to give my reader some necessary respite to draw a cork or so himself, I shall not introduce his lordship’s life till the next chapter” (13). But the stories themselves deny such happy affinity between object and user. Whenever the corkscrew’s owners need to complete a social transaction they suddenly “feel” it in their pockets and, reminded of its economic value, convert it into an object of exchange rather than use. Coupling the act of narration with the object’s continual displacement, the corkscrew’s adventures reveal in a particularly distressing way what Marx calls the “definite social relation between men” that all commodities retain (Capital, i, 65). A chief aim of the object tales is, of course, simply to generate interest through the startling proposition of an inanimate narrator. But they also focus reflexively on the object’s narrative motivation. Punning on the meaning of novel writing and defending its decision to enter a saturated print market, the watch argues that “To handle a feeling subject properly, requires some consideration; for though numbers may speak feelingly, yet to write so is rather novel, notwithstanding there are a number of novel

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writers” (5). More pointedly, the narrator of The Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat, whose story is “as wonderful and as replete with Matter as most Part of our late Novels” (Part ii, 6), extols its narrative to the interlocutor in terms of publishing and profit: “I doubt not but some of the Magazines will sufficiently reward you for a Detail of my Story” (i, 5). The intimacy and authenticity that fiction pretends to gratify in the reader and that would ideally distinguish the printed book from other wares are here bracketed by the power of commodities to create market gains. Of course, the illusion that a book has a more personal impact on its purchaser than other commodities is itself poignantly refuted by the fantastic nature of these stories and their improbable storyÂ� tellers. The actual author has veiled the profit motive that in ordinary circumstances might compromise the narrative’s objectivity by speaking through a seemingly disinterested object. The troubling effect of this public exchange is implied by the narrating object’s painful awareness of its imprisoned consciousness. The corkscrew emphasizes this condition by using the same language of entrapment as its interlocutor, who dies after “a long confinement” for debt (iv). Particularly “fond of scribbling,” the dead man’s only valuable legacy is “a large parcel of paper entirely spoiled, being scribbled all over” (viii)€– that is, the manuscript published by the anonymous editor. The original storyteller, the corkscrew, is a spirit similarly punished by being “confined in” a “steel imprisonment” (5) where it is “doomed” to languish until it “should fall into the hands of some mortal, whose misfortunes were not brought on himself by his folly” (4). The object’s only alleviation is to “relate” the “histories” of those “persons … in whose hands I have been” (5), and its bequest is the same narrative as the man’s. Both the imprisoned “scribbler” (the conventional designation for a Grub Street writer) and the inspirited object share the defining experience of desperately relating a story from the confines of a “steel imprisonment.” Each hopes to escape confinement through narrative production, and to find freedom of circulation through a story that is made public. The narrator of The Adventures of a CorkScrew thus exploits the commodity’s magical transferability while recognizing the limits of economic exchange. Parallels between writer and speaking object are even more pronounced in The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes, where the verses on the title page make speaking objects the virtual counterparts of modern “Scriblers” who burden an already crowded public sphere: So common now are Authors grown, That ev’ry Scribler in the Town,

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â•…â•…â•… Thinks he can give delight. If writers then are got so vain, To think they pleasure when they pain, â•…â•…â•… No wonder Slippers write. Anon.

Continuing this premise, the work ascribes even the “Preface, Introduction, Dedication, or Advertisement” to the Slippers (“… we beg leave to suscribe ourselves, Your most devoted SLIPPERS” [iv]). They not only, like Swift, parody the overloading of texts with prefatory material, they specifically liken themselves to “many great Authors” (iii). In other works, this self-consciousness about “authorship” is reinforced when, in imitation of literary convention, the object uses its pedigree to authenticate itself as narrator and justify the printed text it engenders, thus allying itself with the human authors it otherwise disdains. As The Adventures of a Cork-Screw observes, “when an author issues his performance into the world; every one is desirous to know his name, his character, and the motives which urges him to trouble the world with such a quantity of paper” (1). Similarly, when Dorothy Kilner’s hackney coach notices a customer admiring its unusually fine appearance, it feels compelled to clarify its special pedigree: Before I introduce any of the characters I mean to exhibit to my reader, I must beg leave to introduce my OR IGIN. I WAS made by a distinguished Coachmaker of Great Queen-Street, Lincoln’sInn-Fields, for Mr. M€ ––––, a very worthy merchant in Thread-needle-Street. (Kilner, i, 4)

The coach speaks directly to “my reader” and, like the “SLIPPERS,” stresses its origins typographically, using offset capital letters that accentuate its relation to the printed page. Here the history of its manufacture confers authorial pedigree, as the coach accepts its necessary entrance into a crass commercial world and underscores its superior and inimitable condition. It is a hackney refusing hackney status as a writer. This appropriation of human behavior by narrative objects for the purpose of dramatizing the plight of the author is probably best exemplified in Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom. Here, the narrator actually merges with human bodies, transmigrating through various people, animals, and matter until it lodges in the pineal gland of the interlocutor, who then writes from dictation as its “editor.” After a Â�series of mishaps, a fictionalized “publisher” acquires the manuscript, carefully validates the narrative, and then decides to “present in print” what the “editor” has transcribed from the atom. The story’s progress, in other

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words, exemplifies the mobility of objects, narration, and consciousness in all the stories: fate determined I should exist in the empire of Japan, where I underwent a great number of vicissitudes, till, at length, I was enclosed in a grain of rice, eaten by a Dutch mariner at Firando, and, becoming a particle of his body, brought to the Cape of Good Hope. There I was discharged in a scorbutic dysentery, taken up in a heap of soil to manure a garden, raised to vegetation in a sallad, devoured by an English supercargo, assimilated to a certain organ of his body, which, at his return to London, being diseased in consequence of impure contact, I was again separated, with a considerable portion of putrefied flesh, thrown upon a dunghill, gobbled up, and digested by a duck, of which duck your father, Ephraim Peacock, having eaten plentifully at a feast of the cordwainers, I was mixed with his circulating juices, and finally fixed in the principal part of that animacule, which, in process of time, expanded itself into thee, Nathaniel Peacock. (i, 7)

Here, the narrative impulse is literally embodied and naturalized, “assimilated” into animal, vegetable, and mineral domains by its metempsychosal passage through starches, diseases, soils, bodily discharges, leafy plants, aquatic birds, and human anatomies. Its thorough occupation of the world indicates a universal signifying power; it not only becomes an object, but multiplies its objective state by a fantastic circulation through a variety of all known physical elements. Divided among many, it nonetheless preserves its indivisible nature. The atom’s experience, moreover, encompasses Pacific and Atlantic crossings, blurring of international body types, rapid transitions in national languages, and indiscriminate passage between countries; it surpasses, in other words, all boundaries of human containment, yet is one of the most contained things on earth. Given the complex, and by this time conventional, frame by which the “writer” recounts his acquisition of the story, which is then supplemented by the “editor’s” explanation of his ownership, the atom’s tortuous route is, retrospectively, merely a prelude to its intricate verbalization. The printed form of the story is an extension of the narrative’s strange progress through the world. Its circulation, foregrounded by the elaborate editorial frame, parallels that of the atom. The latter’s absorption into such human agents in global and domestic trade as a mariner, supercargo, or cordwainer before lodging in an author emphasizes parallels between writing and commodity culture that objects in other stories embody more directly. Comparing the diffusion of printed texts to the movement of money, ships, goods, vital fluids, and matter, the stories in such “unauthored” works highlight writerly concerns about the unpredictability of circulating books in the public domain.

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One explanation, then, for the popularity of these works is that they reproduced transformations in the marketing of printed literature. They assume that British culture best succeeds by promoting a continual circulation of goods through highly developed networks of distribution, such as a national postal system, extensive highways and canals, provincial printing houses, circulating libraries, coffee houses, charitable societies, a national bank, and modern international systems of credit and stocks. Indeed, several narratives specifically align their narrator with one or other of these systems of dissemination: The Adventures of a Quire of Paper (printing houses, stationers, and coffee houses), Dorothy Kilner’s The Adventures of a Hackney Coach (turnpikes), the various currency stories such as Thomas Bridges’ The Adventures of a Bank-Note (systems of national banking and credit). If an effective public sphere, in which each citizen participates in ceaseless exchange, is advanced through practical national and international means such as coffee houses, turnpikes, and banks, it is also facilitated through the encouragement of a public-Â�mindedness that urges readers to regard literature itself as an economic instrument as well as an aesthetic, moral, or informational resource. Habermas contends that the development of the “public sphere” in eighteenth-Â�century England was “rooted in the world of letters” (Transformation, 85), particularly through the journal and novel reading promoted by libraries, book clubs, and reading circles that replaced early institutions such as coffee houses and salons (51). As a result of this shared reading, Habermas contends, “the public sphere appeared as one and indivisible” in the “self-understanding of public opinion” (Transformation, 56). This would also seem to be the ideal condition that the speaking objects hope to encounter in their circulation through the world. But, as in A Tale of a Tub, the public sphere described by the objectified narrators is often disrupted by an indiscriminate print industry. As the preface to the black coat’s narrative scornfully, and somewhat paradoxically, proclaims, “In this age of Magazines and Chronicles, the Cacoethes Scribendi hath infected the town so much, that almost every shop, or workroom, harbours an author … When such gentlemen assume the pen, I hope it will not be deeming vanity, if I decline standing as candidate for literary fame” (ix-x). As equally reluctant authors, the anonymous writer and the inanimate narrator regard themselves as suspended between the compromising aspects and demonstrable benefits of the publishing world, denying the value of print culture as they deliberately enter into it. Indeed, the author of this story admits that the anonymity and modesty of the

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speaking object as a narrative trope deliberately elides original authorship: “All I shall say of the following petit performance is, that I have endeavoured to make the Author less conspicuous than the moral” (viii). The disjunction between object narrator and author seems, on the one hand, to enhance claims about the autonomy and disinterestedness of the literary work and free the writer from accountability; on the other hand, it dramatizes the mechanical and alienated nature of modern writing and highlights the problems of literary property and the writer’s status in an overpopulated print culture. In such stories, the narrating object serves several corrective functions, from reversing the relation between subject and object to exposing the contradictions between private and public behavior. But these powers, ironically, serve only to intensify an existing social discord. According to a 1781 review of Helenus Scott’s The Adventures of a Rupee in The Critical Review, such narratives constituted a fashionable repository for “all the farrago of public transactions, private characters, old and new stories,” thrown together by “writers of the inferior class” to provide “a little temporary amusement to an idle reader” (Critical Review 52, 477–8). Underscoring the connection between “public transactions” and “private characters,” the Review’s criticism recognizes, though it does not choose to commend, the creation of a heterogeneous public sphere, and the consequent effects of indiscriminate printed matter on a national audience. The Review’s objections, however, are already highlighted in the stories themselves. Often of irreducible form (as with Smollett’s atom), the speaking objects portray human subjects only as fragments€– partial histories€– that produce neither a unified plot nor a coherent social sphere. The hybridity of the narratives reinforces this discord: any one of them may use satire, allegory, anatomy, picaresque, scandal chronicle, roman à clef or secret Â�history, news, propaganda, autobiography, moral tale, sentimental romance, Aesopian fable, spy novel, travelogue, and imaginary voyage. If these texts are among the cultural technologies of eighteenthcentury Britain that enabled individuals to reconcile personal and civic experience through rhetorical incorporation of the public (which their educative function as satire or children’s cautionary tale might suggest), they also recognized and retained notable traces of disjunction. The circulation of the objects in this respect becomes a measure of the dispersion rather than the consolidation of people and things; their polyglot nature, the rapid shifts in locale, and transfigurations in their physical status belie the unifying force of commodities while accentuating the dismantling effects of human commerce.

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The vacillation in narrative subject that these stories exhibit is often reproduced through the commodity form of the object itself. In The Adventures of a Quire of Paper, originally printed in The London Magazine, the narrator not only embodies the fabric on which magazines, newspapers, and novels are produced; it also understands the essential poverty of textual embodiment, linking its destined conversion into a printed book to a terrifying unalterable condition. Initially a thistle, it is gradually transformed into flax for a large piece of cambric and then converted into various articles of clothing that eventually become the tatters a ragpicker sells to a paper-maker who transforms them into “the sort of paper you have in your hands” (449). Here, the paper “in your hands” doubles both as the sheets of text the reader of The London Magazine holds and as the leaves of a printed sermon that the interlocutor picks up during an idle hour in a “publick coffee-room” and which, in a dream, become the pages that constitute the speaking quire of paper (355). The narrating object, in other words, is tied specifically to two crucial forms of printed material in the period€– newspapers and sermons€– and is associated with one of the most crucial sites of public reading€– the coffee house. But the quire of paper’s feelings about joining these other forms of public print are not entirely agreeable. Spread over a number of texts, the narrator’s greatest fear is that the permanence of a book will “hand me down in my present nature to the latest posterity, and cut me off for ever from being united to my other widely scattered and wretched parts, in my original form” (451). Lamenting the fragmented identity, scattered body, and partial consciousness that writing for a “publick” market entails, it seems aware that its existential status has been reduced to the brief disposable magazine form in which it appears. In this story, the circulation and transformation of the commodity as printed text becomes a process of debasement and devaluation. T o c oi n a ph r a s e Words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values.

(Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605)

… it is pretty to see what money will do.

(Samuel Pepys, Diary, March 21, 1667)

It is not surprising, given the emphasis on circulation in these narratives, that the dominant representative objects are pieces of money. Such figures underline the interconnection of economy, language, and possession. The

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monetary range of this subgroup is broad; there are stories told by banknotes and bank-tokens, rupees, guineas, sovereigns, shillings, and pennies. A few of these are short narratives, often from magazines or newspapers€– the stories of a half-guinea and half-penny are appropriately presented in smaller form than those of a full guinea or shilling. Like the quire of paper, these modest denominations adjust their narrative expectations to fit less exalted textual forms. In contrast, the most popular such work, Johnstone’s four-volume Chrysal: or, the Adventures of a Guinea, produced a sequel in 1765 and by 1800 had reached twenty editions. Almost as long as Tom Jones, it follows the peregrinations of its numismatic hero in four continents, through more than twenty countries, and between over fifty people. Whether short or long, the money tales consistently parallel currency and writing. An explicit example of this alignment, The Adventures of a Bank-Note, accentuates the object’s authorial sovereignty in order to Â�validate its story. Explaining its “unaccountable” ability as “a writer,” the bank-note distinguishes its talents from mere transcription: The inquisitive world may perhaps be curious enough to enquire, why I alone, amongst so many thousands of bank-notes, came to be possessed of such uncommon talents, as not only to recollect the particular passages of my life, but be likewise able to dictate to a secretary, or more properly speaking, to inspire knowledge into a machine, whose utmost qualification before was (like most of the quorum) just to be able to write his name, and read it when he had done. (Bridges, i, 3)

No other note, it later adds, is capable of “making a single remark, much less of arranging those remarks in so masterly a manner as I do” (Bridges, i, 166). Being the offspring of a Grub-Street “scribbler” accounts for its penmanship, since, according to the note, “The person that deposits cash for a bank-note may properly be called its father” (Bridges, i, 6). Its subsequent orphaning occurs when its “father,” unable to publish, changes the note to rent cheaper quarters. The note’s suspicion of print thus arises from losing a father through the printing establishment’s unreliability. Indeed, the narrator regularly attacks the publishing industry: “my bookseller rather hurries me, or more properly speaking, hurries the person I inspire with my knowledge, and whose head and hand are now fully employed in penning these adventures of mine … it is no unusual thing for booksellers to hurry poor devils of authors” (Bridges, i, 164–5). Central to its judgment of publishing is a fear that its words must undergo a sequence of uncontrollable transmissions, not unlike that of currency itself, before reaching their targeted audience.

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These money tales, then, are particularly emblematic of eighteenthcentury literary attitudes toward publishing because they fuse linguistic and material exchange. A sub-specie of a fairly unified body of object narratives initiated by Gildon’s already reflexive story about coinage, they echo broader attitudes toward literary commerce by dramatizing how the design of money parallels the commodification of the literary forms in which the tales appear. Edward Young, addressing Richardson on the topic of originality in his Conjectures, draws the same analogy. “Thoughts, when become too common,” he writes, “should lose their Currency; and we should send new metal to the Mint, that is, new meaning to the Press” (14). Like Young’s “Thoughts,” speaking coins must constantly be exchanged. Passing through various hands, they mediate different physical bodies, but only as symbolic objects whose purchasing power indirectly enables creature comforts (thus distinguishing them from other vocal objects, such as pens or sofas, whose use value is more directly embodied). As Marc Shell notes in The Economy of Literature, “Coins are themselves both artful reproductions and active participants in the sum total of the relations of production” (86). The same, he argues, may be said of the printed word: “The study of economic and verbal symbolization, and of the relationship between them, begins at the mint” (63). What Jochen Hörisch calls “the poetics of money” is thus fundamentally interested in the objective status of words. The vogue for narrating coins was not restricted to prose fiction. In the early part of the eighteenth century especially, various authors doled out poetic versions of the genre. “The Splendid Shilling,” which appeared in miscellanies and anthologies well into the nineteenth century, was one of the most popular eighteenth-century poems; while not an object narrative per se, it prompted a number of poems that embodied coins as verbal icons. The anonymous The Jacks Put to Their Trumps: A Tale of a King James’s Irish Shilling (1714), for example, merges the lament of the coin with reflections on the “fickle” treatment of both political and authorial sovereignty. In the poem, the narrator traces his fate as devalued coinage in the period following the Revolution Settlement of 1688. Clearly and visibly a Jacobite sympathizer, the speaking coin denounces the failure of Irish support in the cause of the Old Pretender (James Francis Edward Stuart, son of James II). Ironically, the authority of the coin, its narrative power, and the King’s legitimacy all deteriorate precisely as the coin circulates in the public sphere in accordance with its function of symbolizing sovereign command. As the Irish shilling notes: “While my Dear Master smil’d on me, / Whose Image still I bear; / I was a welcome Guest

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to all, / Was courted ev’ry where” (6). Following the “REVOLUTION” and “WILL’s Establishment” (8), then “ANNA’s Reign” (9), and finally the rule of “King GEORGE, and all his Tribe” (11), however, the narrator witnesses the depreciation of his Master’s worth as a personal loss: “They scurrilously us’d me there / For nothing but a Farthing … No Jacobite amongst them all / My former Value own’d” (9). This convergence of money, ideology, and language is captured not only in the Irish shilling’s reminder that he bears the image of the monarch, or the emphatic typography within the poem, but also visually on the title page, where the image of the coin’s two faces is reproduced in a presumably accurate reproduction of a King James Irish shilling. The political saga that the coin yearns for, so that his “Image” can be restored, is thus voiced as a eulogy to Stuart lineage in which the law of the name of the Father is repeatedly deflated: “My Master’s Son I thought wou’d come, / His Father’s Cause t’advance; / I thought t’have shewn my Face again, / And welcom’d him from France. / In greater Lustre thought to shine, / Long hop’d to be prefer’d, / T’have laid the Father’s Image down / For that of JAMES the Third” (10). In this instance, the fate of the coin seems to compound the problematic order of signification that Hörisch traces up to the present: “when a sovereign allows money to be the medium of rule and control, he acknowledges at the same time … the bankruptcy of powerful, sovereign language in favor of the numerical code, which has found its earliest and most powerful incarnation to date in money” (12). In the Irish Shilling, the legibility and legal tender of the coin€– its numerical code€– is not so much an alternative to verbal signification as a parallel to it. The poetics of money is as subject to interpretive indeterminacy as poetry itself. While represented by a number of poetic specimens like the Irish Shilling, the subgenre of the speaking coin was nonetheless particularly suited to prose fiction, which could amplify the analysis about verbalization and diegesis that the poems explored. The relation between money and language use voiced by the Irish shilling, for instance, is intensified in The Adventures of a Bank-Note where the note not only speaks directly as author but compares its right to authenticate words with Samuel Johnson’s: “The author thinks he has as great a title to coin words as the great Doctor any-body; and whether he takes his degree or not, he declares he will do it whenever he pleases” (Bridges, ii, 42). The pun on coining simply reinforces the analogy the “author” is drawing between monetary and verbal exchange. The bank-note, moreover, draws attention constantly to the importance of deciphering the text on the note in order to use it best or properly judge its value. When, for example, an illiterate

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couple asks a “bookish” tavern owner what they have found, he is able to bilk them of the note by pretending it is one of his lost account receipts. The speaking money’s approximation of human language thus connects the individual to a treacherous body politic, grounding public experience in a dense, empirical realm of social, economic, and political transactions that stem from a compulsive need for change. A similar relation inheres in the polyglot nature of the stories. Repeatedly, the movement of the objects occurs in a specifically international setting. Currency tales, such as Johnstone’s Chrysal or Helenus Scott’s Adventures of a Rupee, mix “oriental” background and English history to produce a cosmopolitan perspective. In The Golden Spy the editor transcribes the heated debate between coins of various nationalities as they discuss the merits of the countries in which they have been minted. Here, in a parody of the conversation in such discourse networks as the coffee houses, playhouses, pleasure grounds, and musical venues that Habermas celebrates as sites of transformation in the eighteenthcentury English public sphere (Transformation, 32–43), the interlocutor finds that he is “oblig’d to interpose [his] Authority for the Preservation of the Peace” (39). This internationalism both widens the boundaries of the cultural realm and indicates that national bias, competing languages, and imported ideologies continually disrupted sites of public discourse in Britain. One of the consequences of expanding the means of circulation was that the public sphere became increasingly heterogeneous precisely at a time when it seemed to be providing new possibilities for consensus. Although these texts often privilege British citizenry, they also emphasize the international components of national definitions of the state. The authorial interposition of Gildon’s interlocutor, furthermore, divulges a yearning for a powerful central authority that the very notion of “the public” seemed to displace or disguise. The increased global scope, coupled with the transformability of currency in a world market, changes the relation of writer and book in these stories. They are, among other things, parables of textual and authorial objectification; the storyteller is not only transformed into inanimate form, but is constrained by a system of ownership to describe the experience of others, usually at the expense of internal or personal reflection. One of the frustrations for these objects is that, for all their narrative capacity, they are not adequate subjects themselves. Unlike The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe or The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, the adventures, history, and memoirs cited repeatedly in the titles of such works refer not to the title character’s “life” but to

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its accounts of others. The objects have little agency and very little valuable story of their own; rather, they are repeatedly constituted as vessels with a peculiar, magical, or superhuman capacity to both “intuit” (a word used frequently in these narratives) and then recall the entire experience of others simply by being possessed. Their movement through the public sphere is dependent on their debased users, for whom they rarely express any admiration. Having, in effect, become fetishes, with both sentience and a conscience, they invert the totemic power that theorists have ascribed to fetishism; instead of “the most aggressive expression of the social life of things” or of “matter” that “strikes back” (Pels, 91), the canting coins are dominated by the lives they mediate.8 The storyteller, in other words, becomes a figure who gains access to subjectivity only through the impoverished subjectivities of others, gradually unfolding a vision of the national state in which identity itself is fungible. Each of the objects in these narratives is acutely aware of this double bind, owning that its powers of insight, though astonishing, are always dependent on the structures of usage and distribution into which it is disposed. The bank-note, for example, frequently apologizes for not being able to supply an “account” of an episode or complete a given “narrative” because it has been “delivered” into the hands of a new owner (Bridges, i, 179; i, 190; ii, 38; ii, 74; ii, 123; ii, 164–7). Addison’s twelvepenny piece admits that its adventures “would be tedious to relate” but manages to trace its various states of ownership from Peruvian miners to Sir Francis Drake, and then from miser to spendthrift or Parliamentarian to Cavalier. While it asserts that it finds in itself a “wonderful Inclination to Ramble” (Lucubrations, iv, 263) it admits that its mobility is a consequence of human desire: “The People very much favoured my natural Disposition, and shifted me so fast from Hand to Hand, that before I was Five Years old, I had travelled into almost every Corner of the Nation” (Lucubrations, iv, 262). The sequence of displacements here is aligned with the isolating effects of circulation: the power to tell stories is compromised by the subjection of storytellers to systems of social, economic, and material exchange that delimit their identity. In an innovative twist, the corkscrew links these moments of sudden transference to the structure of the text itself: “as I have entered into a new service, it would not be consistent to introduce my new governor, otherwise than at the beginning of a new chapter” (34). But the money tales are more acutely representative than any other object story of the unpredictable mobility that governs signification. The word “circulation” is, in fact, repeatedly invoked by the objects to articulate their almost helpless physical, rhetorical, and mental

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transit through the world. Yet most of the speaking coins also deplore commercial inactivity and are most unhappy in the hands of misers, collectors, and poor economists. As Addison’s shilling observes, “to my unspeakable Grief, I fell into the Hands of a miserable old Fellow, who clapped me into an Iron Chest, where I found Five Hundred more of my own Quality who lay under the same Confinement” (Lucubrations, iv, 262). The Golden Spy similarly complains that hoarding makes the canting coins lose their “agreeable Quality, which is only maintain’d by an absolute Freedom of circulating with the Sun about the World, where we make far greater Discoveries than that glorious Planet” (7). These narrators, in other words, envision the cultural sphere as a hazardous but necessary field for human representation. Authorial voice is effectively prostituted by being detached from the body, circulated, exchanged, and depersonalized. To some degree, these narratives do shield the author from the kind of public vortex into which the text itself is necessarily drawn. It is, after all, the author’s surrogate that experiences the full effect of exploitation by the public marketplace. But that protection is also a sign of the author’s vulnerability. The object narratives explicitly displace and disembody the human agent, simultaneously freeing the author of liability and exposing his or her limited cultural power. Because of this complex negotiation of the marketplace, moreover, it is of crucial importance in all the narratives that the objects be used constantly; this supplies one of the more salacious implications of such works as those produced by sofas, settees, and bedsteads (as Hogarth affirms in Plate 4 of Marriage à la Mode by picturing a copy of Crébillon’s The Sofa on the sofa upon which Silvertongue lounges as he seduces Countess Squanderfield). But the pervasive amorous content of these stories also suggests that the writers themselves aligned writing and publishing with promiscuity (in the bedstead’s account politics quite literally makes strange bedfellows). The money tales, however, are particularly sexualized. In Gildon’s Golden Spy, for instance, receiving stories becomes a carnal, nearly auto-erotic experience, as if the power of the narrator or story worked on the human interlocutor in terms of arousal, seduction, and intercourse. Every evening, during his possession of four garrulous coins from England, France, Italy, and Spain, Gildon’s editorial persona hurries home to repeat a ritual of narrative exchange. First, he locks the door to his “Chamber,” then dresses in his “NightGown,” picks up his four “Bedfellows,” gets beneath the sheets, fondles the coins and then holds them closely to his ear one at a time as they entertain him with their “tales” (34). He is particularly “transported”

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by the French coin: “I took him up in my Hand, gave him a thousand kisses, and hugging him close in my Bosom, full of Pleasure as great as if I had got the beautiful CÆLIA in my Arms€– Go on, (said I) my Charmer, go on, and bless me with a Conversation, which sure no Man ever enjoy’ d before!” (6). Here, in a typical synthesis, the desires for sex, money, and knowledge (all marked as different forms of circulation) coalesce. Similarly, the Jacobite shilling in The Jacks Put to Their Trump (1714) brags that a coin’s attractiveness outstrips the appeal of a monarch. Quoting lines from Rochester’s scandalous impotence poem, “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” it confesses, “The Ladies did my Shapes approve, / My Features too admir’d,? Where ev’n my KING could never go, / Securely I retir’d. / Within their Bosoms lay all Day, / And revell’d in their Arms, / I was my self all over Love, And they all over Charms” (7). While the stamped features of the shilling are those of the King, they nonetheless project an identity of their own that makes the symbolized aspect of the monarch greater than the monarch himself. Eroticizing the act of exchange at all levels, the object tale publicizes its own bodily, economic, political, and intellectual transformability in the details of the stories it tells about others. Such narratives recognize the commercial and national advantages in the trafficking of liquid assets and they underwrite Britain’s market ambitions in sensual terms. Yet the speaking objects invariably disdain the concrete forms they enter, and deplore the physical crudeness of the human bodies they serve or imitate, stressing the corruptible nature of somatic and linguistic being. Orality itself is compromised by its physical source; but the narrative voice nonetheless recognizes the need to assume palpable form in order to yield anecdotal “history,” however frustrating the limits of human language. As Helenus Scott’s rupee typically complains in moments of intensely felt experience, “the mode that mortals have adopted of expressing ideas by words now fails me entirely” (91). Chrysal describes the problem even more exactly, yoking the hazards of language to print culture specifically: “Whenever I comply with the ludicrous taste that prevails at present, and couch a double meaning, in a plain word, my manner of speaking will explain my sense to you, just as well as the use of different characters does in print” (ii, 4). Objecting to the practice of italicizing, Johnstone’s narrator accuses printers of “assuming the liberty of giving any word, phrase, or sentiment, which he does not understand himself or thinks the reader may not understand, just as he does,” a typographical emphasis that will “disfigure the appearance, and perplex the sense.” “I have thought it proper to say this,” it adds, “to prevent the loss of my labours, in the

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mistake or perversion of my words” (ii, 4–5). The bookseller’s italics only confirm what Chrysal already suspected of human discourse, “the signification of words, in the language of men, being so unsettled, that it is scarce possible to convey a determinate sense” (ii, 1–2). Using italics for emphasis, the canting coin indicates exactly where the contest between the author and the bookselling establishment occurs: at the convergence of intellectual and commercial property. Chrysal’s petulance about the vagaries of printed text derives from its convictions about the transparency of language. Like most of the speaking objects, Johnstone’s narrator boasts transcendent powers of communication that eliminate temporal, physical, and vocal distinctions: “I can see your thoughts; and will answer every doubt which may arise in your mind at the wonders of my relation, without the interruption of your inquiries, as awful silence is the essence of my converse” (i, 4). As it goes on to explain, “besides that intuitive knowledge common to all spirits, we of superior orders, who animate this universal monarch GOLD, have also a power of entering into the hearts of the immediate possessors of our bodies” (i, 6). The inanimate narrators, in fact, are often emanations or spirits enclosed in the objects; they can converse as capably outside as within the material form they inhabit, and “speak” silently, anticipating, in a sense, the full exploitation of free indirect discourse later in the century. They do not hear (having no suitable organs for such a task) but “intuit” the details of their owners’ lives; nor do all of them even talk (though the coins do at least have symbolic ears and mouths). In the few cases where a coin specifically notes its own face it does so to sharpen the irony of its ambiguous identity. Addison’s shilling, for example, reared itself “upon its Edge, and turning the Face towards me, opened its Mouth, and in a soft Silver Sound gave the … Account of his Life and Adventures” (Lucubrations, iv, 261–2). The grammatical distinction between “the Face” and “its Mouth” suggests the weird condition of having a countenance imposed upon the self. As it remarks, “I was, soon after my Arrival [in England], taken out of my Indian Habit, refined, naturalized, and put into the British Mode, with the Face of Queen Elizabeth on one Side, and the Arms of the Country on the other” (Lucubrations, iv, 262). It even later observes its capacity, upon being melted and reused, of acquiring a newly gendered identity: “What has happened to me since this Change of Sex which you now see, I shall take some other Opportunity to relate” (Lucubrations, iv, 265). Imprinted both with the head of a state figure and verbal inscriptions that represent that state authority (which the shilling calls its “Titles”), its face is not really its own but the visage of a human authority it serves. Such figural

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representations ostensibly sanction the owner’s use and possession of the objects; at the same time, as money, they pass through the hands of many various individuals. Thus, represented body parts of a particular political and economic meaning (the heads of coins) pass through the hands (or body parts) of a representative cross-section of a contemporary European society, which, in turn, is governed by various related state authorities in a broad international public sphere. Here, the remove from genuine orality serves to clarify the distinction presumed to exist between speech and writing, and, further, between handwritten and printed texts.9 The printed text, following spoken, handwritten, and typeset forms, is therefore quadruply removed from the non-verbal sphere of ideal mental speech. Rather than a semblance of unity, the public sphere is characterized, for these ideal narrators, by systems of metonymic displacement. If, as Benedict Anderson (56–83), Bourdieu (112–41), and Habermas (Transformation, 12–54) contend, the public sphere is foremost a discursive field, many eighteenth-century texts helping to shape it as such suspected the supposed consensual effect of language. By attaching the idea of narration to physical objects which, in circulation, lose their prime function and identity, the object narratives refute some of the more optimistic assessments of print as a mechanism of informed and rational public order or a sign of the nation’s concerted will. Addison’s shilling even comments on the way it cannot assert its own political convictions (as a symbol of the state) without the fear of being manipulated into contrary political stances: “I thus rambled from Pocket to Pocket till the Beginning of the Civil Wars, when, to my Shame be it spoken, I was employed in raising Soldiers against the King” (Lucubrations, iv, 263). Here, Addison suggests that even the most authorized forms of signification risk sudden changes in fortune. The constant punning in object narratives, on words such as “account,” “refined,” “credit,” “betoken,” and “currency,” similarly imply that the meaning of words, like money itself, keeps changing hands. That the authors of these works needed to disguise and protect themselves by speaking in another voice, and, even then, attributing their words to a seemingly neutral object that often moves “invisibly” through the world, suggests that one of the consequences of writing was to alienate the author from the work. In the money tales particularly, the object chosen to emulate the writer effectively aligns authorial activities with the omnipresent circulation of currency, so that its extraordinary symbolic force becomes a measure of its dematerializing power. As Marx notes: “Since every commodity disappears when it becomes money it is impossible to tell from the money itself how it got into the hands of its

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possessor, or what article has been changed into it. Non olet” (Capital, i, 205). The metaphoric lack of smell in money is a sign that, despite its metallic presence, its circulation eliminates all marks of the actual exchange of commodities. Similarly, for all its evocation of the material world and the arduous transference of manuscripts, the object story dramatizes the invisible conditions of authorship in published fiction. The speaking object reveals that writing in a print culture demands the ostensible erasure of a conventional author€– there is, it appears, no odor of the body there. Circulating stories Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

(Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625)

The book is not a thing.

(Bill Cope and Angus Phillips, The Future of the Book in the Digital Age, 2006)

The successful marketing of eighteenth-century fiction resulted, in part, from the mobilization of different mechanisms for distributing published work. As several scholars have shown, these significantly increased means of circulating printed material constituted forms of “cultural technology” that enabled productive social exchange. According to Habermas, for example, the periodicals, printed plays, and books in coffee houses, shops, theaters, circulating libraries, and taverns accumulated models of critical reasoning that allowed “the sphere of private people to come together as a public” (Transformation, 27) and experience a “process of self-clarification” by “focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness” (29). Extrapolating from Habermas, Tony Bennett contends that it is “only with the Enlightenment and its aftermath that artistic and intellectual practices come to be thought of as instruments capable of being Â�utilized, in a positive and productive manner, to improve specific mental or behavioral attributes of the general population” (28). But such clarifying processes could also, by virtue of the complementariness between individual and collective experience that the circulation of objectified words facilitates, function to alienate subjects. Insofar as the object narratives assign human powers of speech to things, they embody this paradoxical condition of exchange. Moreover, as printed stories based on found manuscripts about speaking artifacts, they also represent the process by which such circuits of reification multiply.

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Some of this dialectical energy in the circuit of communication is captured in Marx’s notorious formulation of economic relations in the Grundrisse. “Production,” he writes, “mediates consumption; it creates the latter’s material; without it consumption would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production in that it alone creates for the products the subjects for whom they are products” (91). In a peculiar twist, one that the object narratives themselves dramatize, individual consumers essentially invent new selves in order to circulate adequately in the marketplace but in doing so they actively shape the means of production that will necessitate further reinvention. Printed texts, insofar as moveable type makes them reproducible, can make words renewable, and thus improvable. As Vicesimus Knox proclaims, “To publish without improving … is to multiply the labours of learning without enlarging its use, and is like increasing the weight without adding to the value of the coin” (i, vi). Chronicling similar patterns in what he calls “the scriptural economy,” Michel de Certeau describes print’s succession from orality as “the production of a system, a space of formalization” that reproduces “a reality from which it has been distinguished in order to change it … the island of the page is a transitional place in which an industrial inversion is made: what comes in is something ‘received,’ what comes out is a ‘product’” (161–2). According to Certeau, this transformation was not only “inseparable from the ‘reproduction’ made possible by the development of printing,” but was also “accompanied by a double isolation from the ‘people’ (in opposition to the ‘bourgeoisie’) and from the ‘voice’ (in opposition to the written)” (158–9). That is, for better or worse, printing converted works into “products” that intensified social and political divisions and that further abstracted language from its origins in particular human bodies. While eighteenth-century British social and economic relations may have been messier than Marx, Habermas, or Certeau allow, aspects of the early modern print economy mirror some of what they describe. Many of the object narratives, for instance, depend upon highways, international shipping routes, global banking, newspapers, and modern printing practices as their means of social exchange. Their narrative efficacy is directly associated with their capacity to use both private and public systems of circulation, and they repeatedly accentuate their access to discourse networks such as coffee houses, booksellers’ shops, and taverns. By invoking these venues, however, the object narratives exhibit a fissured, rather than a unified, cultural field, revealing breaches not only in the structures governing private and public behavior, but in national identity as well. Coffee

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houses, for example, not only served to disseminate texts, but also became subjects of concern in the very narratives that profited from such public exposure. These “publick places” were themselves a recognized component of a controversial process of national acculturation; for every writer who claimed they were “The Sanctuary of Health / The Nursery of Temperance / The Delight of Frugality / An Academy of Civility / AND / Free-School of Ingenuity,” there were a host of others, such as Lewis Theobald, who complained “they are Places of Rendezvous to the brocaded Narcissi [where] Reciprocal Civilities are the chief Things to be remark’d, Grimaces of Satisfaction forc’d from the Conceit of a Courtier’s Wit, and Addresses of Compliment instead of Applications of Weight or Moment” (Ellis, 158, 191). To the extent there was a self-clarifying public sphere in eighteenthcentury Britain, it was trapped in a baffling circuit of communication: it needed dependable printed matter in order to function effectively, but such material required a rationalized print industry whose historical validity depended on endorsement by the very readership that books and pamphlets sought to enlighten. In a cultural sphere where texts cannot be sufficiently trusted, authors, printers, and publishers invariably became the targets of disapproval and even hostility. Because of persistent forgery, intentional false attribution, spurious editions, plagiarism, and piracy, many readers were likely unwilling to accept the authenticity of what they read or concede an author’s legitimacy simply because it appeared in print. The countless charges of piracy or plagiary in eighteenth-century Britain would have been meaningless without the presumption that the printed word should be reliable. One can easily imagine, then, how readers might regard a book they subsequently believed was a cheat. One can just as easily surmise how authors estimated deceitful or feckless publishers, and vice versa, or a government perceived libelous writers. But what is less certain is the social impact of print culture on the published material itself. How, one might ask, did books react when mercenary writers, poor translators, venal booksellers, pompous critics, and imbecilic readers betrayed them? How willing were they to trust their human handlers? How did they feel? These questions are obviously facetious, but it is a curious aspect of the object narratives that many appear, in part, to ponder just such Â�matters. Inanimate but vocal, divorced from an authorizing human agent, neglected by the print market, circulated among a variety of consumers, and frequently misunderstood or devalued by their users, these narratives repeatedly seem to speak for the autonomous work that has since become

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associated with the “aura” of the book (to use Benjamin’s suggestive word). And, for the most part, they seem unhappy with their lot. Is it not possible, then, that the object narratives were one means by which readers and writers alike could imagine, from the particular perspective of the book, what it was like to be a thing, anthropomorphized, able to speak but trapped in words upon a page? Such stories, at the very least, confront the limits of communication, the transience of textual embodiment, the eerie reciprocations between oral, chirographic, and typographic expression, and the gyrations of wealth and poverty in both the economy and understanding of human society. Far from mediating private and public spheres or synthesizing national and cosmopolitan values, they are often undone by such categories. While they extol the power of the author to infiltrate, observe, and reveal social customs, object narrators also imply that the author is merely a possession, a medium, or specie, reduced to the status of the artifact that is the writer’s compulsory activity in a world where the commerce of print dictates the value of words. They publish what Habermas calls “novel privateness” not so much to reach consensus as to expose rifts between makers and users. And yet … As trustworthy narrators that embody the autonomous work€– isn’t a thing disinterested by definition?€– the speaking objects also endorse the elusive textual reliability that eighteenth-century culture envisaged. In this chapter, I have examined voluble objects as “instruments” of “Enlightenment” (to use Bennett’s formulation) that clarified economic relations in the book trade by dramatizing vagaries, rather than improvements, in how the circulation of print fostered Â�cognitive or social behavior. In the previous chapter, I discussed the material dimensions of unuttered words. These are not necessarily separate Â�topics. The object narratives treat in storytelling terms what the paratext in Swift, Richardson, and Sterne affixed typographically to the page: the mysterious nature of verbal transmission in printed documents. Such means of cultural dissemination, I have emphasized, produced dissension as much as unified public endeavor. As we have seen, that divisiveness is often inscribed within the very literary texts that contributed to the transformation of the public sphere. In the object tales, literary success depends€ – for author, publisher, and audience alike€ – on the very atomizing effect of circulating stories in a public form that so many of the stories themselves eschew. Mastering narrative techniques, consequently, becomes a destabilizing, alienating, or falsifying experience. As remarked by the canting coin in The Birmingham

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Counterfeit; or, Invisible Spectator€ – a forged gilded shilling that can “pass current for a guinea” (i, 46)€– “We live in a world, where the generality of human actions, like a great deal of our present current coin, is counterfeit” (i, 1). Punning on both the temporal and dynamic aspects of the words “current” and “currency,” the narrator here uses its own currency to trace the interrelated but nonetheless disruptive nature of social, economic, and textual circulation. Implicit in this critique, however, is the conviction that all would be well if the coinage of the realm was sound. The itinerant form of money and goods thus signals both their utility and their instability. The picaresque form of the tales is commensurate with this narrative rationale€ – the abrupt shift in subjects, the fragmentary nature of the Â�diegesis, and the multitude of characters betoken the storyteller’s subordination to extrinsic forces and manifest the continual exchange (literary as well as financial) that gives currency to their various accounts of human behavior. In making this argument, I have paid less attention to the productive aspects of literary circulation than the paradoxical state of the narrating objects necessarily implies (in part because the advantages of print have been well represented by others). Instead, I have concentrated on perhaps the most direct and superficial set of analogues that narrating objects alert readers to, those concerning the objectification of the narrator.10 This objectification, I claim, represented several linked aspects of eighteenth-century print culture. Principally, it embodied the author in displaced form, accentuating the ambivalent relationship between writer, thing written, thing published, and thing read. While not as effective as free indirect discourse, the narrating object suggested that the text contained an objective value apart from the author’s particular intent at the same time that it dramatized€ – sometimes feelingly, sometimes satirically€– the plight of the hack writer. For all the anxiety about authorial alienation, then, the speaking commodities rely on collective exchange to tell their tales. At times the objects wax rhapsodical about the giddy feeling that results from the endowment of language, the capacity to shape-shift, and the opportunity that comes from traveling widely and spying on others to understand human experience. What comes out as an inert product, in other words, can be received as useful and transformable subject matter. These narratives presuppose that only by participating in market relations can storytellers discover their own forms of consciousness. They imply, then, that literature both adopts and engenders cultural value as a result of interactions between authors and publishers, between readers and texts, among readers and

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other individuals, and even between texts, rather than from the operations of a solitary originator or autonomous work. The transmigration of souls within the stories thus mimics, in addition to authorial or bookseller concerns about intellectual property, some of the seemingly ineffable effects that occur to readers in their various encounters with books. Passing from satiric to sentimental appraisal, speaking objects similarly describe the public sphere as a force that fostered both critical distance and sympathetic attachment; they approximate the rhetorical device of free indirect discourse at the same time that they give concrete value to an implied voice, playing off the way in which authors, printers, and readers canvas words. In a more general sense, the correlation of books and coins or other consumer goods finds expression in the tropes of eighteenth-century fiction that align writing metaphorically with economic transactions between sender and receiver: Defoe’s narrative “accounts,” for instance, or Haywood’s stories of “misfortune,” Richardson’s “terms and settlements,” Fielding’s “bill of fare,” or Austen’s “literary corporation.” At the same time, the object tales mimic the acts of circulation that characterize eighteenth-century fiction’s corresponding fascination with restless movement, from Aubin’s itinerant heroines and Defoe’s transgressing travelers to Fielding’s road warriors and highwaymen, a compulsion to move that may be best epitomized by Smollett’s obsessive titular attraction to mobile terms such as randomness, peregrination, adventure, travel, and expedition. We can thus reverse Certeau’s recommendation to “consider the use of things as analogous to the speech act within the linguistic system” (166) by regarding the object narratives as speech acts that resemble the usage of things. Like Kidgell’s two-sided card, they fuse writing, printing, imagery, and paper into a signifying object whose meaning depends on circulation. They might as well be bound. Bundles of typeface that move through a dense social world, books reveal the workings of ideology by copying the various movements and iterations of letters, words, concepts, and feelings within an unpredictable discursive field, where ideas modulate according to who is sending and receiving, to how messages cross physical, discursive, and mental space, to what amount of profit they can yield, and to where power relations preside.

ch apter 5

Only a female pen: women writers and fictions of the page

… his misfortune was to fall into an obscure world that afforded only a female pen to celebrate his fame.

(Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, 1688)

I n t roduc t ion The pen is almost as pretty an implement in a woman’s fingers, as a needle. (Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters, 184)

While male writers frequently manipulated the appearance of print in eighteenth-century British fiction, women rarely considered it viable or permissible. Experimental page layout appears notably not only in works by lionized male authors such as Swift, Richardson, and Sterne, but also by obscurer figures like Kidgell or Sterne’s numerous imitators. In contrast, no dramatic counterpart to this male textual display occurs until Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent in 1800. Indeed, eighteenth-century women writers persistently lament that the “female pen” is barred access to the printed page routinely granted their male counterparts, despite dramatic increases in female authorship. Such laments, I propose, must be considered in relation to, among other causes, a printing and bookselling process largely controlled by men yet dependent in a number of ways on women.1 Many male authors had close associations with printing houses, as we have seen in relation to Richardson and Sterne, for example. At the same time, even though a number of women worked in the print industry as booksellers, printers, printers’ assistants, and mercuries, women who wanted to publish fiction of a sophisticated and competitive nature largely shunned typographical innovation.2 Instances of inventive layout in eighteenth-century women’s fiction before Edgeworth are typically more restrained than in male-authored fiction. By 1744 Sarah Fielding was deliberately employing different 189

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lengths of dash to punctuate much of David Simple, sixteen years before Sterne deployed his five lengths of dash in Tristram Shandy, though long after other risqué writers such as Behn, Haywood, and Manley exploited variable dashes in single works of fiction. Haywood also followed Henry Fielding’s example by using chapter headings to comment ironically on the action in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). Anne Radcliffe is often credited with first supplying poetical epigraphs at the head of chapters, initially in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and again in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), but both Charlotte Smith in Emmeline (1786) and Elizabeth Helme in Louisa, Or the Cottage on the Moor (1787) preceded her.3 None of these examples, however, parallels the pronounced textual experimentalism in many of the male authors. Even relatively modest features such as Kidgell’s folded card or Donaldson’s mock frontispiece sketch of the back of “Somebody” do not occur in women’s fictional works. Generally, if the relationship between the print industry and authorship could be one of integration for male writers it was almost invariably one of marginalization for women. Kathyrn Sutherland has shown, for instance, that Austen’s expressive punctuation was gradually conventionalized as her works moved through the publishing establishment (266–313). Male writers may have attacked the presumptions of the print industry but, as a group, their access to print was privileged in ways that, for the most part, eluded women. Authorial self-consciousness about the materiality of text need not appear, however, directly on the page. In this chapter I argue that such constraints at the material level prompted women to investigate relationships between textuality, Enlightenment, and embodiment less on the actual printed page than on fictional pages described within a narrative. Cursive in particular repeatedly serves in eighteenth-century women’s fiction as a synecdochic emblem of an author’s attitudes toward appearing in print. Female writers, like their male counterparts, frequently used their characters’ writing to express their own complicated relationship to the public sphere. Yet when they did, they repeatedly uncoupled the material practices of the author from those of their characters. While male writers like Swift, Sterne, or Cogan created characters who deliberately wrote to publish, reveling in their proximity to the printer’s house, in women’s fiction, the publishing scene usually appears far removed, displaced by scenes in which characters instead pore over personal handwritten texts.4 In this preference, they reproduced an earlier manuscript attitude, perhaps most resonantly asserted by John Donne in a verse to Dr. Andrews, whose children had ripped one of Donne’s books: “What Printing-presses

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yield we think good store, / But what is writ by hand we reverence more: / A book that with this printing-blood is dyed / On shelves for dust and moth is set aside, / But if’t be penned it wins a sacred grace / And with the ancient Fathers takes its place” (11). Donne’s conceit relies on the aristocratic and “sacred” status that still elevated scribal work over the stigma of print. For Donne’s female contemporaries, however, “printing-blood” also entailed particular hazards. Harold Love notes that “scribal publication” gave women writers who rejected print for reasons of preference, propriety, or blocked access, a legitimate alternative (54–8). While later authors sought print, some stigma still adhered to women’s typographical authority, making the pen and the handwritten page more affirming metaphors than the printing press and books they produced. As Catherine Ingrassia observes, “A woman writer and her text must negotiate the same obstacles and disadvantages in a literary marketplace as a woman confronts in a social or sexual ‘marketplace’ where women compete for male approval” (83). As I show in the following pages, writers as disparate as Haywood, Burney, and Austen confronted the manuscript page€ – what Austen would call “a bit of ivory”€– less as an entrée into a “communications network” of like-minded professionals than as a final assertion of their own fleeting textual embodiment. When Richardson exemplifies his contention that the needle and pen are nearly synonymous in both Pamela and Clarissa, he is echoing a longstanding association that separates women’s work (whether textile or textual, domestic or public) from economic relations generally. Female cursive, of the sort Clarissa literally sews into posthumous documents using black silk thread, had strong somatic relevance in part because of the ontological links between writing, paper, stitching, and fabric. When, for example, Jane Barker addresses “the Ladies” in The Lining of the PatchWork Screen (1726), the sequel to her successful prior “Collection of Instructive Novels” entitled A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), she adopts a complex textile metaphor that relates the continuation’s material existence to its precursor text. Deliberately stressing the actual and etymological relationship between textiles, texture, and text, she compares the rag content of the pages in her printed “Work” to the “patches,” “panes” and “panels” that constitute the fabric of women’s industry.5 The second book, conceived as an interpolated lining for the first book, is thus specifically aligned with women’s continuing domestic labor in a manner that recalls the “spinning” of tales or “weaving” of stories.6 In making this association, Barker implies a series of analogies between cloth “lining,” clothbound text, narrative threads or yarns, and the lines

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of text that lie on the page, linking her fabrications to the textile origins of paper. Similarly, the patches used in sewing become analogous to pages in a book, the various patches of writing within the text, the individual “novels” themselves, or the chapters that organize the bound volume. The author, Barker suggests, must acknowledge that borrowing, collaboration, serendipity, and commonality constitute the activity of writing fiction as much as the work that turns old pieces of cloth into new forms of fabric. The analogy itself draws on the processes that supply the book trade with much of its material; not only were the pages in eighteenth-century books made of cloth, the “gathering” of quires and the attachment of leather binding also required stitching. Barker indicates that her “Work” must resemble (and assemble) a kind of labor that is familiar and natural enough to appeal to her female audience. As she jests, “these Pieces being much larger than the others, I think we must call it Pane-work; which, I hope, will be acceptable to your Ladyships, you having pleas’d your selves with this kind of Composure in your Petticoats; which, methinks, bears some resemblance to Old London, when the Buildings were of Wood and Plaister” (The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen, iii). While the book resembles the ladies’ intimate apparel, further comparison also links their reading to the familiar environs of “Old London,” prompting the consumer’s historical and national convictions. At the same time, Barker is wary of the transient nature of the physical framework that her printed texts assume, acknowledging that books, like “Old London,” can be burned: I wish, Ladies, you don’t condemn this my LINING to the same Fate. Well, be it so; if it have but the honour to light your Lamps for your Tea-kettles, its Fate will be propitious enough; and if it be thus far useful, I hope, you will not think there is too much of it. For my own part, I fear’d there would hardly be enough to hold out measure with the SCREEN. (iii)

Continuing the analogy, Barker adds that the need to cast off text forced her to edit as much as expand the work and to concern herself about the “Fate” of her pages. As a mercer measures out cloth, a writer must measure the paper in a book. “This made me,” she confesses, “once think to have enlarg’d it, by putting in some Pannels … Wherefore, I hope, your Ladyships will easily excuse the want of this kind of Embellishment in my Dedication; remembring, that One Tongue is enough for a Woman” (iv). In a curious twist, the text’s elaboration of visual analogues for writing leads ultimately to the oral dimension of narrating, reducing the variegated embellishments, or multicolored patches, of storytelling, to the singular and unfettered voice of “a Woman.” Implying the modest aspirations

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of the female writer, the “pain” underlying her “Pane-work,” and her womanly self-sufficiency, “One Tongue,” endow the book (print) with the sheen of an original voice (orality). As Barker’s patch-work metaphors suggest, however, many early eighteenth-century authors of printed work realized that the manual labor of manuscript writing, itself the seeming substitute for a voice, resonated in mechanically typeset language. The possibilities for new cultural formations such as the professional woman writer, an elevated middle-class (and increasingly female) readership, or popular domestic fiction stemmed in part from the typographical authority vested in such works as Barker’s.7 In a less demonstrable way, we see the same textual self-consciousness in the manipulation of variegated dashes and italicized text in Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. Even though almost every letter is written in standard roman type, a particularly anguished postscript, such as “I have liv’ d a whole day, and yet no Letter from my Silvia” (i, 6), will appear in italics, as if to authenticate the passion felt by the individual writer. In these instances the variation in font size and type accentuates the particularly intensified discourse and embodied word of the speaker, in an entirely different register than the routine italicization of names and places. At times, these postscripts, as Figures 25a and 25b show, suggest a parallel belletristic space of emotional fervor that competes with the main body of the letter. Like Haywood, Behn emphasizes the original act of epistolary penmanship (in this instance by being “Writ in a Pair of Tablets”) as powerfully felt utterances that may be captured in print but need to be somehow marked as exempt from the rationalizing force of the printed word. Emotional bits of paratext not only supplement the main discursive body, but also extend and recast its seemingly adequate expression of feelings. Nob ody t o s om e b ody ––– In short, to describe this Scene … requires a Shakespear’s Pen;€– therefore I am willing to close it as soon as possible, being quite unequal to the Task. (Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, 1744)

A conception of writing based on unrepresentability may very well be gendered in certain ways, and, as in Barker’s case, it may reflect early modern notions of ephemeral relationships between authors and readers. Indeed, women writers in the period repeatedly grapple with the paradoxes of authorship by fashioning metaphors of writing that center on documents

194 (a)

The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (b)

Figure 25a╇ Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1693), i, 110. Figure 25b╇ Aphra Behn, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1693), i, 111.

never intended for publication, whose content perplexes male and female readers alike. Frequently, these textual encounters either juxtapose the writer’s self-interest with the problems of negotiating a complex, and often indifferent, socio-linguistic field or express the desire to dissolve the barrier between reader and writer that printed books might introduce. A distinction may be drawn then in how male and female authors represented the relationship between authorship and print culture, a difference that is rooted in the concerns that women writers articulate through heroines who write letters not meant for full disclosure. Male writers are as capable as female writers of figuring authorship as a disembodied trace. Swift’s evasions in A Tale disassociate the authorial function (the masked writer of the work) from the fictive authorial character

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(the “Modern Author”). The “Nothing” that ostensibly writes the Tale, along with the other nebulous producers of the text, such as the “Bookseller,” the annotator, the “Editor,” and the “Author” (who may alternately pass under the sign of “Swift” or the unnamed “Modern” but is never fully unmasked) always portend Swift’s identity but then distort it. They shadow forth the author but never fully substantiate him. The author, strategically veiled by the radical anonymity of his stand-ins€– figures who are themselves only named by their function within a print economy€– becomes nobody. No semblance of Swift’s body, or somebodiness, is meant to alert the reader to Swift’s authorship, unless that reader already knows through other means that Swift is the actual author of a given work (and even then Scriblerian collaboration blurs that conviction).8 Similarly, in Bartholomew Sapskull the portrait of Somebody merely inverts the term Nobody, postulating the author as a tantalizing evasion, a figure who turns his back on reader and critic alike. In these cases, however, the absent author is not only surrounded by agents from the print industry who can “re-present” his work but is implicitly marked as somebody who could move through the commercial print world if he desired. Some of the same defiant evasion of Swift and Donaldson characterizes several eighteenth-century woman writers, but more often, they use absence as a means of supplicating the reader’s desire. Gallagher has argued that such women writers participated in a discursive economy whereby the narrative voice replicated the self-effacement that authors used to heighten the supposed disinterestedness of their novels and themselves. Such a process, Gallagher contends, made fiction more personal because the nature of the characters seemed unmoored from the social, political, or ethical directives of the author. As in Swift, those directives emanate from the situation of the characters, but are now made “universal” through the reader’s sympathetic identification with virtually anonymous characters (nobodies). Paradoxically, by making characters appear self-sufficient€ – that is, convincing realistic figures whose validity needed no “extra-Â�textual” validation€ – authors could claim that the story was wholly their own (172–5). Novelists had proprietary interest in their work (they purportedly made it all up themselves) at the same time that it effectively Â�demonstrated their claim to disinterested presentation. Realist novels gained cultural and epistemological prestige by being a “confirmation, rather than obfuscation, of fiction” (173). Complicating Gallagher’s model, Lynch argues that these strategies of self-effacement reveal a return of the author’s repressed interestedness: “the studious impersonality and aspirations to generality that distinguish much

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mid-eighteenth-century fiction” make “genteel characterlessness” a strategy to reenact “inherited forms of social integration and social division” (93–4). But the nobodiness of the narrative (and frequently narrating) protagonist also exposed authorship as a legal fiction, a discursive function that accommodated various social and statutory prescriptions. Fictions that tracked the emergence of a nobody as somebody deserving public recognition simultaneously fostered a literate culture in which characters and texts assumed a degree of self-sufficiency; they postulated “somebodiness” as a detachable quality that made characters frequently seem bits of property that could be owned by others, hence the cultural expropriation of such figures as Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, and Pamela.9 As I have been arguing, this was a more socially vexed problem for women than men. Sterne could glory in the media fame that accompanied the blurring of his public persona and the character of Tristram or Yorick; Donaldson could parade his willingness to turn his back on his public. But for writers like Behn, Barker, Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Frances Brooke, Burney, and Austen, circumspection required degrees of reserve. Even at the diegetic level the embodiment of the woman writer in fictional texts can abruptly challenge the seeming neutrality and authority of a distant if not entirely omniscient narrator. Prov i nc e s of t h e pe n She was embarrassed; she took up the pen; she proceeded; she found the letter too tender; her delicacy was alarmed; she wrote another, she found it too cold.

(Frances Brooke, The Excursion, 1777)

In eighteenth-century epistolary novels written by women, the matter of authorship becomes especially tangled. Frances Burney’s Evelina: or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, for example, focuses on the daughter of a character who appeared in an earlier story, “Caroline Evelyn,” that Burney burned, at the age of fifteen, when the “degradation” connected to fictional works made her ashamed of having produced one.10 Subsequently, a meeting with an established novelist, Frances Brooke, partly convinced her to resurrect the burned work in the form of a continuation that followed Carolyn Evelyn’s daughter, née Evelina Evelyn. After the meeting, Burney wrote in her journal that Brooke was “very well bred, & expresses herself with much modesty, upon all subjects€– which in an Authoress, a woman of known understanding, is extremely pleasing” (Journals, ii, 4–5). Shortly afterward, relying on her brother Charles to

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arrange for the anonymous publication of her own novel, Evelina made its entrance into the world. The authorial modesty that Frances Burney attributes to Frances Brooke signals how valued textual propriety was in the eighteenth century. We have come to consider the “Modest Muse” a significantly limiting concept, often employed to restrict an author’s access to or productivity within the print marketplace.11 Burney’s description of the modest “Authoress” with whom she shares authorial initials certainly conveys the subtle displacements and inhibitions that propriety enforces upon intellectual labor (or, as she puts it, “known understanding”). In fact, if we grant full force to her phrase “upon all subjects” we might doubt that Brooke could manage such scope and yet maintain expected decorum (some subjects surely occasion indelicacy). The “Authoress”’s “extremely pleasing” discourse can only, we must presume, operate on those subjects she imagines are suitable in the first place. As the vague phrase “expresses herself” implies, the affinity drawn between a women’s “well bred” conversation and her professional writing created a murky ontological condition. Propriety and property, as several scholars have shown, were particularly ensnared concepts that had a special impact upon eighteenth-century female discourse.12 The concern about circulating manuscripts in the world stemmed from a view of readers that turned consumers into adversaries and often prolonged the time it took for novels to make their public entrance. Unlike Behn, women novelists such as Brooke and Burney were, in fact, notably encumbered by expectations of modesty, and that burden shaped their distinctive relation to their published work. Just as Burney’s comments on the “Authoress” Brooke blur the distinction between a woman’s conversation and her writing, the epistolary form that Burney adopts in Evelina serves as a vehicle that is uncertainly personal. As Marta Kvande notes, though epistolary novels “clearly define their female narrators’ authority as limited and as private, the delineation of this private authority is necessary before the texts can be made public” (159). Elizabeth Cook argues that because of their “paradoxical self-positioning between the private order” and the “public world of print,” and because they were treated as “a peculiarly ‘feminized’ genre,” epistolary works incorporated “gender, publication, and privacy interlinked with the public sphere” (115). When Burney’s book, a series of letters written mainly by the eponymous heroine, nears the end, these issues launch an intense domestic spectacle; compelled to acknowledge Evelina both by her physical similarity to his deceased wife and by the explanatory letter, in the wife’s hand, that she presents him as evidence of her legitimacy, her father

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finally accepts the need to publicly recognize the legacy of women’s writing that Carolyn Evelyn’s text prompts. Significantly, Sir John Belmont previously denied his fatherhood by having “infamously burnt the certificate of their marriage” (i, 9), an echo perhaps of Burney’s own burning of her fictional creation “Carolyn Evelyn.” As the mother’s maiden name suggests, there had been a time in which the signatures of mother and daughter were inviolably linked. Thus having substantiated her merit in fifty-three letters that precede the concluding ones, Evelina’s writing receives its ultimate imprimatur through the intimate maternal letter that finally reaches the father’s hands seventeen years late and for which she is the restorative medium. While critics have paid close attention to how epistolarity, memoirs, and autobiographies served to authenticate the verisimilitude that printed texts were attempting to reproduce, it should also be observed that such seemingly personal discourse was curiously masked. As we see in Burney’s case, print could simultaneously convey, mystify, and complicate the autobiographical revelations for which some characters may have been created. Poised as the legitimate heir to her father’s estate and equipped with a letter from her mother that demands his acknowledgment of her as the price for forgiveness, Evelina literally trembles before her father, uncertain whether to “prove” her own sense of “duty” to him or obey his command to accept “proof” of his “weakness” and, “in pity,” no longer “force” herself into his “presence” (iii, 210).13 Given that Burney is the author of the letters that comprise Evelina, the homology between her published work and the heroine’s private correspondence seems unavoidable. The mother’s letter, finally reaching its intended reader seventeen years after it was composed, may even be a simulacrum of the burned manuscript that once told the dead mother’s story, but that has an afterlife in the work that is finally published. When the private texts in Evelina’s (and her mother’s) hand become the body of the printed text offered for public consumption by the anonymous editor€– a process reminiscent of the fate of Clarissa’s letters€– they retract, as it were, the original burning of a founding document, whether by Sir Belmont or by Burney herself. The printed novel, presumably already converted from the manuscript in the author’s hand into a published work, is reconverted in the story as the central character’s private discourse (in her hand) that then appears in print. This process of transmission inevitably retains traces of the work’s phantom history. Accompanied by the dead mother’s letter, Evelina even appears before her father at the end of the novel as a ghostly emanation from the past.14 Eyes “riveted” upon the letter, a hand shaking “so violently he could hardly hold it” (iii, 221), the

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father repeatedly looks up from the writing he knows intimately (“’tis her writing!”) to the semblance of the dead woman in his daughter’s person: “never was likeness more striking!€– the eye,€– the face,€– the form,€– Oh my child, my child!” (iii, 223). As Sir Belmont proceeds to call Evelina “dear resemblance of thy murdered mother!” (iii, 223) and “representative of my departed wife” (iii, 224), the outpouring of exclamation points and dashes visually scores the “torment” he feels. As a daughter assuming the mother’s mantle rather than a mother leaving her legacy to an infant daughter, Burney’s primary female writer stands before an uncomprehending man who must reconcile letter and body.15 Burney’s own relation to her work was similarly unsettled. Referring to “these letters” in her “Preface,” she adopts the guise of an unnamed “Editor” to defend them, though their fictionality seems an open secret since the “Editor” casually refers to the letters as the product of a “novelist” and, moreover, admits to concerns that seem more the provenance of a novice author than a publishing intermediary: “though trembling for their success from a consciousness of their imperfections, [the Editor] yet fears not being involved in their disgrace, while happily wrapped up in a mantle of impenetrable obscurity” (i, xii). While difficult to know how seriously this is meant, it nonetheless reflects paradoxes that eighteenthcentury fiction written by women presented. Seemingly confined in the same circuit of authorial desire, Burney, as pseudo-editor, aspires to public notoriety while yet happy in the “mantle of impenetrable obscurity.” Seeking notice and invisibility simultaneously, she appears to separately reject them. To be known and not known at the same time evidently serves the author’s intent, and print becomes an effective medium for that purpose, given the advantages of anonymous fame.16 These intense textual encounters suggest links between the protagonist’s and the author’s experience of the circuit of communication. Often, a heroine’s (and periodically a hero’s) frustrated epistolarity parallels a woman writer’s sense of belonging to a counter-sphere at odds with the “republic of letters” (i, xi). Like Evelina trembling before her father when a personal letter gains her audience, Burney uses a dedicatory poem to her father, “author of my being,” both to announce and withdraw her work: “Concealment is the only boon I claim; / Obscure be still the unsuccessful Muse, / Who cannot raise, but would not sink, your fame” (i, iii). Her father, a noted author himself, belongs to a sphere of judgment and accomplishment that has shaped her€ – “thy good works, my school”€ – but does not confer upon her a confidence about being an “Authoress.” Referring self-consciously to her poem in its final lines, Burney seems to

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comment on dedication and novel alike as she worries about her father’s response to her work: “If e’er thy eyes these feeble lines survey, / Let not their folly their intent destroy; / Accept the tribute€– but forget the lay” (i, iv). In a loose parallel to how Evelina’s presence ultimately forces her father to confer legitimacy upon her, Burney appears to use her filial propriety to negotiate the public sphere for which her father generally stands. Kvande similarly observes that, like her heroine, “Burney makes overt statements about her obedience and submission in the novel’s prefatory matter€– but she then carefully redefines the binaries she employs so as to authorize her entrance into the public sphere … [the narrative] depends on the appearance of privacy for its authority in the public sphere” (170). It is, then, more than simply a droll effect that Burney achieves when she collapses the distinctions between critical oppositions€– such as privacy and publicity, obedience and defiance, character and author, articulate and inarticulate expression, name and namelessness€– by concluding her prefatory remarks with a seemingly humble adieu and a signature composed of seven asterisks that could denote either “Evelina” or “Frances”: I have the honour to be, ╅╅╇╅╇ GENTLEMEN, ╅╅╇╛Your most obedient â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… humble servant, â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… * * * * * * * (i, x)

Like Swift’s or Sterne’s omnipresent stars, Burney’s humble asterisks intimate that the relation between story and autobiography is rarely direct or unambiguous. At times, the deliberate contrast between the author’s command of the text (even if masked as an editorial function) and the characters’ subjection to the vagaries of posted or privately delivered discourse articulates the author’s particular relation to the public circulation of words. There might be some convergence between character and writer, but the author has a different relation to the selfsame texts than what the heroine, hero, or secondary character is presumed to have. As opposed to Swift or Sterne, however, Burney’s lone use of asterisks also guards the writer’s integrity from public scrutiny, an impulse, along with the corresponding urge to preserve textual coherence, she shares with many another “Authoress.” Unlike the writerly characters and intended recipients of the internalized, abandoned and often mutilated pages that make up so many fictional letters, writers such as Burney, Radcliffe, Inchbald, Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, and Austen, sublimate their authority over print in such a way that preserving the formal integrity of their texts

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becomes an act of ideological significance, particularly in relation to those documents mishandled by their characters. Typically, their texts rarely, if ever, toy with the fictional possibility, frequently employed by male writers from Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot to Sterne, Mackenzie, and Kidgell, that the story finally offered to the public has been mutilated, aborted, hijacked, or lost by any of the various agents belonging to the print industry, especially booksellers. In frequent contrast to the fictional documents that woman writers create for a character, the novels that they present to the public must themselves appear stable and whole. Pu rc h a s i ng w i t hou t pu bl i s h i ng I would as much disdain to be personal with an anonymous pen, as to attack an unarmed man in the dark. (Fanny Burney, Cecilia, 1784)

Evelina is perhaps a special case, the product of a first-time author nervous not only about the novel’s reception but sensitive to her own father’s insistence on her appearing in print anonymously. But the same dynamic applies to Northanger Abbey, which was among the last of Austen’s works to be published, in 1818, though one of the first to be written for publication (it was started as early as 1798 according to her sister Cassandra). As the “Advertisement” by “the Authoress” explains, the manuscript had been initially purchased in 1803 and advertised by a bookseller but then never published (i, xxiii–xiv). Austen, who had sent the manuscript to the bookseller Richard Crosby anonymously, had to buy it back through the mediation of her brother Henry Austen thirteen years later and have it published by another bookseller two years after that (in fact, Crosby, threatened to take legal proceedings against any rival publishers who might print the novel without the manuscript first being repurchased from him for the original amount he paid€– ten pounds). In a now famous 1809 letter to Crosby asking about the six-year hiatus in publication, Austen mordantly and acrimoniously signed off as Mrs. Ashton Dennis, that is, MAD. Writing under an assumed name may be a form of protecting one’s personal identity, but having a manuscript held unpublished by the print trade threatens to erase it altogether. Northanger Abbey is not an epistolary work (though letters play an important role in the second half of the story) but it shows traces of the same kind of ambivalence about female writing that Evelina exhibits. Austen may have shared her period’s moral disdain for early scandal writers like Behn and derided some of the more risqué gothic productions

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late in the century, but her novel’s energetic movement also borrows from the popular writing that women writers increasingly furnished between Haywood’s enormous if notorious success as a writer and the appearance of such works as Castle Wolfenbach and Midnight Bell. And like Burney, who is specifically celebrated in Northanger Abbey as an author with “the greatest powers of the mind” (i, 30), Austen retained an equivocal attitude toward the print industry. The “ADVERTISEMENT, by the Authoress, to NORTHANGER ABBEY,” for example, does not expressly fault the bookselling profession for treating a woman’s text inconsiderately but it does vent frustration as to why a publisher “should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think it worth while to publish” (i, xxiii). The admirable balance and effective use of alliteration (purchase/ publish) in Austen’s phrase nicely castigates Crosby for his misdemeanor. On the one hand, this resentment is perfectly understandable, but as a publicized claim years after the event it is, on the other hand, curious. Austen writes this complaint having virtually completed Persuasion and having presumably begun the unfinished Sanditon€– that is, as a relatively successful author with four novels already published, and, though perhaps already aware that her illness was limiting the time she had left to write, a still productive writer. She was an experienced author, then, who would surely have some insight into the vagaries of publishing in which furtive copyright ownership among booksellers and either delays or inaction in the publishing of manuscripts were virtually clichés. Why, then, would a seasoned author want to adopt the guise of a naïve beginner to announce and contextualize the latent appearance of an early work? Austen herself, torn between capitalizing on her success to make the early work public and worrying about how “comparatively obsolete” or unpolished it might subsequently appear, seems to have considered Northanger Abbey a mixed success. In 1817 she may very well have deemed it a work that lacked psychological substance. There is evidence that she revised the work, particularly in the second half, as late as 1816 in order to ready it for publication, but she also admitted in a March 1817 letter to her niece Fanny Knight that it “is put upon the Shelve for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out,” as if expressing doubt over the quality and suitability for late publication of a book manuscript, once called “Susan,” that she was then simply calling “Catherine.” In the same letter she expresses much greater hope for another novel€– Persuasion in fact€– as “a something ready for Publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short, about the length of Catherine” (Letters, no. 153).

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In these well-known remarks we can perceive a set of attitudes that both unite and differentiate the two works, as if they were uneasily linked in perpetuity. Of similar lengths and readied for publication, one is nonetheless treated as a girlish thing, referred to by name and a personal pronoun and lodged at home upon the shelf, while the other, already sanctioned by a professional identity and a specific time-frame as a “Publication” (the word is capitalized by Austen herself), is to “appear” in about a year. This later work is resolutely a thing€ – a “something”€– exclusively assigned the objective pronoun “it.” That is, where Persuasion is ready to enter the public sphere, Northanger Abbey shies back in perpetual expectancy, uncertainly identified as first a thing, “it,” and then as a forgotten female€– “she.” One wonders if the phrase “that she will ever come out” alludes ironically to a girl’s failure, in eighteenth-century parlance, to make her entrance into the world€– what Austen in Northanger Abbey refers to as “our heroine’s entrée into life” (i, 15). “The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World” is the subtitle of Burney’s first novel and it links the events of Evelina’s “coming out” with that of the author’s first professional outing. Northanger Abbey tells a different story, though it too could easily have been subtitled as a young lady’s entrance into the world, implicating both the heroine and the author. Early in the story, the narrator observes the misfortune that the incompetent Mrs. Allen is elected “to introduce a young lady into public” (i, 18). Like Burney’s first novel, Austen’s would have initially appeared while the author’s father still influenced her professional aspirations, and Austen may have had Burney in mind as she sought publication for the first time. Moreover, like Evelina, Austen’s heroine, Catherine, must confront a father figure (her future father-in-law in fact) before finally accrediting herself. The text Austen chose to publish might then have had an entrance comparable to Evelina’s. But Crosby, and the vagaries of bookselling, impeded such an entrance; the book appeared not only after her father’s death but her own as well. What, then, is the status of Northanger Abbey as a novice work? If, as Austen’s own demise loomed, she was both revisiting her juvenile writing and producing mature later works, how her early and late craft might mesh must surely have been linked to concerns about renown and strategies for revising new and old work simultaneously.17 Northanger Abbey not only stands in the shadow of Persuasion, it contains both aspects of the author’s youthful writing and revised elements written in the same practiced voice as the final completed work. Did Austen intend them to be published together? She was likely working on them simultaneously in the year of her death, probably knowing that they

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would be the last revised works she penned, yet she seems to have felt uncertain about their comparable merits to the end. Northanger Abbey, then, was not only nearly her first publication, it was also the one that caused her the most aggravation. Austen’s letter to Fanny Knight is one of her last, so the determination to publish Northanger Abbey posthumously under that title seems to have been made by Henry and Cassandra Austen at some point in the latter half of 1817. Austen was too sick to write “anything that was not absolutely necessary” for a fortnight preceding her last extant letter (on 6 April 1817) and presumably until her death three months later judging from the lack of any further letters. Perhaps she never foresaw eventual publication of Northanger Abbey; Persuasion’s publication, on the other hand, seems to have been decided by Austen, even if final arrangements had not necessarily been completed. In some sense decreed a mismatch, the two novels appear to have settled in Austen’s mind, from the last available evidence we have, as a troubled pair. “T wo s hor t bu t v e r y c l e v e r nov e l s” Oh that I had a pen like yours!

(Charlotte Lennox, The Lady’s Museum, 1760–1)

When John Murray finally published Austen’s early satire on gothic fiction he printed it together with her last completed work in a fourÂ�volume edition entitled Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion (see Figure 26). Cassandra, Austen’s heiress for both real and literary property, may, like the author herself, have relied on Henry to negotiate with the publisher, and the decision to publish it alongside Persuasion may have been either the Austens’ or Murray’s, but the latter evidently wanted to print both, writing in December 1817 to Lady Abercorn, “I am printing two short but very clever novels by poor Miss Austen, the author of ‘Pride and Prejudice’” (in Smiles, ii, 64–5). Murray printed 1750 copies of the set, each priced £1.4s.0d., only a few of which were remaindered in 1820, but he never produced a second edition. The Courier advertised Murray’s edition of December 1817, calling Northanger Abbey a “Romance” and Persuasion a “Novel,” though the title pages do not reflect these classifications.18 From that point on the two works tended to be read and evaluated in conjunction until the second half of the nineteenth century, though with varying estimations. The unsigned 1818 review in the British Critic was kinder to Northanger Abbey, “one of the very best of Miss Austen’s productions,” than Persuasion, “a much less fortunate performance” whose “moral is a chief demerit”; the Gentleman’s Magazine noted in 1818

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Figure 26╇ Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion (1818), i, title page.

that Northanger Abbey “is decidedly preferable to the second Novel, not only in incidents, but even in its moral tendency” (Southam, 83, 84). The unsigned 1821 review by Richard Whaley in the Quarterly Review, generally praising the moral efficacy of Austen’s novels, inverts the judgment of both the British Critic and Gentleman’s Magazine. Northanger Abbey is “decidedly inferior to her other works, having less plot … and also less exquisite nicety of moral painting”; Persuasion, on the other hand, “which is more strictly to be considered as a posthumous work, possesses that superiority which might be expected from the more mature age at which it was written, and is second, we think, to none of the former ones, if not superior to all” (Southam, 101, 102). All of these reviews, however, affirm Austen’s stature and bewail the loss of her talents. As the British Critic puts it, the two works “are the productions of a pen, from which our readers have already received several

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admired productions; and it is with most unfeigned regret, that we are forced to add, they will be the last” (Southam, 80). In 1859 George Henry Lewes finessed earlier contrasting judgments by simply praising both in relative degrees: Northanger Abbey, although the first in point of time, did not appear in print until after her death; and this work, which the Quarterly Review pronounces the weakest of the series (a verdict only intelligible to us because in the same breath Persuasion is called the best!) is not only written with unflagging vivacity, but contains two characters no one else could have equalled€ – Henry Tilney and John Thorpe. (Southam, 150)

Though the distinction drawn between “Romance” and “Novel” in The Courier’s original advertisement may have foretold later judgments, it is not until 1862 that critical opinion of the two works assumes its general modern cast. Julia Kavanaugh’s assessment in English Women of Letters, for example, disassociates the earlier Austen work from the later, as an inferior example of satire: “[Austen’s] irony, though gentle, was a fault, and the parent of much coldness. She learned to check it, but she never conquered it entirely … Sense and Sensibility … though not one of Miss Austen’s best [is] a far better tale than Northanger Abbey” (Southam, 178–9). With regard to Persuasion, however, the favorable reviews mixed elegy with aesthetic judgment of the work: Here we see the first genuine picture of that silent torture of an unloved woman, condemned to suffer thus because she is a woman and must not speak, and which, many years later, was wakened into such passionate eloquence by the author of Jane Eyre. Subdued though the picture is in Miss Austen’s pages, it is not the less keen, not the less painful. The tale ends happily. Captain Wentworth’s coldness yields to old love, Anne’s beauty returns, they are married, yet the sorrowful tone of the tale is not effaced by that happy close. The shadow of a long disappointment, of secret grief, and ill-repressed jealousy will ever hang over Anne Elliot. This melancholy cast, the result, perhaps, of some secret personal disappointment, distinguishes Persuasion from Miss Austen’s other tales. They were never cheerful, for even the gentlest of satire precludes cheerfulness; but this is sad. (Southam, 195)

The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine essentially reiterated this judgment, separating the two works by location and assessment. “In Northanger Abbey, her first book, she does not, as may be conjectured, arrive at so high a pitch of art as she afterwards attained. In spite of some very excellent character drawing, the book, on the whole, is crude, the interest insufficient, and the story incompletely worked out” (Southam, 205). Sense

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and Sensibility, by comparison, is again deemed “a great advance in every respect” (Southam, 206). While not as eulogized, Persuasion remains the superior work: “Persuasion has been called the latest and best of Miss Austen’s works, chiefly, as it seems to us, because in the character of Anne there is the nearest approach to a sentimental attachment. In point of general interest in the story we cannot think that any one would give it place above either Mansfield Park or Pride and Prejudice” (Southam, 210). By 1870 Richard Simpson’s unsigned assessment in the North British Review simply notes that Northanger Abbey “still retains the traces and the flavour of [her] early essays [in burlesques]” before calling Persuasion “the last and altogether the most charming of the novels” (Southam, 242, 256). Simpson concludes that “there is a decided growth in the general intention of Miss Austen’s novels; she goes over the same ground, trying other ways of producing the same effects, and attempting the same ends by means less artificial, and of more innate origin” (Southam, 257). In these evaluations of early and late work, especially as it bore on Austen’s oeuvre, we see a condensed version of how the machinery of bookselling confers canonical status on an author, shaping her works into a model of intellectual and textual development. Anticipating the appearance of the Memoir of Jane Austen in 1870 that solidified Austen’s reputation, the mid nineteenth-century reception of her work formalized what the early critical eulogies predicted about Austen’s future appeal, that she would, in the words of the anonymous review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (May 1818), “be one of the most popular of English novelists” (Southam, 267).19 Predictably, as the canonical impulse increasingly sought to measure the works in relation to a professional teleology, publishers increasingly disentangled Northanger Abbey and Persuasion as physical artifacts. While a French translation, L’abbaye de Northanger, appeared as a separate work in 1824 and the first American edition of the two titles printed them separately, each in two volumes, British publishers throughout the early nineteenth century twinned them, starting with the second edition issued by Richard Bentley in 1833 in his Standard Novels series. After mid-century the trend toward separate publication predominates. To some extent, this gradual disarticulation of the two works matches Austen’s own first impressions. She felt that Persuasion had a better chance of survival than Northanger Abbey, but her remarks in “The Advertisement by the Authoress of Northanger Abbey” indicate that her opinion was based more on timeliness than merit: “The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places,

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manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes” (i, xxiv). This apology implies that Austen regarded her works not as abiding classics but as temporal items suited to the immediate tastes of a reading public (in contrast, say, to Sterne, Johnson, or most male Romantic writers, who keenly anticipated their literary posterity). If in the period between her last letter and her death she agreed that the two be published together, she still probably regarded them as an odd pairing. But by the end of the nineteenth century they rarely appeared bound together, except in collected editions. Few twentieth-century editions, for practical reasons in a fully fledged mass market, bundle them as a stand-alone offering. Modern practice, in other words, problematizes one historical aspect of the “text,”20 mirroring the history of its paradoxical reception. A scale of value was required to substantiate a progressive view of the author’s professional life; at the same time, isolating the better work from the juvenile delinquencies of the weaker enhanced profit. Just as the posthumous pairing helped establish Austen’s canonicity, so too our canonical reading of her has been shaped by later material practices.21 By the time the Memoir of Jane Austen appeared, its author, J. Edward AustenLeigh, observed considerable contrasts in quality between the two works, the later of which demonstrates “greater refinement of taste, a more nice sense of propriety, and a deeper insight into the delicate anatomy of the human heart, marking the difference between the brilliant girl and the mature woman” (146). We thus canonize Austen’s work by now reading it in a materially different fashion, eliding the temporal discontinuities that made Northanger Abbey both earlier than and coterminous with Persuasion. A mou l de r i ng h a n d … she trembled, let the pen fall, and refused to sign.

(Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794)

Perhaps it was more than mere accident, then, that Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared initially to couple so nicely after Austen’s death in 1817, despite even their author’s assessment of their contrary chances of appearing in print. While Austen’s fiction arguably uses a basic blueprint about a heroine’s romantic life, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion seem particularly complementary. In terms of plot, for instance, the two narratives appear to be tracking comparative lives, as if the portrait of Anne Elliot as a mature woman was the deliberate obverse of Catherine Morland’s naïve biography. In the latter an immature but lively heroine, equipped with random

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literary quotations, must learn to become observant and perceptive about the world. She leaves mother and father and moves to Bath, where she is generally infatuated by its charms. Eager to be educated by others, she begins to acquire the necessary skills in reading and interpreting texts, landscapes and people, especially under the tutelage of a male preceptor and lover. For a period, however, both in Bath and later at Northanger Abbey, she spends time reading and misapplying popular gothic novels. Later she comes to believe mistakenly that her foolishness has lost her the affections and admiration of the hero. In contrast, and almost as a pointby-point refutation, Anne Elliot’s plot inverts Catherine’s. She begins her story suffering under the belief that her rectitude has forever cost her the love and respect of the man to whom she was once affianced and who is now actively seeking another alliance. Clinging to home and dwelling on a rich store of literary quotations, she remains behind without parental guidance as her family disperses. Eventually she too moves to Bath but finds it distasteful, though it also ultimately prompts romantic attachment (the return of her alienated lover’s admiration). Whereas Northanger Abbey moves from Bath to the Gloucestershire countryside, Persuasion shifts from the countryside of Somerset to Bath, with the break from one volume to the next marking those transitions in each case. Unlike Catherine, Anne already possesses discernment, taste, and acute powers of observation, ready to be an instructor of others, especially her lover. She prefers high rather than low Romantic literature. She is, in other words, a mature and retiring woman who (re)gains her lover through her mature and reflective behavior. Finally, where Catherine returns home at the end of the story before the narrator briefly summarizes her future married life in her husband’s parsonage, Anne appears destined for marriage aboard a ship, out in the world, “the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine” and the “tax of quick alarm” all she “must pay” for belonging to that “profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than its national importance” (iv, 298). Thus as the early exuberant heroine retires into a proper household, the retiring one contemplates a life of adventure. These odd parallels between the two novels are intensified by their joint appearance in the first edition, lending them even broader reciprocity. A twice-told tale of sorts, Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion is a composite work whose parts seem to trace the curve of Austen’s career. One is a satiric text, nearly burlesque at times, like the juvenilia from which it seems to have sprung (low Romantic literature in a sense); the other is a sober text akin to Mansfield Park, the novel written just before it, almost

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melancholic in effect (and suited to the high Romantic literature its heroine prefers). Judging from the memorial essay by Austen’s brother, the “Biographical Notice of the Author” that fronted the dual offering, canonization was already beginning. The “Notice” is the first printed source that attributes the six novels to Austen by name. It also begins by celebrating the living status of the author’s work, consecrated in the instrument of her labor: “The following pages are the production of a pen which has already contributed in no small degree to the entertainment of the public” (i, v). The “production” of the “pen” in this sentence alliteratively mediates the material results of the author’s effort, printed “pages,” and the consumers of that work, her “public.” The verbs Henry Austen uses here suggest a living presence. It is as if the pen is still capable of writing€– a more appealing but comparable version of Swift’s “Ghost of Wit, delighting to walk after the Death of its Body.” His account, utterly conventional, reveals, precisely for that reason, how much the writer’s role was connected to production and dissemination. It is this interconnection that governs the writer’s canonical status. It seems inevitable, then, that Henry Austen immediately highlights Austen’s grave where “the hand which guided that pen is now mouldering” (i, v). In the grim logic that underlies the displacement of the living Jane Austen by her canonized self, the pen, the corporate part of her professional identity, assumes a vital agency. Significantly, at this point we are also reminded of the author’s oeuvre: “the merits of ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Mansfield Park’, and ‘Emma’” (i, v). Having animated Austen’s “mouldering” hand, Henry Austen quickly dispels the gloom by reverting to history, to the body of the author as it was lived, and, in the conventional language of early eighteenth-century accounts of female virtue, to his sister’s career as a secular saint. While the “mouldering” body subsides in the grave, we are treated to a glowing representation of the author’s living presence, conveyed to us in the promise that we will read the print record€ – the novels themselves€– and be enlightened about, and by, the author’s life. These contexts show that different sets of attitudes toward a printed text, such as the 1818 edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are embedded in the author’s “works” as they pass through the various stages of material embodiment. For Austen the novels appeared to be more forcibly linked to the dynamic pressures of a contemporary audience. Her family, on the other hand, regarded the paired texts as a means to both honor and profit from Jane’s literary contributions. They did so by initiating a canonizing impulse that merged mourning and reanimation. Murray’s motives were more likely trained on profit, exploiting the

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family’s canonization of Austen to bolster sales of all the works he owned. The critics, generally speaking, were mostly interested in establishing a professional and literary narrative for Austen’s body of work, ultimately creating a national monument. All these different, and admittedly interconnected, attitudes suggest that the “public sphere” itself was a complex and shifting field of opinion in which texts circulated among various “owners” in a manner akin to the speaking objects in the “circulating stories” I described in Chapter 4. Wa s h i ng bi l l s … so much did she shrink from notoriety, that no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen. (Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” 1818)

The fungible quality of Northanger Abbey as commercial product is, arguably, reproduced in the story when the heroine, Catherine, discovers, on her first night at Northanger Abbey, what she believes is an abandoned manuscript gathered in a roll that she hopes will, upon inspection, be the real life counterpart to the gothic narratives that nurtured her imagination. Whether this supposed manuscript reflects Austen’s initial anxieties about appearing in print, or her later frustrations with the book’s deferred appearance, cannot be gauged since we do not know whether, and to what extent, Austen substantially revised the manuscript prior to posthumous publication in 1818. But, regardless of whether it represents Austen’s initial or terminal artistry, the bundle of papers Catherine finds provides a striking textual event in a work self-consciously about appearing in print. The heroine’s heightened response to the papers signals their critical function. Her breathless excitement over them reflects the excess of suspense that defines the gothic, and that Henry Tilney has coyly suggested will erupt during her stay at his father’s Abbey: The manuscript so wonderfully found, so wonderfully accomplishing the morning’s prediction [that she will uncover a hidden manuscript of the “memoirs of the wretched Matilda” by the third night of her visit, “at farthest”], how was it to be accounted for?€– What could it contain?€– to whom could it relate?€– by what means could it have been so long concealed?€– and how singularly strange that it should fall to her lot to discover it. (ii, 112–13)

The scene satirizes not only Catherine’s heightened sensibilities, but also the tendency of gothic readers to indulge in fancy; it also directly parodies a comparable scene in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Additionally,

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the mysterious manuscript underlines the ephemeral status of writing, either in the gothic or realist domestic mode. Unable to peruse the manuscript after accidentally snuffing her candle short, Catherine wakes in the morning to discover that the papers had scattered on the floor when they “burst from the roll on its falling to the ground” the night before. In the light of day they disappoint: “She now plainly saw that she must not expect a manuscript of equal length with the generality of what she had shuddered over in books, for the roll, seeming to consist entirely of small disjointed sheets, was altogether but of trifling size, and much less than she had supposed it to be at first” (ii, 118). When she then reads these “small disjointed sheets” she learns they are merely washing bills “in coarse and modern characters” itemizing the “shirts, stockings, cravats and waistcoats” of a previous male guest (ii, 115). The bills substitute for the gothic itself, reconfigured as a smaller text akin to those Austen writes. The bathetic reduction of Catherine’s fantasies to commonplace realities parallels Austen’s gothic demystification in her “modern” fiction. It may even echo Austen’s mock assessment, in a letter responding to a playful charge by her nephew that she had “pilfered” his manuscripts, that her own work was inferior: “What should I do, my dearest E. with your manly, vigorous sketches, so full of life and spirit? How could I possibly join them on to a little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which I work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour?” (Northanger Abbey, i, xv–xvi). Like the diminutive domestic laundry list, Austen’s household bit of ivory seems to tremble before more dramatic productions but in fact deflates them. While Catherine is not a writer of Evelina’s sort and the discovered papers prove worthless, the treatment of the manuscript here does imply authorial interest in what happens to lost, neglected, or devalued manuscripts. This interest, furthermore, reflects the narrator’s own ambivalent relation to the objects of her parody. Despite her satirization of gothic novels, she recognizes them as part of a larger class of narratives that permits women writers (often through their female characters) to enter public literary discourse, both challenging a largely masculine aesthetic regime and recording their relationship to books. Decrying the tendency of fictional heroines to treat fiction as a secondary form of discourse, the narrator draws a meta-fictional line between writer, reader, and heroine: Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press

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now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. (i, 29–30)

The blurring of the imagined world and the author’s material experience becomes a complex ontological matter. Heroines who regard one another across texts rapidly dissolve into an “injured body” of women writers that Austen implores to act more harmoniously as a “literary corporation”: “let us not desert one another.” Defending heroines becomes support for women’s writing in a public sphere that treats their work as “trash.” Invoking “Reviewers” and the “press” and punning on the etymological parallels between “body” and “corporation,” Austen situates women writers in a separate sphere that overlaps but is not indistinguishable from the dominant public sphere, which looks increasingly like a corporate body in complex negotiations with other, perhaps more marketable, “literary corporation[s].” Similarly, the putative readers of this passage, the other women writers whom Austen is exhorting, the “us” and “we,” shade into the readers of the novel. The body most likely reading “us” and “we” is not the woman writer but the novel-reading public in general. Is it not being exhorted as well? Is there not some transference between the woman writer and the reader that is activated by the inclusive pronouns? Moreover, as Henry Tilney and Jonathan Thorpe (more dubiously) demonstrate, the reader is never a predictably gendered body: “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel,” Tilney expounds, “must be intolerably stupid” (i, 45). Though Austen’s prose always teeters on irony, these remarks manifest an intricate field of literary “productions” (to use Austen’s word) in which writers, readers, reviewers, and the press variously, and sometimes combatively, constitute fiction as popular entertainment, serious work, or trash. What, however, is trash? The washing bills that Catherine discovers at Northanger Abbey belong, it turns out, to the “man of fortune and consequence” (ii, 328) who marries Eleanor Tilney and thereby smoothes the way for Catherine to marry Henry. The papers, in other words, allow Austen’s narrative persona to reflect self-consciously on “the rules of composition” that “forbid the introduction of a character not connected with my fable,” a concern that has been prompted by the possibility that her readers will see from the “tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity” (ii, 328). In Austen’s typically ironic mode, the obsolete papers finally serve a practical purpose. Useless in the diegetic world€– trash really€– they become

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a featured element in a mock reflection on the material dimension of the book, the agents of its materialization, and the process of its consumption. Compressed here are not only the pages but also the entire scaffolding of a book’s “production,” from the author to the press to the reading public. If the bills (a commodity exchange of sorts) utterly disappoint the heroine, they nonetheless demonstrate the crafty use the woman writer puts them to in her literary creation (another sort of commodity exchange). The description of the failure of the written word within a text thus enables the offsetting command of a female authorial voice. When Austen contrasts her domestic and private work to her nephew’s apparently public-spirited writing, the cumulative ironies reveal a complex differentiaton of male and female, private and public, familial and professional elements. Given that Austen writes her nephew after having successfully Â�published four novels, the “little bit of ivory” effectively becomes the public document while the manly sketches of J. Edward Austen-Leigh (the later author of the Memoir) become the modest personal document. Austen has quietly inverted the meaning of the terms by which texts might ordinarily be judged. T h e pe n i n t h e i r h a n d s Considering that the pen was to women a new instrument, I think they have made at least as good a use of it as learned men did of the needle some centuries ago. (Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies, 1795)

The explicitly literary elements that are deliberately scattered throughout Northanger Abbey€ – burlesques of gothic fiction’s conventions, authorial reflections on writing novels, discussions among the characters about the nature of novels, novel reading, and books in general€– are complemented in Persuasion by the compact and notorious debate about literature between the heroine Anne and her acquaintance, Captain Harville. Harville has been asked by his friend Benwick to “properly set” a locket with a portrait of the latter, once intended for the now deceased Fanny Harville, sister to the Captain. In its new incarnation the portrait is to be offered to Benwick’s new fiancée, Louisa Musgrove, a woman once courted by Anne’s former fiancé, Wentworth. As several critics have shown, the scene is staged as a triangulated and highly gendered performance in which one vocal man, the emotional Harville, and one silent man writing at a table, the agitated Captain Wentworth, resist the calmer but still adamant opinions tendered by a woman, Anne, as she attempts

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to argue for the capacity in women to feel loss lastingly and be able to express it even in an age in which “men have had the advantage in writing about it” (iv, 266).22 Appearing in the crucial penultimate chapter of the novel and activating the romantic dénouement of the narrative, the conversation provides an extended account of how writing, books, and art mediate feeling, both as an emotional and physical condition. Throughout much of the novel Austen has pondered the value of books through Anne’s attempts to regulate her and others’ emotions through reading literature, particularly Romantic poetry and prose.23 In this scene, Anne speaks as a reader, but implicit in her claims is a manifesto about the restrictions upon women writers in the print sphere. Responding to a conviction uttered by Harville, who has been pained by how quickly his dead sister’s fiancé Benwick has reattached himself, that men have a superior emotional constancy and that “all histories … all stories prose and verse” demonstrate it, Anne replies: “if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing” (iv, 266). In these remarks, Anne nimbly accommodates both the masculine and feminine perspectives of the two disputants, diplomatically acquiescing that “we each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it” (iv, 266). Her rejection of books, however, is only partly satisfactory as the mediation of writing, both privately and publicly, returns in the form of Wentworth’s busy work with pen to paper at the desk nearby. Throughout the exchange Anne is, we can safely presume, thinking of her own feelings toward Wentworth and perhaps secondarily of how she too was once linked feelingly to Benwick (by their shared interest in books, in fact). She understands, even feels “a nervous thrill all over her,” when the otherwise empty conversation between the fatuous Mrs. Musgrove and the respected Mrs. Croft exonerates her decision long ago to accept the advice that she reject Wentworth’s marriage proposal for its financial uncertainty. Mrs. Croft, whom Wentworth also admires, declares, “To begin without knowing that at such a time there will be the means of marrying, I hold to be very unsafe and unwise.” Anne then observes Wentworth as he visibly responds to the admonition: “Captain Wentworth’s pen ceased to move, his head was raised, pausing, listening, and he turned around the next instant to give a look€– one quick, conscious look at her.” Anne thus discovers that the verbal transactions in the room have “an unexpected interest” and recognizes their “application

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to herself” (iv, 258). But she is also able to apply all these emotions and reflections to a general condition of the relationship between the sexes, to see them in a wider context. The men show less flexibility, less of a willingness or disposition to see literature or emotion in so comprehensive a manner. Harville, perhaps glimpsing his own contradiction in starting the conversation with the example of Benwick’s inconstancy, falters. Having admitted from the outset that “Poor Fanny! she would not have forgotten him so soon,” he simply says to Anne, “There is no quarelling with you.€– And when I think of Benwick, my tongue is tied” (iv, 261, 269). Like Anne, who because “her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed” has just before discovered that she “could not immediately have uttered another sentence,” he lapses into silence (iv, 269). Wentworth registers his response in a covert letter that he composes on the spot while drafting another letter for Harville that arranges for the setting of the locket’s picture. Wentworth cannot see very clearly past his particular circumstances to the wider application; he only knows that Anne is, on some level, addressing him through her remarks (as the passionate intensity of his re-proposing attests). He writes: “Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you” (iv, 273). The memorializing condition of literature appears on several levels in this conversation. The literary discussion has been prompted by Harville’s reflections on the redirection of the locket from his sister to Benwick’s new fiancée. A lover’s remembrance that has become a memento mori upon her death has been inappropriately re-converted into a romantic token for another woman. Benwick’s story is, like Wentworth’s history with the same woman, Louisa, a twice-told tale about a man forgetting a past love that prompts a discussion of male and female remembering. At the same time, the subtext of both the letter and the dialogue activates in the hero and heroine a revival of their passionate intercourse; his love has had “no earlier death.” More generally, the discussion of reading and gender also recalls the literary conversations on similar subjects between Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney. Thus the later book, Persuasion, famous for its obsession with remembering, again recalls the earlier one, Northanger Abbey. Unlike the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, who playfully advises her lover to “[t]hink only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure” (iii, 279), Persuasion’s protagonist relies on the powers of recall to restore history. As she asserts in the tell-tale compression of her novel’s last pages, “I have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong, I mean with regard to myself;

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and I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it” (iv, 294). Examining her own history, Anne authorizes a decisive interpretation of it, as if establishing a canonical reading of her past. Anne’s story, her own methods of persuasion, and indeed Persuasion itself constitute exercises in revision and canon-making that are both narrative and intertextual. Austen further complicates this scene about the position of women in a literary field dominated by men by making the only writer a man at a “distant table” (iv, 258). The contrary impulses of publicly declaring private thought emerge through a literal man of letters as he composes his thoughts about love. It is Wentworth, Anne obliquely reminds us, who has “the advantage in writing about it.” Creating a love letter of passionate intensity to the woman he now loves while constructing a business letter to facilitate the new romance of the woman he thought he once loved, all the while trying to disentangle the “buzz” of the room from the hushed tones between his lover and another, Wentworth demonstrates his sensitivity and intellectual prowess. Of his two epistolary productions, the letter that matters most, the one to Anne, is immediate, subjective, and reactive rather than measured, dispassionate, reflective. One can even retroactively map his responses to the discourse between Anne and Harville by marking the temporal and conversational expressions in the letter: “You pierce my soul”; “Dare not say that man forgets sooner”; “I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me”; “You sink your voice”; “I must go” (iv, 272–3). The other letter, never described, simply does its business without comment; it is, indeed, merely a business letter. Is Austen imagining her function as a writer through the male figure at the distant table or is she unmasking the subjectivity underlying male writing? Wentworth is astonishingly adept at simultaneously performing the personal and the public forms of writing, listening to the conversation while he composes a business letter, on one hand, and writing a deeply private epistle on the other. Anne, finally, may be less advantaged than Wentworth at writing the history of love, but Austen, employing her skills at free indirect discourse, is able to negotiate a range of discursive modes: she effortlessly navigates the crude business of love as well as the uttered and silent, direct and indirect, personal and impersonal, male and female languages about love. Is the successful woman writer, then, one who mysteriously embodies all these modes? Is she capable, like Anne, of accommodating a diffuse gendered position, yet also able to move beyond the heroine’s sphere into professional writing? Is she able to occupy, but more reflectively, the position of a male writer who juggles personal, private, commercial, and romantic obligations? Is this deft maneuvering

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what Austen means by “little effect after much labour” and “fine” work on “a little bit of ivory” as opposed to “manly, vigorous sketches”? In the scene where Anne defends women we perhaps glimpse Austen’s own sense of her place, as a woman, in the literary field of production, somewhere between the unrecorded conversation and the material letter. Here, the author marshals her own elusive voice in order to dramatize how a woman resuscitates desire in a reader who, as a letter writer himself, appears to be an author when, in fact, he merely re-produces the woman’s words. Like many romantic male leads, Wentworth never fully comprehends his subordination; he is fired by Anne’s words but takes them for his own. Mov i ng t h e de s k c l o s e r It was nothing more than that the pen had fallen down.

(Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818)

In the letter writing scene, the paradox of converting voice into written language is captured in the opening sentences of Wentworth’s letter: “I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach” (iv, 272). The scene is, in fact, one of pointed material action. When Wentworth begins the task, “Materials were all at hand, on a separate table; he went to it, and nearly turning his back on them, was engrossed by writing” (iv, 255). He significantly lifts his pen at one critical point, drops it another. The table he works at even seems to gain proximity to Anne as he proceeds: “a slight noise called their attention to Captain Wentworth’s hitherto perfectly quiet division of the room. It was nothing more than that the pen had fallen down, but Anne was startled at finding him nearer than she had supposed, and half inclined to suspect that the pen had only fallen, because he had been occupied by them, striving to catch sounds, which yet she did not think he could have caught” (iv, 264). Wentworth appears to fold Harville’s letter “in great haste” and seal it “with great rapidity” (iv, 270). The hastily folded letter is, in fact, the surreptitious letter that he draws “from under the scattered paper” and places before Anne “with eyes of glowing entreaty” when he returns to the room moments later (iv, 271). Wentworth’s letter manifests the writer’s emotional and intromissive concerns: “The letter, with direction hardly legible, to ‘Miss A. E.€– .’ was evidently the one which he had been folding so hastily. While supposed to be writing only to Captain Benwick, he had been also addressing her!” (iv, 271–2). The two letters, one business-like and one passionate, are easily confused. To write privately is to write publicly. Moreover, by the time

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Anne reads her letter, the real and metaphoric distance between her and Wentworth’s “distant table” has collapsed: “sinking into the chair which he had occupied, succeeding to the very spot where he had leaned and written, her eyes devoured the following words” (iv, 272). The scene of writing and the site of reading have merged. Writer and reader are one, seemingly the same body in the same place, suggesting a circuit of communication that doubles up bodies, genders, and verbal roles. Proving to be an interested reader, Anne also dramatizes his contention that written language is conversing by other means. Started as a means of joining the conversation between Anne and Harville, Wentworth’s letter becomes a continuation of Anne’s discourse. When he drops his pen, it is because he strains to hear her story, a woman’s tale, as if he were revising then and there Anne’s observation of men that “the pen has been in their hands.” Wentworth then finishes the letter, which, in strict property terms, may now be considered a joint possession. This letter also prompts the “actual” conversation that follows in which Anne and Wentworth repair their romance. Anne’s devouring eyes thus read back her own words through the male pen. Who, then, is the writer here? Who is the one sitting at the desk? How distant is it? In this scene the communication between the man and the woman, the writer and the reader, the listener and the speaker is one that continually reverses those very distinctions. These inversions are, in turn, rooted in a typically eighteenth-century metaphysical concern. In Austen’s rendition of conversing and letter writing, communication is a powerful somatic event in which body and mind transfer. Recalling the language of eighteenth-century sensibility in the passage, Austen repeatedly invokes feeling, not only in terms of emotion but also in relation to embodied experience. Not only are there general references to various physical actions such as returning, entering, moving, walking, crossing, standing, sinking, sitting, laboring, toiling, and suffering, but relevant parts of the body€– hands, mouths, eyes, and ears€– are variously invoked to indicate physical actions. In particular, Austen employs verbs that summon the corresponding senses and emphasize the lovers’ corporeality. The movement of hands, for instance, is signaled by various inflections of the verbs “touch,” “feel,” “write,” “fold,” “seal,” “open,” “draw,” “press,” “place,” “put,” and “collect.” Allusions to the activity of mouths echo in variations on “say,” “speak,” “tell,” “cry,” “utter,” “call,” “address,” “talk,” “whisper,” “smile,” and even “taste.” Less frequently, versions of “see,” “glance,” “watch,” “look,” “catch,” “read,” and “devour” conjure up the spectatorial nature of the scene. Finally, otic functions resonate

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in forms of “hear” and “listen.” These repeated references to the senses, as well as the “scattered papers” that embody emotions, sensations, and thoughts in the scene, signal the body’s engagement in language (iv, 243–74). Wentwoth, for instance, regards writing as spontaneous transference when he describes “the irresistible governance” under which he “had seized a sheet of paper, and poured out his feelings” (iv, 283). Anne, when she devours the letter, is barely given time to experience “the first stage of full sensation” before having to compose herself. In this she fails; so powerful is the effect of reading the letter, her body assumes the conventional aspect of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heroine: “she looked very ill” (iv, 275). In these evocations of the mental and material, Austen links writing, or reading, to a larger gendered debate about sense and sensibility. Harville’s and Anne’s discussion about feeling, literature, and the sexes is rooted, in fact, in contrasting theories of body/mind relations. Harville tries to validate his view that men feel more lastingly by alluding to “a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings.” Anne, without actually avowing his theory, simply reverses it: “Your feelings may be the strongest,” replied Anne, “but the same spirit of analogy will authorize me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longerlived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments.” Pretending disinterest, she further postulates that the condition of a man, and especially a naval man such as Harville (or, covertly, Wentworth), inures him to the suffering of women: “You are always labouring and toiling, exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time, nor health, nor life, to be called your own. It would be too hard indeed” (with a faltering voice) “if woman’s feelings were to be added to all this” (iv, 264). The discussion here, like Anne’s voice, falters from the philosophical to the personal, as if to demonstrate the fusion of feeling and thought, body and mind, that is their subject. The description is not only general, but applies directly to Wentworth, a man often “exposed to every risk and hardship” who has periodically “quitted” his “home, country, and friends” (and, more grievously, Anne) and who is at the moment “labouring and toiling” at a desk nearby. Significantly, it is precisely at this point that Wentworth drops his pen, signaling at least his if not other men’s acquiescence in Anne’s alternative philosophical stance (notably, she is standing all the while he sits and writes). Responding both to her arguments and her tone of voice, as he later admits, he turns back to the page on the writing table and reproduces her words: “Dare not say

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that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.” Then, adding his words, he continues the story: “I have loved none but you” (iv, 273). A conversation that is part memorial, part philosophy, part lover’s discourse, even part chit-chat thus underwrites a text whose transferable emotion spurs narrative resolution. The writing dissolves and materializes subject–object relations by which self and other, feeling and thought, body and mind, voice and text converge. Anne has “ten minutes only” to recover from a letter that would ordinarily require “[h]alf an hour’s solitude and reflection” to have “tranquillized her” (iv, 274). When others enter the room she must decorously continue her “conversation” with Wentworth more directly. After various instances of “vexation” and, finally, “a most obliging compliance for public view” she is outside, Wentworth by her side, “where the power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed; and prepare it for all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow” (iv, 275–80). Reversing the painful acts of remembering that have structured their story, the two characters, like authors of a collaborative work, rewrite the ending that opened the book as a satisfying mutual conclusion. Produced by a complex interaction of conversing, listening, writing, reading, and thinking, the ecstatic union that concludes the book collapses diegetic and narrative frameworks. As the characters discuss and model forms of written, spoken, and pondered discourse, Austen asserts her control of the medium. And, typically in an Austen novel, the knowing authorial voice€– a distinctively public and published one€– alerts us to the text’s artificial nature in the final pages: Who can be in doubt of what followed? When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry the point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth; and if such parties succeed, how should a Captain Wentworth and an Anne Elliot, with the advantage of maturity of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them, fail of bearing down every opposition? (iv, 298)

The burlesque quality of the writing here echoes Austen’s own beginnings in the art of fiction. The articles before the names of Wentworth and Anne even make them appear to be types in a general catalogue of literary productions as well as individually realized characters. Significantly, the tell-tale signs of the author’s hand emerge not in the kind of textual display practiced by Swift, Richardson, or Sterne, men close to the business

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of printing houses, but in the embedded nuances of the language itself, the printed word that modestly effaces itself for the reader who devours the text. Yet just as Wentworth partly authorizes Anne’s original words, Austen only appears to invite the reader into the process of making the text. Like Sterne more than Wentworth, her invitations also foreclose the moment of sharing. Seeming to ask us questions, the text decides them: “Who can be in doubt of what followed?” Not only the pen, but the printed book itself€– how it should be presented, how it should be read€– is firmly in the woman’s hands. Or is it? Metaphoric allusions to the textual condition, rather than direct manipulation of the material page, register both the women writers’ subordinate position in the literary marketplace and deliberate strategies that enable their particular access to the medium. While men also used such tropes, women had different reasons for using them, given that they were effectively barred from directly manipulating a text’s printed form. Such allusions demonstrate the author’s awareness of the complexities associated with the material embodiment of the text at the same time that they preserve the authorial integrity of the written (and published) word. Fiction, these strategies suggest, offers a distinct model of self-authorization and “reflected satisfaction” that simultaneously exploits the “impenetrable obscurity” of the woman writer and the intoxicating effect that comes through the “mechanical reproduction” of one’s words. Deferred for a time, such “productions of the pen” tenaciously preserve the pleasure of a fully private discourse as they submit in material form to the Â�purported disinterestedness of the public sphere.

Ch apter 6

After words

While the form of the “book” is now going through a period of general upheaval, and while that form now appears less natural, and its history less transparent, than ever, and while one cannot tamper with it without disturbing everything else, the book form alone can no longer settle€ – here for example€ – the case of those writing processes which, in practically questioning that form, must also dismantle it. (Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 1981)

Book’s frighted them terribly.

(Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722)

As carpenters, smiths, masons, and all mechanics smell of the trade they labour at, booksellers take a peculiar aura from their connexions with books.

(The Beauties of English Prose, 1772)

Anxious that London might experience another plague like the one in 1665, H. F., the quasi-anonymous narrator of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), opens with an assessment of how print culture could both address and inflame the ills of the metropolis. “We had no such things as printed News Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things; and to improve them by the Invention of man, as I have liv’d to see practis’d since” (1). H. F.’s comment suggests that Defoe perceived a qualitative difference between the immediate post-Revolutionary circuit of information and early eighteenth-century forms of dissemination. The fifty-seven years between the plague and the appearance of H. F.’s journal had, it would seem, significantly altered the publishing landscape. Although the emphasis on the “printed” nature of “News Papers” may seem slight, it signals a distinction that would disappear when newspaper and print became virtually synonymous. The very stress on “print” indicates a shifting attitude toward typography, and reinforces the implicit parallel between Â�publication and plague that Defoe exploits throughout A Journal.1 223

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Starting the conclusion to my book with A Journal of the Plague Year may seem odd, but Defoe’s work dwells, perhaps more than any other eighteenth-century text, on the unpredictability of how book production and distribution intersected with authors’ and readers’ activities in a time of national crisis. Circulated twelve years after the passage of the Act of Anne in the wake of renewed fears of plague, A Journal broods over the perplexing nature of appearing in print. Indeed, H. F. frequently uses the word “publish” and its variants to connote the public airing of information and opinion by concerned citizens, the release of official regulatory documents, and the mechanical reproduction of texts. While at times he seems to commend unimpeded publication of material, at others he Â�cautions against its hazards. Rather than demonstrating only how the fixity, uniformity, trustworthiness, and authority of print were logical and inevitable extensions of letterpress technology, he also posits that early eighteenth-century printed matter was diverse, intricate, and often unreliable. He likewise features aspects of print culture that indicate the disordering impact as much as rationalizing force of the Enlightenment’s publishing revolution. And as a fictional mouthpiece for Defoe’s reconstruction of historical events, H. F. also foreshadows concerns about the role of fiction in shaping public mindedness through increased circulation in print. Defoe’s narrative thus highlights the principal features of print culture that I have been tracing in assorted fictional settings throughout The Appearance of Print. In essence, he offers two accounts of print ideology, a clearly visible binary version in which print is either beneficial or detrimental and a more submerged variant that registers the mobile, interconnected, and rapid forces at work in the eighteenth-century sphere of British publication. While the vagaries of print culture matter to most authors, Defoe’s specific historical circumstances make his fiction appear more overtly engaged with the public uses and policies of published work.2 Because he was active in influencing the conceptual and discursive framework of the Act of Anne, it is not surprising, for instance, that A Journal manifests the accumulated views that generated such legislation over the print industry in the period between “The Great Plague” and the threat of new plague (Greene, 107–42). The title page itself trumpets the work’s attention to “Occurrences, as well Publick as Private.” Published in 1722 as a historical document composed at an earlier indeterminate time by a nearly invisible author about events observed or learned by the narrator in 1665, Defoe’s text is a virtual palimpsest. It not only reveals how a Â�single text can overlay different historical contexts, it also bears witness to

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the highly mediated quality of printed matter. While discussions of the printed book often postulate a time when it was a “natural” or “transparent” form of communication, as Derrida implies in the epigraph above, Defoe’s work suggests otherwise; it reveals that the Enlightenment, at least, was not such a time. In exploiting a long-standing metaphor that equated print with pestilence, Defoe shows that the principal constituents of eighteenth-century print culture€ – producers, distributors, and consumers of printed material€– acted as reflexively and promoted as complex attitudes toward print as at other periods in time. Adopting a skeptical pose about print’s efficacy, A Journal neither wholly celebrates the form in which it is itself enclosed nor entirely denigrates it. Mimicking Thomas Dekker’s admission in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) that a plague narrative serves as a “Phisicall” against infection but is also a “booke” that is likewise “infected,” Defoe augments fears that books might be contagious (Gilman, 97). H. F. mainly focuses on the biological hazard to a congested urban environment, but he also insinuates that typography was an instrument of correction and injury. He effectively spells out the metaphoric implications of the plague by protesting print’s tendency “to spread Rumours and Reports of Things; and to improve them by the Invention of man, as I have liv’d to see practis’d since” (1). The word “spread” identifies print as a possible menace akin to the communication of disease. “Improve” ironically signifies both negative and positive effects of human intercourse on the plague’s advancement; and “invention” links the progress of the infection to the problematic nature of imaginative work itself since the word “invention” in the early eighteenth century applied to both mechanical innovations and fictional creations and is linked here to the spread of misinformation.3 The metaphor that analogizes pestilence and print, in other words, fluctuates like the disease itself. Printed works in H. F.’s account act€– rather like the plague and the Great Fire, which “purg’d” the city “within Nine Months more” (280)€– as agents that alternately harm and heal London, and, by the city’s function as a capital, the nation as a whole.4 Significantly, in Defoe’s plague city, published Bills of Mortality ultimately trigger the moral cleansing of London once the disease abates, since their circulation temporarily prompts citizens into a euphoric, if at times mindless, gratitude for their “Deliverance” (264). As H. F. observes, the first account of dramatic declines in deaths binds the city to a newfound conviviality and piety: it might have been perceived in their Countenances, that a secret Surprize and Smile of Joy sat on every Bodies Face; they shook one another by the Hands in

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the Streets, who would hardly go on the same Side of the way with one another before; where the Streets were not too broad, they would open their Windows, and call from one House to another, and ask’d how they did, and if they heard the good News, that the Plague was abated; Some would return when they said good News, and ask, what good News? and when they answered, that the Plague was abated, and the Bills decreased almost 2000, they would cry out, God be praised; and would weep aloud for Joy, telling them they had heard nothing of it; and such was the Joy of the People that it was as it were Life to them from the Grave. I could almost set down as many extravagant things done in the Excess of their Joy, as of their Grief; but that would be to lessen the Value of it. (283)

Despite the final cautious aside, the paragraph mainly celebrates print’s capacity to spread information that ensuing oral transmission swells into a unified civic response. This faith in the constructive effects of printed matter parallels earlier claims about the benefits of publishing official information, as when H. F. praises the city government for publishing their decision to remain in London “for the preserving of good Order in every Place, and for the doing Justice on all Occasions” (211). “[H]ad any Regulations,” he notes, “been publish’d that had been terrifying at that time, especially such as would pretend to dispose of the People, otherwise than they would dispose of themselves, it would have put both the City and Suburbs into the utmost Confusion” (211). These observations exhibit H. F.’s confidence in print’s rational uses that many of his contemporaries shared (and that to varying degrees informs claims by scholars such as Habermas, Eisenstein, and Sher). In these instances, the print response to plague, rather than fully imitating the disease, critically intervenes in social upheaval. Defoe inserts official documents such as the Bills of Mortality and Lord Mayor’s orders to make H. F.’s report seem authentic, and thus validate the print medium itself. The mortality bills, however, are not neutral demographic items that simply document urban affairs in a time of plague. Typographically, the periodic eruption of offset mortality rates within Defoe’s text provides distinct visual evidence that the disease’s sweeping consumption of the environment has invaded one of the most prized Enlightenment vehicles of rational human advancement€ – the printed word.5 The report of the first two cases of plague, for example, are made to appear almost routine: it was given in to the Parish Clerk, and he also return’d them to the Hall: and it was printed in the weekly Bill of Mortality in the usual manner, thus, â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Plague 2. Parishes infected 1. (2)

Despite its cursory typicality, however, the entry arouses immediate anxiety: “The People shew’d a great Concern at this, and began to be

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allarm’d all over the Town” (2). H. F. himself regards the mortality bills skeptically; very early on he notes that they are as subject to “Knavery and Collusion” (7) as other forms of communication, deepening his worry that “Rumours” not only “spread” but gain additional force “by the Invention of man.” In this, authorized civic discourse resembles less authorized printed matter that H. F. criticizes for misleading citizens in a time of fear. While he does not insert the actual bills themselves, Defoe has taken some pains to recreate the active print context of the period. These typographical moments serve as expressive tools for articulating the varied responses of London’s residents to what H. F. calls the “National Infection” (40).6 A Journal may, in fact, be plausibly considered the obverse of Robinson Crusoe, to be “read antiphonally,” in Ernest Gilman’s words (51), as a dystopic corporate autobiography about a genuine island country, destroyed by the failure of a diseased social body and an unassimilable act of nature; it is, in effect, an anti-survivalist tale … annus horribilis. In confronting the excesses of print, H. F. particularly targets the accumulating and often fraudulent texts that invade the city; as he observes, “Whether this unhappy Temper was originally raised by the Follies of some People who got Money by it; that is to say, by printing Predictions, and Prognostications I know not; but certain it is, Book’s frighted them terribly” (25). More importantly, he frets over the invasion of printed ephemera in urban space: “it is incredible and scarce to be imagin’d, how the Posts of Houses, and the Corners of Streets were plaster’d over with Doctors Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows; quacking and tampering in Physick, and inviting the People to come to them for Remedies” (36). Nor, it appears, can a counter print campaign by officials offset the pernicious influence of false documents: “Some Endeavors were used to suppress the Printing of such Books as terrify’d the People, and to frighten the dispersers of them, some of whom were taken up, but nothing was done in it, as I am inform’d; the Government being unwilling to exasperate the People, who were, as I may say, all out of their Wits already” (30). Pondering an age-old conundrum over censorship’s promotion of the material it seeks to repress, and an ongoing fear that instead of reasoned public debate, published material could incite mob irrationality, the government here seems caught in the same double bind that underlies Defoe’s own implicit view of print culture. The officials recognize as well that there is an ungovernable interface between printed information and oral remediations of it that resembles infection itself; as Paula McDowell states, “rumors are themselves a kind of plague” (“Contagion,” 100). Defoe may even have

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been aware, from the analyses of such theologians as Henoch Clapham, that in Hebrew the root etymology for “word” and “pestilence” is the same (“DBR”), thus supporting the common early modern conjunction of plague not only with the Word of God but with human perversions of words.7 Yet H. F. also notes that “Rumours” are not always lies; at times, they convey, though often only approximately, truthful information. The printing of bills, and by extension, published information generally, is therefore neither good nor bad in itself, neither merely an agent nor transparent reflection of social or personal tenets, neither a solely natural nor exclusively artificial mode of communication. It is rather part of a set of print practices that enmeshes with others, such as oral discourse, handwritten exchange, or physical gesture, and that shifts in import according to how the various social actors in the circuits of communication€– writers, publishers, printers, readers, etc.€– engage with printed matter. Indeed, Defoe clarifies how variables in the production, distribution, and reception of printed matter crucially affect its capacity to serve public or private interest. This applies to other related forms of exchange€– even money is poisoned and must be cleansed of its infectious state in order to be used profitably (93, 122–3)€– but “publication” seems a particularly vital form of transmission, at times a force comparable to the plague, at others a means to address it. Nonetheless, it remains one form among many of discursive embodiment. This complex relationship between print and other modes of verbal reproduction becomes conspicuous when H. F. draws attention to his writing time during periods of self-confinement as a result of being too “Terrified” by the “frightful objects” he encounters on the streets: “Such intervals as I had, I employed in reading Books, and in writing down my Memorandums of what occurred to me every Day, and out of which, afterwards, I took most of this Work as it relates to my Observations without Doors” (91). Here, H. F. first distinguishes his private handwritten journal from the one that eventually appears in print in edited form (drawing attention to the compressed diurnal nature of the published Journal€– a word literally deriving from “day”). He then goes on to describe his acts of reading, “private Meditations,” and, later, “Meditations upon Divine Subjects” as activities that he withholds for “private Use” and that he hopes will not “be made public on any Account whatever” as they are “profitable to myself, but not fit for any other View, and therefore I say no more of that” (91). Reserving himself and his words in a private realm but stressing that we are not privy to such personal reflections (in effect, a reverse censorship of the reader), H. F. creates a selfhood that

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exceeds its printed form, gesturing (much like Richardson’s lacunae) to an extra-textual life lived within doors. Such pursuits as reading, meditating, and writing are thus partly absorbed in the printed text but they also preserve their own singularity, and suggest an authorial identity that is defined as much by separation from as involvement in the public sphere, fueled by an aversion to the market’s “profitable” ends as well as an antiHabermasian desire to “say no more of that.” This meditative authorial self is connected to but buffered from the phantasmagoria that awaits him “without doors,” a phrase that resonates beyond its mundane reference by intimating the disturbing adjacency of public and private realms. Some of H. F.’s feelings are commensurate with the anguish circulating outside; some are decidedly not. Adding further to the mystery, it is not clear, given his concern over unauthorized publication, that H. F. himself sees any of his work through to publication. Either certifying his word by quarantining him from the crass material interests of professional authorship or intensifying the emotional appeal of his words by implying that his work appears posthumously, the enigmas surrounding his authorial role permit him, seemingly, to transcend the pragmatic constraints of embodied authorship. Frighted by the human mortality he observes outdoors, H. F. retreats indoors to read books, meditate, and then write a “work” in which he disappears, one that, in turn, may well frighten people terribly when published.8 Defoe’s reconstruction of the plague year 1665 as a posthumously printed text, a sign both of human death and textual reincarnation, thus manifests fluctuations between the theological, providential, and numinous rhetoric of earlier plague narratives and an increasingly secular, empirical, and pragmatic world view that, under duress, prompted fear.9 It also parallels patterns of textual consumption by London’s citizens that mirror the unruly production of published material. Print’s fluid character is indicated, for example, by the use that adept readers like H. F. make even of governmental propaganda to gain a partly accurate view of conditions in the city. It is H. F.’s friend, Doctor Heath, who rationally sifts the mortality bills, appraising how patterns in the printed number of mortalities expose the plague’s progress, leading him to correctly predict the decrease in its virulence (258). Then, as the decreasing number of deaths printed in the bills mimics the abatement of the plague, H. F. reiterates this positive function of print, demonstrating his sensitivity to fluctuations in the lessening of deaths: “There were indeed some Returns of the Distemper, even in the Month of December, and the Bills encreased near a Hundred, but it went off again and in so short a while, Things began

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to return to their own Channel” (263). Other readers only partly interpret the bills correctly, “running so rashly into Danger” that, in response “[t]he Physicians gave out printed Directions, spreading them all over the City and Suburbs, advising the People to continue reserv’d” (261). Here again, the effort to disseminate “Arguments and Reasons” through print mirrors the spread of “the Distemper” (261). What emerges is a mobile textual culture whose effects are as much a result of reactions as original intentions. At the same time, Defoe stresses his conviction that good reading can prize truth from printed matter that might otherwise be suspect. This view corresponds to a pervasive eighteenth-century emphasis among writers on molding the customary practices of readers. According to J. Hunter, much of what Defoe wrote “has a palpable design on the reader, and he speaks to us for our own good. His tone is insistently didactic; he wants to affect his society, even straighten it out, and his method is essentially a homiletic one” (55). At the same time, the few able interpreters of the bills suggest that, like Milton, Defoe imagined a small number of fit readers. Both the didactic hailing and condescending assessment of an unenlightened audience, however, may be best understood not as a simple contradiction but as rhetorical acts intended to situate, predispose, instruct, and describe a complex readership defined at the extremes by seemingly opposite capacities, a process by which Defoe attempts to coordinate the variant responses his text invites. That is, A Journal manifests the same dynamic interactions between production, dissemination, and consumption that I have been studying in this book, even if Defoe’s particular approach to these elements of print culture produces a singularly elusive text. Defoe recognizes that his own work is no less shaped by print culture’s ambiguous assessment of published matter than others. It is peppered not only with the recurrent Bills of Mortality, but also other bits of imported documentation. Even the footnotes and notations work occasionally to complicate issues of interpretation, voice, authorship, and textual history. In particular, the notorious nota bene that informs the reader very late in the narrative, when H. F. is describing a burial ground in Moorfields, that “The Author of this Journal, lyes buried in that very Ground, being at his own Desire, his Sister having been buried there a few Years before” (268), creates a radical aporia in the text. This temporal displacement marks the “now” of the book’s opening as an ambiguous present, one overlaid by the time of the 1665 plague, the indeterminate period of the author’s writing of the book manuscript, and the year 1722 when England seemed vulnerable again to bubonic plague. Since this editorial intrusion appears in the

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body of the text, we are for a moment made aware of the involved textual process underlying the book, from the eyewitness account written down in H. F.’s “memorandums” and their conversion into a book manuscript to the 1722 posthumous publication overseen by an unidentified editor (all of which is complicated by the fact that Defoe invented the work in the form of what Davis calls a “factual fiction”). This variability in Defoe’s presentation of the text’s print history, like the embedded history of Austen’s twinned posthumous novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, epitomizes how printed texts accentuate the pre- and afterlife of the writer’s words; only here the death of the author is apparently an imaginary one. Furthermore, like Austen’s experiments with free indirect discourse (or, for that matter, the rambling voices in the object tales, or Gildon’s pilfering editors), Defoe’s spectral narrator appears to be a part of and apart from the private stories he makes public. A Journal’s anomalous treatment of authorship, reading, and publishing also corresponds to other points in the narrative that intimate the concern Defoe may himself have entertained over the varied purposes of his work. Paradoxically, he could value and exploit print culture but also see it as an agent of contagious proliferation. Much of his evasiveness about the author function, textual history, and reader response stems from his reactions to what Greene calls “the disorderly business of the book trade” (107). According to Greene, the early modern period so weighted the writer’s increased proprietary rights with complex legal liabilities as to make those rights a highly mixed blessing (94–5). Defoe, in fact, defended legal proscription of illicit work. But, as if to emphasize the strange nature of the legal obligation he extolled, he himself tenaciously evaded many such responsibilities for much of his career by suppressing his authorship.10 This anonymity, in turn, necessarily implicated him in Grub-Street culture. Periodically exploiting his society’s preoccupation with the licentious hack in his depictions in A Journal of quacks, prognosticators, and zealots, Defoe hopes to distinguish himself from the scribblers he was so often identified with in order to insinuate a correlation between their authorial licentiousness and pestilence.11 Yet it is also through his own incessant and often indiscriminate publishing that he hopes to battle the contagion plaguing the nation, the cacoethes scribendi in other authors. In the last paragraph of the book, these various tensions converge in a series of typographical features that punctuate the conclusion (Figure 27). In the body of the main text, declaring he “can go no farther,” H. F. unwinds his narrative first by hinting that, as “an Eye-Witness,” he could have written more on the “Return of all manner of Wickedness among us” (286).

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Figure 27╇ Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), 286–7.

He follows this with a “coarse” offset italicized poem in ballad form lifted from his original “Memorandums” (287). He next records, for the first and only time, the initials of his own name, and then, just before the book’s “FINIS,” plants a symbol of the plague in the form of a printer’s ornament depicting a phoenix, a visual emblem in part of his own survival but also of London’s rise from both the Great Plague and the Great Fire. The sequence is significant for its gradual shift from a prosaic insistence on the factual credibility of the narrative to a non-lexical representation, translated perhaps from one of Defoe’s favorite poets, John Dryden, who pictured London as a phoenix rising from her ashes in the closing quatrains of Annus Mirabilis. The final image of the phoenix in A Journal is preluded by a poetic redaction of the book’s content to the plaintive utterance of a single perplexed survivor, which is succeeded by the reduction of that individual’s identity to two lonely graphic initials that both establish and disguise the author’s

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name, teetering at the verge of anonymity. The particular and general relevance of the phoenix at the end therefore captures the paradoxical treatment of both plague and print that Defoe consistently maintains throughout A Journal. Like the metamorphic play between text and paratext that I tracked in Chapter 3, the sequence of elements here begins by alluding darkly to the persistent “Wickedness” of us all, transitions to the mournfulness of the disaster (even to its survivors), modulates into the neutral but puzzling evasiveness of initials that name without naming, and terminates in a picture of blazing hope in black print, ambiguously reversing the paragraph’s beginning darkness. The personal, national, and universal are strangely mixed; unwritten thoughts, oral communication, manuscripts, and print material fuse mysteriously; experience, history, fiction, and symbolic representation are collapsed. We see here that despite airing dichotomous views of the press and the value of printed material, Defoe just as frequently, if unsystematically, recognized the complex and sometimes weird ways in which print, people, and place coalesce. Defoe’s dualistic pronouncements about print, while commonplace in his culture, mask the even greater range of motivations, effects, accidents, shifts, confusions, and convergences that characterize the eighteenthcentury circuit of communication. Ironically, the latter more intricate assessment of print culture is deeply embedded in A Journal, thus complicating a narrative that Defoe produced, in part, to clarify the relationship between print and human conduct. A similar combination of dualistic and integrative approaches to print culture structures many recent studies of early modern media. That is, current scholarship often engages in a binary logic produced by standard critical practice at the same time that it reveals a more complex and situated understanding of print’s function in the early modern communications network (see Chapter 1, 4–15). As in the rhetorical strategies that A Journal employs to characterize the extremes of authorial definition, print credibility, and reader response, recent academic accounts of print culture may be practicing similar maneuvers that serve rhetorical as much as historical purposes. That I have arranged The Appearance of Print according to principal elements in print culture makes me perhaps as prone to bounded thinking as others, though I have tried throughout to emphasize that any choice of focus was heuristic, that concentrating on a single feature of a complex social context is like momentarily tightening one thread in a woven fabric. As A Journal demonstrates, such features are discernible but not always reconcilable. In an academic climate that favors interdisciplinarity,

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globalism, and comparativism, approaches that examine periodization, nationalism, and genre can often seem limited. My concentration on British fictional texts published between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries thus runs the risk of reproducing a familiar scholarly enterprise. It is not, however, intended to confirm the centrality of that body of work but to use a set of constraints to query the complexity of temporality, identity, and form in a material construct€ – the printed book€ – whose history has never been transparent or natural. As I have tried to demonstrate, a work such as A Journal (or the fiction I have discussed in the preceding chapters) shows that printed matter is a part of a larger circuit of communication. Print, for instance, routinely shapes oral communication, but it is also just as frequently shaped by the spoken word, and is equally and similarly intertwined with written discourse. Defoe’s text, moreover, simultaneously endorses and questions the legitimacy of fiction, the power of national unanimity, the passage of time, and the fixity of print. In its concern with the business of publishing, the interests of the author, and the activity of readers, it likewise exploits both the specifically material aspects of printing, the social context of print culture, and the metaphoric implications of publicized words in order to elucidate a complex field of human interaction. Books, H. F. implies, are not only a partial account of lived experience but a part of it as well; books about books may be particularly susceptible to this enigma. Scholars often align London’s labyrinthine circuit of communication with the flocked coffee houses and other busy venues of social interaction that the Spectator champions and that Habermas extols as sites of reasoned civil discourse. Defoe’s representation of the plague’s spatial and cultural effects likewise mirrors eighteenth-century print culture’s thronged spaces, but in his account the dissemination of print can both imitate and abet the plague’s virulence, though his ire never rises to the level of indignation recorded in the anonymous 1673 satire that attacks perhaps the most celebrated space of print-mediated discourse: “A Coffee-House is a Phanatique Theatre, a Hot-House to flux in for a clapt understanding, a Sympathetical Cure for the Gonorrhea of the Tongue, or a refin’ d Baudy-House, where Illegitimate Reports are got in close Adultery between Lying lips and Itching Ears” (Character, 6). Unlike Addison, for example, who believed that the “Art” of printing “seems to be the noblest and most beneficial that was ever invented among the Sons of Men,” and that the printing press and the “Learning” it spreads “has made our own Nation as glorious upon this Account, as for its late Triumphs and Conquests” (Spectator, no. 367, v, 290), Defoe was customarily more

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reserved. Though he offered similar accolades, as in “A Vindication of the Press” where he celebrates “how infinitely happy we are by the Use of Our Sacred Writings, which clear up the Cloud of Ignorance and Error, and give a Sanction to our religion … Tis owing to Writing, that we enjoy the purest Religion in the World” (5), he was equally suspicious of the print industry, claiming that “continual Roberies, Piracies, and Invasions of Property, range among the Occupation” (Review, ii, 424). The Appearance of Print, like Defoe’s work, presupposes that complex personal, commercial, and national concerns shaped the production, circulation, and reception of printed discourse and that such discourse, conversely, modified those and other interests. How individuals engaged books€– as readers, booksellers, printers, or authors€– necessarily changed how such objects functioned. Printed words on rag paper exhibit particular features (such as relative uniformity, reproducibility, and durability) in specific periods and contexts. However, this does not consequently signify that print technology itself naturally or inevitably conveys those qualities. Such characteristics are, I argue, as much the result of how human agents, from booksellers to scholars, attribute certain traits to the technology. More importantly perhaps, while my approach may be owing to Derrida’s conclusion that “the form of the book … now appears less natural, and its history less transparent, than ever” (Dissemination, 3), I also presume that eighteenth-century British culture itself did not cultivate the “nature” of the printed book. That “the form of the book” should be natural or transparent is the result largely of rhetorical constructions in the Romantic era, and does not become a pervasive notion until later centuries (if at all). As Defoe’s text demonstrates, attitudes about the empirical character of printed matter can shift depending on the observer’s perspective. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, print triggered a host of reactions among a wide range of people. Accounts that ignore the complex interactions among producers, distributors, and consumers risk slanting our view of how print might have progressively shaped the enterprise of fiction in eighteenth-century Britain. It is a long way from Defoe to Austen, but that span does suggest that the physical aspect of books gradually acquired recognizable modern conventions that affected the development of “the novel.” The stabilization of eighteenth-century conventions may have been owing to relatively slow advances in technical changes to the printing press; the next major technological refinements in the nineteenth century had less to do with dramatic visible alterations in the look of books than with rapid changes in cost, reproduction, and distribution, not least of which was the switch in

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paper-making from handmade to mechanized procedures between about 1800 and 1860. I have used Defoe in my conclusion to suggest that what might appear to be a historical telos is, in good measure, a set of interpretive choices that have been made, sometimes by readers, sometimes by publishers, and sometimes by authors (among many others, including paper-makers, typesetters, librarians, historians, and politicians). A Journal exemplifies this heterogeneity because of its lasting resistance to generic classification. As Robert Mayer somewhat hyperbolically claims, A Journal is “quite possibly the borderline case in English fiction and as such useful in delimiting the contours of novelistic discourse” (209).12 Defoe is also a useful bookend for this monograph because his more prominent name is routinely yoked to his Grub-Street nemesis, Charles Gildon, a figure to whom the uncertainties of factual fiction also apply and who is the subject of this book’s first extensive analysis of the shifting character of print. Moreover, since I ended the prior chapter by focusing on Austen, Defoe’s placement here reminds us that despite revisionary assessments of the origins of “the novel,” he and Austen continue to be standard markers for the British novel’s first stage of development. Austen herself continues to be honored as the first mature English novelist. But that appraisal surely depends on a variety of historical, intellectual, and aesthetic orientations, as the constantly changing benchmarks of the genre’s history imply. The numerous dates and texts offered as watershed moments in “the novel,” such as 1719 (Robinson Crusoe), 1740 (Pamela), 1778 (Evelina) or 1811 (Sense and Sensibility), largely reflect the period biases of their proponents. These are approaches to fiction that “novels” themselves continually defy. Ending by coupling Defoe and Austen is meant to suggest neither a bland confirmation of a rise of the novel that depends on the “feminization of discourse” nor reclamation of a masculinist tradition. Nor is it meant to substitute one traditional origin (1719) with another (1750, say). It is meant rather to demonstrate the unpredictable feedback between present and past; between reading, writing, publishing, reviewing, borrowing, and selling; between reason and emotion; and between individual, urban, and national contexts. In some respects, the attention that the authors I have discussed give to the material text€– paper, type, ink, layout, binding, and circulation€– signals their investment in the literary property they have created. But in other respects, that attention to the appearances of print also emphasizes the peculiar autonomy of written work once it reaches printers, publishers, and readers. These are among the vital cultural energies that keep moving the goalposts in histories, theories, and appreciations of prose fiction. It may be judicious to think

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less in terms of whether print engineered a specific cultural change in how individuals used fictional texts to arrive at consensus than in how it variously transfigured the paper that was appearing in Britain at unprecedented levels, and whose consumption provoked ongoing shifts in mental and emotional engagement. If Derrida is right that we should be questioning and then dismantling “the form of the book,” then what do we make of a genre (“the novel”) that is itself historically allied with the printed book and that is constantly open to as much questioning and dismantling as the thing that, until recently, exclusively contained it? Will changing the container change the contents? And is the question even germane? The sudden extinguishing of Catherine Morland’s candle in Northanger Abbey creates suspense not only for her but also for the reader, and permits the illusionary but euphoric expansion of vapid domestic facts into fiction. Where, however, does her fiction begin and what form does it take? Is it prompted by her imagination, by the unread papers she finds in an apparently locked Â�cabinet, by Henry Tilney’s teasing suggestion that she interpret the Abbey according to the conventions of gothic fiction, by the Abbey itself, or by the very fiction that Tilney exploits for comic effect and that Catherine has read perhaps too assiduously? Doesn’t the context in which a text is read, like the form in which it appears, alter its meaning? The candle in eighteenth-century culture was both a crucial asset to the reading of texts and a danger, from dripping wax and tipped flames, to the books they were helping to illuminate, thus perhaps heightening the value of attentive reading. At the same time, the quivering light it shed probably created a distinct atmosphere that made reading in the early modern period a distinct physiological and psychological experience.13 Catherine’s narrative ultimately takes shape in Austen’s “novel,” a book the author never saw made in her own lifetime. But in the story itself, Catherine’s fiction never fully assumes a form; yet it is no less a fiction. Like the eleventh hour revelations that Austen’s narrators make about the fabricated nature of fiction, Catherine’s elusive story mirrors her creator’s need to critique the effects of fiction. Perhaps, as Anne Elliot cautions in the work to which Northanger Abbey was posthumously twinned, we should “not allow books to prove any thing.”

Notes

I n t r oduc t ion: pr o s e f ic t ion a n d pr i n t c u lt u r e i n e ig h t e e n t h- c e n t u r y Br i t a i n 1 Darnton’s elaborate flow chart indicates reciprocal influences among Â�producers, distributors, and consumers (Kiss, 112). The only influence represented as a dotted line (because its process is “unknown”) is from readers to author. Jackson argues that in “the marginalia of many Romantic readers we seem to see the gap closing, the dots being joined up” (302). 2 Jackson similarly observes that the practical value of important new technology such as “the Stanhope Press, Foudrinier paper-making machinery, Church’s letter-founding machine, lithography, stereotype, stream printing, and cloth bindings” did not facilitate “mass production of printed matter” until “after 1830” despite their earlier development between 1790 and 1830 (8). Yet the “alleged reading revolution” predated these developments and the “possibility of a mass market existed even before 1790” (7–8). For a wideÂ�ranging history of British reading see Colclough, Consuming Texts. 3 For other challenges to Eisenstein see various essays in Agent of Change edited by Baron et al., all of which serve equally as an homage to the force of her work. 4 As Bonnell cautions, the consequences of Donaldson v. Becket “should not be overstated” and are better understood in relation to intersecting social, economic, and intellectual activity in a variety of domains (30–4). 5 See Eisenstein, Printing, 628; and Ong, 117–19. For a skeptical response, see Finnegan, who questions whether one can assume “a clear-cut and nonÂ�problematic association between literacy or orality on the one hand and specific cognitive processes on the other” (150). 6 On distinctive changes in eighteenth-century printing and its cultural context see Brewer, 124–66; Feather, Provincial, 1–68; and Raven, Judging, 20–60. A groundbreaking account of how these changes impacted literature is Kernan, especially 49–55, though he does not extensively address prose fiction. In relation to poetry see Foxon; and Hess. 7 For a discussion of “Lusus” see Bosch, 275–80. 8 On how “public opinion” may have been “an authorial creation that exists in virtue of its instantiation in printed discourse” see Zaret, 133–73. 238

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9 See also Felski, who similarly challenges Habermas’ public sphere theory on democratic grounds of equality in participation; and Mah, who disputes the existence of “individualism” as well as “public sphere,” asserting that people “have always belonged to groups, and, as historians have demonstrated, when people present themselves publicly there are always group identities behind those presentations” (168). 10 Loehwing and Motter maintain that critiques of Habermas focus on “the particular historical examples he investigates, rather than the democratic potential he extends from such historical practices, however deficient critics may judge them to be” (221). They instead foreground the rhetorical dimension of Habermas’ theory as a means “by which publics create democracy” (221). Interest in Habermas has been fairly pervasive in the early twenty-first century. See, for example, Backscheider and Dykstal; Sharpe; Sauer; and Zaret. McKeon provides a sensibly balanced appraisal of the weaknesses and strengths of Habermas and his critics (Secret, 70–6). 11 See, for example, Kernan, 71–90, 148–51; Rose, 113–29; Stewart, 4–19; and Woodmansee, 35–55. Rose notes that a literary work in the eighteenth century was coming to be seen as something simultaneously objective and subjective. No longer simply a mirror held up to nature, a work was also the objectification of a writer’s self, and the commodity that changed hands when a bookseller purchased a manuscript or when a reader purchased a book was as much personality as ink and paper. (121)

12 For an incisive discussion of the shifting connotations of the term “novel” see Cruise, 68–74, especially 73. 13 For Reeve’s, Holcroft’s, and Walter Scott’s claims to the novel’s ascendancy, see Allott, 46–50. 14 For these quotations see Corman, 13, 23, 30, 35. 15 See also McKenzie’s seminal treatment of seventeenth-century media interdependence in “Speech€– Manuscript€– Print” in Making Meaning, 237–58. For full-scale discussions see Love; and Marotti, Manuscript. 1â•…Pr e - s c r i p t s: t h e c on t e x t s of l i t e r a r y pr oduc t ion 1 This figure comes from McDowell, “Women,” 136. Even in the oft-maligned circulating libraries where prose fiction was supposed to dominate and debauch, it may have accounted for only 20 percent of holdings (Allan, 135). 2 On the term “novelism” and rising publication of fiction in the 1780s, see Siskin, 153–90. As Downie reports, however, there were earlier striking escalations; in the 1720s, he observes, “the number of new titles just about doubled the output of the previous decade, reaching a peak at mid-decade at around twenty new titles per annum” (254). 3 See Coiro, 261–89. 4 On the interdependence of oral and literate modes see also Fox; and Goody. 5 The most vitriolic parody of authorial “spirit” appears, suitably, in A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. Speaking of the

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“excrements” of a rhetorician’s “brain,” the speaker observes that “Hawking, spitting, and belching, the defects of other mens rhetoric, are the flowers, and figures, and ornaments of his. For the spirit being the same in all, it is of no import through what vehicle it is conveyed” (Tale, 211). Here the terminology of print (“flowers” and “ornaments”) collapses into the language of orality to suggest the indifferent embodiment of both. On the function of ornaments see Chapter 4 below.. 6 On patronage, see Griffin, Patronage. For a recent assessment of Johnson’s views on print, see Wildermuth 7 Swift uses the “maggot” famously in the passage describing various modes of analysis in A Tale of a Tub, 30. 8 On Sterne’s meta-textuality see Fanning, “Page”; Keymer, Sterne; Moss; Vande Berg; and Voogd. 9 Chartier alludes to Baldwin’s work before describing Quixote’s experiences in a print shop (Inscription, 28–45). 10 In a droll aside, the editors of The Oxford Companion to the Book note that the ancient concept of a book serving as a companion becomes a titular commonplace in England only from the mid seventeenth to eighteenth centuries (Suarez and Woudhuysen, i, xi-xii). 11 See Brewer, 133; Chartier, Order, 32; Siskin, 109–12; and Suarez, who says of “imaginative works” specifically that they “manifest an attitude toward intertextuality and literary borrowing that suggests we need to think beyond the body of statutes and legal cases regarding copyright if we are to develop a more realistic understanding of how copyright and its attendant notions of intellectual property actually functioned in the period” (160). 12 Jackson notes that annotations by Romantic readers are more similar to the reading practices of their “counterparts two hundred years earlier than with ours two centuries later” (300), implying a longer and more accretive development of habits than “reading revolution” denotes. On the “revolution” in women’s reading see Pearson. 13 See, for example, Jajdelska, who further argues that from the late seventeenth century on, increasing numbers of silent readers prompted new roles for “assumed readers” and “implied writers” that occasioned transformations in prose style and narrative form in which a silent reader “listens” as if engaged in conversation with the internal imagined voice of a “notional” author, thus displacing an earlier mode that reflected the common practice of reading aloud whereby the external presence of a voice oriented an audience toward declamatory writing. 14 See, for example, Brewer, 169–71. Darnton, Cat, 249–52, disputes Engelsing’s model; as does Chartier, Inscription, 114, by analyzing how various consumers, among them Diderot, “read and re-read, studied, quoted, and recited” Richardson’s works. 15 On the numerical holdings of circulating libraries, and the proportion of imaginative literature in them, see Allan, 119–62, which provides both a summary of existing views and a corrective to frequently overestimated amounts

Notes to pages 49–63

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of fiction attributed to the circulating library collections. Brewer notes that other kinds of libraries, particularly subscription libraries, “contained little fiction” (180). 16 As Johns notes, the “printing revolution” was a “retrospective creation,” not only the product of “a later, political revolution” but also the means to Â�“render that revolution both permanent and universal” (374). 17 On literature, the public sphere, and nationalism see Keen; Siskin; and Sorensen. Several of these additionally critique Habermas, but see also Hill and Montag, and special issues on the public sphere in Prose Studies 18.3 (1995) and Studies in Romanticism 33.4 (1994). 18 Bourdieu’s theory requires modification to accommodate eighteenthÂ�century literary practices. For example, he limits each field to “a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those of politics and the economy” that might be less structured in an eighteenthcentury context (162). 19 On reviewing see Bartolomeo; Donoghue; and Gardiner. 20 The seminal study is Wiley. 21 Here, the work of such scholars as Rose and Woodmansee has been crucial to our understanding of the author’s history. 22 See, for example, Burgess; and Gallagher. 23 See Benedict, Anthology; Ezell; and Hudson, Writing. 24 Bosch relates the “Somebody-Nobody opposition” in Sapskull to festive treatments of “figurative identities” in medieval and early modern farce (134–5); Barchas mentions the frontispiece in passing, 59. 25 The phrase “Pamela media event” comes from Warner, 176–230. Pamela’s popularity was reflected in various media (painting, music, textiles, ceramics, etc.), creating what J. Turner calls a “Pamela frenzy” (72). See also Fysh, 57–79, who uses “Pamela phenomenon”; and Keymer and Sabor, 117, who, preferring “controversy,” cite the relevant evidence: separate advertisements for a Pamela fan and wax figurines in the Daily Advertiser, Francis Hayman’s paintings of scenes from the book (widely mentioned in contemporary sources), musical compositions, and so on. 2â•…

P o s t s c r i p t s: t h e fat e of t h e pag e i n C h a r l e s Gi l d on ’s e pi s t ol a r y f ic t ion

1 On Grub Street see Rogers; Eisenstein, Grub Street; McDowell, Grub Street; and Hammond. 2 The classic version is Watt. The historical accident that such words as “novel” and “history” had fluid meanings prior to their conventionalized modern significance has occasioned much confusion. In the early eighteenth century, for instance, the word “novel” or “nouvelle” drew on French etymology and semantics to denote relatively short amorous tales. By the time that Edward Philips complained in The Adventures of a Black Coat of the general failure of a typical “Novelist” to “excite virtue, depress vice, and

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Notes to pages 65–84

ridicule folly” (vi) the term had, for some writers, settled essentially into its modern meaning. 3 For Zaret the transition from “communicative norms of secrecy and privilege to public opinion in English politics” marks the British public sphere’s distinctive emergence (8). 4 The Post scripts have, like Gildon, received scant or disparaging attention. But see G. L. Anderson; and brief remarks by McKeon, Secret, 568–9. 5 For extensive accounts of Dunton and the Athenian Mercury see Berry; McEwan; Parks; and Shevelow, 58–92. See also Bhowmik; J. Hunter, 99–106; Pollock, 22–4; and Starr. 6 On interrelations among oral, chirographic, and print cultures see Derrida, Grammatology, 101–40, 269–316; Love, 141–76; McKenzie, “Script” in Making Meaning, 237–58; and Ong, 78–138. 7 See Brewer, 124–66; Feather, Provincial, 1–68; Laugero; and Raven, Judging, 20–60. 8 On the relation between periodicals and fiction see Kay; Mayo; Shevelow; and Sommerville, 109–18. 9 See Brewer, 154–62; Raven et al., English Novel, I, 35. 10 See Mullan for an overview of literary anonymity. 11 On serial publication see Myers and Harris. 12 On errata see McKitterick, 97–165. Jackson notes that marginalia in the Romantic period reveals a respect for writing in books that we no longer fully endorse and that derived from “traditional techniques of assimilation (glosses, heads, cross references) and enrichment (correction, supplement, commentary) that had been carried over from manuscript to print culture” (300). 13 Coincidentally, Johnson cites Locke for his third definition of “imprint”€– “to fix on the mind or memory”€– immediately following the second definition€– “to stamp words upon paper by the use of types”; the first meaning is admittedly a more general one€– “to mark upon any substance by pressure”€ – but writing is not specified at any point (Dictionary, s.v. “imprint”). For a similar approach to mine that links print metaphors, cognition, and somatic effects, see Mandell, and the various essays she introduces in Technologies of Emotion. On the relative stasis in eighteenth-century book-binding practices see Pickwoad. 14 Again, Johnson notes that “characterize” can mean “to engrave, or imprint” as well as “to give a character or an account of the personal qualities of any man” (Dictionary, s.v. “characterize”). 15 On historical aspects of ink see Carvalho. 16 Associations between textiles and text are long-standing. Stallybrass details the interaction between the cloth trade and Stationers’ Company: “in 1600, twelve drapers were translated into the Stationers, and the fact that they were working as printers and publishers may have been because of the direct connection between drapery and paper” (306). Swift’s Drapier’s Letters is one of the more famous instances of an authorial use of this metaphor. On the history of paper in Britain see Bidwell; Coleman; Hills; Jenkins; Shorter. 17 See Johns, 230; Warner, 130–9; Brewer, 188–90.

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18 On the economic and literary repercussions of paper credit see Ingrassia. On the post-revolutionary relation between paper and civil society see Sauer. On the market impact of the profuse pamphleteering see Halasz. 19 On the relative changelessness in production of type see McKitterick, 212. Interestingly, despite its gradual progress and traditional nature, Â�eighteenth-century English innovations in typeface (especially those by Caslon, Baskerville, and Bell) have long been regarded as crucial contributions to what is termed “modern” face. See Morison, On Type, 44–7, 52–5. Morison calls Bell’s typeface, with its “highly refined but tapered serif,” the “first British modern face” (55). 20 Historians who have asserted that cotton and linen rag paper needed to be reinforced before it could evolve from withstanding the force of quill pens to the even greater impact of metal type, a problem solved by adding a glutinous top layer, include Blum, 31, Coleman, 24–33, and Jenkins, 23–8. 21 See Achinstein, Milton, 3–70. Sauer adds that “dramatic, macrohistorical events, including the rise of political instability and religious dissent, the closing of the theatres, and the emergence of a middle class, led, in conjunction with an evolving print culture, to the outbreak of paper wars as well as to the development of various hermeneutic circles and public spheres” (3–4). Whether this explosion triggered increases in paper production has been disputed. See McKenzie’s skeptical remarks, pace Keith Thomas, about purported increases in paper production as a result of the pamphlet wars (Making Meaning, 128–32). Nonetheless, the relatively rapid proliferation and enlargement of printing houses between the 1630s and 1730 (Suarez and Woudhuysen, i, 106), or the “sharp escalation in the availability, variety, and popularity of periodical literature” in the late seventeenth century (Shevelow, 24), implies corresponding increases in production and circulation of paper. See also Halasz; Sommerville; and Weber, Bullets, on the ideological impact of the pamphlet wars and rise of journalism. 22 The average retail price of paper, for example, rose more than 50 percent from 5s.3d. per ream in 1677 to 11s. in 1696. In that period the duty on paper rose to 25 and then 30 percent for imported supplies and 20 percent for domestic supplies (Jenkins, 53). For a recent overview of eighteenth-Â�century developments in the production of paper see Bidwell. For a theoretical account of paper’s significance see Lupton, “Paper.” 23 See Gaskell; and Balston. For an eighteenth-century summation of papermaking see Chambers, iii, s.v. “paper.” Chamber protests the crippling effects of duties on the nation’s competitiveness. 24 Addressing paper’s “unstable movement between the excremental and the ethereal,” Weber contends that the “material/spiritual binary” associated with paper reflects authorial anxieties about intellectual versus physical property as well as about the flimsiness of literary fame (Memory, 139). 25 On incest, adultery, and epistolarity in Love Letters, whose popularity extended to the last third of the eighteenth century, see Pollak, 59–85. On the uses of paper in Clarissa see Weber, Memory, 137–74.

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26 Swift parodies this kind of proposed academy in the “Preface” to A Tale, but he suggested something similar in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), written as a letter to Robert Harley that suggests the regulation of the English language by an academy according to the French model. 3â•…Da r k m at t e r s: pr i n t e r’S or n a m e n t s a n d t h e s u b s t i t u t ion of t e x t 1 As evidence of Sterne’s creative borrowing critics often cite the passage in which Tristram discusses plagiarism in a paragraph he has himself plagiarized from Burton’s equally appropriated text (iii, 1). 2 See Bosch, 180–3; and Keymer, Sterne, 63–5. 3 See the Critical Review, 2 (October 1756), 227: “the most doleful jumble of miscellany thoughts, replications, and haring, scaring diabolism that was ever posited in the sensory of a man’s head.” 4 For example, see Stewart, especially 133–72. 5 Swift’s dispersal of voice has long been a critical issue, as suggested by Ehrenpreis, Literary Meaning, 49–60; Traugott; and, more recently, Saccamano; and Weinbrot. 6 Griffin notes that capitals in A Tale are sometimes used for effect rather than simply to follow standardized capitalization of nouns (“Interpretation,” 159). While the capitalization of every letter of the first word in a paragraph nonetheless seems standard, Swift may very well have appreciated its unintended effects. 7 See, for example, Guthkelch and Smith, xxii–xxv. Other important assessments include Palmeri, 251; Saccamano, 257; Probyn, 187–97; and Walsh, 290–303. Of these, Walsh alone claims Swift neither endorsed nor anxiously rejected “the inevitable polysemy of writing” (290). Rather, by connecting A Tale to seventeenth-century arguments between “the Roman Church and the Anglican Church … concerning Scripture as a rule of faith” (291), Walsh concludes that Swift was “so convinced of the effectiveness and value of humanist textual scholarship that he could think the project of textual reconstruction credible, if not unproblematic” (299). For a similar argument see Griffin, who links his brief discussion of typographical devices (“Interpretation,” 159) to the problems of interpretation, using Swift’s religious and political views of textual authority. 8 Of course, the authors represented in this chapter concerned themselves with issues other than print and typography. Both Swift and Sterne’s effects are part of their “satire on learning.” Swift attends particularly to the quarrel involving Wotton, Bentley, Temple, and others. These matters have, however, been treated extensively elsewhere. See, for example, Ehrenpreis, Swift, i, 195–209; Levine, 85–120; Starkman; and Zimmerman, Boundaries, 99–136. For Sterne, see Jefferson; and New, Sterne, 53–69. Both Swift and Sterne also addressed controversies over biblical scholarship. See Griffin,

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“Interpretation”; Montag; New, Sterne, 7–28; Walsh; and Zimmerman, Boundaries, 185–204. Richardson, to a lesser degree, has also been linked to the satire on learning and crises over biblical scholarship; see Cook, 72; and Stuber, 10. 9 Henry explains that the “asterisk or ‘asteriscus’ was initially used by early mediaeval scribes to indicate damage, illegibility or omissions in the manuscripts from which they were copying” and that it “was unusual amongst other punctuation marks in that it retained to a large degree both its form and function within print, and in the eighteenth century was still used to indicate the fragmentation of copy-text” (130). 10 Grafton remarks that Swift’s chasms reveal the author’s knowledge of “the minutiae of philological technique” but he mostly analyzes Pope’s parody of such scholarly activity in The Dunciad (111–18). Of course, Swift’s parodies of footnoting in A Tale and The Battle of the Books pre-date Pope’s work. As Grafton notes, Pope invited Swift to add notes to the Variorum Dunciad (117). See also Palmeri, 245–62. 11 Swift’s “tampering” with the printer’s copy to the fifth edition suggests ambivalence about accommodating literary and publishing practices (see Ehrenpreis, Swift, i, 336–8). Neither simply rejecting nor merely parodying modern print culture, he appears to distinguish critically between abuses of print and its potential, even modern, applicability. Saccamano observes that “the modern writer of the Tale embraces a conception of authorship that gained dominance in the eighteenth century and that still remains to some extent our own,” concluding that emphasis on “the ‘Genius and Spirit of the Author’ places Swift and Pope on the side of modernism” (247, 260). Similarly, Griffin argues that “the struggle for control in the Tale, and the politicization of interpretation, reflect Swift’s own situation as writer€ – as churchman, as aspiring author, as ‘Modern’€– and his fears about being misrepresented and misunderstood” (“Interpretation,” 158). 12 Like A Tale, The Battle and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit also Â�contain asterisks and marginal Latin glosses, which mark assumed gaps in a pretended manuscript. On Swift’s complicated relation to manuscript and print media see Karian. 13 Book Four contains the only significant instance, when the narrative breaks off as Dulness applauds the practice of modern wits who appropriate the work of distinguished writers (even here, however, the aporia is relatively modest compared to other works and appears only in 1742, after other writers had already exploited the technique). On Pope’s attention to print see Foxon; McLaverty, Pope; and Rose, 58–66. 14 Swift relished the analogy between the modern swarm of books and the press of an unruly crowd (it seems likely, in fact, that he consciously puns on the word “press”). In A Tale it appears in the anecdote about the “Mountebank in Leicester-Fields” (14) and also opens Section i of the “actual” tale (24). 15 Throughout Clarissa’s genesis, printing house minutiae would have been a daily preoccupation as Richardson carried on his regular business (see

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Notes to pages 129–134

Maslen, 3–4). As Borck says of the third edition, “this is a story which should be read as a text created by Richardson’s knowledge of his printing craft” (346). See also Fysh, 7–8; and Stuber, 4. 16 Critical responses to the indices usually focus on their relevance to the characters’ acts of discursive production. Flynn argues that, along with other paratext, they “convince the reader of the authenticity of the Richardsonian world” (267). Ferguson counters: “The very impulse of using the printed page to ape Clarissa’s mental derangement with skewed and unjustified lines of print is, however, both mimetic and antimimetic at the same time, for it calls attention to the fact that one has dutifully been reading for hundreds of pages as if the printed page counted as handwriting” (105). 17 Richardson probably had in mind the customary use of the pointing finger as an emblem, of “Dominion” or “Preeminence” and “Command ” (Ripa, 25, 54). Indices also suggest Lovelace’s tendencies toward dismemberment, fetishism, and necrophilia. His notoriously deranged desire to claim Clarissa’s dead body as his own and embalm her heart (vii, 76) is only the most striking example of these proclivities. 18 Interestingly, Lovelace is the only character besides the editor who employs footnotes, and although he uses them sparingly they create a visual analogue linking his supplemental urges to the annotator’s impatient clarifications, even if only by contrast. 19 My following claims about Richardson’s ornaments appeared originally in “Other Words,” when I was unaware of Ann Henry’s brief exploration of them two years earlier (Henry, 131–4). For an even later but similar analysis see also Barchas, 118–52. 20 Bueler, 44–52; Doody, Natural Passion, 216–40; and Holtz, 450. Cook notes that Joseph Spence, who wrote a 1748 letter, at Richardson’s request, offering editorial advice on Clarissa, was the author of Polymetis (1747), a “treatise arguing for the reformation of the elaborate tradition summed up in works such as Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia” (73). 21 Stuber observes that the third edition is both the most definitive (4–5), and that “with the use of a variety of typographical devices, [Richardson] created a clear record of the history of his revision” (12). In terms of florets, it is the most reliable, with few inconsistencies appearing. 22 On the “floret” see Glaister, 117–18; Meynell and Morison; and Ryder. 23 For Richardson’s awareness that ornaments marked his texts as belonging particularly to his printing house see Sale, 251; and Maslen, 5. 24 Many of Ripa’s explanations add further resonance to Richardson’s use of particular florets, as I note in “Other Words,” 653–61. 25 Cook similarly links epistolarity, and Clarissa specifically, to print culture (8–13, 93–5, 103–13). Her argument, however, focuses on Richardson’s rejection of allegory to establish a “disinterested field independent of the values of the market” that was rooted in “the mimetic, psychologized novel” (72). 26 Cirlot provides meanings for the florets Richardson attaches to other characters. Anna Howe’s arabesque, for instance, implies not only exoticism (by

Notes to pages 137–146

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its linguistic and imagistic connection to Arabia), but also repetition, turning back on oneself, and intertwining (15). Belford’s symbol, ivy, and more loosely, any vine or looping, entwining figure, suggests parasitism, devouring, entrapment, and grotesqueness, as well as binding, linking, and problem solving€– this last for its connection to unraveling (191–2, 212). For other characters see Flint, “Other Words,” 653–5. 27 Cirlot notes that the rose was associated, among other things, with the feminine, potentiality, movement, perfection, multiplicity, and because of thorns, corresponding pleasures and pain. Richardson’s readers certainly knew the rose emblematized Christ’s martyrdom and redemptive love. 28 Asterisms frequently signaled emphasis or served to attract attention. Various characters repeatedly note Lovelace’s emphatic behavior or craving for attention. Groups of asterisks can also signify matter that is “wanting, defective, or immodest.” A star, moreover, represents spirit, multiplicity, disintegration, and night (Cirlot, 309–10). Even a triangle of asterisks, or the number three in general, may have had ironical bearing for Richardson, as it customarily evoked resolution, synthesis, heaven, and the trinity (holy if upward pointing)€– see Cirlot, 232. An inverted triangle, Lovelace’s particular design, could thus signify his unholy values, especially as he is constantly linked to Lucifer. 29 On print’s isolating and psychologizing effects on readers, see, as examples, Kernan, 48–70; and McLuhan. Explaining “the interiorization of technology,” McLuhan bluntly states that “the unconscious is a direct creation of print technology, the ever-mounting slag-heap of rejected awareness” (244–5). 30 Henry also notes that suspenseful asterisks in gothic fiction reveal the genre’s overall debt to writers like Richardson and Sterne, though, eventually, asterisks yield to ellipses (134–5). 31 For a provocative account of Tristram Shandy as an “industrial novel” that “not only has no qualms about the commercial economy but also adapts to the ‘machines’ of its productivity” see Cruise, 155–85. Cruise cautions, importantly, that to “imply that Sterne is a product-based novelist is not to slight him or his creation at all.” On Sterne’s typographical play see Voogd, 383–91; and Fanning, “Page,” 431–3. 32 Swift’s influence on Sterne, who acknowledges the debt openly, was commonly recognized. For example, the Clockmakers Outcry Against the Author of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760) devotes its preface to contrasting A Tale and Sterne’s work. On Sterne’s Scriblerian debts generally see Fanning, “Particles”; and Regan, 9–33. On satire see New, Sterne; and Sherbert. 33 For more examples of many imitations of Sterne, see Bosch, 98–109; and Sterneiana. 34 On Tristram’s window mishap see Darby, 72–84; and Ehlers, 61–75. 35 Sterne both used and explained the asterisk in his letters (see Bosch, 120). 36 For pithy summaries of modern criticism on Sterne’s work see Keymer, “Introduction,” 1–27; and New, “Introduction.” Brown cites Burckhardt,

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Notes to pages 148–160

Lanham, and Rothstein as particularly important representative approaches to, respectively, gravitational tendencies, comic sources, and structures of analogy and modification (263–4). I would add Lamb on reflexivity and Traugott on Sterne’s sentimental and philosophical critique of rationalism, which, according to Donoghue, “set the tone for the bulk of Sterne criticism that followed” (186). 37 On parental relations in Tristram Shandy see Flint, Family, 271–88; and McKeon, Secret, 672–80. 38 On satiric prints that invoke the four stars see Bosch, 96–9. Donoghue devotes an important chapter to Sterne’s complex attitude toward celebrity, 56–85. 39 A Lacanian reading of lack would be apt here but hardly necessary. Tristram Shandy repeatedly highlights the variety of ways in which absence marks women’s cultural condition, including the denial of language, legal and political power, social consequence, household command, and sexual authority. In any event, see R. King; and Perry. 4â•… I n a n i m at e f ic t ion: c i rc u l at i ng s t or i e s i n obj e c t n a r r at i v e s 1 Kidgell, a clergyman who later produced a pamphlet pretending outrage at John Wilkes’ obscene parody, An Essay on Woman, and was subsequently defrocked and then charged with seditious libel (for which he reportedly fled to Flanders in 1763), knew the intricacies of print culture. Like several other aspiring mid-century writers, he knew how to exploit print effects and authorial gamesmanship. 2 The jack likely alludes to anti-Jacobite posturing (see Barchas, 53–5). 3 For a crucial account of the function of eighteenth-century titles and title pages see Shevlin. Her footnotes, in addition, provide a useful bibliography of scholarship on title pages. See also Barchas on frontispieces and title pages (19–91). 4 Keymer, Sterne, 69–72, and Barchas, 50–5, 112–17, discuss The Card ’s textual self-consciousness. Essays in the recent collection, The Secret Life of Things, edited by Mark Blackwell, regard Kidgell’s title as a reference to “it narratives.” Of particular interest for their insights into this genre are the contributions by Douglas, B. Blackwell, M. Blackwell, Ellis, Festa, J. Lamb, and Lynch. For a related account of “thingness” as represented in and by books, see Benedict, “Writing.” 5 In Travells of a Shilling, the narrator notes that “In AESOP’s Days inanimate Things were made to speak” (3), suggesting either a distinction between animals and things or a treatment of animals as things. Speaking things, although rare, do appear in Aesop: the sun, trees, reeds, bramble, the sea (in the guise of a woman), a lamp, wheel axles, and pots; only the last three, however, are manmade. In the eighteenth century manufactured speaking things proliferate, and can be distinguished from animals

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or vegetation in narratives such as James Howell’s Dodona’s Grove, or the Vocall Forest (1640–50), Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little (1751), or History of a French Louse (1779). Bellamy (in Blackwell, 118), has disputed this claim, yet authors of the tales themselves describe the genre according to distinctions between living and non-living. The Adventures of a Pin, for example, contrasts the “adventures of inanimate beings” to “rather more rational (although dumb) animals” (i). Bellamy’s useful tabulation of non-human narrators (134–44) does show that animal narratives dramatically outpace object narratives in the nineteenth century, perhaps because of the influence of Romanticism and moralized fiction but also because many late-century “it narratives” consist of sentimental children’s literature. That is, by the turn of the century the satiric mode associated with speaking currency had given way to largely sentimental and Romantic modes; money narratives, in other words, were distinct (and perhaps overworked) enough a subgroup to be the victim of shifts in taste that made animal narratives more profitable. 6 The most threatening possibility was that authors were merely products of market forces. Feather argues that demand increased the need for writers, and notes that the evolving book trade deeply affected “literary” authors, many of whom now acknowledged financial rewards for writing (History, 102). 7 In addition to Aileen Douglas (in Blackwell, 147–61), see Meeker; Olshin; Tompkins, Popular Novel, 49. 8 On fetishism see also Apter and Pietz; and Spyer, all of whom discuss fetishism in terms that draw on both Marx and Freud, as well as Arjun Appadurai and Michael Taussig. 9 The insistence in these stories on the value of speech may stem from the privilege orality was then granted. On oral authority in the seventeenth century, see Elsky, 209–23. On the eighteenth century, see Kernan, 12–16, 71–102. Hudson, “Oral,” discusses the interchange between spoken and written language in eighteenth-century literature. On the interplay between seventeenth-century handwriting and print, see Goldberg, 136–7; and Love, 288–310, on the continuing script-value of print. Ong discusses the combined effects of orality, chirography, and print (78–138). 10 For a recent examination of object narratives see Englert, who observes that expanding production of books can also be extended to “periodical redaction and, later in the century, republishing in volumes of beauties, gleanings, excerpts, and fragments” (266). Since the shorter article on which my chapter here is based first appeared, it has prompted several spirited responses. Lupton, “Knowing,” for example, challenges arguments that the speaking object both replicates the author, and, among other things, voices the writer’s alienation, a term she accuses me and Mark Blackwell of using anachronistically. Her salutary discussion emphasizes the published text’s positive agency, a point that she acknowledges I also make (411). But her intensive swing toward celebrating the printed object’s “healthy material existence” (417) resurrects a generally Foucauldian and Barthian demotion of authorship and

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Notes to page 189 a somewhat one-sided view that the print market essentially fortified the so-called hack writer. The complaint about using conceptual terms from a later period to mischaracterize a prior time is an old one; it is as if evolution should not be applied to a point before, say, Pierre Maupertius’ protoevolutionary work of 1745. In any event, the word “alienation,” while not construed in Marxian terms, was in fact used in the eighteenth century to denote loss of property ownership. Lupton’s account of object narratives and her skepticism that eighteenth-century authors could imagine a more rewarding system of publication than in place at the time fails to reckon that many of the authors she cites were, for a variety of reasons, writing from necessity; their access to publication was routinely balanced by aggrievement. Even Swift, although he parrots the complaining “modern” writer, was often bitter about published work. See also Lupton’s forthcoming book; Price, “History”; and Schmidgen. 5 â•…On ly a f e m a l e pe n: w om e n w r i t e r s a n d f ic t ions of t h e pag e

1 There are compelling reasons for this reticence. Women had long been equated with the receptive “blank page” that men inscribed with the “procreative” pen (often doubling as penis). See Gubar; and Ann and John Thompson, 163–206. Written pages could also be feminized objects that men penetrated through superior acts of reading. Appropriating the pen, and by extension writing and publishing, women emasculated male privilege, as lines from Rochester’s “On Sanazar” crudely remark: “Each snatches the male quill from his faint hand / And must both nobler write and understand, / He to her fury the soft plume doth bow, / O Pen, nere truly justly slit till now!” (Love, 151). Appearing in public (a synonym for appearing in print) also linked the woman writer to prostitution, as Behn and Haywood well knew. As the Thompsons note, “The general tendency is for women to be seen as the books or papers which are to be read by men€ – having been written or printed upon by other men” (177). Little wonder that many women preferred to conceal their papers. 2 A plausible, if not entirely satisfactory, explanation for this diffidence is that women were under-represented in the literary marketplace and thus less well positioned to make unconventional contributions to textual formatting. The striking increase of women writers as the century proceeded should, however, have changed this fact sooner. Alternatively, because women printers and publishers entered the print marketplace€ – as Greene (41–68), McDowell, Grub Street (especially 33–62), and others have demonstrated€– it cannot be that no sympathetic figures existed to whom women writers might appeal. While market conditions might have contributed to the hesitancy of female authors to experiment with the printed page, these are not sufficient causes in themselves to explain radical disparities in male and female inventiveness over formatting. Nor is it the case that male writers rejected metaphoric allusions to textuality, though their use of it has different implications; because

Notes to pages 190–198

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other male writers freely exploited textual layout, the decision not to could be a deliberate resistance to such conscious materiality by competing male authors. Women writers, effectively barred from manipulating format, might regard “metaphoric textuality” as either a masked form of textual experimentalism or a gendered rejection of it. 3 See Tompkins, Radcliffe, 27. 4 Even when female characters read printed works, they rarely are authors themselves, and occasionally even denounce their own reading. Conversely, a male-authored text featuring exchanges of handwritten documents, such as Clarissa, often privileges the male writer. Where Richardson pretends to be a bookseller as well as editor in his preface to Clarissa, Fanny Burney, in her preface to Evelina, pretends to be an editor but quickly reveals that she is a “novelist.” 5 “Text” derives from the Latin textus, signifying “style, tissue of a literary work (Quintilian), lit. that which is woven, web, texture”; “textile” derives from textil-is, meaning “woven, textile (sc. opus) woven fabric”; both come from the “f. text-, ppl. stem of tex-ěre to weave” (OED Online, s.v. “text” and “textile”). 6 In a later, celebrated instance of this analogy, Sterne compares digressions to the lining of a jerkin, as part of an extended comparison between books and clothing (see Flint, Family, 282–6). On women’s writing and needlework see Chartier’s summary in Inscription (101–3), much of it based on Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing, 134–71. 7 For an astute discussion of this issue see K. King, “Of Needles”; a more general discussion of Barker’s relationship to the print marketplace appears in her monograph, Jane Barker. See also Eicke. 8 Ehrenpreis notes that readers were aware of or suspected that Swift was the author almost immediately after A Tale appeared in print (Swift, i, 122–3). 9 On the independent cultural reproduction of these fictional characters see Briggs, 79–107; and Keymer and Sabor. 10 On the relationship between The History of Caroline Evelyn and Evelina see Doody, Burney, 35–40. 11 See Poovey, 35–47. 12 On the property/propriety dyad, see Nardin. Donoghue surveys strategies women used to counter restrictions on professional literary achievement, including anonymous publication, pre-emptive self-criticism, claims of financial distress, male sponsorship, addressing women alone, and pleading kindness from reviewers (159–74). On Burney’s relation to publishing see Justice, “Burney.” 13 Kvande assesses the heroine’s impudence in writing letters at all. Evelina pens her first at the insistence of Lady Howard, a long-standing family friend, seeking permission from the paternalistic guardian, Mr. Villars, to go to London (for Villars the epitome of public life) instead of returning to him. Filled with “apologies and demurrals,” the heroine’s first entrance into correspondence reveals that, as a daughter whose identity is secret, she has no

252

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authority to write (even as she is composing the letter). Eventually, Evelina finesses this difficulty through regular and minute descriptions that “make her seem to be with Villars” and “create the impression of her obedience,” eliminating impressions of having transgressed by leaving him, providing reports he can evaluate as if he were a present monitor, and preserving an intimacy that corresponds to their former life of privacy (171–3). The pretense that the woman’s compliant private body verifies her text is thus crucial to such evocations of female authorship and intensifies the scribal dimension of the writer’s utterance. 14 For discussion of these parental relations see Greenfield, 35–56; and Campbell. 15 On questions of naming and identity in Burney’s work see Choi; Epstein, 93–122; Straub, 23–52; and Tucker. 16 For complementary accounts of this theme see Campbell; and H. Thompson. Donoghue considers Burney’s prefatory material an unparalleled if ultimately doomed attempt by an eighteenth-century woman to address problems of “female literary production” directly, especially given reviewing organs like the Monthly and Critical Reviews (162, 169–74). 17 Speculations about revisions to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were largely triggered by Lascelles’ claim that alterations to Northanger Abbey may have occurred as late as 1816 (36–7), and further elaborated by Southam, 18; and Gooneratne, 60–2. Mudrick, 39, n. 5 and Litz, 58 allow for revisions only as late as 1803, and Leavis, 63–4 and Mansell, 40–1 as late as 1809. But Shaw, 591–601, argues persuasively that moments of indirect discourse in Northanger Abbey confirm 1816 revisions. For a thorough account of Austen’s relations to revision and print see Sutherland, 118–97. 18 These publishing details derive from Benedict and Le Faye, xxvi–xxxii. 19 On the biographical, familial, and nationalist mainsprings for Austen’s ultimate canonization see Sutherland, 55–116. On the relationship between commercial industry (including bookselling practices) and the making of an English literary canon generally, see Kramnick, 15–53. 20 According to Benedict and Le Faye, “During the nineteenth century Austen’s works were several times reprinted as multi-volume sets, and the individual novels also appeared separately, but Northanger Abbey has never been as popular as the others … From 1818 up to 1976 the number of individual reprints (disregarding foreign, abridged or school editions) is respectively as follows: Pride and Prejudice 54; Sense and Sensibility 40; Mansfield Park 32; Emma 28; Northanger Abbey alone 23; Persuasion alone 18; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion together 12,” xxx–xxxi. 21 Sutherland, 338–58, extends this process to include film adaptations. 22 Other critics who have analyzed the letter writing scene in terms of reading, writing and books include Favret, 176–96; and Pinch, 137–63. That the scene may be based on Spectator 11, as Cottom argues, would of course square the triangulation that Austen creates in the scene (122). 23 See Pinch, 156–63.

Notes to pages 223–229

253

6â•… a f t e r w or d s 1 Defoe may have exaggerated the suddenness of the transformation from oral or manuscript news to printed news. Several scholars note that midÂ�seventeenth-century publications were a common source of information, and that newspaper precursors existed as early as 1664 (McDowell, “Contagion”; and Ezell, 8). As Gilman observes, “plague texts flood the presses as if to fill the void with explanation and consolation,” producing a “vast and repetitive outpouring of plague sermons, jeremiads, and broadsheets characterizing each of the English epidemics [of 1603, 1625, and 1665],” and forming, if “read symptomatically,” a “psychosocial form of traumatic repetition€– a collaborative, overdetermined, and never completely successful effort to write ‘out’ the plague, in both senses of the word” (57). He also notes that woodcut images of plagues in England are “embedded” in books as early as 1625, “and so share the black-and-white format and the reproductive technology of the printed word” (110). Achinstein, “Plagues and Publication,” analyzes the connection between the plague and ballads that spread stories about it. 2 For why Defoe was drawn to disaster narratives see Backscheider, 3–21. On the relation between A Journal and Due Preparations for the Plague, both published in 1722, see Novak, Defoe, 603–7. 3 The OED Online notes that between 1615 and 1800 “improve” could mean “To increase or augment (what is evil), to aggravate, make worse.” It also confirms that “invent” signified “To compose as a work of imagination or literary art; to treat in the way of literary or artistic composition” which merged with the meaning “To devise something false or fictitious; to fabricate, feign, ‘make up’â•›” that persisted between 1535 and 1871 (s.v. “improve,” and “invent”). 4 Defoe repeatedly parallels the transformative effects of the Great Plague and the Great Fire on the urban environment, especially in the culminating pages of A Journal (109, 228, 257–8, 278, 280). 5 As readers often note, the bills rapidly permeate the text. See McDowell and Seager for a discussion of the statistical nature of the bills as either a sign of Defoe’s embrace of printed statistical data or his rejection of it. In A Journal, the appearance and discussion of the bills occurs within the first five pages. 6 Gilman notes that Defoe scrupulously incorporated source material and compiled statistics from the mortality bills published during the plague (229). The bills are thus both documentary evidence and signs of print’s fundamental role in how the plague was immediately and subsequently understood. 7 For a fuller discussion of this etymology, especially in relation to God as a “keeper of the books” whose “pen” inscribes his disposition on the bodies of his guilty subjects through tokens of the plague, see Gilman, 94–100. 8 For different but complementary readings of this scenario see Lewis; and Gilman, 238–9. Lewis situates such passages in the context of apparitional narratives (to which Defoe himself contributed), postulating that the mysteriousness of H. F. as an author mirrors the invisible workings of the plague and the spectral aura of the text itself. Extending Lewis’ observations,

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Notes to pages 229–237

Gilman argues that unresolved tensions in H.F.’s theological and secular beliefs effectively make him a ghost, compelled to relate the plague but unable to reconcile his faith to what he observes in the street; he becomes “an apparition of the plague itself” in the face of a God that “has fallen silent” (240). 9 Stephanson claims that plague is often “a vehicle for allegory,” linking A Journal to “vital features of the human imagination” (225–7); Womersley regards the doubleness as a product of post-Revolutionary political ideologies that produced both victories and defeats (247). Like earlier plague writers, Gilman implies, Defoe’s work reflects the belief that plague is “a form of (divine) utterance, and a form of writing that inscribes itself in the natural world” (3) which demands interpretation. On H. F.’s thwarted attempt to glean an intelligible spiritual purpose in the plague, see Zimmerman, “H. F.’s Meditations.” 10 For a short discussion of the long contested Defoe canon, see Novak, Defoe, 3–5. Defoe withheld his name from many publications, including all the major fiction, to make invented stories seem authentic or offset perceived partisanship; in other cases he suppressed identification because of a work’s genuine political or theological sensitivity. 11 See Backscheider, 78–83, especially her observation that Defoe became synonymous with the Devil. 12 Of course, one might argue that A Journal’s unclassified nature either demonstrates that it does not properly belong to the history of the novel or shows that histories of the novel are not yet adequate to the task of accommodating the full range of novelistic discourses. 13 This cognitive state cannot be easily reproduced since we know we can always turn on the lights. The value of candles in the Enlightenment was such that coffee houses were popular in part because they could provide free illumination in a sociable setting, as the anonymous 1673 poem The Character of a Coffee-House indicates: “we do never / Our Candles, Pipes or Fier grutch / To daily customers and such, / They’r Company (without expence,) / For that’s sufficient recompence” (9).

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Index

Abercorn, Marchioness of (Ann Jane Hamilton), 204 Achinstein, Sharon, 243, 253 Act of Anne, 5, 56, 71–2, 164, 224, See€ also intellectual property, law, piracy Addison, Joseph and asterisks, 124 and paper, 91, 92, 101 and printing, 234 and speaking money, 160, 178, 181 Spectator, 67 Tatler, 75, 161 Adventures of a Cork-Screw, 166, 167, 168, 178 Adventures of a Kidnapped Orphan, 96 Adventures of a Quire of Paper, 171, 173, 174 Adventures of a Watch, 165, 168 Adventures of an Author, 38, 52, 62, 95 Adventures of George Maitland, Esq., 81 Adventures of Oxymel Classic, 108 advertising, 9, 66, 119, 158 Aesop, 159, 161, 248 affect, 1, 4, 20, 48, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 89, 97, 98, 106, 111, 125, 127–39, 141–51, 168, 193, 199, 214–21, 228, 229, 230, See also€individual authors Aiken, John, 18 Alexander, Judith, 97 Allan, David, 239, 240 Allott, Miriam, 239 Amory, Thomas, 105–8, 110, 149 Anderson, Benedict, 13, 48, 77, 140, 182 Anderson, G. L., 70, 100 anonymity, 45, 74, 160, 162, 171, 182, 195, 197, 198, 224, 231, See also€authorship, collaboration, object narratives, writing pseudonymity, 10, 76, 201 Appadurai, Arjun, 249 Apulieus, 159, 161 Arbuthnot, John, 126, 201 Armstrong, Nancy, 8 Astell, Mary, 28

asterisks, See€paratext Atkyns, Richard, 12 Aubin, Penelope, 97, 188 Austen, Cassandra, 201, 204 Austen, Henry, 201, 204, 210 Austen, Jane, 10, 21, 47, 56, 111, 188, 201–22 and affect, 214–21 and authorship, 217, 221 and canonicity, 207–8, 211 and epistolarity, 201, 216–21 and fiction, 237 and manuscript, 211–12 and private/public discourse, 214, 215 and public sphere, 211, 213 and punctuation, 190 and reading aloud, 44 and textuality, 210, 214 Letters, 202 Mansfield Park, 209 Northanger Abbey, 22, 41, 201–14, 216 and gothic, 211–12 and publication, 201–8 and reviews, 204–8, 213 and women writers, 213 Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published together, 203, 204, 208–11 Persuasion, 22, 202–11, 214–22 and epistolarity, 216–21 and private/public discourse, 217 and publication, 204 and reviews, 204–8 writing and gender, 214–21 Pride and Prejudice, 216 Sanditon, 202 Sense and Sensibility, 206, 236 Austen-Leigh, James Edward, 207, 214 authorship, 1–3, 9, 22, 38–9, 61–72, 111, 169, 179, 183, 193, 217, 222, 229, See also€anonymity, collaboration, Grub Street, women writers, writing; individual authors

274

Index and stigma of print, 39 images of, 30–7, 53–6 Backscheider, Paula, 239, 253, 254 Baldwin, William, 39 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 45, 139 Barchas, Janine, 7, 158, 241, 246, 248 Barker, Jane, 191–3, 196 Barthes, Roland, 51, 149 Bartolomeo, Joseph, 241 Baskerville, John, 92 Bayley, Harold, 134 Beauties of English Prose, 46 Beckett, Thomas, 73 Beckford, William, 16 Behn, Aphra, 8, 29, 57, 60, 80, 97, 164, 193, 196, 197, 201 and dashes, 190, 193 and italics, 193 Love-Letters, 8, 97, 164, 193 Oroonoko, 80 Belanger, Terry, 3 Benedict, Barbara, 43, 51, 241, 248, 252 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 74, 186 Bennett, Tony, 183, 186 Bentley, Richard, 207 Berry, Helen, 242 Bhowmik, Umi, 242 Bidwell, John, 243 binding, 34, 80, 83–4, 91, 110, 163, 192, 236, See€ also commodities, manuscript, textuality Birmingham Counterfeit, 187 Blackwell, Bonnie, 248 Blackwell, Mark, 248 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 207 Blake, William, 15 Blakey, Dorothy, 40 Blum, André, 90, 243 Bohum, Edmund, 91 Bonnell, Thomas, 238 books, See€textuality booksellers, 5, 22, 23, 32–41, 50, 53, 56, 74–5, 78, 91, 98, 110, 140, 161–6, 188, 201, 202, See also€advertising, circulation, collaboration, commodities, Grub Street, intellectual property, law, piracy and images of, 32–7, 93 as fictional characters, 31, 39, 78, 95, 98, 110, 112, 114, 117, 121, 130, 158, 174, 181, 195 Benjamin Motte, 38 Edmund Curll, 94 fictional, 174

275

John Dunton, 65, 69, 74 John Murray, 204 Richard Crosby, 201, 203 Robert Dodsley, 141 Samuel Richardson, 83, 134, 140 Thomas Beckett, 73 William Lane, 40 Borck, Jim, 246, 260 Bosch, René, 148, 152, 238, 241, 244, 247, 248 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 50, 182, 241 Bradshaigh, Lady Dorothy, 46 Brewer, John, 12, 34, 39, 40, 45, 84, 238, 240, 242 Bridges, Thomas, 171, 174, 176, 178 Briggs, Peter, 251 Briscoe, John, 92 Bristol, Michael, 50 British Critic, 204, 205 British Merchant, 92 British Prose Miscellany, 46 Brooke, Frances, 196 Brown, Marshall, 247 Bueler, Lois, 246, 260 Bühler, Curt, 29 Burckhardt, Sigurt, 247 Burgess, Miranda, 57, 241 Burney, Fanny, 44, 56, 58, 111, 191, 196–201 and asterisks, 200 and authorship, 201 and epistolarity, 196–201 and fictional editor, 199 and public sphere, 199 Cecilia, 95 Evelina, 196–201, 203, 236 and coming out, 203 Burton, Robert, 39 Campbell, Gina, 252 capital, 19, 48, 140, 155, 160, 182, See booksellers, commodities, money capitalization, See€orthography Carroll, John, 127 Carvalho, David, 242 Castle Wolfenbach, 202 Caxton, William, 3 censorship, 71, 72, 93, 100, 123, 227, See also€intellectual property, law Certeau, Michel de, 184, 188 Chambers, Ephraim, 243 chapter division, See€paratext Character of a Coffee-House, 254 Chartier, Roger, 2, 9, 95, 240, 251 Choi, Samuel, 252 Churchyard, Thomas, 92

276

Index

circulating libraries, See€libraries circulation, 1, 3, 8, 13, 22, 32, 41, 47, 66, 140, 153, 155, 159, 161, 164, 166, 171, 172, 177, 178, 182, 184, 186, 191, 200, 224, 235, 236, See€booksellers, coffee houses, commodities, libraries, money, object narratives, post, print culture, public sphere Cirlot, Juan, 137, 246, 247 Clapham, Henoch, 228 coffee houses, 13, 48, 73, 124, 171, 173, 177, 185, 234, See also€circulation, print culture, public sphere Cogan, Thomas, 98, 108–12, 158, 190 Coiro, Ann, 239 Colclough, Stephen, 45, 238 Coleman, Donald, 89, 243 collaboration, 1, 4, 32, 42, 52, 74, 105, 112, 152, 192, 195, 221, See also€authorship, booksellers, intellectual property, print culture, writing Combe, William, 93 commodities, 2, 7, 18, 19–20, 37, 39, 52, 155, 159, 183, 214, See also€booksellers, circulation, intellectual property, object narratives, print culture, textuality communications circuit, See€circulation Company of White Paper-Makers, 93–4, 101 compositor, 34, 38, 136, 139 Condorcet, Marquis de (Marie Jean Antoine Nocilas de Caritat), 49 Congreve, William, 57 Cook, Elizabeth, 197, 245, 246 copyright, See€law Cottom, Daniel, 252 Courier, 204, 206 Coyne, Richard, 49 Crébillon, Claude Prosper Jolyot de (fils), 179 Critical Review, 51, 85, 165, 172, 244 critics, See€reviewing Crosby, Richard, 201, 203 Cruikshank, Isaac, 34–7 Cruise, James, 239, 247 Curll, Edmund, 94 Darby, Robert, 247 Darnton, Robert, 3, 238, 240 dashes, See€orthography Davis, Lennard, 7, 19, 231 Davy, William, 28 Day, Geoffrey, 141 dedications, See€paratext Defoe, Daniel, 46, 57, 58, 100, 188, 237 and anonymity, 231 and authorship, 229

and death, 230 and copyright, 15, 224 and fiction, 235 and footnotes, 230 and italics, 232 and manuscripts, 233 and nationalism, 233 and orality, 226, 233 and plague as metaphor for print, 225–34 and print culture, 235 and printer’s ornaments, 232 and private/public discourse, 2, 228–9 and public sphere, 224–35 and typography, 226, 233 Essay on the Regulation of the Press, 15 Journal of the Plague Year, 235–6 and fiction, 224, 235–6 and reading, 231 Robinson Crusoe, 2, 29, 63, 78, 177, 196, 227, 236 Dekker, Thomas, 225 DeMaria, Robert, 42, 44 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 51, 225, 235, 237, 242 Diderot, Denis, 17, 240 Dodsley, Robert, 141 Donaldson v. Beckett, 5, 15, 33, 40, 53, 56, See also€intellectual property, law, piracy Donaldson, William, 105, 111, 190, 195 Bartholomew Sapskull, 53–6 Donne, John, 190 Donoghue, Frank, 241, 248, 251 Doody, Margaret, 246, 251 Downie, J. A., 239 drama, 19, 35, 48, 63, 108, 177, 183 Dryden, John, 62, 86, 94, 232 Du Bois, Edward, 96 Dunlop, John, 10 Dunton, John, 65, 67, 69, 74, 75 Echlin, Lady Elizabeth, 46 Edgeworth, Maria, 8, 164, 189, 200 editors, 38, 67, 74, 134, 135, 141 fictional, 1, 29, 41, 63, 69, 74, 78, 86, 98, 109, 112, 115, 119, 127, 129, 135, 140, 158, 163, 166, 168, 169, 177, 179, 195, 198, 231 Ehlers, Leigh, 247 Ehrenpreis, Irvin, 115, 244, 245, 251 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 4, 7, 12, 125, 226, 238, 241 Elsky, Martin, 249 emotion, See€affect End of Lusorium, 10, 81, 88 Englert, Hilary, 249 Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 206 Enlightenment, 9, 13, 19, 48, 51, 62, 63, 75, 125, 149, 152, 183, 186, 190, 224, 226

Index epistolarity, 48, 64–71, 79, 134–8, 193, 196–201, 216–21, See€manuscript, post, writing Epstein, Julia, 252 Erickson, Lee, 27 Essay Against Too Much Reading, 74 Ezell, Margaret, 44, 241, 253 Familiar Letters betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, 96 Fanning, Christopher, 240, 247 Favret, Mary, 252 Feather, John, 40, 238, 242, 249 Felski, Rita, 239 Female Gamester, 95 Fergus, Jan, 5, 8, 45, 47, 60 Ferguson, Frances, 246 fetishism, 155, 178 Fichte, Johann, 15 fiction, 10–11, 27–9, 34–51, 62–9, 155, See also realism; individual authors and affect and authorship, 53–60 and print, 7–8 and private/public discourse, 66–9 and reading, 44–51 as percentage of book production, 27 gothic, 22, 40, 202, 209, 211, 212 in anthologies, 46, 51 influence of, 5 romance, 2, 16–19, 206 the novel, 15–20, 57–60, 206, 237 and gender, 59–60 and print, 1–2, 237 influence of, 28–30, 34–42 Fielding, Henry, 10, 22, 43, 47, 56, 57, 106, 158, 188, 190 Joseph Andrews, 22, 83 Tom Jones, 95, 155 Fielding, Sarah and dashes, 189 David Simple, 155, 190, 196 Finnegan, Ruth, 238 florets, See€paratext Flynn, Carol, 246 footnotes, See€paratext Foucault, Michel, 51, 71, 72 Fox, Adam, 239 Foxon, David, 238, 245 Fraser, Nancy, 13 free indirect discourse, 2, 112, 181, 187, 188, 217, 231, See also€omniscient narrator Freud, Sigmund, 249 frontispieces, See€paratext Fysh, Stephanie, 241, 246

277

Gallagher, Catherine, 7, 195, 241 gaps, See€paratext Gardiner, Ellen, 7, 241 Garside, Peter, 88 Gaskell, Philip, 243 Gentleman’s Magazine, 27, 39, 204 Gildon, Charles, 21, 62–102, 165, 166, 175, 177, 231, 236 and authorship, 62–71, 74, 163 and circulation, 163 and Defoe, 63 and epistolarity, 64–71, 78 and fiction, 63–7 and Grub Street, 62–3 and ink, 81 and journalism, 67 and law, 64–73 and money, 179 and paper, 82, 87, 99–102 and print culture, 66–71 and private/public discourse, 64–71 and proposed academy of English letters, 70, 99–102 and public sphere, 64–78, 163 and readers and reading, 65–70, 73–80 and textuality, 163 and collective effort, 64–72 authorship, 61–72 Complete Art of Poetry, 64, 67 Golden Spy, 159–64, 177, 179 Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D-----. de F –, 29, 63, 77 New Metamorphosis, 64 Post-Boy Robb’ d of His Mail, 21, 63–71, 74–80, 87, 96, 99 Post-Man Robb’ d of His Mail, 21, 48, 64, 66–78, 81, 86, 96, 99–102 Gilman, Ernest, 227, 253 Glaister, Geoffrey, 246 Goldberg, Jonathan, 249 Goldsmith, Oliver, 22 Goody, Jack, 239 Gooneratne, Yasmine, 252 gothic, See€fiction Grafton, Anthony, 245 Greene, Jody, 71, 224, 231, 250 Greenfield, Susan, 252 Griffin, Dustin, 240, 244 Grub Street, 56, 61–3, 67, 168, 174, 187, 231, See also€booksellers, Defoe, Gildon, Haywood, Pope, Swift Gubar, Susan, 250 Gutenberg, Johann, 3, 8 Guthkelch, A. C., 244

278

Index

Habermas, Jürgen, 7, 12–14, 47–9, 77, 125, 140, 171, 177, 182, 183, 186, 226, 234, 239, 241 hack writers, See€Grub Street Halasz, Alexandra, 243 Hammond, Brean, 241 Harris, Michael, 6, 59, 242 Hawkesworth, John, 101 Haywood, Eliza, 10, 43, 57, 60, 188, 191, 193, 196, 202 and chapter division, 190 and dashes, 190 Betsy Thoughtless, 58, 155, 177, 190 Invisible Spy, 62, 76 Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, 58 Hazlitt, William, 1, 2, 14, 93 Helme, Elizabeth and epigraphs, 190 Henry, Anne, 245, 246, 247 Hess, Scott, 238 Hill, Mike, 241 Hills, Richard, 242 History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes, 168 history of the book, 3–6, 7, See also€book, print, print culture, public sphere, textuality Hogarth, William, 179 Holcroft, Thomas, 16, 18 Holtz, William, 246 Hörisch, Jochen, 175, 176 Hudson, Nicholas, 43, 241, 249 Humorous Life, Travels and Adventures of Christopher Wagstaff, 143 Hunter, Dard, 88 Hunter, J. Paul, 10, 57, 230, 242 Hunter, Joseph, 45 inanimate narrators, See€object narratives Inchbald, Elizabeth, 58, 200 indices, See€paratext Ingrassia, Catherine, 191, 243 ink, 31, 79–84, 87, 88, 89, 97, 142, 149, 151, 236 intellectual property, 52, 55, 56, 61, 62, 66, 100, 153, 188, 240, See also€authorship, booksellers, censorship, collaboration, commodities, law, print culture italics, See€typography it-narratives, See€object narratives Jacks Put to Their Trumps, 175, 180 Jackson, H. J., 3, 43, 45, 46, 238, 240, 242 Jagodzinski, Cecile, 43 Jajdelska, Elspeth, 240 Jefferson, D. W., 244 Jenkins, Rhys, 90, 243 Johns, Adrian, 4, 15, 39, 84, 241, 242

Johnson, Samuel, 32, 38, 42, 44, 56, 62, 176, 208 Johnstone, Charles, 41, 166, 174, 180 Jones, Rosalind, 251 journalism, 9, 67, 173, 223 Justice, George, 7, 251 Karian, Stephen, 245 Kavanaugh, Julia, 206 Kay, Donald, 242 Keen, Paul, 241 Kernan, Alvin, 238, 247, 249 Keymer, Thomas, 7, 158, 240, 241, 244, 247, 248, 251 Kidgell, John, 154–9 and typography, 154–9 The Card, 154–9, 188, 189, 190, 201 Kilner, Dorothy, 169, 171 King, Kathyrn, 251 King, Ross, 248 Kittler, Friedrich, 3, 48 Klancher, Jon, 46 Knight, Fanny, 204 Knox, Vicesimus, 28, 87, 184 Kramnick, Jonathan, 252 Kunastrokius, Jeremiah, 148 Kvande, Marta, 197, 200, 251 Lamb, Charles, 59 Lamb, Jonathan, 248 Langford, Paul, 3 Lanham, Richard, 248 Larpent, Anna, 45 Lascelles, Mary, 252 Lathom, Francis, 81 Laugero, Greg, 242 law, 5, 9, 15, 41, 64–73, 90–4, 196, 201, See also€censorship, intellectual property, piracy and literary property, 73, 231 copyright, 56, 72, 164, 224 Le Faye, Deidre, 252 Leavis, Q. D., 252 Lennox, Charlotte, 84 letters, See€epistolarity Levine, Joseph, 244 Lewes, George Henry, 206 Lewis, Jayne, 253 libraries, 9, 30–2, 36, 39, 43, 48, 100, See also€circulation, print culture, public sphere, readers and reading circulating, 5, 34, 45–6, 59, 171, 183 Licensing Act lapsing of 2, 241, See€law Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, 112, 170

Index Litz, A. Walton, 252 Locke, John, 80, 87, 106, 150 Loehwing, Melanie, 239 Loewenstein, Joseph, 41, 53, 115 London Magazine, 173 Love, Harold, 191, 239, 242, 249 Lupton, Christina, 243, 249 Lynch, Deidre, 7, 195, 248 Macauley, Catharine, 56 McDowell, Paula, 60, 227, 239, 241, 250, 253 McIntosh, Carey, 9 McKenzie, D. F., 239, 242, 243 Mackenzie, Henry, 10, 45, 86, 102, 164, 201 McKeon, Michael, 8, 239, 242, 248 McKitterick, David, 8, 88, 242 McLaverty, James, 11, 245 McLuhan, Marshall, 7, 247 magazines, See€journalism Mah, Harold, 239 mail, See€post Mangin, Edward, 16 Manley, Delarivier, 58, 60 and dashes, 190 Mansell, Darrell, 252 manuscript, 6, 28, 31, 38, 52, 82–3, 161, 166, 182, 190, 193, 198, 211–12, 231, See also€authorship, circulation, epistolarity, intellectual property, scribal culture, writing marginalia, 42, 47, 80, 106, 115, 120, 123, 127–30, See also€paratext Marotti, Arthur, 50, 239 Marx, Karl, 19, 167, 182, 184, 249 Maslen, Keith, 246 Mayer, Robert, 236 Mayo, Robert, 242 Meeker, Richard, 249 Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat, 168 Michaelson, Patricia, 43 Middleton, Conyers, 92 Midnight Bell, 202 Milton, John, 53, 160, 230 money, i–3, 159–64, 187, 228, See also€capital, circulation, commodities, object narratives Montag, Warren, 241, 245 Monthly Review, 11 More, Hannah, 28 More, Rowe, 134 Moretti, Franco, 57 Morison, Stanley, 134, 243 Moss, Roger, 240 Motte, Benjamin, 38

279

Motter, Jeff, 239 Moxon, Joseph, 12 Mudrick, Marvin, 252 Mullan, John, 242 Murray, John, 204, 210 Myers, Robin, 242 Nardin, Jane, 251 narrative, 159–83 nationalism, 2, 4, 13, 49, 89–102, 160, 166, 177, 178, 180, 184, 192, 235, See also€public sphere needlework, 98, 191–3, See also€women’s writing New, Melvyn, 244, 247 newspapers, See€journalism North British Review, 207 Novak, Maximillian, 253, 254 novel, See€fiction object narratives, 154–5, 158–88, 211, 231, See also€circulation, commodities, money, textuality and authorship, 160–72 and commerce, 159–69, 183 and commodities, 160–9, 173–83 and money, 159–64, 173–83 and narrative, 159–83 Olshin, Toby, 249 omniscient narrator, 111, 112, 196, See€ also free indirect discourse Ong, Walter, 7, 19, 29, 139, 238, 242, 249 orality, 29, 79, 180, 182, 192, 228, 234 orthography, See€paratext, textuality, typography, See€also€individual authors capitalization, 107, 116, 157, 169 punctuation dashes, 8, 106, 111, 125, 141, 149, 152, 190, 193 Ovid, 159 Oxford Miscellany, 46 Palmeri, Frank, 244, 245 paper, 8, 9, 82–102, 235, 236 and fabric, 193 and law and taxation, 90–4, 99 and nationalism, 89–102 as metaphor, 80–1, 87–8, 94–102, 138, 142, 149–51, 173, 191–3 history of, 88–102 production of, 89–96 paratext, 37, 78, 82, 106, 111, 112–53, 233, See also€orthography, textuality, typography; individual authors asterisks, 8, 105, 111, 112, 116–26, 200 chapter divisions, 10, 108 dedications, 106

280

Index

paratext (cont.) florets, 111 footnotes, 8, 111, 119–23 frontispieces, 53–6, 155 gaps, 32, 151 indices, 8, 111, 127–30 prefaces, 106 printer’s ornaments, 8, 21, 109, 112–53 title pages, 10, 53, 109, 157, 176 Parks, Stephen, 242 Pearson, Jacqueline, 240 Pels, Peter, 178 periodicals, See€journalism Perry, Ruth, 248 Phiddian, Robert, 116 Philips, Edward, 167, 171 Philips, John, 160, 165, 175 Phip, Mark, 52 Pickwood, Nicholas, 242 Pinch, Adela, 252 Piozzi, Hester, 40 piracy, 73, 101, 121, 161, 185 plague, 89, 237 as metaphor for print, 225–34 plays and playhouses, See€drama Poem on the Invention of Printing, 12 poetry, 15, 175 Pollak, Ellen, 243 Pollock, Anthony, 13, 242 Poovey, Mary, 251 Pope, Alexander, 15, 56, 62, 73, 86, 100, 126, 152, 201, 245 Dunciad, 66, 130 Further Account, 94 Peri Bathous, 123 post, 64–6, 69, 87, 171 prefaces, See€paratext pressmen, 34, 38 Price, Leah, 6, 51, 250 print culture, 4, 8–11, 43, 66–71, 116, 187, 223–37, See€also€individual authors advantages, 11–20 disadvantages, 11–20 print, printing, printing press advantages, 224–35 and authenticity, 184, 185, 186, 198, 224–36 and language, 180–3 and mentalité, 8 and proliferation, 6, 27, 34, 114, 231 disadvantages, 184, 224–35 history of, 2–3, 9, 11–20, 235 printer’s devils, 34, 37, 142 printer’s ornaments, See€paratext private/public discourse, 1, 29, 64–71, 165, 172, 214, See€also€individual authors

prose fiction, See€fiction Probyn, Clive, 244 pseudonymity, See€anonymity public sphere, 12–20, 47–9, 65–78, 155, 159, 163, 167, 171–2, 175, 177, 178, 182, 183, 185, 213, 224–35, See€also€individual authors and gender, 222 publishing and gender, 222 See also booksellers punctuation, See€orthography Pythagoras, 159 Quarterly Review, 205, 206 Radcliffe, Anne, 200, 211 and epigraphs, 190 Ralph, James, 56 Raven, James, 10, 40, 43, 45, 56, 59, 238, 242 readers and reading, 5, 31, 39–51, 73–80, 85, 106, 110, 111, 125, 193, 195, 237, See€also€individual authors and gender, 35 extensive v. intensive reading, 44 images of, 33–7 reading aloud, 43 reading as social act, 43–4 silent reading, 43, 149 realism, 2, 66, 139, 140, 154 Reeve, Clara, 16, 18, 56, 239 Regan, Shaun, 247 reviewing, 50, 59, 95, 107 Rhodes, Neil, 3 Richardson, Samuel, 14, 22, 29, 46, 57, 79, 97, 102, 126–41, 149, 151, 154, 175, 186, 189, 191, 221, 229 and affect, 127–39 and anonymity, 140 and capitalization, 138 and dashes, 136 and emblems, 130–9 and epistolarity, 134–8 and fictional editors, 130, 135 and footnotes, 137 and gaps, 126–40 and indices, 127–30, 134, 136 and italics, 138 and print, 139 and printer’s ornaments, 126–40 and psychological realism, 139 and public sphere, 140 and readers, 136 and reading aloud, 44 and textual absence, 127, 130 by Clarissa, 135–7

Index and textual encroachment by Lovelace, 137–9 and textuality, 128–32, 138 and typography, 10, 126–40 as bookseller, 83 Clarissa, 8, 10, 21, 44, 46, 58, 59, 79, 97, 98, 126–40, 149, 155, 164, 166, 191 Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, 58 Pamela, 58, 83, 97, 130, 133, 135, 157, 191, 196, 236 Sir Charles Grandison, 58, 133, 156 Ripa, Cesare, 134 Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot), 180, 250 Rogers, Pat, 241 romance, See€fiction romanticism, 5, 15, 42, 62, 126, 208, 209, 235 and authorship, 52, 56, 60 Rose, Mark, 56, 239, 241, 245 Rothstein, Eric, 248 Rowlandson, Thomas, 32–4, 93, 110 Ryder, John, 246 Sabor, Peter, 241, 251 Saccamano, Neil, 244 Sale, William, 246 Sauer, Elizabeth, 239, 243 Sawday, Jonathan, 3 Schmidgen, Wolfram 250 Scott, Helenus, 166, 172, 177, 180 Scott, Walter, 16, 18, 40 scribal culture, 3, 79, 191, See also€manuscript, writing Seager, Nicholas, 253 serial publication, 9, 51, 75, 242 Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 61 Sharpe, Kevin, 239 Shaw, Narelle, 252 Shell, Marc, 175 Sher, Richard, 4, 56, 226 Sherbert, Gary, 247 Shevelow, Kathyrn, 46, 242, 243 Shevlin, Eleanor, 40, 248 Shorter, Alfred, 90 Simpson, Richard, 207 Siskin, Clifford, 4, 6, 46, 239, 241 Smith, Charlotte and epigraphs, 190 Smith, D. Nichol, 244 Smollett, Tobias, 16, 51, 155, 166, 170, 172, 188 Sommerville, C. John, 242, 243 Sorensen, Janet, 241 Southam, B. C., 252 Spencer, John, 142

281

Spyer, Patricia, 249 Stallybrass, Peter, 19, 242 Starkman, Miriam, 244 Starr, George, 242 Stayley, George, 142 St. Clair, William, 5 Steele, Richard Spectator, 67 Tatler, 75 Stephanson, Raymond, 254 Sterne, Laurence, 10, 14, 22, 29, 46, 47, 52, 56, 102, 111, 141–52, 154, 158, 186, 189, 196, 200, 208, 221 and affect, 141–51 and asterisks, 141 and authorship, 105, 141 and dashes, 141, 149, 190 and emasculation, 141–9 and gaps, 148 and gender, 147–8 and manuscript, 150 and paper, 89, 95 and paratext, 141–52 and print, 37 and private/public discourse, 146 and readers, 150–3 and textual absence, 141, 144–9 and textuality, 141 and typography, 141 Sentimental Journey, 46, 97 Tristram Shandy, 21, 37, 38, 43, 50, 81, 83, 84, 87, 89, 95, 105, 141–52, 166, 190, 196 Stewart, Garrett, 239, 244 Stoddart, Judith, 49 Straub, Kristina, 252 Stuber, Florian, 245, 246 Suarez, Michael, 27, 56, 240, 243 Supplement to Dr. Harris’s Dictionary, 12 Sutherland, Kathyrn, 190, 252 Swift, Jonathan, 10, 22, 30–2, 43, 75, 86, 87, 100, 102, 113–26, 141, 149, 151, 158, 169, 186, 189, 221 and asterisks, 8, 116–26, 200 and authorship, 114 and footnotes, 119–23 and gaps, 116–26 and narrative voice, 114 and paper, 83, 88, 95 and print, 114, 116 and print culture, 114–27 and proliferation of printed text, 114 and public sphere, 125 and readers and reading, 85 and textuality, 85 Battle of the Books, 30–2, 83, 123

282

Index

Swift, Jonathan (cont.) Correspondence, 120 Gulliver’s Travels, 38 Letter to a Young Clergyman, 32 Tale of a Tub, 8, 21, 38, 83, 85, 88, 95, 113–26, 130, 149, 154, 163, 165, 166, 171, 194, 210 To the Grub Street Verse-writers, 41 Tadmor, Naomi, 43 Tale of Genji, 15 Taussig, Michael, 249 Taylor, John, 44 textuality, 7, 8, 33, 38, 80, 106–53, 177, 214, See also€binding, ink, orthography, paper, paratext, typography; individual authors and collective effort in eighteenth-century fiction, 64–72 theater, See€drama Theobald, Lewis, 185 Thomas, Keith, 243 Thompson, Ann and John, 250 Thompson, Helen, 252 title pages, See€paratext Tompkins, Joyce, 249, 251 Tonson v. Collins, See€intellectual property, law, piracy Tooke, Benjamin, 115 Traugott, John, 141, 244, 248 Travells of a Shilling, 161 Tucker, Irene, 252 Turner, Cheryl, 57, 60 Turner, James, 241 Turner, Peggy and Thomas, 44 typeface, See also€typography typography, 4, 7, 9, 10, 37, 89, 112–53, 154–9, 176, 193, 236, See€also orthography, paratext, textuality

and gender, 189–93 italics, 8, 115, 180, 193 typeface, 65 Vande Berg, Michael, 240 Voogd, Peter J. de, 240, 247 Wall, Wendy, 6, 29 Walpole, Horace, 22 Walsh, Marcus, 244 Warner, William, 7, 39, 57, 84, 241, 242 waste paper, 34, 41, 86, 93, 94 Watson George, 154 Watt, Ian, 7, 139, 241 Watts, Isaac, 42 Weber, Harold, 8, 243 Weinbrot, Howard, 244 Whaley, Richard, 205 Whatman, James, 92 Wildermuth, Mark, 240 Wiley, R. M., 241 Wither, George, 39 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 50, 200 women writers, 52, 189–222 and needlework, 191–3 as professionals, 193 Womersley, David, 254 Woodmansee, Martha, 239, 241 Wotton, William, 120 Woudhuysen, Henry, 240, 243 writing, 29, 228 and gender, 52, 189–222 Young, Edward, 15, 56, 62, 156, 175 Zaret, David, 6, 13, 19, 49, 238, 242 Zimmerman, Everett, 244, 254