Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain 9780812205213

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Knowing Books

MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors

Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Knowing Books The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain

CHRISTINA LUPTON

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adel ph ia

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lupton, Christina.   Knowing books : the consciousness of mediation in eighteenth-­century Britain / Christina Lupton. — 1st ed.    p.  cm. — (Material texts)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8122-4372-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)   1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Mediation in literature. 3. Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature. 4. Literature publishing— Great Britain—History—18th century. 5. Books and reading—Great Britain— History—18th century. I. Title. II. Series: Material texts. PR441.L87  2012 820.9'005—dc23 2011023526

Contents

Prologue Introduction: Giving Power to the Medium

vii 1

Chapter 1. Powerlessness as Entertainment

21

Chapter 2. What It-Narratives Know About Their Authors

47

Chapter 3. The Theory of Paper

70

Chapter 4. Sermons Written on the Screen of Print

95

Chapter 5. Gray and Mackenzie Printing on the Wall

122

Notes

151

Bibliography

169

Index

181

Acknowledgments

183

Prologue

I began thinking about this book in England in the mid-1990s. In those days my interest in self-conscious literature led me to fairly well defined places. The reflexive play that made writing self-conscious revealed how language worked as a set of constructed meanings and conventions, and self-conscious fiction exposed the operation of narrative: Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, and Italo Calvino wrote, for instance, more self-consciously than Samuel Richardson, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. But more important, literary theory seemed able to open up almost any text in these reflexive terms. Postcolonial and poststructuralist theory placed self-consciousness on the side of the critic who exposed the true operation of discourse, typically in spite of an author’s attempt to use words as transparently as possible. We were conditioned not to see the conventions of writing, I thought, and any critical method that brought these conventions to light was working against the mainstream habits and history of reading. In the British and European contexts where I first studied theory and philosophy, there was a political aspect to this too; one that combined Marxian strands of social critique, which identified the raising of consciousness with the transformation of imperialist and class society, the theories of Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, which celebrated antimimetic forms of representation as the aesthetic branch of this undertaking, and post-structuralism as a way to contextualize the whole Enlightenment project of critical transcendence. None of these theoretical frameworks made the journey across the Atlantic with me in quite one piece. When I arrived in the United States in the late 1990s, I began reading eighteenth-century literature more closely than I had done before. Almost immediately, I was struck by the ways much of this literature was self-reflexive in its own terms, not just about representation, but about the material, economic, and colonial contexts of textual production. Reading a little outside the canon of British and American eighteenth-century works, I was quickly convinced that Sterne was much more typical in his habits than courses that began with Daniel Defoe and ended with Jane Austen

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made him seem. But, if this was the case, and eighteenth-century literature was less invested in transparency and vraisemblance than Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and Edward Said supposed, was this literature also spared of the charges these theorists laid against it? Could imperialist and elitist literature that announced its ideological operations be held responsible for them in the same way as literature that conducted them more by stealth? Were commercially produced texts that announced their racist or capitalist origins in candid terms also challenging them? Or, most to the point for this study, were texts signposting their reliance on the material world transcending its laws and limitations? As I was asking these questions, I was experiencing late twentieth-century America as a setting more self-conscious than any I’d lived in before. The students I was teaching spoke more knowingly than students in England about the way news stories and movies were produced, about social and political corruption, and about the mechanisms of truth-making generally. Every teenager seemed to understand the way the sports and entertainment industries worked together. And yet most loved spectator sports. They were more comfortable with capitalist society, more engaged with the entertainment industry, and more tolerant of authority than any of the communities of humanities students I’d known elsewhere. Ideology critique as I understood it did not apply easily here, where such high levels of critical knowledge could be woven together with an acceptance of and pleasure in the way things were. Critical understanding of society, such as the kind fostered so effectively in North American humanities departments, did not seem obviously related to changing it. But what configuration, I wanted to ask, made such consciousness compatible with the status quo? When was an acute understanding of representation compatible with its consumption as entertainment? What theory did I have that would help me understand these phenomena? During a decade in which I have lived with one foot planted in Europe and the other in North America, this study has taken shape against the backdrop of the questions I asked as I arrived in New Jersey. And even as the project has grown much narrower in its depth, I have continued to think of it in its broadest conception as an early chapter in the history of the compatibility of discourse that announces its own operation (socially, materially, economically) with an audience that “gets” and enjoys this candor while also granting power and mystery to the technologies supporting the production of discourse. When I describe this book to people outside English departments, I say I am interested in the long history of the attitude we have to our laptops and kindles and mobile phones as devices through which we receive



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information of which we can be bitingly critical, but in relation to which we routinely entertain the idea that machines have their own opinion, and may even know more about ourselves than we do. I give the example of “Freedom,” the Internet blocking program that sets a computer to deny its user online access for a certain amount of time, and of the Wikileaks website celebrated for making the process of government more transparent while simultaneously baffling audiences with the technological wonder of making classified diplomatic cables visible to the world. I cite Derrida describing the word processing function that tells him his paragraphs are too long, and using this reminder to bring his thoughts to a close. There is something liberating, he claims, about “submitting…to an arbitrary rule made by a program I hadn’t chosen.”1 These phenomena illustrate some of the moments in which ceding consciousness, and even agency, to an electronic object becomes the modern equivalent of the eighteenth-century attitude to books I set out to describe. Talking about the eighteenth century’s fashionably “self-conscious” texts raises the question of where the consciousness named in this book’s title really resides. The chapters of Knowing Books refer to the way eighteenth-century texts are written so as to suggest that they have an artificial intelligence of their own: a sentience that emanates from their material form in print and announces itself as a knowledge of the relation between an author, narrator, and audience that belongs to none of these parties. My examples demonstrate a wide variety of discursive tricks used in the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s to create texts that appear cognizant of how they are made. They include writers using language to project their texts’ physical form as print, paper, and commodity, and to make texts appear able to register their physical origins, movement, and arrival in a reader’s hand. Novels are managed by metafictional narrators who suggest their residence inside books by ordering readers not to fold down or fall asleep over their pages, or insisting that they turn over a page in order to see the color of the book’s binding or a musical score glued inside chapters.2 Magazine columns ventriloquize the voice of paper and pens, deploying narrators like the sermon that speaks to its reader of the material on which it is printed, or the published graffiti that anticipates its own discovery as tragic artifact.3 While these texts are made to seem more like subjects than we might expect, their readers and authors are invited to know themselves as products of a mechanical process, and thus to seem more like the sentient objects they consume. In none of these cases do words or the objects allowing them to be written actually come to life. As I understand it, inanimate objects cannot be self-conscious. This should perhaps go without saying. Yet, because we now

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live in a world where objects so convincingly model intelligence, and in which so many approaches to cultural and literary history explore the ways things, systems, and environments serve as a nexuses of nonhuman consciousness, it is worth stating at the outset that this project is not about artificial life or intelligence, nor about any simple belief on the part of eighteenth-century readers in these phenomena. It is not even about the life of the nascent commodities that appear in the thriving international marketplace of the eighteenth century. Rather, it is about the preparedness of people to imagine consciousness in things, and about the literary uptake of this attitude by readers and writers invested, at least for the sake of entertainment, in the fictional consciousness of their tools and their powerlessness over them. In this context, the “knowing” of my title refers as much to the knowledge eighteenth-century readers had of the making of books (and sermons and newspapers) as it does to the knowledge these books professed of their own constitution and their readers. “Knowing” underscores my claim that the modern history of being entertained by books and screens is compatible with much higher levels of awareness about representation than critics of mimetic and realist immersion generally imagine. In this sense I challenge the idea that entertainment has historically been focused on making alternative worlds seem as believable as possible. But the term “knowing” also points to the suggestion developed throughout this study, that knowing how representation works can support the entertaining illusion of books and games and films knowing more than we do. Although this is a historical study, focused quite tightly on three decades of the eighteenth century, it also aims to do the conjunctural work of making clear the relevance of these decades to our own. Current terms for thinking about objects, and about media, qualify us to understand the possibility that eighteenth-century audiences simultaneously parodied and dissected the print medium and granted it new kinds of power. Their attitude toward technologies is akin to the one Bruno Latour appeals to in his twentieth-century readers when he claims that we, more than earlier generations, have “digested, integrated, and perhaps socialized” technologies and are therefore capable of looking squarely at their causes without either absolute optimism or despair.4 Latour may be wrong to assume that we are the first to look at technologies in these sanguine terms, but he is quite right to foreground a view of technology that is both knowing and accepting, and to see this legacy of modernity as more important than the attitudes that either decry technology as the antithesis of the humanism, or celebrate it as our salvation. The following chapters suggest that the attitude Latour describes as our own also characterizes the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s. When authors invent a life for



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their productions, artificially severing them from the sphere of creative control, they do so, I suggest, under conditions we can recognize, of candid reflection rather than false consciousness. In making this claim, is not my intention to exclude other ways of thinking about the eighteenth century’s foreignness, nor to suggest that studies of later periods might not be used to demonstrate similar kinds of affinity. Yet the decades on which I focus are ones in which ways of looking at the page emerge as particularly close equivalents to the ways we have of looking at the screen and thinking about digital technology. From a historical perspective, one can show that this is because in the mid-eighteenth century printed books and papers went, in the way screens have in the twentyfirst, from being fairly limited educational and institutional devices, to being a prolific form of entertainment, portable, private, and increasingly available, even threatening, in their number and popularity. I am less concerned, however, with describing these changes causally than with exploring the reflexive, literary forms that emerge once a new way of reproducing and disseminating language is widely recognized and accepted. This study marks its own origins in the twenty-first century by beginning fairly quickly with the assumption that acceptance of a new medium can coexist with a high level of critical consciousness about its presence. The questions that Knowing Books raises, about the literary forms that support the combination of consciousness of, and complicity with, the media, and about the role of literature in encouraging and overcoming our feelings of powerlessness toward technologies of inscription and representation, are ones that I attempt to answer in the eighteenth-century domain. But they are questions that I think of as our own. I have felt this very clearly while finishing this book, during a snowy winter in London that has brought human movement of all kinds to a halt, but has only emphasized the apparent ability of words to move of their own accord. In the city where sermons and graffiti and papers and windows were once constructed as sentient things by the people who wrote for and about them, digital text and images now appear to traverse spaces we cannot; to speak about their own and our constitution; to say the things authors would not dare; to appear in ways individual writers could never have anticipated. The British Library is abuzz with excitement about technologies for representing and retrieving words that dwarf in potential the content of what has been written. My hope for this project is that it will help to give this buzz a history; not a history of writing as a technology, but a history more human and more disquieting than that, of our imaging ourselves in the thrall of the things we have written.

Knowing Books

Introduction: Giving Power to the Medium

Flat Reflections In 1766, Evan Lloyd published at his own cost “The Powers of the Pen,” a poem satirizing the mid-­century market in literature. Lloyd presents readers mindlessly clamouring after sentimental tales, life histories, novels, and religious writing, and authors egged on by poverty and mercenary booksellers to produce these forms as efficiently as possible. In this energetic world of superfluous literary production, Lloyd describes pens rather than minds generating different kinds of text, imagining as the ultimate piece of hack writer’s equipment a pen so indifferent to content that it can write everything: Can by the Foot sob, whine and sigh, Tho’ too polite to make you cry. Sometimes, so various is this Pen, ’Twill deign to write of common Men; Will tell the Feats of Tommy Thumb, As well as those of Fee-­fa-­fum—­ Histories, Novels, Odes, or Tales, As the fantastic whim prevails.1 Parodying literature as quantitative output, Lloyd damns the mechanical production of writing. Yet what his catalogue of popular forms leaves out is the most typical kind of mid-­century writing of all: writing that, like his own poem, reflects critically on the economic and material production of literature. As a participant in the flood of reading matter it describes, Lloyd’s poem belongs to a moment where such reflexivity was so deeply embedded in popular culture that it can be described as a fashionable and technological impulse rather than one of real human outrage.2

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There is, of course, nothing particularly new about the claim that eighteenth-­century literature commented wryly on the overproduction and mindless consumption of literature. It is well known that Cervantes was enthusiastically read and imitated in England throughout the 1700s, that Swift specialized in ridiculing the efforts of the writers aspiring to popularity and economic success, and that Fielding rose to popularity as a novelist by challenging the new thirst for credible narratives. The success of these writers underscores the now widely accepted view that the eighteenth century’s best-­ known literary invention, the realist novel, evolved as writers sought ways to trump and belittle older genres and habits of belief and not, as critics once supposed, as an ideal of its own. Michael McKeon describes seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century readers exposed to successive versions of truth-­telling, each of which dialectically overturns the one that had come before it.3 And J. Paul Hunter documents a market early in the century for ever more innovative examples of sermons, didacticism, and travel literature, arguing that the genesis of the novel at this time can best be understood as a response to the demand for works capturing readers’ imagination through visible kinds of experimentation.4 These studies have laid the basis for understanding the eighteenth century as a period in which fiction was produced through, and productive of, participant awareness—­of genre, of epistemology, and even of print. Most literary historians now agree that the period’s newest kinds of novels, magazines, and anthologies announced themselves as novelties through their reflexivity about older kinds of reading and writing.5 Far from being swept up only in ever more convincing imaginative alternative realities, eighteenth-­century readers were entertained by the feeling of knowing more than the generations before them about the production of language and the representation of truth. There is, however, a certain slant to this narrative that assumes, if not a teleological development of literature, then at least a process of innovation required to satisfy the demands of savvy readers. Studies emphasizing the constitution of literary genres tend to document the production of new forms through the usurping of older ones. This perspective applies well to the first four decades of the century, when self-­consciousness and formal innovation run closely together. It even works to describe why a certain kind of generic, literary innovation dries up in the middle years of the century. With the exception of Tristram Shandy (1759–­ 67), which can itself be understood as a reflective reiteration of the process of which it announces the end, relatively few mid-­century works advance the history of the novel—­or of literary novelty. As an engine of change, literary



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self-­consciousness seems to run more slowly once the institution of the modern novel is in place. The market in ephemeral literature, well-­established by the 1750s, produced instead a range of predictable products that were greeted for the large part as old hat by their public. All this is true. And yet, this version of literary history does not describe how and why certain kinds of self-­consciousness should have exploded in this otherwise imitative literary climate. What has a writer like Lloyd to gain by critiquing the commercial incentives and mechanisms his own poems follow? It is difficult to explain why a writer like Edward Long should caricature the vanity of minor authors like himself in this way: “Having concluded this History to the destined period, I threw down my Pen; and looking steadyfastly at the manuscript before me, began to entertain myself with those self-­Applauses, and flattering conceits, which most Authors are sensible of, whilst they survey their new fangled performances.”6 Equally perplexing are the ways that minor novelists in this period represent their frustrated readers, and that pious texts written for profit encourage their readers to scrutinize the practice of penmanship. A special account is needed of why these kinds of writing, produced largely for profit, reflect so closely on their status as paper products, on the marketplace for which they written, and on the misbehaviour and appetites of their authors and readers. In this respect, mid-­eighteenth-­century British literature complicates the ways literary critics have previously understood the relation between self-­consciousness and literary innovation. While literature did become less exciting on many fronts once the novel was established as a genre, the self-­consciousness of texts did not decline as commercially driven and sub-­ canonical texts took over the mid-­century market. On the contrary, if there is one thing characterizing the writing of this period, it is the vivid interest that writers like Lloyd show in representing the phenomena of bad writing, mindless reading, and ruthlessly profit-­driven publishing. Clifford Siskin describes eighteenth-­century authors “making writing as much an object of inquiry as a means: writing about writing produced more writing in a self-­reflexive proliferation.”7 In the mid-­century such self-­reflexivity is striking and widespread. It is not, however, proof of an author’s originality, literary merit, or class aspiration. The mid-­century culture of self-­consciousness about literary production and consumption cannot be explained as a laboratory in which norms were challenged or new forms made. Rather, it must be understood as culture in which critical awareness becomes compatible with the production and consumption of fairly predictable and widely berated literature. Thus Columella, or, the Distressed Anchoret (1779) begins:

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The Public is overwhelmed already with books of every kind, but especially with tales and novels; and I begin to think that in time the world, in a literal sense, will not be able to contain the books that shall be written. Nay, a droll friend of mine imagines, that one reason why this terrestrial globe will be destroyed by fire, is, that a general conflagration will more effectively consume the infinite heaps of learned lumber (with which it was foreseen our libraries would be stored after the invention of printing) than any inundation, earthquake or partial volcano whatsoever, could possibly do.8 At first glance, Richard Graves’s humor seems Swiftian in its emphasis on the disturbing, material proliferation of texts. It is tempting to imagine the author of Columella trying to distinguish his own work from the mass of novels on the market, and to produce in Columella’s reader a feeling of conscious distinction. Yet Graves’s satire occurs in a text that seeks no exemption for itself from the conditions of print popularity it describes. Written by a second-­rate novelist, this description of literary superfluity illustrates the way that the professional writers, publishers, and booksellers who had been the target of ridicule in Augustan satire became involved in managing the prejudices of the public against the their own profession. In making the posture of critical knowledge collective and compatible with ordinary forms of reading, their style differs from the wit that drives those seeking distinction for their own work. Unlike the Augustan satirists, the authors of most novels, poems, magazine columns, and philosophy tracts of the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s can’t ridicule earlier literary forms, nor distinguish themselves from current, fashionable ones, because they have not actually surpassed them. Instead, they cultivate a reiterative brand of self-­consciousness for their work that points with remarkable candor to the actual conditions and materials of their writing. This flat style of reflexivity has specific qualities and effects. Most importantly, self-­conscious writers at this time are more likely to direct readers to the physical and economic life of pages and print than to the constructions of genre or rhetoric. While mid-­century writers tend to treat with a jaded sense of familiarity the novel or the newspaper article as conventions to which they conform, they flaunt with great energy the way these texts are produced and circulated as paper, print, and commodity. In doing so, they call attention not just to the rhetorical nature of language or discourse or genre, but to the material and social reality that supports these conventions: to pages, ink, fonts, imprints, editions, sales figures, booksellers, readers, reviewers, libraries, and to authors’ working conditions, contracts, wages, physical exertion, and exploitation.



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Thomas Keymer identifies the most innovative feature shared by novelists in the 1750s as their tendency to push a literary self-­consciousness inherited from Fielding into a more directly practical self-­consciousness about the mechanisms and institutions of print-­culture; specifically, about the relationship between authorial production and its materialization as a printed object, and about the over-­determination of both by the forces of literary commodification, consumer fashion, and regulatory reviewing.9 What Keymer calls these writers’ “practical self-­consciousness” can also be termed their consciousness of mediation. Mediation describes, first of all, the material aspects of writing that “form” and “discourse” leave out of literary analysis. While discussions of a text’s self-­consciousness have traditionally referred to the way Pope, for instance, deploys the beauty and symmetry of his own couplets in making a case for social order, talking about these couplets’ consciousness of mediation would involve taking account of Pope’s signposting at the level of discourse his poem’s neat physicality as print and paper. When Hume and Beattie direct readers to think about the pages in their hands, or Mackenzie presents his poems as property that may get carried, lost, and reclaimed on a deserted beach, these authors are displaying consciousness of their work’s mediation. Although many texts invoke ink on paper as the primary scene of composition, most references to mediation in the eighteenth century point, as “Powers of the Pen” and Columella illustrate, to the technology of print and the reception of its product. They invite readers to think about the long journey that brings a published text to hand, imagining impressions made by the printer on the page; the way pages are bound, or unbound; and the way books and papers are advertised, consumed, and, in possible futures, surfeited and recycled. This field of reference makes mediation distinct from materiality, which shows up as soon as a poem references its own constitution in glass or ink or stone, because it extends to the complicated and multifaceted present and future of the text as object. As Lisa Gitelman defines them, media are “socially realized structures of communication.”10 A text that refers to its own mediation therefore represents a process that exceeds the moments in which a text is written and published. Accordingly, a text’s profession to know of its mediation exceeds in scope and outlook the perspective of its author. When played out well, this impossibility can cause the page to quicken with the impression

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of sentience. Authors, for instance, normally have no sense of how, or even whether, their manuscripts will appear in print, or whether they will be reviewed or bound. They certainly don’t know for certain whether a reader will stop to drink coffee at the eighteenth page of a novel or skip certain passages in search of others, or whether reviewers will hate their work. If I write now asking you to mark this, the sixth page of your book, I must do so before I know myself the page on which these words will appear. For the direction to make sense, it must be inserted once pages are set and paginated in a process over which I have no direct command. Eighteenth-­century authors frequently experiment in this way with the fusion of authorial and material control over a text. In doing so, I will argue, they offer a representation of writing as something aware of itself in the present. The books in this study also tend to explicate the social and economic aspects of their production, circulation, and reception. This, too, is an instance of their referencing mediation. Richard Griffith’s The Triumvirate (1764) includes half a page of dashes, “a hiatus,” the narrator explains, to be “supplied in the second, or third edition, for there is a peculiar nicety in this article, which requires some time to be able to accommodate for public view.”11 A few chapters into the first volume of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne offers, with a similar view to the future of his text, a dedication to a Lord, declaring that “the above dedication was made for no one Prince, Prelate, Pope, or Potentate . . . ​nor has it been hawk’d about, or offered publickly or privately, directly or indirectly, to any one person or personage, great or small; but is honestly a true Virgin-­Dedication untried on, upon any soul living.” In the next passages, Tristram declares that his dedication is up for sale to anyone it suits, ranks its merit in terms of “composition,” “coloring,” and “design,” and commands any interested customer to pay to Mr. Dodsley, Sterne’s actual bookseller, the price of the dedication. Once the money is received, Tristram promises, “in the next edition care shall be taken that this chapter be expunged and your Lordship’s titles, distinctions, arms and good actions, be placed at the front of the preceding chapter.”12 Like invocations of the here-­and-­now of the page, descriptions of the economic process of publication and circulation shore up the effect of a book being conscious of the material form it takes in the present and will take in multiple editions in the future. In exposing their material and economic basis, books make themselves visible as what Latour might describe as “quasi-­objects,” things “much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the “hard” parts of nature.”13 Yet books that reference this social aspect of their objective being do so from a newly “hardened” perspective because they stake a claim to register



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experiences that no author or publisher could have anticipated for them. In many cases, this involves eighteenth-­century authors using nonhuman perspectives from which to describe writing as a human technology, a field of economic concern, and a social practice. The Adventures of a Quire of Paper (1779), published as a series of newspaper columns, capaciously documents from the perspective of printed pages the production of cloth and paper, as well as the temper of hack writers willing to compose almost anything that will fill this paper for profit, and the way ephemeral publications are read. The question raised by my title, of what books know, is answered generally by the claim that texts written to the future in this way appear to know their own mediation. By definition, they expose their social and economic life and their material basis. Yet, because the representation of such processes involves electrifying loops of self-­reference, the knowledge of mediation also becomes a strangely anti-­human cause, entertaining because of the way in which it seems to make paper cleverer than people.

Thinking About Mediation There are several ways to explain historically why people began to think about mediation (as opposed, for instance, to communication or materiality) in the eighteenth century. One factor is that it was at this time that books emerged as objects of entertainment, distinct from the didactic and religious messages they carried.14 In this form they began to travel through post offices, circulating libraries, and bookshops, and to show a propensity to get lost or rearranged, as well as to overcome distances. Deidre Shauna Lynch, recording what can be described as the way writers dwelt on mediation, describes “how enthusiastic eighteenth-­century novelists were about the portability enabling written words to be conveyanced from book to book and about the materiality rendering those words collectibles that novelist-­collectors might arrange as they pleased.”15 By the mid-­eighteenth century, the commercial properties of literature were also evident to readers, writers, and professionals in general. Booksellers become conspicuously rich, bringing print sharply into focus as a technology producing objects of economic value and opportunity.16 Under these conditions, readers were more likely to see print as able to intervene in and contribute to the message it was carrying. John Guillory’s work on the concept of mediation describes eighteenth-­century readers and writers thinking in these terms. Earlier, he argues, tools of communication such as ink and voice and paint were viewed primarily in terms of the thoughts or images they

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conveyed. In contrast, mediation “directs our attention first to the material and formal qualities of different kinds of cultural expression and only second to the object of representation.”17 By this account, mediation, though not limited to print, became visible at the time when print and its dissemination was on the rise.18 Guillory is relatively unusual in his emphasis on mediation as something that eighteenth-­century writers thought about actively. Most critics working with the concept in recent years have claimed it as part of their method of looking at the past, assuming media to be visible in retrospect rather than to the original users of a medium. This is in keeping with the tradition of late twentieth-­century literary critics’ practice of foregrounding inscription as a tool used unknowingly by earlier writers. Derrida achieved his prominence as a theorist in connection with the claims that writing is always inaugural of new meaning; that meaning can never precede writing; and that a slippage of will at the point of inscription is inevitable.19 These claims were never meant to furnish historical observations about the way literary producers handled language in the past, or to describe concepts that writers themselves manipulated. Rather, they were to inaugurate a new way of looking at history from beyond the perspective of its human actors and intentions. More recently, post-­structuralism has given way to an emphasis on material culture that puts technologies and their objects, rather than people and ideas, at the forefront of literary investigations. Book history has introduced print production as a determinant of subjectivity and ideology, reversing the idea of books being at the service of the ideas they contain.20 Paula McDowell’s The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–­1730 (1998) and Janine Barchas’s Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-­Century Novel (2003) both exemplify the rewards of recovering the material aspects of eighteenth-­century print communication as distinct from the ideological ones. This involves focusing on print, circulation, and the oral culture of the street in McDowell’s case, and on the frontispieces, title pages, and indexes of mid-­century novels in Barchas’s. Their studies show that even texts and particular editions that seem of little interest from a narrative or generic perspective can be used to reconstruct the ways print and its associated activities of production and marketing shaped the lives of those involved in them.21 In a related vein, many recent studies of the eighteenth century have drawn on the rubric of thing theory to refashion the claim that human history might best be told from the perspective of nonhuman actors. Critics including Bill Brown, Alfred Gell, and Arjun Appadurai have built a theoretical matrix



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in which to think creatively about the way meaning accrues to “things.”22 Webb Keane, offering a compelling anthropological justification for making things the object of social inquiry, argues that they constitute an alternative to linguistic systems of meaning making. In the case of chairs or coats, he argues, “it is not simply that their meanings are undetermined, but also that their semiotic orientation is, in part, toward unrealized futures.”23 Things open up new versions of history that are by definition impossible to narrate as cognitive operations or intentions. For Gell, this claim comes to rest on the work of art, whose visual properties facilitate connections and meanings that language and cognition preclude.24 Such approaches shed new light on a set of correspondences, affinities, and accidents that animate material objects through forces distinct from the market.25 These theories approach mediation, broadly conceived, as something critics highlight in texts and their contexts. Post-structuralism, book history, and material cultural studies as they are currently practiced by literary critics all offer ways to read texts against the grain of their semiotic intentions. Book historians focus on the recovery of paper, print, and paste, making it possible to include as objects of study texts that are of little interest from a literary perspective. For instance, the cases that attract the attention of McDowell and Barchas are only coincidentally texts where authors are themselves concerned with the topic of printing or book presentation: although intersections become clear at some places in their studies, neither McDowell nor Barchas uses discursive analysis to focus explicitly on the affinity of a given narrative with its graphic or physical incarnation.26 While their studies encourage us to see more accurately the way eighteenth-­century readers, authors, and printers were shaped by the words they printed, bought, and sold, they relax the literary critic’s traditional hold on the knack of certain kinds of language to index its own operation. Literary critics focusing on material culture frequently do the same. When books are used to illustrate the growth of material things and processes, the engagement of texts with the development of material culture is understood as an auxiliary reflection of the way technical progress, globalization, and print capitalism gave rise to new kinds of objects and materials. As a result, the history of mediation as it is currently being told often comes across as being the result of our theoretical orientation. The history we recover appears only coincidentally recorded in texts themselves, and not as a phenomenon that was apparent to the writers and readers caught up in its development. In some cases, mediation has been used to explain the thematic preoccupations of writers and readers from a more sociological perspective.

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Siskin’s and William Warner’s collaboration This Is Enlightenment (2010) makes the bold move of describing the Enlightenment as a “media event”—­a point in history at which the transmission of ideas overwhelms and reshapes the essential nature of those ideas. Their productive rubric opens up innovative ways to think about the historical ebb and flow of content in terms of media, capaciously defined here as a set of institutions, genres, and their associated protocols that help pinpoint better than any ideological tendency the specific character of Enlightenment knowledge and communication.27 But while Siskin and Warner are keenly attuned to the importance of public engagement with these institutions, they show no particular investment in privileging the texts that were thematically occupied with their own situation within this mediated setting. As well as discouraging any approach that consults closely the meaning of texts, this approach leaves unasked the phenomenological question of what happens when mediation registers in discourse. Are the texts that have something to say about print and its proliferation different kinds of objects from those that simply employ print to get their message across? Do texts that talk about mediation move along more quickly in or absent themselves from its history? In order to answer these kinds of questions as literary critics, we need to continue to read closely and describe texts that cultivate discursively the impression of understanding their own mediation.

Dialectical Approaches to Consciousness By focusing my discussion of mediation on such texts, I take what may seem to be an older orientation, away from the new history of technologies and objects, and toward models of consciousness expressed in and worked up through writing. At the most basic level, the subject of this book is the human, rather than the technological, force behind texts displaying consciousness of their own production and circulation. Like Latour and Gitelman, I believe that the ascription of independence and objectivity to technology must be described as a social process. In the realm of literary criticism, I agree with Catherine Gallagher, who describes the eighteenth-­century effect of books belonging to nobody as a “rhetoric of dispossession,” and with Sandra MacPherson, who documents an uncoupling of responsibility from agency and voluntarism that occurs in the imaginative realm of the eighteenth-­century novel.28 In keeping with these projects, this book contributes indirectly to the argument that people do in fact control the technologies they use. More directly, it focuses on the



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way texts can disavow this fact by making print media appear beyond human control. Although Knowing Books has at its horizon the ideal of human agency, its subject is a form of literary self-­consciousness that has helped to conceal this horizon. Mid-­eighteenth-­century texts perform through their consciousness of mediation a version of reflexivity that refutes its origins in the human imagination. From the perspective of book or cultural history, these texts testify to a technology-­centered history of print capitalism (think, for instance, of the evidence Lloyd’s poem might provide of a culture overwhelmed with new forms of literature). With close reading, however, their apparent concern with the ability of print to overtake thought can be reclaimed as belonging to the realm of wilful human construction and imagination. If the consciousness of mediation does not simply describe technological occurrences or promote literary distinction or human control, what does it do? The chapters to follow maintain the complexity of this question by showing the very different effects of mid-­century experiments in working up a book’s literal self-­consciousness. Chapter 1 documents the way narrative journeys teach readers to think of themselves as powerless to shape the novels they consume, and Chapter 2 carries through by showing how it-­narratives perform the trick of usurping their authors as the producers of stories. Chapter 3 suggests that philosophy texts pointing to the paper on which they were printed have the double effect of making the world appear more malleable and more objectively given. In Chapter 4, sermons referencing their own production as handwriting fashion an authenticity for their writtenness in spite of their appearance in print; and in Chapter 5, texts modeling themselves on graffiti encourage readers to imagine writing left to find its own way in the world, cut off from its author’s intentions. These different reasons for making a book appear conscious of its mediation share, however, one effect, which is to support the idea of print having autonomy from and power over its message. This observation goes against the grain of the most successful critical precedents for thinking about self-­consciousness, both at the level of a society, and as something modeled in and encouraged by literature. Histories of the novel, as I have already suggested, tend to present generic self-­consciousness as generative of change. In the realms of philosophy and social science there is also a long tradition of philosophers answering the question of what self-­ consciousness does by suggesting that it alters the conditions of which it makes people either individually or collectively aware. For Hegel, philosophers transform a historical situation by bringing consciousness to it. In this process, the spirit of self-­knowledge becomes its own end and reality, confirming the self as the source of all objective conditions.29 Marx turns this argument around

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to claim that consciousness has it origins in everyday life and in practical transformation, situating the self as the product of these objective conditions. But both descriptions of history insist on consciousness being central to a process of radical development. The whole tradition of dialectical materialism can be understood as a description of understanding entering into the dynamics of capitalism, overcoming commodification and alienation as forms of false consciousness that conceal the realities of labor. “Value,” argues Marx, “transforms every product of labour into a hieroglyphic.” But in the reality of class society and in relation to its modes of production “men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product.”30 That process of revealing the way things are made signals the reorganization of a system dependent on the obfuscation of these truths. The most direct analysis of the transformative role of consciousness in history comes from Georg Lukács, who describes the consciousness of the proletariat of their own class situation as the aim of socialist revolution. In order to achieve class consciousness, he argues, the proletariat must overcome through collective action the forms of false consciousness that class society puts in their way. Namely, they must overcome the illusion of individual psychological reality, as well as a “class conditioned unconsciousness of their own socio-­historical and economic condition,” in order to comprehend their place in history.31 This positive emphasis on class consciousness helps define the spirit of Marxist literary criticism in the twentieth century. Brecht and his followers argue that an audience conscious of the theater as a medium will realize their power to shape the world beyond the theater. The compatibility of early twentieth-­century literary formalism with Marxist poetics also rests on the idea of it being progressive to grasp literature’s function as a specific mediation of reality.32 John Frow describes a politics of reading that would “account for the culturally determined vraisemblance by which the conventions determining the reception of the work are naturalized” and concludes that “the full social dimensions of the literary sign can only be restored through a deliberate reconstruction of these conventions.”33 These practical claims for the role of consciousness-­raising are rarely cited by critics of eighteenth-­century literature today, yet they continue to provide the frameworks within which scholars approach self-­conscious literature from the past. The most detailed account of the way in which authors participate in the communication networks of eighteenth-­century print, Christopher Flint’s The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction (2011) illustrates this orientation. Flint provides evidence for why language remains in the eighteenth-­century the most fascinating medium of all, able to reflect in



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profound and detailed ways on its own existence. Focusing on a wide range of canonical and sub-­canonical eighteenth-­century fiction, Flint offers a history of novelists preoccupied with the possibility of controlling and directing print through references to authorship and experiments in controlling how it appears on the page. His basic tenet is that authors want to own their creations: “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.”34 Thus, although Flint acknowledges the paradox involved in this effect of de-­authorization, he remains loyal in his study to the logic that by raising the profile of their own professional and material undertakings, authors try to control them. Underlying his work is the assumption that by making economic conditions visible, writers attempt, to use Marx’s terms, to unscramble the “hieroglyphic” that commodification has made of their words. Flint’s work exemplifies the prevailing idea that an author who makes visible the marketing of literature works against its commercial operation. But he is not the only one to seize on authors who represent the production of literature as feisty protagonists in the story of its commercialization.35 Laurence Sterne has been consistently celebrated as an outlier in the competition for popularity, an eccentric whose reflexivity defines his resistance to the demands of his own society on authors. However well grounded this assumption is in social theory, it does not work easily in relation to the bulk of eighteenth-­ century writing, where the paradox Flint describes, of de-­authorization being a central conceit in the battle for literary ownership, still needs to be explained. Marxian models of self-­consciousness create this paradox by ignoring the possibility that writers elucidating the way literature is made might also conform to a market in entertainment. Before Marx and Brecht and Hegel, it was this proposition that many eighteenth-­century writers explored as they made words referencing the operation of print media the most fashionable commodities of all. I have introduced this as a phenomenon to be explained in human rather than technological terms. But the fact is that the imaginative efforts of mid-­ eighteenth-­century writers did have material effects: books whose primary mode is to expose the way the media work as human constructions do, in some sense, achieve a life of their own that makes them attractive as objects. By performing consciousness as the property of the text itself, they use the knowledge of mediation to create the reality of media having agency and autonomy. This is evident in some of the examples already mentioned. It-­narratives, for

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instance, typically satirize the way writing is made and handled for economic gain—­one of the stories they tell most often is that of the writer forced to write faddish fiction for a living.36 In this capacity, it-­narratives disarm themselves of the power to appear as mere windows on the world, mysteriously cut off in their perspective from human needs and efforts. Instead, their authors cultivate the power to entertain readers with the trite consciousness of the paper objects in their hand. As The Adventures of a Quire of Paper concludes by announcing to its fictional reader, “I was found just as some of My kind was required to print the very sermon you hold in your hand,” the magazine in which it was published appears to light up with self-­knowledge (3:452). A text referencing its origins in human labor and design ends up appearing possessed of an artificial intelligence that puts it one cognitive step ahead of the processes it represents. This makes the characters who try to imprint and profit from paper into objects of ridicule in a form of entertainment that exceeds human management: the story’s reflexive turn to the reader transforms consumers of paper into spectators of their own behavior. Put critically, the attitude these self-­conscious texts support is one of an early technodeterminism. The willingness of self-­conscious novelists to liken reading to the experience of being held captive in a coach, or Hume and Beattie to imagine their books moving unseen around their rooms, or Mackenzie to represent his own publications haunted by their longevity as paper relics, are literary manifestations of what Lukács will describe as the “structure of consciousness” common to the factory worker who obeys his machine and the technologist who treats the profitable application of science to technology as inevitable.37 Eighteenth-­century texts that appear programmed to register their own existence conspire with an attitude Frankfurt School critics have associated with later stages of modernity. Knowing books anticipate for their readers feelings of resignation that Adorno and Horkheimer attribute to twentieth-­century audiences as the mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, (which) finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history.38 This analysis can be applied to the poems of Henry Mackenzie, the subject of Chapter 5. These sentimental poems are almost empty of content; they consist, rather, of elaborate frame narratives describing the aleatory conditions



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of their own circulation and reception. Although there are readers in the world Mackenzie imagines for his poems, they are lone figures connected by texts whose writers are long dead. In their authors’ wake, these texts inherit a post-­ apocalyptic landscape where they are driven as objects through a world void of human volition, passed from the hands of one sentimental survivor to the next. Mackenzie’s poems are remarkably detailed about the kinds of contingency haunting creative attempts to achieve posterity. They document the lives of papers lost at sea, used for gun wadding and to lift hot kettles from the stove, and handed forlornly between editors. At their best, they anticipate what Susan Stewart describes as the ability of the book to appear as its own object, turning the makers of both the electric toaster and Finnegans Wake equally into “absent and invisible fictions.”39 In reality, however, the printed magazines and collections Mackenzie edited and in which he published his work did not circulate as misguided attempts at posterity: they were highly managed productions, successfully contrived to meet and shape the demands of a newly constituted Scottish reading public. Their pages could only qualify as part of a narrative about the material autonomy of print by obscuring the degree to which Mackenzie found journalism a sphere of personal control and empowerment. It is nevertheless possible, in line with Horkheimer and Adorno’s observation that the “mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality . . . ​finally becomes itself a positive fact,” to claim that Mackenzie’s poems are animated by the circuits of self-­reference that imagine writing’s conquest over its author’s life and intentions. This is not because a poem that tells us it is floating, rudderless, on the currents of the material world automatically becomes such an object. It is because books that refer to themselves as books become circuits open to what Hegel defines as the “recognition” by one self-­conscious being of another. A book that announces it is a book involves an author recognizing a reader who is conscious of reading a book. Many of the self-­conscious novels published in the 1750s use this strategy to develop the category of the self-­conscious novel reader. They belong to a strand of eighteenth-­century quixotic fiction, popularized in England by Fielding, with a characterized narrator and direct line of address to the reader, which seems to encourage the reader’s participation in an openly created world. As we will see, however, these novels establish a complicated relationship with their reader, not unlike the one Hegel imagines in his master-­slave narrative, where self-­consciousness becomes a struggle for power. The upshot of the dialectic Hegel describes in the case of two self-­ conscious minds is that

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Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.40 Applied to books and their readers, this description helps explain how it is that self-­conscious books contribute to the perceived autonomy of print mediation. The recognition of the reader, which shows up in the consciousness modeled by the book of its own mediation, and of the reader’s categories of understanding, qualifies the book to perform as a partner in what is by rights a human process. In these terms, Mackenzie’s poems claim a life of their own because their performance as documents conscious of mediation qualifies them to recognize the self-­conscious, sentimental reader, and to recognize this reader through their frame narratives. It is because of this recognition, and not simply because they describe themselves as having a life independent of this reader, that they promote the existence of their autonomous status as print and paper. In other words, the scenarios Mackenzie imagines for print-­mediation in his texts, which represent the culpability of poems as material objects that stray from their authors, can be understood as self-­fulfilling—­but the fiction of papers visible beyond the orbit of human intention equates roughly, not smoothly, with the objective reality in which papers can be described as having a material life of their own. Similarly, although the first really self-­conscious novels after Fielding confirm their readers as knowing participants in convention, they typically reclaim these conditions of knowledge as ones that belong, incredibly, to the book itself. The ability of the reader to recognize herself as the book’s interlocutor casts her as a known entity, part of a process to which she is subject. Texts achieve this effect by acknowledging the medium with which they work as porous to human interaction while also making this recognition something that elevates print to a position of control over the moment of its reception. Under these conditions, the ability to register interaction becomes the ironic hallmark of the medium that can pretend command of its own existence. Like Mackenzie’s poetry, texts illustrate the imaginative effort involved in creating the effect of the medium having an autonomous existence. Put differently, while the literature of the eighteenth century is clearly an effect of print capitalism and technology, its function is much more than one of recording their occurrence. Through its field of reference, this literature profits from a human



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willingness to perceive objects, and to perceive media in particular, as being beyond human control.

From Marx to Media Theory I have drawn in the spirit of this argument on the strong tradition of Marxian critics, from Lukács and Horkheimer and Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Axel Honneth, critiquing the tendency to ascribe objectivity to history and technology; to assume a passive relationship to its unfolding. Jameson, for instance, has always distanced himself as a Marxian critic from a particular brand of technological determinism. Critiquing historians of media, he argues: nothing is further from Marxism than the stress on invention and technique as the primary cause of historical change. Indeed, it seems to me that such theories (of the kind which regard the steam engine to have been the cause of the industrial revolution . . . ​) function as a substitute for Marxist historiography in the way they offer a feeling of completeness comparable to economic subject matter, at the same time that they dispense with any consideration of the human factors of classes and of the social organization of production.41 The efforts of eighteenth-­century writers to imagine print as more powerful than they are reinforce Jameson’s point about this way of thinking as a teleological error. Texts referencing the proliferation and power of print cannot simply be read as evidence of these facts. In Jameson’s terms, to do so is to overlook the social and class-­based conditions of a book’s existence. This means, however, that a book that turns reflexively to these conditions qualifies as part of the human struggle to claim ownership of them. While I am entirely sympathetic to this possibility, I have discovered in the course of writing this book that theories placing literature on the side of Marxist historiography, and against technodeterminism, do not quite capture the phenomenon that makes mid-­eighteenth-­century texts operative as knowing objects. Some frameworks I have found more helpful in understanding eighteenth-­ century cases are those developed by media theorists to explain the imaginative appeal of media in renouncing control over the things we have made. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, for instance, describe the simultaneous awareness and forgetting that modern audiences experience through what they term “remediation,” a process that calls one medium to mind as a human

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construction while insinuating another as the purely technological venue for this reminder.42 This framework offers one way to describe how books representing aspects of writing, such as manuscript production or the economic struggles of authors, accomplish a certain invisibility for themselves as human productions. Gitelman’s description of the development of a twentieth-­ century “tendency to naturalize or essentialize media—­in short, to cede to them a history that is more powerfully theirs than ours” also turns out to be relevant to an earlier period.43 Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (2006), focuses on the phonograph and the worldwide web at their inaugural moments because, Gitelman argues, it is when a medium is new that it is negotiated and contested, thereby providing a site for the “the ongoing and vernacular experience of representation as such.”44 Once people are won over to a new medium, they accept its authority as an instrument for the collection and storage of data, and this initial moment of consciousness about representation dies down into discussions of content that, regardless of tone, grant authority to the medium. This analysis is helpful in pinpointing what is happening in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, where the culture of self-­consciousness worked-­up through literary production targets the means, rather than the content, of print representation, but quickly helps characterize these means as unavoidable. In a different vein, I have found inspiration in Bruno Latour’s insistence on the false distinction between nature and society, subject and object. For Latour, the human tendency to attribute objectivity to certain phenomena while defining others as purely social characterizes all modern, social scientific enterprise. With forms of critique and indignation premised on the idea of nature and society falsely encroaching on each other, he argues that we are impeded in recognizing the quasi-­objects that are in fact constitutive of our existence, entities that have a life of their own although they originate in the social, or that rely on collective human practice even though they originate in objective reality. Latour includes as such objects IBM, the laws of gravity, global warming, and the computer. These things are our own doing and yet they feed, though our own desire to separate the natural from the social, either into our experience of a world that is beyond our control, or into our belief in there being a purely social dimension. In this separation, their quasi-­ objectivity is lost to us. The books in this study can be seen as earlier versions of such quasi-­ objects. Discursive constructions that loom over their readers and authors as evidence of print and its circulation being outside their control, material objects compromised in their autonomy by the discourses to which they refer



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and on which they rely for their existence, their being makes it inappropriate to describe them either as social constructions or as autonomous objects. As paper and print, they do have a physical constitution, but this life is not nearly so distinct from their intentionality as their authors would have us believe. Lloyd’s “Powers of the Pen,” which bemoans the way inscription technology drives modern literary production, is typical of the literary climate we must describe. Rather than taking Lloyd’s description of literary production at face value, the challenge is to consider the way the poem projects forward a wry understanding of itself as printed product, thereby helping to create the sovereignty for writing, and the disenfranchisement of the writer, of which it appears most critical.

Chapter 1

Powerlessness as Entertainment

Intrusive Narration In the years before and immediately after Tristram Shandy appeared, a significant number of lesser-­known but equally self-­conscious novels were published. Most of these contain only moderately interestingly romances, adventures, and life narratives. But they are framed and delivered by well-­characterized narrators possessed of the disarming power to describe the flaws of novel writing and to reprimand and banter with fictional readers. The narrator of one of the more successful fictions of the period, the anonymous History of Charlotte Summers, the Fortunate Parish Girl (1750), comments in this spirit on the interpretive activities of those reading the novel. His intrusions include addresses to “Miss Censorious,” who is told not “to run too quick upon a malicious Scent,” and to readers who are permitted to “yawn a little” while the narrator rests to “smoak a serious Pipe.”1 In the second volume, the “numerous Tribe of Criticks, who may find materials sufficient in this work to employ their malicious talents” is hailed as a force from which the author must be saved (2:52). Charlotte is introduced as a character to be “dressed and presented” and installed within the papery mansion of the book, where readers are invited to visit her (1:13). As such gestures illustrate, the entity that fictions like Charlotte Summers appear to know best is a reader whose mood oscillates between boredom and frustration. “You are much obliged to me,” claims the narrator of The Temple Beau or the Town Coquets (1753) in justification of an abridgement, “if I cure you of that impatience, which many Readers are seized with, to know the End of a Story.”2 More specifically, these fictions anticipate a reader in the physical throes of reading or of mishandling a text. The brazen narrator of Edward Long’s The Anti-­Gallican; or, The History and Adventures of Harry Cobham,

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Esquire (1757) flags the hardship of reading a bad novel by advising that “if, after traveling through half a dozen Pages, you find your senses gradually declining into a heavy Torpitude, halt directly, and advance no further without the repelling Aid of Tea or Coffee.”3 In John Kidgell’s The Card (1755), the narrator claims to have included an illustration of the ten of clubs, on which a message is written, in order to increase the chances of his novel being rescued from its fate as waste paper by a child’s seeing the illustration: as probably the labourious compilers of the History of the Present Times may adjudge Incidents of this sort too low to deserve a place in their immortal Register, this elaborate Representation of a Message is devoted to the Perusal of the curious. By this artifice doth the Author ingeniously project a message to preserve himself from total oblivion; humbly conceiving, that when this neglected Treatise under the character of waste-­paper, shall be doomed to share the Fate of it, some little Master or Miss may be kindly advertised of the picture of that harmless Card which adorns one happy leaf of it, and which began about the year one thousand Seven hundred and Fifty, to be universally respected as a high Messenger of Honour.4 The inclusion of an illustrated page works here as occasion to flaunt the author’s perception of novels being fashionable items, quickly cast aside and reduced to paper. In a similar spirit, William Toldervy includes songs that he hopes will catch the eye in a novel his narrator otherwise admits is thin on remarkable events.5 Other authors describe more broadly the mood of their disgruntled audience and their possible reactions to the page. Readers of William Goodall’s Adventures of Capt. Greenland (1752) are invited to “indulge their spleen” by tearing out digressive passages they don’t like or “if it should better please them, by throwing the Whole Book into the consuming flames,” and Shebbeare’s Lydia, or Filial Piety: a novel (1755) challenges readers discontent with a chapter to “write a better themselves.”6 The cocky narrator of The Marriage Act (1754) encourages readers to leave off reading and head down to the club to bet on the events to come in the novel—­“Now in this very Place, if an Author could lay Wagers with his Readers, Thousands of Pounds might be won; but as he cannot, it may serve a Bet a White’s, where the Lives of men are play’d at Chuck-­Farthing.”7 In return for their assumed animosity toward the novels being written, readers are cast in these asides as distractible gamblers, volatile and impatient.



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Until recently, these novels have been discussed very little by critics. In the 1950s, Wayne Booth reviewed them as part of the fashion in intrusive narration that began in England with Fielding and culminated with Sterne. Booth imagines the mounting tension readers felt as they saw devices used by Fielding—­the chapter headings, intrusions, prefatory material—­implanted in the works of lesser authors “with almost complete disregard for their artistic function.”8 For Booth, these intrusions register as distractions, impinging on otherwise limp but progressive narratives in a pattern that is not corrected until the appearance of Tristram Shandy, with which Sterne skillfully sublates the progressive function of narrative entirely to the humor of digression. Because his main interest is in pegging the development of mid-­century fiction to the work of better-­known authors, Booth shows little interest in the self-­reflexivity of these mostly forgotten, mid-­century novels being of its own order. Yet the frequency and creativity with which mid-­century novelists refer to readers and introduce them as locked in combat with the materiality of the page is unrivalled in the more famous examples of eighteenth-­century, self-­ conscious fiction Booth privileges. Although Fielding anticipates such a field of reference, imagining reading as a form of physical travail and presenting chapter headings as physical breaks in his narrative journey, he never goes so far as to write prose that explicitly anticipates its mediation in print, or on paper. On the contrary, while he promotes the spirit of transparency about the production of fiction that carries over from Cervantes into so much mid-­ century fiction, he generally does so by suggesting the conversational presence of an author accountable to the demands of a live audience. The most significant feature of self-­reflexive, mid-­century fiction, however, is its genuine engagement of its own qualitative limitations. Neither Cervantes, Fielding, nor Sterne is in the position of most mid-­century authors, of candidly referencing the limited quality of the reading material they are producing. The frequency with which sub-­canonical authors acknowledge that their work is boring, incoherent, written only for profit, and likely to be used as scrap paper is productive of an unusually flat kind of reflexivity. When Shebbeare invites readers to bet on the turn his story is to take, he highlights a novel written conspicuously on the fly; when authors pronounce their powerlessness to produce a certain quality of prose, the gesture becomes disarmingly honest. “It would be tedious and disgusting to our readers, to give a particular and minute account of the little accidents and trifling circumstances which befell our heroines on their journey,” writes William Dodd in The Sisters (1754), a novel full of tedious descriptions and concessions to the inability of the narrator to complete unfinished scenes. When Long uses his novel to

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deplore “a Tribe of Novelists [who] have started into Business, and carried on a very extensive and lucrative Trade,” the joke rebounds as an indictment of his own ambition (ii). And when the narrator of Sarah Scott’s Agreeable Ugliness (1754) grants readers “full Liberty to forget me,” her claim that she will also try to forget herself rings true with a novel in which the artifice and conventionality of the prose make this patently difficult.9 These metanarratives seem to nullify any critical debate about how good the novels actually are by anticipating every criticism that might be thrown their way. Yet the novels I discuss in this chapter, and the it-­narratives I discuss in the next, cultivate a consciousness about the production of bad fiction for a target audience inclusive of middle-­class readers that does not rely on the production of distinction for either readers or books. Instead it yields the impression of a book sentient about its limited conditions of production and reception and resistant to human efforts to usurp its ironic, critical authority. With mid-­century novels, this ruse relies on various representations of readers having to contend with the stuff of narrative. The page and the conventions of novel writing are presented as impasses to reader involvement. Later in the chapter I argue that this shows up as books are likened to more mechanistic forms of transport. In providing perspectives on their own production and consumption, these novels achieve a certain status as entertaining objects. They do so, however, at the cost of instilling in readers a sense of the way in which print prevents people from intervening in the events unfolding on the page and from controlling the fate of the narratives they consume.

The Appeal of Self-­Conscious Novels It is in some sense difficult to explain why candidly self-­deprecating novels should sell at all. In drawing attention to the ephemeral and material aspects of their literary enterprise, surely inferior authors drive potential readers away? To some extent, this was the case of mid-­eighteenth-­century novels, which were lambasted by critics in disdainful reviews published in the Monthly Review, established in 1749, and the Critical Review, established in 1756. In 1761, the preface of the Critical Review looked back at recent history and compared novelists to “the insects of a summer’s day that have buzzed, and stung, and sunk and expired.”10 James Raven suggests that two-­thirds of reviewers in the 1760s shared this negative opinion of the novel and cites as typical one vehement judgment of A Fair Citizen (1757) as “a puny, miserable reptile that has here crawl’d into existence, happily formed to elude all attack by its utter



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insignificance.”11 However, as Raven also points out, such reviews evidence the frustration critics felt as readers continued to buy novels under these conditions, against their advice. Even as the general opinion of the form remained low, the number of self-­proclaimed novels in circulation increased from 50 in 1759 to more than 100 in 1769.12 Most of these were slim volumes, commodious to experimentation, rash to announce their own popularity, and aligned with fashion rather than erudition.13 Their success was closely connected to the fortunes of a new class of booksellers and printers engaged in a period of frenzied economic activity. Between 1750 and 1770, the number of fiction publishers in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin doubled.14 There is also evidence that at least some readers found more pleasure in this faddish, reflexive fiction than in the works of realism on offer at the time. The mood in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu opened a box of newly published novels sent to her in Italy in 1752 shows her genuine taste for the humor of self-­conscious productions. Perusing the contents of the package, she has little to say about Smollet’s Peregrine Pickle, finds the style of Leonora “most affectedly florid, and naturally insipid” and calls Clarissa, on the whole, “most miserable stuff.” The novels she reads with interest are Charlotte Summers, which she finds good enough “not to be able to quit it till it was read over,” and Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little, “which has really diverted me more than all the others, and it was impossible to go to Bed till it was finish’d. It was a real and exact representation of life, as it is now acted in London.”15 Pompey, a sharp satire of London life delivered from the perspective of a lapdog, includes chapter titles such as “Containing what the Reader will know, if he reads it,” “a dissertation upon nothing,” and frequent representations of bad readers and novelists. These devices are integral enough to the novel that Montagu can hardly have found herself engrossed in its depiction of real life in spite of them.16 Thus, while self-­conscious novels like Pompey are openly derivative of Fielding and inferior in obvious ways to Tristram Shandy, it is misleading of ������������������������ most compelling eviBooth to imply that they were not enjoyed at all.17 The dence for their entertainment value may be the fact that Sterne looked to them when he planned his own entry in the race to please and attract consumers of the novel. Keymer’s work situating Sterne squarely in the 1750s, articulating his debt to the minor novelists writing before and during the publication of his best-­selling volumes, has made it clear that Sterne’s choice of models went beyond Cervantes and Scriblerian satire and almost certainly included Capt. Greenland and the equally self-­conscious Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756). As an author responsive to the newest fashions in fiction,

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it is significant that Sterne chose to follow the lead of modern authors who were exposing and ridiculing realist tendencies. Tristram Shandy becomes in this sense a confirmation, not only of the fascination of eighteenth-­century readers with experimentation, but of the tolerance for “self-­consciousness about innovation and novelty” that Hunter lists as characteristic of the novels to emerge in the eighteenth century.18 What is it, then, that made Montagu and Sterne amenable to novels boasting of their own devices, shoving the reader conspicuously from scene to scene, and reminding her of the papery world in which she is unwittingly ensconced? The appeal of self-­conscious fiction is often explained by theorists of the novel as liberating readers from their belief in an alternative reality. Rather than forcing them to surrender to the effects of mimesis, fiction that announces its own operation can be seen as disseminating power among its readers, making them visible and dialogically active in ways that are normally opposed by the impersonality of print. “These strategies,” argues Hunter of the tendency of early novels to address their readers directly, “create an atmosphere—­ intrusive and unattractive to most modern readers—­of directness, a feeling that the author is right there with us, intruding as we read, observing and sorting us.”19 Celebrating a tradition of fictions that draw attention to their artifice, Brian Stonehill contends that “by virtue of its greater honesty, its manifest awareness of its own limitations, and its peculiarly sophisticated humility before life itself, self-­depicting fiction can in fact be more persuasive than purely naturalistic fiction.”20 The category of writers he describes includes Fielding and Sterne as its eighteenth-­century founders, and he praises the way both achieve intimacy with their readers through their narrators’ concessions to the operation of fiction. Wolfgang Iser and John Preston also celebrate the openness of eighteenth-­century fiction to the subjective discoveries of the reader. In Iser’s terms, Fielding’s reader has to formulate meaning: “the text offers itself as an instrument by means of which the reader can make a number of discoveries for himself that will lead him to a reliable sense of orientation.”21 For Preston, this extends more widely to the novelists of the eighteenth century who invite the reader to participate: “They are interested in creating a text which will, as it were, give instructions to the reader. They wish to keep the form open; they think of the novel as a process, not a product, and as a situation for the reader, not as a received text.”22 Although these reader-­response theorists focus on canonical works rather than on writers who package the derivativeness, disposability, or obsolescence of their single-­edition productions, some of the less celebrated novels of the 1750s and ’60s can be understood in their terms. The dramatized narrator of



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John Shebbeare’s Lydia, for instance, comes across as charmingly open about the mechanics of novel writing. Early in Lydia, he interrupts a description of his heroine with a long paragraph comparing his making characters to an army tailor’s cutting out clothes for off-­the-­rack consumption: “when we have gotten together our materials, and, like the . . . ​army-­taylors, we have cut them out into characters, and spread them upon the ground, we let people chuse for themselves, till they are fitted” (1:73). Shebbeare uses this analogy to distinguish his work from the common romance, which he claims only dupes readers by taking existing literary material and “tacking it together” under a new title, “like rags gathered by old women, and then beaten into paper to form a new manufacture” (1:22). In preference, he suggests, the writer of a “true history” works openly with words, cutting them out and presenting them as material offerings, acknowledging the freedom his readers have to apply the general truths of his story to their own particularity: “by Tom’s being too tall, and Dick’s being too short, the clothes are all out of fitting at first, till, changing round, every man in the regiment settles into the coat that suits him” (1:72). Shebbeare’s pun on textiles cleverly connects the material process of paper-­making with the metaphorical one of dressing readers and characters according to well-­worn conventions. It also allows him to think of “pulp” literature in two ways: one that involves the literary product compromised and beaten flat by the recycling of conventions, and the other that foresees the scale of production as an occasion for physical multiplicity and flexibility. The readymade novels Shebbeare advertises as his line of business are visible generally on book stalls and in libraries as an array of objects belonging to the first category, but those that qualify as “true histories” are elevated to the second category, making their popularity into the capacity to accommodate the preferences of different readers. In this spirit, many of the self-­conscious novels of the 1750s and ’60s distinguish themselves by soliciting readers literally as partners in the processes of bringing characters to life, solving problems, and finishing or destroying the book they are reading. Readers of mid-­century fiction are asked in various tones of joviality and condescension to fill in blanks and help out with scenes authors have failed to complete. Capt. Greenland’s “amorous readers” are told they will “save our Pen almost a quarter an hours Labour if they will here be pleased to conceive the extraordinary situation of our poor entangled Silvius” (1:61). The narrator of Pompey the Little complains, “had I a hundred Hands, and as many pens, it would be impossible to describe the Folly of that Night” before “begging the Reader to supply it by Help of his own imagination”

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(156). The narrator of Charlotte Summers cedes power to the reader by rhetorically excusing himself from the scene of composition while assuming that the reader’s imagination continues to work in his absence: as it is almost Morning, the reader must excuse me if I return to Bed and take a Nap, after the Fatigue of this Chapter, before I proceed any further, if he is not so disposed, he may entertain himself with Miss Summers under the old Oak, till I am at leisure to conduct her further on her Journey. (1:56) Later, once Sterne has made the invitation to readers to fill in narrative blanks well ­known, readers of Jenner’s The Placid Man (1770) are praised for having stuck with the book as long as they have, then asked to step in and write the final wedding scene: “as describing wedding ceremonies is not so much my talent as Mr. Richardson’s, let him (the reader) be so good as to take the two brides and the two bridegrooms . . . ​and having marshalled them in as many coaches as he thinks proper, convey them safe to St. ­Georges church.”23 These representations of author-­reader collaboration carry through the carefully controlled appeals Fielding makes in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones to the judgment and imagination of his audience, described by Warner as “a novelistic species of performative entertainment which concedes to the reader his or her essential freedom as a pleasurable responsibility.”24 But the specific trick of less accomplished authors is to position readers as physical co-­authors of a text, rather than as imaginative collaborators in an unfolding story. Arguably, second-­rate authors make their interpretive openings wider than those of accomplished authors by building them into less-­polished works of fiction, where references to the book’s improvised quality, the condition of its pages, or its vulnerability to public opinion have their own degree of candor. The possibility that pages will be missing or scenes incomplete is quite real in these faddish novels, which would much less often have been bound, and much more quickly have been recycled as paper, than the works of major literary figures. Gestures of authorial distress are not, in Goodall’s or Shebbeare’s case, quite the “false scent” that Dorothy Van Ghent shows them to be in the case of Sterne.25 In this perspective, Sterne capitalizes on the self-­deprecating humor of the relationship professional novelists had established with their public. Expanding his cast of fictional readers to include distinct characters and their various interpretive hobbyhorses, blank pages, and jokes about sexual imagination, Sterne plays in a new realm of confidence with the dangerous alliance



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forged in these earlier novels, between an author genuinely uncertain about the objective shape of his output and his sceptical customer.

Artificially Intelligent Books In this light, the novels of the mid-­century provide important evidence that eighteenth-­century readers were not simply, or even primarily attracted to novels as a credible, alternative realities. Even their moderate success attests to the presence of a reader different from the one imagined, for instance, by Julie Park in her account of eighteenth-­century novels beloved as part of a culture devoted to making non-­human characters as lifelike as possible.26 Readers of Shebbeare and Goodall and Coventry were keenly attuned to the quality and economy of entertainment as a human construction. And yet the mid-­century fiction that reminded readers of the material constraints of novels did not necessarily encourage them to command or improve the production of fiction or to deploy the spirit of critique for their own purposes. One sign that gestures of transparency and collaboration worked against a feeling of human empowerment in mid-­century novels is the number of fictional narrators pursuing a combative relationship with their reader. Shebbeare, Goodall, and their contemporaries are artful at making the environment of the printed book a barrier to the human involvement in the technical production of a story. Tristram Shandy has been described as a narrator whose collaborative gestures frequently turn out to have no substance: although he relinquishes passages of his narrative, he frequently recants on these moments. At one point, after inciting readers to guess what is to come next, Tristram announces that “if I thought you was able to form the least judgement or probable conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,—­I would tear it out of my book” (70). “It is in vain,” he exclaims at another point, “to leave this to the Reader’s imagination . . . ​.’Tis my own affair: I’ll explain it myself ” (340). In such moments, argues Keymer, Tristram becomes more of a “control freak” than a partner in conversation with his readers.27 But most self-­ conscious novels that appeared before Tristram Shandy flaunt an even cruder brand of authorial control than this. The passage from Charlotte Summers in which the narrator has left his readers to imagine Charlotte for themselves concludes, for instance, with the narrator pointing out that although he has left his character to their imagination, he has also “cast a Spell upon her, that she cannot move one Step without my leave” (1:56). In the same spirit, the narrator announces gleefully that

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I am determined my Readers shall learn something in every Chapter, and this, amongst other Things, they must learn and practice Patience, for let them be in never so great a Hurry to come at the Speech of Miss Summers, they cannot come near her, without my Permission, and as I have now got them into my Custody, they must travel my Pace, or get back to London, on Foot, without seeing the show. (1:24) This attitude of authorial bravado makes narrators the tormenters and hostage takers of fictional readers, who are subject to digressions and deprived of narrative satisfaction. In The Sisters, the narrator turns to the implied reader after offering a brief glimpse of the “young, gay, sprightly and charming” Charlotte to advertise his power: “no wonder the heart burns to know more of her, and the bosom pants for a nearer acquaintance.”28 Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) tauntingly claims that “the reader, if he has the patience to go through the following pages, will see into the secret springs which set this machine in motion.”29 In this move, Haywood, like Sterne later, presumes knowledge of and superiority over the hungry consumer of novels. In some novels, the narrator reins in the fictional reader on the charge of indecency. Dodd’s narrator hails “gentle readers” in the middle of a raunchy scene from The Sisters to “stop here a while with me [and] think not these pages . . . ​written solely to amuse or divert thee” (55). The narrator of Charlotte Summers claims that when he circulates among his female characters in their private rooms he wears his “conjuring invisible cap” and views them chastely from his position as a deity (2:155). Asserting that he chooses not to represent things more intimately, this narrator distinguishes himself from readers who lack such impunity by announcing that, while readers must be controlled against their will, he has access to the pornographic aspect of his narrative but restrains himself from using it. In The Brothers (1758), Susan Smythies coos: “I choose to leave to the imagination, rather than attempt the description of the tender, generous, grateful things, which were thought and said on this affecting occasion.”30 This playful willingness to withhold erotic and romantic detail gestures to the real reader’s ability to fill it in. But the same strategy often erupts into pure shows of authorial confidence: “if ����������������������������� we had the least inclination,” Shebbeare’s narrator of Lydia boasts, “we might fill this journey with marvellous and surprising adventures” (2:18). Goodall’s narrator puts it most vociferously in Capt. Greenland, announcing at one point that “we are much better Judges than our judicious Readers, what is necessary to insert in this History and what should be omitted” (1:47).



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Rather than enjoining the reader to participate in a conversation with a narrator, these dialogues underscore a situation in which the lone reader-­ of-­print’s powers are few and desires are many. They draw attention to the way that narrators design a plot and its characters without consulting an audience and to the fact that, once this plot makes it into print, it becomes indelibly fixed as a course of events. Novel readers are positioned in these exchanges as particularly impatient and likely to be sexually frustrated by the non-­interactive environment of the book. Their communication with the narrator, however tantalizing it might appear as a dialogue between creative minds, is thematized as a confrontation with the medium of the novel and an impasse to the imagination: the reminder of paper works against the illusion of collaboration. But the dialogue between fictionalized readers and narrators can also be used to spell out the way narrators are subject in different ways from readers to the medium with which they work. One tendency that distinguishes Shebbeare, Goodall, Haywood, and the author of Charlotte Summers most clearly from Cervantes and Fielding is their suggestion that even aggressively original storytellers are answerable to the established rules of novel writing. Haywood, for instance, makes a point of obeying the putative unity of time and space by arguing������������������������������������������������������������������������� that “it would be as absurd in a writer to rush all at once into the catastrophe of the adventures he would relate, as it would be impracticable in a traveller to reach the end of a long journey, without sometimes stopping at the inns in his way to it.”31 She differs in this respect from Fielding, who explains in Tom Jones that he will meet the reader’s need for interest by filling out extraordinary scenes and passing over periods of time when nothing happens.32 The narrator of Lydia makes a similar gesture to fixed narrative conventions when he turns a long digression into a description of himself running as a child to meet his father on the road, but discovering it is impossible to speed up the rate at which he travels: “In the like manner we conceive if we walked through the woods of America to meet this valiant chief, we could in no wise hasten his journey to New-­York” (1:28). These intrusions demonstrate a writer bound to produce a sequential story, to write one sentence after another in continuation on the surface of the page. They pit this writer against the reader tempted by the possibilities of codex to leap ahead in the story. Digressive asides illustrate that even an author’s deviation from a narrative must occur in obedience to the linear logic of the scroll, while a reader has the power to skip or access at random the pages of a book. Such gestures of creative limitation on the part of the narrator function as reminders of the novel as a medium rather than a forum for open conversation.

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As authors work with print’s constraints, their humor suggests, they become answerable to way that pages contain and convey their narrative, and the way that novelists are expected to write. In Lydia, Shebbare’s narrator presents himself obliged to include the salacious diary of his character, Rachel Stiffrump. However, he postures, “we desire those readers, who trifle with their salvation, to skip the leaves which contain this diary” (42). This scenario presents reader and narrator wrangling in their own way with the physical and generic conventions of the novel. Odysseus-­like, the narrator who is bound to the mast of his own profession has no choice but to transcribe the sirens’ song while the reader, unable to stop rowing, can only block her ears by skipping pages. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of this scene the vital question, the one that modernity has prevented us from asking, is why the whole ship might not be steered differently.33 Mid-­century novels seem to raise the same question in presenting the logic of book production as the one invariable in their contest for power. Some of the most creative endeavors of the time present narrators and reader locked in a struggle which ultimately works to the disadvantage of both kinds of human agent. When Charlotte Summers entertains the reader with the idea of a paper object mysteriously programmed to include her, or Kidgell, rather than defending his novel as literature, deploys its disposability by securing his pages the special status of being precociously alert to their lowly material fate as waste paper, books appear as the only victors in a visibly mediated world. This fiction becomes the elaborate and ambiguous selling point of self-­conscious, mid-­century novels. As I suggested in the Introduction, one of the basic tricks of authors working in this mode is to suggest that a text already knows what will happen to it in print. David Hume captures this spirit of resignation to the transcendence of books when he delivers his own “funeral oration” by speaking in the past tense of his existence, concluding “I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humor.” His perspective suggests that he has committed consciousness itself to paper, a conceit in keeping with his claim that his life story will be “little more than the History of my Writings.”34 Jonas Hanway produces a more basic version of this effect when he prompts his reader to look at the “gilded leaves” of his book’s material form as corresponding with his treatment of “celestial matters,” and at the green binding, which “will naturally remind [them] of the livery of nature.”35 This description appears in a first-­person travel narrative. And yet, when Hanway boasts knowledge of his book’s binding, the center of conscious seems to tip



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from being his, as the author of a manuscript of uncertain future, to being that of a book already bound and in circulation. Books, Hume and Hanway imply, have not only the ability to describe their own physical presence, but also the gadget-­like ability to register and stay ahead of their readers. Charlotte Summers anticipates its real reader in this way by having Miss Arabella Dimple, lying naked in bed, call her maid to fetch “the first volume of the Parish Girl I was reading in the afternoon.” When Polly returns and sits down with the copy of Charlotte Summers, the sixth chapter of the novel procedes with a description of Arabella searching for the place she left off, which turns out—­of course—­to be the sixth chapter (1:67). In one sense, this scene simply carries on with a vein of humor introduced in Don Quixote, where the fictional world of the novel’s second part includes the presence of the first part, but it also pushes the joke to the surface of the page. As Arabella chastises her maid for imagining that she might have turned down a corner of the page as a marker, the copy of Charlotte Summers in the reader’s hand seems to become alert, not only to its own existence, but also to its physical condition. The culture in which such a possibility seemed entertaining is one in which Tristram Shandy was affably at home, native to a context where authors were playing with the idea that paper could be conscious of what was written on it, and of how that writing was to be received in the imagined future of its material life. Tristram Shandy is well known as a book about a man trying to tell the story of his own genesis. But it can just as well be described from the perspective of the 1750s and ’60s as the story of a book—­a book that makes its physical extension an integral part of the world of which the narrator claims to be conscious, recalling its genesis and circulation and announcing its cognitive superiority over the reader who is hostage to its technology. This is a good description of many of the jokes that have made Tristram Shandy seem so modern. Like the narrator of Charlotte Summers, Tristram illogically claims experience of his book as a material entity: he knows when the marble page is coming up and he deploys previous pages and volumes as a presence to which readers can be referred. At one point, excusing the bookbinder from charges of carelessness, Tristram mentions that he has torn out a chapter of his narrative (282). As we saw in the Introduction, he inserts a chapter offering his dedication for sale to the highest bidder, pledging to remove this advertisement in his next edition and to update the dedication according to the wishes of the winning bidder. At another point, he introduces Dr. Slop just as Trim is about to start speaking: ’Tis not two-­pence matter—­the corporal shall go on in the next chapter, let who will come in” (360). In each of these cases, Tristram

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draws attention to the materiality of his occupation and the process of communication that will follow from his publication. The effect of his doing so is that he inflates the knowledge an author can plausibly claim to have of the writing process at hand by extending it to take account of the book as an object already in print. At times Tristram is also physically identified, like Hume, with the pages he is writing. For instance, he accuses his reviewers of having “cut and slash[ed] my jerkin,” offering a gloss on the image that suggests a literally bookish body, with his leather bound surface connected to his “rumpled” interior—­“A Man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—­rumple the one—­you rumple the other” (144). Within the logic of his own life story it makes sense that Tristram should strive for the limited kind of transcendence associated with the inanimate consciousness of a book. His father, Walter Shandy, has tried to breathe life into books with little success, scratching meaning out of the pages of Slawkenbergius and pouring meaning fruitlessly into his Tristrapedia rather than into his son’s body. He handles Euclid with reverence, turning over the leaves of its initial chapter while displaying his knowledge of its contents, correcting its translation, and shutting it “slowly; his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon the upper-­side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower-­side of it, without the least compressive violence” (355). By transforming himself into a book cognizant of its own handling and reception, Tristram becomes the object that Walter fantasizes about keeping company with, a superior version of his own textual siblings, able to respond to the reader’s avid attentions in ways that Walter’s books so pointedly cannot. Tristram’s figurative father, Yorick, is also honored in the possibility of Tristram Shandy as a book that stays awake to its own circulation. Yorick is, of course, dead at the time Tristram Shandy is supposedly being written, but his presence is palpable through the documents he has left behind. The fate of these documents, which include the sermon that has been lost, sold, misused, and finally made its way—­as commodity, rather than legacy—­into Tristram’s and now the reader’s hands, suggests that the promiscuous life Yorick leads as a literary character circulating on the market keeps him uncannily alive and present. In Yorick, Tristram has a model for the metemphychosis of papers as objects to whom superficial consumers as well as readers supply volition. The afterlife of Yorick’s writings provides evidence that the posterity of character is facilitated by the market. But in creating an equivalent life form for himself, Tristram also trumps Yorick, whose papers circulate with a logic alien to their original, whimsical sprit of composition. The intimacy Tristram claims



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with his reader at the moments where he “tugs” her through a chapter, promising that “the book shall not be opened again this twelve-­month” or referring him to the title page for evidence of his own name, thus converges with the vertiginous claim a variety of self-­conscious novels make on the present in which they are read; on the “now” in which this very moment can be invoked through the sentient presence of the paper (364). By making his model of a paper self an improved one, where circulation and misappropriation are anticipated, and into which self-­consciousness is built, Tristram continues in the tradition of the self-­conscious, mid-­century narrators who may revile the commercial transactions propelling them toward uncreative situations, but who count on the impression of their novels coming to life in the reader’s hands.

Novels as Coaches In the last decades, eighteenth-­century culture has been described as experimenting with the simulation of life in forms that included automata, popular displays of lifelike machines and clockwork mechanisms, newly complicated networks of commerce, and expedited forms of transport.36 It is tempting to assume that books were simply part of this setting: axes of material autonomy generated as technological developments pointed generally but objectively in the direction of a material world straying away from control and understanding. But the novels I have discussed so far belong more convincingly to another history—­that of an imaginative investment in the artificial intelligence of the medium of entertainment. They complicate the idea of authors registering at the level of their thematic concern the developments of material culture, and show instead the specific ways novels refract and work this interest into their formal and material properties. Books that are strenuously aligned with the material world under these conditions conceal, as Latour argues of many of the phenomena on which we bestow objectivity, their real intractability from the field of human creation. I have already suggested some of the cases in which narrative intrusions were used to propagate the effect of books being beyond human control. I turn now to a different source of evidence for the ways the authors of novels cultivated the fiction of books being more powerful than the people who made them: the analogy between reading and coach travel that was built up after the publication of Joseph Andrews. This analogy was used by novelists to suggest that certain episodes of fictional action involved a reader’s

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surrender to an objectively given technology. Novels delivered experience, they proposed, in the same way that journeys did, as a compound of scenery, company, and physical progress and limitation. During the 1750s and ’60s, Goodall, Shebbeare, Toldervy, and Sterne, along with Susan Smythies, who perfected this ruse of the novel as journey in The Stage-­Coach (1753), delight in imagining their readers as passengers in claustrophobic narrative machines that consist of paper and pages as well as generic conventions. They set up thematic excursions within their novels that use this comparison to emphasize the objective technology of a book. Toldervy, for instance, compares the pacing of his novel to the pacing of a horse, suggesting that drivers and passengers are in a similar position of having to obey the limits of technology. His narrator becomes a horseman who must manage his steed carefully by reining in the story, as if it were likely to run out of steam: “not presently upon the spur, or in his full career, but leisurely out of the stables [he] settles himself in his stirrups, and when fair road and season offer, puts on perhaps to a round trot.” This rider is obedient, like Goodall’s and Smythies’s, to external conditions: he “favours his Palfry, and is sure not to bring him puffing, into a heat, into his last inn” (3:2). In Capt. Greenland, Goodall uses this analogy to dramatize the way his reader gets stuck with a stretch of tedious narrative. One episode describes Silvius, Shebbeare’s well-­meaning hero, traveling by stagecoach to London. For company he has a host of characters suggestive of those Sterne will reinvent later in the decade: a captain log-­line, who cannot speak except in nautical terms, a Methodist midwife and her daughter, and a reverend who spends most of the journey asleep. Despite this company, readers are told from the outset that the journey will be uneventful. Abusing the “learned biographers” who would have used “such a coachful of good-­natured people to have them robbed or assaulted,” Goodall’s narrator announces that the only interruptions to the passage will be his own interventions (1:168). This creates an image of the reader’s entrapment that is premised on her being like the stage coach traveler, a victim to random fellow passages. Although the narrator announces “that it may possibly be as amusing to our Readers to now and again to pass an intervening minute in conversation with us, as in the continual Prosecution of the direct Narrative of this History,” his sourness and self-­confidence as a character emphasize the reader’s sense of being trapped in a small, inhospitable circle of company (2:108). Clearly, readers of fiction do not automatically experience either the kind of enthrallment to a journey or the sense of captivity to technology that these narrators dramatize. As we have seen, readers know quite well that they can



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close a book at any time, or skip pages to come more quickly to its highlights. But, by being compared to paying coach-­passengers, readers of self-­conscious novels are primed to entertain their concession to the demands of print technology as a necessary condition of being moved by narrative. The authorial intrusions that bring the presence of mediation into view through this trope help create a stance for the reader that is like that of the passenger: aware of herself turning the pages, she feels bound to the course of action followed by the characters and events represented there. Although one can burn a book, or tear it up, scenes focusing on the reader’s desire for narrative movement make it appear as difficult to really get at a story as to change the route taken by a stagecoach. Emphasising the physicality of the book, and the fiction of a narrator as little responsible for the course events in his plot as the driver of the stagecoach for the route his coach must follow, novelists downplay the interactive and elective elements of reading and writing in order to promote the book as a medium that makes content unreachable. Eighteenth-­century coach travel worked well as an analogy for those who wanted to imagine printed objects in this way, as things over which customers had limited control. There is a widespread sense among cultural and literary historians that the history of transport, like the history of the novel, involved an outward expansion of spatial and imaginative horizons.37 Fielding and others before him celebrated this connection by likening the novel in a positive light to the forward-­moving journey. But eighteenth-­century descriptions of how it felt to travel inside “a tedious, tiresome, dull, jolting Vehicle,” as one character from a dramatic satire describes a stagecoach, outnumbered accounts emphasizing the pleasures of transport.38 Coach travelers could easily appear effeminate and restricted in outlook. Cowper’s “The Task” addresses “ye who, bourne about / In chariots and sedans, know no fatigue / But that of idleness, and taste no scenes / But such as art contrives.”39 Real travelers’ reports also frequently describe coaches as scenes of artificial confinement, boredom, and forced company. One English traveler in France describes his captivity in a “ponderous machine”; another traveling through England describes how “the coach was for three days a perfect jail to us.”40 Daniel Bourn, identifying boredom and a lack of view as the traveler’s main problems, recommends milestones as “an entertaining piece of garnish and road furniture, that by measuring the way make the hours pass with pleasure, and thereby much alleviate the irksomeness of a long stage.”41 Coach travel also produced for many the feeling of really losing control over what they did and said. James Murray diagnoses sleep as an inevitable condition of travel and recommends ways to fight its onset:

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After a person in perfect health has traveled two stages in a stage-­ coach, even suppose he should take a nap, he will find himself disposed for his breakfast at the end of the second stage.—­This is necessary for the purpose of keeping the spirits strong, to beat off sleep from his quarters;—­if a traveller desire to keep awake, he must take his breakfast to strengthen his spirits.42 Sylvia Hughes describes her father moved artificially by the motion of the coach from a state of reverie to a state in which “the Jumbling on the Stones made him open his Mouth and address himself to the Ladies,” and The Travels of the Imagination; a True Journey from Newcastle to London (1773) describes passengers “jolted into good humour by the motion of the coach.”43 This loss of control over one’s body was made worse by a driver’s determining the pace and shape of a journey. Those who hired private carriages frequently relayed in writing how vulnerable they felt to the men Murray portrayed as petty tyrants, “vociferous hostler(s)” and “little arbitrary Bashaw(s).”44 Although better off travelers were able to navigate the public road system by way of private vehicles, the power of the coachmen and innkeepers who kept it running could make even their power seem negligible. Fielding’s and Sterne’s accounts of travel both describe their lack of control as passengers over the technology of the road, and include tirades against the men who convey them along it. The feeling of bodily disempowerment and the feeling of vulnerability to a driver are captured most acutely in Fielding’s account of being transported as an invalid to Portugal. His Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) depicts the perspective of a conscious person deprived of volition. As his dropsical, dying body is hauled between boats and carriages, he makes the unfavorable comparison between his flesh and his luggage. In the conveyance of goods and people from one place to another, he argues, one general principle prevails: as the goods to be conveyed are usually larger, so they are to be chiefly considered in the conveyance; the owner being indeed little more than an appendage to his trunk, or box, or bale, or at best a small part of his baggage, very little care is to be taken in stowing or packing them up with convenience to himself.45 In the 1760s Sterne describes himself in similar terms as no more than an object while on the road in France, and he writes in his letters that he has been “conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous goods consigned to Pluto



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and company—­lying in the bottom of my chaise most of the rout [sic], upon a large pillow which I had the prevoyance to purchase before I set out.”46 On this same journey he describes himself “toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed and carbonated on one side or another” like a piece of meat in the heat of the carriage.47 These reports demonstrate that coach travel served as an occasion for passengers to note their own powerlessness. In the scenes Sterne and Fielding describe, it can even be said that this physical powerlessness, actively observed, becomes its own source of entertainment. But what finally happens in texts where such a posture is taken up as a description of fiction reading involves a complicated transference of a practical experience into the realm of imaginative transport. Coaches can be used only by a sleight of hand to represent the kinds of transport that discourse provides. Evidence provided by the technology of coach travel that humans were prey to the machines that moved them must be made to fit the image of books controlling minds and bodies, and the coachman must be worked into a caricature of the professional author in the system of print entertainment. Thus, although there is a strong ethnographic element to Fielding’s and Sterne’s descriptions of travel, there is also a literary one. Writers keen to explore the reader’s submission to the mechanical nature of print mediation put their experience of the real hardships of traveling to work as an analogy that is far from obvious. Fielding’s and Sterne’s disposition as travelers who report with glee on their powerlessness illuminates some of the better-­known junctures at which self-­conscious writers play up the human vulnerability to the technology of print. Take Tristram’s boast of the way he has kept his reader hostage to the physicality of the book, and thereby kept her from other kinds of exploration: “What a tract of country I have run!...and how many cities have I seen, during the time you have been reading, and reflecting, Madam, upon this story!” (460). This jibe draws attention to Sterne’s prowess as manipulator of the book as printed product. But it also works, like many of the analogies with coach travel in earlier novels, to emphasize the way the physical vehicle of the book prevents readers’ contact with the scenes they experience. Approaching his marbled page, Sterne reminds readers of the black page they encountered in the first volume of his novel and warns against “deep” reading on this new occasion of physical interruption: You had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading . . . ​you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world

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with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths, which still mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. (204) Underscoring this warning, on the next page Walter Shandy tries with his penknife in hand “to see if he could not scratch some better sense into” a sentence of Erasmus. This episode ends with Walter announcing that he has repaired the sense of the sentence: “But you have marr’d a word, replied my uncle Toby.—­My father put on his spectacles,—­bit his lip,—­and tore out the leaf in a passion” (208). In such moments, Sterne’s references to the physicality of the novel construct for the reader a vantage point similar to the one he takes as a passenger conscious of being hostage to the technology of travel. As Sterne reminds the reader of the material page that limits her interpretive freedom, he evokes a sense of what McKeon has argued of the novel more generally: that “taken to its limits, the skeptical claim to historicity becomes an insistence of the factuality not of the representation but of the act of representation: not of the documentation but of the document.”48 Jokes in this vein work by making it entertaining to observe one’s own confrontation with a document. But they also make the page appear more solid and more mechanical than it need be. Promoting a false analogy between the machines on which physical and im­ aginative transport depends, Tristram and the other narrators who plead their ­powerlessness over the physical and spatial demands of the page prove that atten­ tion to technological dependence can become its own wry form of amusement. As we have seen, novels that draw attention to the book as a surface-­level environment in which readers and narrators are trapped have an ambivalent effect on the reader’s empowerment. As readers are openly reminded of the physical constraints of novel reading, they experience their understanding of these constraints as a form of cognitive one-­upmanship, an awareness of mediation that is the last layer in the logic of a satire presenting the reader as participant in a set of materially as well as generically defined conventions. The pleasure of this awareness, these media-­savvy narrators suggest, involves the reader in a game in which self-­awareness comes at the cost of recognising one’s human limitations. Self-­consciousness on the part of reader and narrator involves the consciousness of the consumer’s weak relation to the technology of the book, and in this form it is directed toward the emergent realm of entertainment and away from that of practical action. As self-­conscious fiction produces a plastic and social space of wit and self-­awareness, it therefore also fosters the attitude of a reading public willing



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to see print as something akin to the coach system. Books and coaches become technologies that can be bought or rejected, used or refused, but not individually shaped or controlled. The content of novels obviously remained highly contested in the eighteenth century. Like the first consumers of phonograph records, whom Gitelman describes as participants in a fraught and “semiritualized” process that preceded recognition of the record as medium, but that nevertheless cobbled “users into publics and narrower counterpublics, invisibly uniting ‘us’ ‘all’ as potential consumers,” readers of the first truly commercial novels agreed through dissent on the medium, not the message.49 A comparable process in mid-­eighteenth-­century Britain saw travelers complain vociferously about the compromises and forms of disenfranchisement entailed in coach travel. Yet, while they were protesting their own condition as mere objects to be transported, they were contributing to the process in which coach travel would become an acceptable technology and the position of the passenger a recognizable vantage point in the history of narration. Consumers of novels as printed objects were created under conditions similar to those that gave rise to the consumers of phonograph records and coach rides because, even as readers felt most skeptical of the novel’s narrative content and bullying commands, they began to think of its physical and commercial character as something that would not change. In this scenario, the most literally self-­conscious fictions may have failed as novels, but they succeeded in securing readers’ consciously non-­agentive presence in relation to the novel as narrative’s physical medium.

The Impotent Narrator The spectacle of consciousness as something independent of practical agency or effect was reinforced in two new subgenres of the 1750s and ’60s, the it-­ narrative and the sentimental novel. Both these literary forms are the subject of separate chapters to come, but I want to introduce brief examples of each in the line of inquiry this chapter has followed, into the entertainment that comes from the reader seeing herself trapped within the medium of the book. Although autobiographies of objects had been written in England earlier in the century, it was only in the 1750s, amid the burgeoning columns of magazines, cheap fiction, and pamphlet literature, that they became fashionable. Told from the perspective of objects imprisoned within a degenerate and unrecoverable human world, these narratives share many of the tendencies of self-­conscious novels of the time. For instance, as the next chapter argues,

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they routinely reference their own material and generic form. It-­narratives also experiment daringly with the representation of a consciousness limited by physical constraints but elevated in awareness of this limited condition. Inanimate narrators model, in other words, a stance companionable with the one readers were being encouraged to develop of their disenfranchised relation to the pages that entertained them. When it-­narratives expose a coat, a sofa, a shoe, a banknote, and other forms of inanimate life to intimate scenes of human commerce, the presence of these narrators as critical outsiders, unable to intervene in the scenes they relate, recalls the scenes in which powerless readers are represented within self-­conscious novels. This dynamic becomes particularly clear in one pamphlet-­length narrative, Travels of Mons. Le Poste-­Chaise, written by itself (1753), which is focused on the relationship of a small chaise to a vivacious Englishman who has purchased it to make a journey through France. At one point, the Englishman parks the chaise in a yard overlooking the garden of a nunnery where it spies a beautiful, grief-­stricken woman: I wished for nothing more than to have her near me and it is certain, had I been made of Flesh and Blood, not all the Racks in France cou’d have kept me from o’er-­leaping the Bounds of Virtue. I now began to think what an opportunity my Lord had lost, in not being a Post-­Chaise here in my room, and whether such a happy Glance was not worth an Age of Slavery.50 Thanks to the prosopopoeia underpinning its existence, the chaise is in no position to act on its desire. Instead, it watches enviously as its master finds a plaintive letter the woman has dropped and approaches her while she walks in the garden. As he does so, the chaise responds: “every Brace in me began to be in Motion and caus’d such a Disorder in my whole Composition, that I had lik’d to have shook out the Fore-­Glass as I stood trembling” (16). In its state of enforced impotence, the chaise must await its master’s action, which soon ensues—­but not without first registering the pleasure and entertainment of its own limited position: “I began to think, if I was in England, I would turn Pimp, where I might enjoy both the Pleasure and the Profit” (18). This scene gets taken up in the opening pages of A Sentimental Journey (1768), where Yorick, in hiding from his recent acquaintances in France, climbs into an old chaise made for one and sets it shaking with the motion of his writing. Like the chaise, he watches with pleasure from the cover of his vehicle a grieving woman whose face “wore the characters of a widow’d



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look”: “Good God!” cries Yorick, “how a man might lead such a creature as this round the world with him!”51 The similarity between the two scenes suggests that Sterne had read The Travels of Mons. Le Poste-­Chaise; but the parallel between them does not depend on this being the case. More important is that both underscore the interest in the 1750s and �������������������������������� ’60s���������������������������� in the experience of physical and technological constraint as something the reader could be made aware of. Described by Paul Goring as having the function of “a mobile viewpoint,” Yorick’s position as voyeuristic spectator of sentimental scenes leaves him powerless in the same way as the chaise rendered powerless by its objecthood, and readers by the novels they read.52 Each scenario models the experience of being consciously confined within a machine, suggesting that such a position might be the enabling condition of entertainment rather than its confounding principle. Arguably, his willingness to represent Tristram as a speaking book suggests, Sterne was already captivated by the possibility that a consciously impotent figure could govern the delivery of fiction when he wrote Tristram Shandy. One way to describe the success of Tristram Shandy in relation to novels of its period is to say that Sterne transforms the atmosphere that less successful authors create, of readers being hostage to the unfolding of a novel and the ill-­temper of a narrator, into the feeling of a being kept company by a narrator who plays up his obedience to the technologies of writing and publication. Tristram becomes playfully helpless over the process of writing, which is forever getting away from him and undercutting his own intentions. A related strategy for managing the gridlock into which self-­conscious narrators and readers had fallen in the 1750s was being tried out, I am suggesting, in it-­narratives like Travels of Mons. Le Poste-­Chaise, which make a study of the way pleasure arises from being in the position of a narrator who experiences powerlessness, but cannot act to change it. Sterne maximizes this effect in A Sentimental Journey, where Yorick’s posture as a passenger with much to say and feel but little power over the technology of his journey becomes a comment on the position associated with the novel reader throughout the 1750s and ’60s. It is notable, for instance, how rarely Yorick leaves the shelter of the coach and the perspective it offers him. At the beginning of his journey, he so resents being forced from his vehicle to help the postilion retrieve his portmanteau from the mud that he hires La Fleur to accompany him on the road. The sexually active La Fleur then rides horseback, going ahead to reconnoiter situations Yorick thinks may be of sentimental value. Yorick’s position, however, remains conspicuously mediated by his vehicle. From inside the coach he observes the man who sits

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grieving his dead ass, whose corpse La Fleur’s horse refuses to pass. While La Fleur dismounts and joins the crowd of people who have gathered around the mourner, Yorick continues sitting in the chaise, from which he “can see and hear over their heads” (57). This posture becomes typical for Yorick, a traveler disposed to watch from the safety of his vehicle. In Versailles, with two hours to kill, he decides he “might as well take a view of the town; so I pulled the cord, and ordered the coachman to drive round some of the principal streets” (109).53 When he spies a street vendor, Yorick has La Fleur cross the road and speak to the man. But even when La Fleur reports that the man is an honorable knight, it takes Yorick some time to decide to leave the vehicle himself: “I could not help looking for some time at him as I sat in the remise—­the more I look’d at him—­his croix and his basket, the stronger they wove themselves into my brain” (110). Outside Lyons, it is only under similar duress, when his horse has lost two shoes, that Yorick leaves his chaise and the postilion “to manage his point as he could” and stumbles into the refuge of a nearby farmhouse (129). Yorick could be celebrated in this way, as recipient of a world mediated by his vehicle, because by the late 1760s novel reading was widely understood to promote this version of experience. Novels invited an active recognition of the reader’s surrender to the direction of another, and of her physical relation to the limits of the page. This consciousness had become part of what it meant to read: self-­conscious novels’ methods of drawing attention to mediation had become features, rather than just descriptions, of reading as a practice. Thus, novel readers understood themselves as versions of Yorick, holed up inside vehicles that made their powerlessness an entertaining perspective. In creating a narrator who combines a heightened state of self-­awareness with a lack of agency and potency in the world, Sterne appeals to this modern reader. His interposing of Yorick as sentimental narrator, and the it-­narrative’s interposing of the material object, help invigorate the way readers see themselves as conscious objects; perceptive about their experience of being positioned and transported, they are now joined by narrators who help make self-­consciousness and powerlessness humorously compatible stances. Why did people read such novels? This chapter has offered a series of interconnected answers to this question. The consciousness these texts flaunt of their own mechanisms, of their commercialization, and of their generic limitation works in a remarkably flat way—­as a description, for instance, of the reader’s falling asleep just when this is most likely, rather than as a call to the reader to wake up. But novels that so literally declare their limits inaugurate a form of entertainment that has been overlooked, both in affirmative



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accounts of the way self-­conscious fiction appeals to the involvement or distinction of the reader, and in accounts of immersive narrative as the most popular. The novels of the 1750s and ’60s amuse as machines that register their own reception, appearing alert to human presence while also turning this illusion of mechanical sentience into evidence of printed entities being impermeable to human agency and desire. Comparing themselves to vehicles over which passengers have no control, they encourage in their readers what Lukács diagnoses as a “contemplative stance,” whereby users are enlisted as self-­aware but non-­agentive in relation to technology. This stance, adopted “towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and . . . ​impervious to human intention,” must, Lukács argues, “transform the basic categories of ��������������������������������� most of the scenes I have disman’s immediate attitude to the world.”54 In cussed, this means that readers and writers begin to seem predictable in their motivations and responses, while books begin to seem cutting-­edge in their ability to reflect the nature of their producers and consumers. Historically speaking, we have very few models for thinking about why or how people have paid to view themselves from the perspective of media. Most accounts of the rise of fiction reading assume that it is more pleasurable to forget than to remember the technology of print. Many scholars have offered explanations for how realist entertainment and panoramic perspectives develop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a strategy for self-­ forgetting. This applies, for instance, to descriptions of travel and literature in connection with imperialism and the colonial survey, as well as to descriptions of how the novel develops as a genre.55 When historians and social theorists have been called to account for moments of self-­consciousness in history and literature, it has usually been with the assumption that such perspectives produce transformation and movement: we expect new identities or nations to be formed or revolutions begun as a result of the kinds of self-­understanding that eighteenth-­century readers seem to have had of their own powerlessness. But neither of these larger frameworks of explanation will do for the novels of the 1750s and ’60s. In Britain at this time, a psychic structure is emerging in which consumers are being taught to remember themselves in unfavorable terms, while this awareness itself becomes popular.56 This structure brings the pleasures of reflexivity into play as way of managing the paradoxes of machines that exact stillness from their passengers: the activity of reading novels, a practice itself viewed ambivalently as passive, indulgent, and corrupt, rewards its participants with a knowing, sidelong glance at themselves as the consumers of narratives. These tendencies of reflexive entertainment do not have the radical effects

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of changing the lived experiences of class, gender, and subjectivity. In fact, self-­ conscious fiction of the kind prevalent in the 1750s and ’60s clogs the forms of identification and desire that eighteenth-­century audiences feared would arise from avid novel reading, often by making human responses to reading feel inanimate and gimmicky. Yet the prevalence of this fiction suggests that it also fulfills, through stylistic efforts, imaginary scenarios, and humor, the fantasy of novels having a life of their own. Novels that behave as self-­aware media, productive of an non-­human consciousness, and generative of an equivalent stance in readers who come to feel their limited agency over a determined world, belong in this sense to a human history of wanting certain kinds of entertainment.

Chapter 2

What It-­Narratives Know About Their Authors

Speaking Coats In 1770, after reading Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, Adventures of a Guinea (1760), one of the century’s most popular and extended it-­narratives, Henry Mackenzie summed up the experience as being “like looking on a collection of dry’d serpants; one trembles at the idea of life in Creatures so mischievous to man.”1 Mackenzie’s response captures the way speaking coaches and coats and coins appealed to the imagination of readers as phenomenologically disturbing experiments, proposing the possibility that something nonhuman could acquire its own form of consciousness. From a twenty-­first-­century perspective, the idea of a car, a coin, or a book being conscious of those who use it no longer seems quite so troubling as it did to Mackenzie. Copy from an advertisement for a twenty-­first-­century car suggests the distinctly comforting possibility of putting one’s body into the hands of a conscious vehicle: There are times when the ES insists it’s smarter than you. Arrogance? Or Compassion? As a car dedicated to your safety as well as your comfort, sometimes the ES takes upon itself certain liberties. Suppose, for example, that you take a corner too fast and begin to slide. Sensors will intervene and, by applying one or more brakes and even reducing the throttle, can help return you to your proper “arc” through the corner. At which point the ES can then return to what it does best—­leaving the driving to you. A gesture that, in our minds, is decidedly compassionate.2

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I�������������������������������������������������������������������������� n the broadest sense, the technology of recent decades has produced a multitude of these kinds of objects, able “compassionately” to anticipate their human users: fabrics, doors, word processing programs, and everyday devices with embedded sensors now carry out what may be called formulaic versions of human thought. In contact with these surfaces we are becoming familiar with questions such as those posed by anthropologist Susanne Küchler: “We have to ask how a thing can be ‘thoughtlike,’ or ‘how thought can conduct itself in things.’ ”3 The previous chapter was concerned with what this situation meant for the way novels came to be enjoyed as narratives that purported to understand their own physical and generic hold on a reader. Here, I explore the way it-­ narratives claim to register their own production. This will involve turning toward critics who have looked at objects in relation to their human origins. As I suggested in the Introduction, the best developed view of this relationship has been a Marxian one, in which commodities are understood to conceal in their form the human interests and relationships that bring them into existence. One line of explanation for the writing of it-­narratives in the eighteenth century has drawn on this view by suggesting that their popularity coincides with the moment at which foreign import and marketing begin to outweigh local use value as the logic of material production. It-­narratives are described in these terms by Liz Bellamy as “the paradigm of alienation” and by Aileen Douglas as “emblematic of a burgeoning consumer culture which seemed, to contemporaries, to dissolve the marks of social class and to render the barriers between social orders frangible and vulnerable.”4 Lynch describes it-­narratives in terms of “the prosopopoeia that grants objects the power to talk about their peregrinations through the circuitry of the economy.”5 The life that they imagine for their narrators is symptomatic in these terms of the market reality that was making objects everywhere increasingly mysterious to their eighteenth-­ century consumers. Clothing in particular seems to register from the eighteenth century onward as an enigmatic substance, cut off as commodity from any relation to human labor or need. But clothing, with all its creative possibility as a surface, also supports another account offered by social scientists and critics of objects’ claim to life; one that distinguishes their “thing-­ness” from their commodity status. In the framework of “Thing Theory,” it-­narratives have been rediscovered by twenty-­first-­century critics as essays in the autonomy of things, understood more widely in their materiality and their movement than the condition of the commodity suggests. Lynn Festa has described it-­narratives as endowing objects with life by inserting them into sentimental relationships that bind



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them into a national space.6 And, in a series of major articles, Jonathan Lamb has begun to map out a genealogy for the phenomenon of speaking things, not as a barrier to humanity, but a complex language in which refuge from and opposition to the human is articulated.7 The case of one short it-­narrative, Edward Phillips’s The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760), serves to illustrate how cultural materialist and new materialist modes of explanation bring out different aspects of the subgenre. The black coat is a typical it-­narrator in being a piece of clothing that seems to speak out of its status as a commodity, as part of a wardrobe of sentient clothes rented out on a temporary basis to customers needing an occasional outfit. Having begun life as a mourning coat made for a high ranking commoner, it has been sold by a servant to the clothing merchant in whose service, the coat tells a young, fellow coat, it first “began to exist” as accomplice to the tricksters, fortune-­tellers, and hack ­writers who rent it.8 The organs with which the coat registers its experiences are never precisely located, but its diffuse sensory input appears to be gathered by all its fibers and to spread as nonlocalized knowledge throughout its body. At the end of its life, the coat confesses that “when I contemplate the scenes I have experienced, and meditate on 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” (6). The coat’s nonhuman body becomes evident in the way in which it must orient itself to every new setting, reporting things as they happen without being able to anticipate or investigate scenes: the activities of a sharper, or conman, will never be forecast by the coat-­narrator as criminal but only deduced after the conclusion of each episode to have been dishonest. The formal device of the speaking object also supports the fast pace at which the coat moves from one scene to another of its episodic life, a story capturing the downward spiral of the coat’s devaluation as it comes to rest in the wardrobe where, rejected even by the rag-­dealer, it tells its tale. The Adventures of a Black Coat thus suggests quite directly why the fictional life of it-­narrators can be associated with the new commodity status of eighteenth-­century goods. Marx’s famous opening section of Capital, “The Commodity,” also uses the example of a coat to describe the way in which a coat comes to “speak” to the linen with which its commodity value is being equated. As commodities, these two objects “speak” to each other because they appear to have a third value in common, that of human labor in its abstract form. Although very different processes and uses have created the coat and the linen, once they are calculated as units of human labor-­power, they seem to acquire a voice or “soul”: “Despite its buttoned-­up appearance, the linen

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recognizes in [the coat] a splendid kindred soul, the soul of value.”9 The irony, of course, is that this “soul” resides nowhere in the coat itself: its property as value “never shows through, even when the coat is at its most threadbare.”10 Marx’s version of the talking coat therefore involves an illusion, a misrecognition of the coat as something with the ability to enter in its own terms into social relations. “If commodities could speak,” argues Marx, “they would say this: our use-­value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects.”11 But the example of the black coat also supports theoretical descriptions of the way that objects like coats speak most loudly at the point where they become “things.” This argument for the particular agency of things follows through on the insights of Appadurai, who points out that the status of the object as a commodity cannot really be analyzed as a simple snapshot of the social situation in which it was produced. Instead, he argues in The Social Life of Things (1988), objects lead rich social lives in which the “commodity situation” may be only one phase in a more diverse range of exchange situations.12 In these terms, the coat’s story, in which it moves in and out of visibility on the market and ends up outside it altogether, confirms Appadurai’s sense that objects are the key to a much richer array of social practices than commodity exchange suggests, and can even be seen in some sense as leading free-­ranging “social” lives. A material like cloth will always have the potential to stray from its specified paths and accumulate new political meanings (as in the case of Gandhi’s use of cotton) or creative ones born of distance and recontextualization (a coat from India might turn up as a wall hanging in Denmark). A coat, for instance, cannot tell us how it should be worn. It can, however, make its presence felt and activate a future different from any its owner had in mind. Seen as part of this process, summarized by Daniel Miller as one in which “everything we create has, by virtue of that act, the potential to appear, and to become alien to us,” the material world can be seen to have a “voice,” or a form of agency, because it is through material practice that our thoughts and intentions become something other than what we first conceived them to be, and in this process that they transform the kinds of subjects that we become.13 If analysis of eighteenth-­century it-­narratives were limited to these two approaches, it would, however, still be focused on the way they represent the life of mid-­century objects. Yet both the approaches I have described above skirt the most compelling aspect of these it-­narratives, which is not the way they speak about commodities or things, but the way they speak as commodities and things. In order to see this, one must first dispel the idea that these tales, most of which were cheaply produced and quickly and formulaically written, track the life of the object their narrator claims to be in any



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phenomenological detail. The slippers of The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes (1754), which begin life in the possession of a young lady of distinction before having chocolate spilt on them in a lover’s tryst and being passed on to her lady-­in-­waiting, are no more specific about the origin and materiality of slippers than the coat is about coats, or the Poste-­Chaise about carriages.14 Reading these tales, we do not feel what it is like to contain a foot or see the world from the ground up, nor to roll along in contact with an eighteenth-­century road. In each case, as the last chapter suggested, the narrative trick involves, at best, the general exploration of a position of reduced agency in which the experience of being moved quickly from scene to scene is one that mid-­century readers, narrators, and objects seem to have in common. It is not surprising, then, that some of the most sophisticated critical readings of it-­narratives have focused on the way the form reflects, not the life of objects in general, but the life of the literary object as it is animated by the market. Flint, whom I have already mentioned, and Blackwell have emphasized to different degrees the frustration that eighteenth-­century authors might have felt about their labor being turned into value in the emerging world of print capitalism.15 For Flint, writing in the 1990s, the inanimate narrator is linked to the depersonalized cultural sphere, and its popularity as a device reflects the alienation that authors felt from their own work as a commodity. Tales told by objects embody the way authors were supplanted in the new literary economy by the marketable entity of their work. For Blackwell, writing more recently, this alienation has to do with the fatigued and self-­deprecating tone that these narratives often assume in their framing, suggesting a generic self-­ consciousness that acknowledges the it-­narrative as being a hackneyed and reiterative form that reflects the objectification of literature. The Adventures of the Black Coat, with its preface announcing the “age of Magazines and Chronicles . . . ​[in which] almost every shop, or work-­room, harbours an author; and gentlemen of the file now leave their more useful labor at the vice and toil to polish periods,” serves as an example (iv). Stressing the work of self-­definition that writers of it-­narratives perform, Blackwell reads such reflexive invocations of literary commerce as “registering the moment in the commodification of prose fiction when the novel begins to emerge as a respectable form through differentiation . . . ​from hack-­work.”16 These accounts of literature as the key “object” in it-­narratives resonate strongly with the one I offer of it-­narratives as self-­conscious texts in the most superficial sense, invested in their pages’ status as surfaces capable of cognizing but not of transcending their own fate. As texts without generic aspiration, deliberately formulaic, cheaply produced and carefully positioned to be easily

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disposed of on the market, and yet remarkably candid in pointing to their own materiality, it-­narratives offer fascinating examples of the phenomenon they claim to be about: the thinking object. As I argued in the Introduction, however, most it-­narratives do not use the mechanisms of self-­consciousness in the ways Flint suggests, to oppose the alienated conditions of production they lay bare. Rather, they help to produce the illusion that literature as a material product can have more intelligence than its author. While the consciousness modelled in the it-­narrative as an object that references its own formulaic and commercial constitution does much to support an eighteenth-­century version of the understanding that writing is an “independent being endowed with life,” it does so without reclaiming writing as the property of the people who make it. In presenting this case, I draw partly on terms that have been worked out for the description of media. In our highly computational world, N. Katherine Hayles points out, “artefacts carry part of the cognitive load, operating in flexible systems in which are embedded human thoughts, actions, and memories.” And yet Hayles also goes on to distinguish between these forms of cognition and a more ideologically loaded notion of self-­consciousness: machines may think—­they may even think about themselves—­but this does not generate a human standard of self-­awareness.17 This chapter borrows this distinction from media studies in order to discuss eighteenth-­century it-­narratives as “cognitive systems”—­fictions that are capable of speaking formulaically about their own constitution as objects—­while also performing perfectly well as commodities. My proposition is that the cases where authors played with the commercial possibilities of narratives self-­conscious about their own production may open up better under the lens of twenty-­first century discussions about materiality, embedded cognition, and “thingness” than in the light of the Marxian concepts bequeathed to us as a part of an understanding of a world that stands to be transformed by understanding.

From Inside the Garrett Most eighteenth-­century it-­narratives were written by professional authors with a pragmatic approach to the production of literature. They reused material, copied formulas, and added volumes to their narratives as the market demanded. Keen to produce whatever kind of literature booksellers wished, they employed what one reviewer in 1781 styled “a mode of making a book” that is “a convenient method to writers of the inferior class, of emptying their



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commonplace books.”18 Authors like Charles Johnstone, Helenus Scott, Francis Coventry, Edward Phillips, Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Bridges, and the other anonymous writers who wrote it-­narratives in the latter half of the century had often already failed at other careers (for instance, as wine-­merchants or employees of the East India Company) before turning to authorship, and in a few cases their writing offered a definite solution to their financial problems. Johnstone, for instance, wrote Chrysal (1765) after deafness limited his legal career, and he continued for the rest of his life to write fiction for profit.19 These biographies mean that it-­narratives mirror their own production in a scene, included in almost every example of the form, where the non-­human narrator encounters a hack writer buried in his papers, tacking together scenes, scrambling for money, anticipating the market, and measuring his output in material terms. The “Mr. Rhymer,” “Squire Tag-­Rime,” “Mr. Stanza,” “Mr. Scribble,” “Mr. Plagiary,” and “Mr. Tellagain” who routinely turn up in these narratives are distinguishable only by degree from the narratives’ real authors. In Chrysal, the speaking guinea spends time in the possession of several authors representing aspects of Johnstone. One author is characterized by the way he approaches writing much like manual labor, cutting, recycling, and “changing his subject with as little concern as he did his paper.”20 The list of his recent productions, which he presents as an account to his bookseller, includes “nineteen pamphlets, with answers to fourteen of them; nine rapes, six murders, five fast and four funeral sermons, thirty-­six essays, twenty-­two titles, [and] four quarto volumes re-­writ” (1:129). Another is a garret poet enveloped in a cloud of pecuniary despair, to whom the guinea is given in charity and of whom the narrator claims: “I had never experienced my own influence on the human heart so strongly as on this occasion. The poet kissed the hand of his benefactor in a rapture too big for utterance, and forgetting for a moment all his distresses, went to a coffeehouse and changed me to pay for his breakfast” (3:84). And yet another “Votary of Apollo” works in “the double capacity of physic and letters”; there is not “a branch in the wide world of letters which had not felt his pruning, the lowest rudiments of the most vulgar arts being, in his opinion, not more beneath the philosophic pen, than the most abstruse heights of speculation” (1:120). Chrysal’s cast of literary producers also includes the author who ruthlessly delegates much of his work to writers more desperate than him, an unscrupulous theatre director, and an exploitative bookseller. Most it-­narratives feature similar characters. Bridges’s The Adventures of a Bank-­note (1770–­71) opens with the banknote coming into being at the moment when Squire Tag-­Rime sells his verses for thirty guineas and exchanges twenty of them for a banknote. Inscribing it “Squire,” he procures a title by

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assumption but locks himself into dire poverty because he can’t spend it. When his next poems fail to meet the approval of the publisher, Squire Tag-­ Rime lacks even the coal that he needs to burn them. After throwing them in the empty grate he knocks himself unconscious by bending to retrieve “six good lines” and wakes to find one of his pages being burnt under his nose in his neighbor’s effort to revive him.21 The narrator of The Sedan (1752) carries a “venerable young man in black with his pockets bursting with papers” on his way to a book seller; the coat of The Adventures of a Black Coat is worn by a desperate young author of a wan complexion whose play has been used by a theater manager for “taking the tea-­kettle off the fire”; and The Adventures of a Cork-­Screw (1775) describes a young scholar too much in debt to descend from his garret. The second volume of The Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1781) concludes with a scene in which “a dramatick author” and his friend ride the coach to the house of a manager, where the author demonstrates to his friend that literary productions recommended by a “titled idiot” are welcomed over those of genuine merit.22 Other encounters involve authors at work on pieces conspicuously like it-­narratives. In The Adventures of a Quire of Paper, eight sheets of the narrator are bought by a shabby author who rushes back to his garret in order to write an essay on wealth, which he sells to a “fashionable magazine” (3:449). Mr Threnody, owner of the Embroidered Waistcoat, “was a Poet, Historian, Index-­maker, Mathematician, memoir-­writer, and Lexicographer; but he particularly excelled in Monodies, Elegies, Visions, Pastorals, and Satire.”23 He is a character, in other words, of exactly the kind to resort to writing it-­narratives. As we have seen, it is not unusual to find other kinds of mid-­eighteenth-­ century texts reflecting the decline of the literary profession, either through satires of authorship or through direct appeals to the public about the hard conditions under which professional authors had to earn their living. James Ralph’s The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade (1758) makes a plaintive case for the predicament in which the mid-­century author stands: “he is laughed at if poor, if to avoid that Curse, he endeavours to turn his Wit to Profit, he is branded a Mercenary.”24 The mid-­century literature in which authors are represented in derogatory terms includes many of the novels already mentioned. In The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, Bates “takes it into his head to turn Author” after running out of money: “Bates smiled at the Fate of Authors in general; but like most Authors, thought his Fortune would be particular from the rest.”25 Working for “Mr Titlepage,” a bookseller, Bates is exploited and ridiculed, his papers stolen and retrieved, and his fate sealed with the inscription, “Alas, poor Bates.” This representation of authorship cuts



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very close to the bone of describing the production of Ephraim Tristram Bates itself. But it also continues in the tradition of Scriblerian satire in which the exposure of authorship has traditionally helped exempt the work in question from the kind of poetry it satirizes. The mock-­heroic satire, including most famously Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe” (ca. 1679) and Pope’s “The Dunciad” (1728–­43), Swift’s Tale of the Tub (1704), or the verses written in the war between Richard Blackmore and the “wits” at the turn of the century in London, all achieve their distance from the mechanical endeavors of bad writers by drawing attention to Grub Street practices. This kind of critique can involve divulging in journalistic detail the gritty, impoverished lives of garret poets in London early in the century. Its primary effect is to contrast, rather than associate, Pope or Dryden’s work with the labor they satirize. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White describe Augustan poetry’s returning obsessively to low literature in order to “cleanse the cultural sphere of impure matters” and declare its absence from the scene it has defined.26 The way Fielding and Sterne infuse the image of the slightly hair-­brained and overly zealous professional writer into their figure of the author-­narrator connects to this tradition. Joseph Andrews’s narrator, who tells us that “there are certain Mysteries or Secrets in all Trades from the highest to the lowest, from that of Prime Ministering to this of Authoring, which are seldom discovered,” before proceding, as a gentleman “of the latter Occupation,” to give away several of the rules governing his own art of composition is more autobiographical of Fielding than the figures of the Dunciad are of Pope.27 But Fielding’s strategy, which points the way toward Ephraim Tristram Bates, which points in turn toward Tristram Shandy, a novel that declares itself to be written for the market and sensitive to the responses of readers and critics, remains one of distinction: a novel that can satirize fiction writing as a profession seems in some basic sense to surpass the conditions it describes. One way the Scriblerian satire of professional writing secures this distinction from the professional field is by highlighting the proximity of bad literature to paper in its material form. Pope, Oldham, Dryden, and Swift present the poems of hacks as food for mice, fuel for fires, wrapping for oranges, lining for trunks, and tails for kites. Blackmore, unpopular author of “Satyr against Wit,” is accused, for instance, of writing poems “Whose towering Non-­sense braves the very Skies: / Like Paper-­kites the empty volumes fly, / And by meer force of Wind are rais’d on high.”28 “From dusty shops” writes Dryden of works that do not sell, “neglected authors come, / Martyrs of pies and relics of the bum.”29 Emrys Jones, writing about Pope, points out that this emphasis on

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the materiality of poems, combined with the general emphasis on the hack’s physical environment, forces into violent antithesis the notions of body and mind by showing the ethereally spirited poet of tradition yoked to a clumsy machine of a body which constantly craves to be fed, clothed, warmed, and cleaned. Such a poet drags out a doleful existence—­which we are invited to find funny—­in a world of unsympathetic objects, an environment totally hostile to and unsuggestive of mental and literary activity. The traditional garret setting seems to make the writing of poetry—­any poetry—­absurd; it derides it.30 In Sterne’s case, this line of ridicule becomes more reflexive as he refers to the existing volumes of his own book being used by the reader as a seat, to the volumes collecting dust on the bookseller’s shelf, or to the fate of old documents as wrapping paper and bandages. But even here, the risk associated with drawing readers’ attention to the materiality of the work in their hands as mere paper is offset by Sterne’s investment in the possibility that Tristram Shandy belongs to a distinct realm of literature that will never return to being just paper. The Augustan framework in which materiality is considered the antithesis of the spirit of the word has certainly changed by the 1750s; but novelists, including the author of Ephraim Tristram Bates, still gamble on the representation of literature-­as-­paper helping to ensure their novels are never used as bum-­fodder or grocery wrapping. Against this backdrop, the representation of hack authorship in it-­ narratives is noteworthy. The cheap editions and magazine pages where these narratives first appeared work materially against their generic aspiration, and the recognizable form of the it-­narrative locates it firmly, Blackwell contends, as having been written for the market. It-­narratives satirizing authors and booksellers as overly invested in the material aspects of their trade leave their readers little alternative but to read these as reflexive scenes. When Chrysal describes authors whose “rambling prevented (them) ever getting deeper than the surface of the any subject” and who pamper to “the caprice of the world . . . ​ buying most eagerly what it affected to decry most,” Johnstone directly invokes the constitution of his text.31 The strategy by which these narratives turn such indictments to their advantage differs from the one of aspiration that has its roots in Scriblerian satire. Rather than dismissing literature that appears in the guise of paper, these narratives reclaim the sheer materiality of literature as leverage in their production of a literal, rather than literary, objectivity. It is



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the experience of pages as speaking objects, rather than their mysterious quality as literature or commodity, that wins them credit in the economy of the world they describe. In several cases when speaking objects end up in an author’s home, they describe their experience there. At these junctures, it becomes obvious that the author himself, whether malign or simply foolish, is well represented in the drabness of his productions: the authors who get their hands on Chrysal are clearly no candidates for literary distinction even when circumstances are on their side. And yet it-­narratives suggest that even the lowliest of objects can bristle with sentience. Although the coat of Phillips’s tale lacks the ability to generate its own experience, and is dependent on the people who wear it for the life it claims, it registers the space of the writer’s garret as one in which objects, particularly papers, seem livelier than Mr. Stanza’s ideas: [The furniture] consisted of an old miserable bed and bed-­stead, with a coverlet and an old blue curtain, which was fixed to the side of the bedstead; adjoining to the casement, a whitewashed wall served to keep the wind from intruding upon the privacy of the reposed gentleman on the other side, and also to receive that which some people of a phlegmatick constitution, carry with them in their pockets. A table next presented itself, which seemed to lament the loss of a flap, that either time, or something else, had amputated from it, and which was laid across a chair, the cane bottom having given way; two other maimed chairs supported themselves by leaning against the wall, one of which sustained me; the next were two deal boxes which occupied a fourth part of the room, one of which wanting a lid disclosed a confused heap of papers, amongst which I saw the cover of a letter directed to Mr. Stanza, and lastly a shelf that ran the length of the room, on which lay one black pudding.32 According to the conventions of Scriblerian satire, Mr. Stanza is derided for the inelegance of his surroundings. The “heap of papers” that spills from an open deal box, and from Mr. Stanza’s pockets, is tainted as literature by physical association with the casual atrocity of his career. Yet, speaking from within the range of clutter it describes, observing a table “present[ing] itself ” and “lament[ing]” the loss of a flap, the coat’s language playfully underscores the human attributes of the “maimed” and “amputated” objects who share the room and sets their liveliness up against the drabness of the author’s mental landscape.

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While the writer’s garret becomes a space without promise of upward mobility for people, scenes like this make it a space of promising lateral mobility for objects. As the property of a hack writer, paper’s objecthood guarantees it higher stakes in the lottery of life than the writing on it guarantees it as text. Coventry explores a similar dynamic in Pompey the Little when the lapdog jumbles together the objects he sees on Mr. Rhymer’s table. Assigning literary productions their crudest generic shape—­“the first acts of a comedy, a pair of yellow stays, two political pamphlets, a plate of bread-­and-­butter, three dirty night caps, and a volume of miscellany poems”—­Coventry’s list uses a pattern of alternation to play with the equation of writing with dirty underwear, testing, rather than pronouncing, the possibility of reducing papers to passive objects.33 But the joke here is that we are in a world where underwear has almost certainly seen more, and has more to say, than Mr. Rhymer. Later in the scene, when Mrs. Rhymer threatens to burn her husband’s papers as useless rubbish, this becomes apparent as a misjudgment on her part, on a par with her misjudgment about Pompey himself as a creature who can be talked about or eaten. But the reason for saving the papers is not that they are good pieces of writing: it is that they are objects with the ability to speak. Seen from the perspective of an object, the writer’s garret becomes an extreme version of the world Lynch has described more generally for the eighteenth century, in which texts replace people as the prime movers of plots, and superficial characters become more important than anything deeper they might be said to represent.34 The narrator’s predicament as a conscious object suggests an atmosphere of epistemological confusion that works to the advantage of Mr. Stanza and Mr. Rhymer’s papers as papers, not as expressed meaning. This reverses the thrust of much Scriblerian satire, which makes materiality the target of ridicule, by turning the very inanity of the hack author, a category to which Mr. Rhymer and Mr. Stanza’s indubitably belong, into the occasion for their compositions becoming cognitive systems of their own, awake to the basic materiality of their own composition. In this way, it-­narratives provide a solution to the challenge of representing the figure of the professional author and his output without use of either his own voice or the assumption of his papers having turned into literature. Instead, it is the precocity of his medium that produces an angle on his work. In Pompey the Little and The Adventures of the Black Coat, this happens from the perspective of an object sensitive to, but distinct from, paper itself. But there are other cases in which papers are directly implicated in the creation of a perspective from which to report on the life of the hack writer. One example of this case is The Adventures of an Author (1767), a witty life story which the



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narrator claims is written “by himself and a friend” but turns out, in fact, to function more as an it-­narrative than an autobiography, with the mysterious role of “friend” used to imply that writing might recount its own story of coming into being. The Adventures, which describes a young man who climbs every rung on the professional writer’s ladder and down again, from “writer of taste, fancy, and imagination” to “bookseller’s galley-­slave,” begins traditionally enough in the first person. However, as soon as the protagonist announces that writing is his chosen profession, the narrator runs into complications. Announcing that “I have in the commerce of this world, been obliged so often to change my name, as well as appearance, that it requires a greater memory than wits are generally endowed with to remember my primitive appellation,” the narrator seizes in his fourth chapter on “Jack Atall” as “a name which I believe is spick and span new, and therefore, upon that account, not devoid of merit.”35 By creating this avatar, the narrator solves what he admits was the “great difficulty” of “being obliged, as I apprehended, to speak throughout this whole performance in the first person singular” (1:27) and resumes “the thread of narrator, in the adventures of John Atall, poet, author, lawyer, metaphysician, sentence-­monger, politician, and chapman” (1:28). This shift in perspective amplifies the formal question of who it is that is speaking, and what access he can claim to the protagonist of the story. It-­ narratives solve this problem by having narrators who enjoy privileged access to all kinds of human activities and scenes without the limitation of belonging to any of them. In this sense, they anticipate, Nicholas Hudson has argued, the formal achievement of omniscient narration.36 But it-­narrators like the Black Coat and Pompey also remain severely limited in what they can say about the thoughts or motivations of humans. The narrator of the Adventures of an Author differs on this account because of his explicit access to what Jack Atall thinks. At one point, having brought Mr. Atall to the point where he is successfully initiated into the world of corrupt booksellers, the narrator resumes the first person and discusses in his fourteenth chapter the merits of literature. He explains this in the fifteenth chapter by saying that “though we did not introduce Mr. Atall either directly or indirectly in the last short but pithy chapter . . . ​yet the truth is that every thought, and almost every word therein contained, were the subjects of his rumination” (1:111). But while the narrator has access to Atall’s “ruminations,” he speaks not from the perspective of another human in whom Atall confides, but from the problematic position of an anonymous “friend” or alter-­ego whose first responsibility is to the reader of The Adventures of an Author. This means that the identity of the narrator remains an issue throughout

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The Adventures of an Author, which switches back into first person narration at several contrived points of the tale: The reader may perhaps be curious to know who it is that is speaking all this while; whether it is Mr. Atall, or his editor, or both. For an answer to which question, I refer him to the title, wherein he will find “The Adventures of an Author, written by himself.” Yes, but, then, he will say, in the fourth chapter you disclaimed all pretence to speaking in the first person singular, and were seeming very happy that you had found out an expedient to avoid it. To own the truth then . . . ​I could not suppress the impulse of letting my pen take a spontaneous ramble, and this being a very natural and genuine excursion, it as naturally fell in a string of egotisms, which I had not the power to suppress, till it was too late, and when I found I should spoil the whole by correction. (1:138) The first person perspective is explained by imagining that the pen itself has taken over the narration, justifying the production of an identity closely associated with but not identical to Atall’s. The suggestion that mechanical writing may be looking back and reflecting on the conditions and thoughts in which it originated may be vague and playful, but it is also supported by a strain of interest throughout the Adventures in the way mechanical writing is overtaking and controlling authors. Late in his career, Atall enters the service of Mr. M—­—­, manager of the Monthly Review, who is in the process of extricating his publication from human hands altogether: “He informed Jack that reviewing was as mechanical a thing as making an index, and that Mr. M—­—­had now the plan of a machine, which by the working of a single horse, would perform all the operations for fabricating a dozen indexes at once” (1:177). Inspired by this machine, Mr. M—­—­ proposes a similar model which will mechanically produce Reviews according to the physical merits of the works in question, and which Atall will be able to run singlehandedly. The scenario is a dystopian one, ridiculed rather than celebrated, but also confirmed in the overarching impression the narrative gives of being told from nowhere more specific than the surface of the pages on which it is formulaically written and printed. In the end, bringing Atall into existence as an object of gentle ridicule requires a materially agile, but not a generically superior, perspective from which he can be described. The account I have given here of the it-­narrative as a perspective from which to look at the alien life of the author corresponds to Lamb’s broader



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historical understanding of the use to which objecthood has been put as a bitter but formally effective challenge to the depravity of the human. He applies the point in his account of Swift’s Battle of the Books as a drama animated by “aggregates” of “paper, ink, pasteboard, and calf ” to which authors can lay no claim: “The more a book performs as an unowned thing, the more spirit it exhibits; whereas the more it functions as a vehicle for the identity and meaning of its author, the less of it there is to own.”37 In this configuration, as in those discussed above, authors emerge from the object’s point of view as ridiculous. But this is not for the reasons Flint suggests when he describes the speaking object as stand-­in for the author: “prostituted by being detached from the body, circulated, exchanged, and depersonalized,” the object represents the fate of authorial voice in the rapacious world of print capitalism.38 As Flint’s deployment of the terms “alienation,” “detachment,” “displacement,” “erasure,” and “disjuncture” suggests, his emphasis is on the cost of print culture for the literary producer.39 Depicting society from the perspective of an object, authors reproduce what it feels like to have their voice transferred to a marketable object over which they have lost control. Flint acknowledges that the freedom of the circulating object might also imply that the author has a certain freedom from accountability, and a useful claim to disinterest, but his emphasis is on the alienation that speaking objects register, and on the resentment conveyed through the device to their readers. In these terms, the scenes described above would suggest that Atall and Mr. Stanza and Mr. Rhymer have become victims of the autonomy their intellectual and physical property asserts over them; their only horizon of promise would be the possibility of a different relationship Mr. Rhymer might have had to the plays and pamphlets he has written and tossed on his kitchen table were he not pressured by economic circumstance to write for the market. And yet these are characters whose only hope of existence lies in the exuberance of their material productions; in the distance the life of their compositions can put between an author’s ideas and their material incarnation. They share the condition Gallagher ascribes to eighteenth-­century women writers who are invested in the value their work as an effect of its exchange rather than its production: “As authors, they imply, they themselves are effects of exchange. They do not present their texts as places where they have stored themselves, nor do they portray their authorship as an originary activity of creation” (xxi). In this view, authors are not betrayed by the ambulatory nature of their text but are made by it. Thus, there is a sense, argues McKeon, in which “the very being of authorship—­the authenticity, the ‘private or real sense’ of a deep

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interiority—­results from the creative alienation of the superficial and worldly entity of the literary character.”40 In it-­narratives, it is not characters who acquire a life independent of their author, but papers themselves. The process, however, is akin to the one McKeon describes as reversing the commonsense view of the author as preexisting the character he or she creates. It-­narratives make authors into “objects” to which the work itself provides access from a point in the future where it, the paper “subject,” has acquired more experience than the author. This reverses the joke by which sordid materiality becomes the downfall of literature: now literature, reliant on its medium, provides the perspective from which the hack writer will be recognized as a producer.

Cognitive Systems So far I have suggested that the junctures at which authors appear in it-­ narratives are ones where papers stir most vigorously with the artificial life of objects able to report on their own origins and circulation. This possibility that texts with the ability to represent their existence are the real subjects of it-­narratives becomes most concrete in two examples of the genre that make the medium of writing into the narrator. In one, already mentioned, a quire of paper becomes the explicit narrator of its own adventures. At another juncture, present in many it-­narratives and novels and connected to their referencing of mediation, readers are instructed to see the published papers in their hands as the tenacious survivors of the fictional author’s garret. The Adventures of a Quire of Paper opens with a country curate stepping into a coffee-­house “in order to run over the newest pamphlets” and finding himself attracted in a mood of professional envy to read the sermon of a celebrated preacher instead.41 Yet, when he picks up the sermon, he finds himself addressed audibly by the pages he holds. Speaking to him in the first person, the voice that emerges is that of a consciousness that has been distended across space: first as the atoms of a decomposed thistle, then as a flax plant, then as a fine piece of material, then as rags, separated and joined in the making of paper. Most of the consciousness has been turned into high-­quality paper, and thus kept on the move in the vividly depicted economy of paper recycling, with its separate parts put to various comically contradictory uses: The very fragment that some time since soared at the tail of a kite, now took its flight from the poet’s garret, in all the altitudes of Pindaric verse; and the same tatter that helped to cure the itch, now



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appeared as an advertisement displaying the virtue’s of Maredant’s Scurvy Drops. Not to mention, that as a rag of me once bound up a fore leg, so its paper offering now offered itself from the pen of a Methodist, as a sovereign balm for a sore conscience; and that the very tatter that once served the poet for a shaving cloth now procured him a dinner by a humorous essay on the use and abuse of beards. (3:451) From the perspective of the paper, the more ridiculous of these uses for paper are advertising, proselytizing, and essay writing. But we also find realized the promise made in other it-­narratives depicting authorial production, that even paltry compositions must lead their life as objects. In the Adventures of a Quire of Paper it becomes clear that what gives the paper its authority as a narrator is the movement it has experienced as a result of its not having been used in the making of quality literature, and therefore having been freed up to be kite-­paper and shaving cloth. The paper’s durable materiality, in conjunction with its mobility, trumps all the kinds of compositions it has contained: in the form of a pastoral, it is used to rub off grease in an eating house; as a birthday ode, to wrap a dead kitten; as an elegy, to make a pattern for a cap; and as a Defense of Dissenters, it becomes a bishop’s blotting paper. Speaking as paper, rather than as a sermon, the narrator makes itself felt to a reader in ways its text has failed to do. Celebrating paper’s ability to function simultaneously as an object and as container of discourse that runs up against or comments on this objectivity, Adventures of a Quire of Paper draws attention to the double status of the medium as self-­identical thing and vehicle for ideas. From this position of advantage, the paper can deliver the ostensible moral of its story, which is that vanity and ambition are always likely to be undercut by material contingencies and affinities. Whatever immanence one desires, the narrator points out, in the end all forms of authorship fall victim to the aleatory fate of cheap print. Any advantage a composition has comes from recognizing this. Throughout its tale, the paper has privileged movement over stasis, claiming that its greatest hope is that its wildly scattered parts will be reunited. This possibility depends on its components remaining in physical circulation and not getting holed up in books or libraries. For this reason, the paper cheekily remarks, it rejoices that “I was found just as some paper of My kind was required to print the very sermon you hold in your hand” (3:451). Sermons, this joke implies, are unlikely to arrest paper long as literature, especially when read by envious parsons like this one, interested in reading only insofar as it advances

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his career. The joke extends most compellingly beyond the frame of the tale to the European Magazine and the it-­narrative it contains. This piece of writing is also almost certain to be quickly recycled as paper. But the implication is that both the sermon and the it-­narrative, which fail to secure paper any kind of posterity, underwrite the narrator’s lifelike ability to report on its own fate. Because it-­narratives themselves circulate in magazines, they become powerful physical receptors of the society they claim to know: as an imaginative trick, the speaking object comes to life through the ephemeral form it takes. The strategy of magazine pages being used to recall their own rapid circulation as a form of advantage has a history as old as the form. In Spectator 367, Addison discusses the benefits of the paper in terms of its material circulation: If I do not take care to obviate some of my witty Readers, they will be apt to tell me, that my Paper, after it is printed and Published, is still beneficial to the public on several Occasions. I must confess, I have lighted my Pipe with my own Works for this twelve-­month past: My Landlady often sends up her little Daughter to desire some of my old Spectators, and has frequently told me, that the Paper they are printed on is the best in the World to wrap Spice in.42 In this case, Addison “obviates” his wittier readers by anticipating the return to paper that he hopes to avoid by making the Spectator papers valuable as literature. But he also draws attention to the medial quality of the page and to the fact that it is being read at a point in the future over which he has no real control. The notorious ability of Mr. Spectator to see all things, from all places at once, turns out to have much to do with the literal dispersal of bits of paper that work like tracking devices in the landscape, displaying their own futures as objects on the screens of their page. In The Adventures of a Quire of Paper, however, the equivalent involves the piece in a much fuller surrender of all aspirations to literary posterity in favor of its genuinely to-­be-­expected experience as a low generic object. In this process, the surface to which Addison has drawn attention as part of a trick of confidence becomes a baser source of epistemological certainty. It is not only magazine pages than can be deployed in this way to suggest a “cognitive system” in which reader and author are anticipated by paper itself. As we have already seen, many mid-­century novels produce a similar effect by announcing consciousness of their own reception. Like Charlotte Summers and Tristram Shandy, Adventures of a Quire of Paper includes a record of its encounter with its readers of the future, whose physical entity comes into focus with



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the “thumbing and spoiling of Leaves” in which we are inevitably engaged as readers of our own copy of the text. The reflex is even more effective, however, when the rapid, physical circulation of paper makes the text palpable as a document on the move. This becomes apparent when it-­narratives introduce their readers into cognitive systems by presenting the papers they are reading as having escaped or survived the fictional authors’ garrets. Like the device of having paper speak directly to its reader, the frame narratives in which discarded and unworthy looking piles of paper turn out to contain an it-­narrative imply that readers are being monitored by papers capable of narrating their way into the present. The Adventures of a Cork-­Screw (1775) begins by describing how the editor has given ten guineas to a grieving widow in exchange for the possessions of her husband, who has just died a pauper in jail. The husband’s estate consists of “one old ragged coat, a pair of rusty breeches, part of an old tye-­wig, some old books, and a large parcel of paper, entirely spoiled, being scribbled all over.”43 Here the medium of paper is represented at its most antithetical to literature—­it has been “spoiled” by being written on. But it also becomes clear that the narrative we are now reading is the text that spoilt the paper. Just as the manuscript of Chrysal has been discovered as “some old stuff that had lain a great while lumbering in [a] garret,” The Adventures of a Cork-­Screw has been rescued by an editor and made its way into print (xi). This redemptive process is never quite complete: instead the antithesis between a text’s materiality as a circulating object and its immateriality as literature is recast as a special duplicity; one that makes it possible for a text to reflect in what comes to seem like real time on the process of its material and social mediation. Like many it-­ narratives, The Adventures of a Corkscrew, where scant attention is paid to the particularity of the object, turns out to be more invested in telling the story of a pile of paper than in the object described there. The Adventures of a Black Coat is not explicitly framed by the discovery of a manuscript, but a great part of the narrative is devoted to Mr. Stanza, the author who borrows the coat, and who ends up going to jail for debt. Even in prison, where the coat accompanies him, he continues to write and to send his work out to publishers, giving his papers an axis of flight that is of little promise to his work as literature but turns out to be of material interest when we learn that the public “will have the pleasure of perusing . . . ​his works, which he intends to publish by subscription, having already written thirty pages of a preface” (175). The question whether the text we are now reading belongs to these works is raised to suggest a productive tension between the negligible literary importance that we now know any text by “Mr. Stanza” must have, and

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the different claim to experience that this same text might make as it accompanies its author into poverty and escapes from jail when Mr. Stanza cannot. We are invited to imagine, in other words, the possibility that Mr. Stanza’s works could speak as objects about how they came to have such a paltry composition written on their pages. This wish, playfully enacted in later it-­ narratives, repudiates what Stewart describes as the longing for the containment of the book as a miniature world: “the book sits before me, closed and unread; it is an object, a set of surfaces. But opened, it seems revealed; its physical aspects give way to abstraction and a nexus of new temporalities.”44 Rather than opening up worlds within the book, it-­narratives tend to move papers across the threshold between fictional worlds and reality, making documents more compelling than anything that appears in the body of their text.45 When the banknote stresses that the verses Squire Tag-­Rime saves from the fire have not been “lost to the world forever,” Bridges suggests that these poems now circulate alongside the banknote and The Adventures of the Banknote as paper witnesses to the story of their own composition and near destruction. Such moments can be read, in Gerard Genette’s terms, as defying verisimilitude by overstepping a boundary between the world of which one tells and the world in which one tells.46 Papers that have been introduced as part of the plot suddenly appear as objects in the world of the reader, provoking the vulnerability of the reader to the feeling that she or he is now part of an ongoing the narrative. This partly explains the shock value of these moments, which move the eye to the margin of the text and its surface as if the paper’s ability to witness lives on and will incorporate the reader in its next installment. But the real audacity of the metafictional moves practiced in it-­narratives cannot be easily accounted for by narrative theory because it has to do with the way literature deploys its own incarnation as a commodity to suggest that it will always be an object first and a site of meaning second. The way the objecthood of the ephemeral text is loaded up in these narratives has more to do with Derrida’s suggestion that writing is always “inaugural” and that words must live as things in order to bring into being, from the perspective of their objectification, the human society that made them—­but even Derrida’s focus is on language, rather than on the objects that contain and shape meaning.47 More important in the case of it-­narratives is the way that the physicality of pamphlets, cheap editions and magazines is appropriated by the narratives printed on them. By suggesting the part paper plays in an economically (not humanly) driven process, it-­narratives take the side of the mysterious economic life force they represent: their papers openly transmit its energy, and



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their ability to recognize this energy is what verifies their status as nonhuman agents of cognition. In this context, hack writing becomes more appropriate to a particular kind of self-­conscious enterprise than high literature. Pamphlets and “scribblings,” with their rapid movement through social spaces in which they are never seriously read or understood, accumulate the experience that empowers discourse to arrive plausibly into the hands of the reader as an object that understands its own mediation.

The Modern Consumption of It-­Narratives I began by suggesting that it-­narratives raise the question of whether all narratives that alert consumers to the production and circulation of commodities are by definition working against the forces of alienation and reification that they represent. This is a question of continuing relevance today, when popular histories are commonly organized with a “thing” as their focus. While the form of the it-­narrative disappeared by the mid-­nineteenth century, magazine readers still encountered pieces detailing the way objects including beer, lace, fabric, money, and paper were made. These pieces appeared, for instance, in Dickens’s Household Words, a journal that circulated in keeping with the objects described, on pages that were themselves candidates for the kind of appraisal of surfaces that readers were encouraged to undertake. Today such narratives are popular as self-­contained books of history that focus on the origins of one commodity or another. In a survey of “commodity history” as a twenty-­first-­century genre, Bruce Robbins lists a dazzling array of such histories, including Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas; Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence; Oil: The Devil’s Gold; Chocolate: Food of the Gods; and The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force of History.48 These recent examples of the form have several elements in common with eighteenth-­century it-­narratives. They tend to emphasize the passive but pervasive presence of objects, thereby promoting what Robbins describes as the object’s role as the “underdog” protagonist in a story about the increasing availability of a certain substance across the world. These are stories in which objects succeed where government regulation, ­national culture, and religious and ethical prohibition fails; stories that share, in other words, some of the spirit of conquest that informs the it-­narratives in which the paper in the reader’s hands becomes the undeniable legacy of all things’ ability to persist. Paper stands for this persistence, foregrounding through its sheer presence the immediacy of the object

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while backgrounding the story of the society that has let materiality through its conceptual grasp. Many of the more popular versions of these commodity histories also share with earlier it-­narratives a reflexive quality that Robbins describes in these terms: “The popular histories are themselves commodities. Their flagrant after-­the-­colon excesses, which loudly advertise both the commodity and the book about the commodity, might be considered a sly acknowledgement that their fate depends on their ability to compete on the market.”49 Like their eighteenth-­century forerunners, these commodity histories have a lot to say by implication about their own circulation. The victories they track, of commodities on the global market, is in some sense a victory they embody. Robbins, however, sees this reflexive aspect of commodity histories operating backhandedly; these texts do not fully disclose their own commodity status (their acknowledgement of their own marketability, while loudly announced, is “sly”). Robbins extends a Marxian argument in his analysis of the commodity, attributing the success of its form to the deception on which it depends and implying, inversely, that any text or object that announces its origins in human labor is a challenge to the market. While Robbins may be right in this case to diagnose a lack of self-­ awareness as one of the limits of the commodity narrative as critique, his argument also implies that any increased public awareness about the way objects are produced and circulated must weaken the spell of the commodity. If we only knew how our clothes were made, this line of reasoning goes, we would stop buying them. Flint makes a similar assumption when he suggests that it is an easy step from reading it-­narratives as a reflection on the production of literature to reading them as a critique of the literary market place and its alienation of the literary producer from his product. Any literature self-­ conscious about its own status as a commodity, his reading supposes, must undermine its commercial status. A reasonable species of this belief underlies Robbins’s mood of disappointment with commodity narratives in general as a form from which critics of global capitalism still have more to hope. But to the extent that it-­narratives offer an exception to its principle, they provide occasion to unpack our tightly packed bundle of assumptions about the relationship between commodification and consciousness-­raising literary projects. They model exactly the phenomenon Robbins discounts, namely a form of literature that is thoroughly instrumental about its own performance on the market but is nevertheless candid, and frequently scathing, about the way this market operates. Taken negatively, their lesson is that consciousness alone is not enough to challenge commodification.



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If their lesson is seen more positively, however, eighteenth-­century it-­ narratives suggest more richly the risk that reflexive and popular commodity narratives take as a critique of the market in which they participate. For Robbins the problem is that commodity narratives are not conscious enough about their commodity status. For eighteenth-­century readers, however, the problem may be better understood in terms of these narratives having appeared too conscious of their own material life. The way they register their production and anticipate their circulation contributes, as we have seen, to the amusing effect of a paper-­thing able to subject its own author and reader to scrutiny. This effect has some basis in the way mediation gives words the capacity to carry, as Hayles describes it, some of the “cognitive load.” Although both are projections of our own capacities rather than technological realities, a conscious book is much easier to imagine and experience than a conscious coat. In the constellation these texts set up, whether it is the historical victory of the coat, the coffee bean, the cod, or the cocaine that we are invited to imagine, the apparent agency of the text therefore offers an important inroad into the mood of respect for the object we are being asked to cultivate. If there is a trick involved here, it is that the reader’s consciousness of a text’s mediation, which can occur with entertaining effects, appears to support the conclusion that all forms of materiality might warrant such recognition. Thus, what it-­narratives play with through their reflexivity is the fact that mediation makes writing more than the sum of an author’s thoughts; but what they do with this self-­knowledge, both now and in the past, is to alert readers to a diffuse world of animate objects that seems, largely because of the sensation of contact with the knowing book, to demand respect and against which protest seems difficult. The more conscious a book seems about its own mediation in this constellation, the more likely it is to promote a reverence for the power of all material; a reverence that extends by homology and in a certain mood of epistemological confusion to thinking about commodities in much the same way that we can think about “the media” as an objective process against which consciousness per se is no defense. In this perspective, it-­narratives license our complacency about the sovereignty of objects because they slide the perceived inevitability of mediation and the elective process of commodification together, not because they conceal the way they themselves are made. On the contrary, the more they tell us about the way they are made; the more they lay the processes of textual production and circulation bare in entertaining and value-­free terms, the more beguilingly they suggest that coats are just like writing: both can discover their own objectivity without politically transformative effects.

Chapter 3

The Theory of Paper

Making Impressions While the last two chapters have described the bootstrapping operation of texts that invent an autonomy for themselves by dwelling on their reception and production, this one is concerned with texts that seem to have a more solid material referent: paper. The philosophical texts I discuss here all try to know the ground on which they are written. “This paper,” which Hume and James Beattie both invoke, turns out, however, to feed some of the period’s deepest skeptical concerns. Although paper can appear a self-­evident thing in the writer’s private world, it can also vanish as an elusive and ungraspable referent in the public sphere of print. And while the page can be located as a medium eighteenth-­century reader and writer inevitably share, the impossibility of “this” page can also be the thread by which all claims to knowledge unravel. The way this drama is played out in two very different epistemological projects reveals mediation to be a complicated field of knowledge—­one where rendering the world more visible also risks rendering it less so. Paper comes into focus in Hume’s Treatise almost as soon as he begins to argue for the inaccessibility of the material world. The closer we look at writing in its materiality, he contends, the more the meaning of the characters recedes from us. The more we think about paper and print, the more they seem to fall beyond the reach of understanding. Hume invokes “the paper, on which I write at present” and “the table . . . ​beyond the paper” before pointing out how complex an act of mind is involved in “ascribing a real and corporeal existence to these impressions.”1 Eventually, Hume’s focus on mediation comes to licence a more constructive way of thinking about reading and writing as socially successful engagements that do not depend on absolute knowledge—­ but in the first place, the materiality of the page serves Hume in his efforts to



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show the impossibility of pinning down an objectively given world through rational explanation. In the 1770s, Hume’s popular “commonsense” opponent, James Beattie, also drew the public’s attention to paper. Whereas Hume invoked the medium of writing to argue that all objects only become meaningful in our minds when we “read,” or interpret, or learn to overlook them, Beattie, his chief rival in these years, fixed his attention on paper in order to illustrate the availability of certain spontaneous and self-­evident truths. By pointing to paper in his instantly successful Essay on The Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism (1770), Beattie includes texts in their physicality as evidence of noncontestable, shared reality, safe from the assaults of skeptical argumentation. He uses paper to underscore his argument for the availability of the world to perception and intuition, confidently asserting: That my body, and this pen and paper, and the other corporeal objects around me, do really exist, is to me as evident as that my soul exists; it is indeed so evident that nothing can be more so; and though my life depended upon the consequence, I could not, by any effort, bring myself to entertain a doubt of it, even for a single moment.2 Yet Beattie’s confidence is undermined by the fact that “this” paper is neither here nor there. He wants to extend his assertion all the way to the reader’s sensory environment, but in doing so he must muddy indefatigably the waters of his own example. These cases of Hume and Beattie therefore give way, as we will see, to one another. Hume’s skepticism about paper as an object that can’t really be known also calls attention to his printed pages as things that were confidently handled by readers, and his skepticism hardens into a firm editorial grip on reality when it comes to his own publication practices. On the other hand, Beattie’s confidence about the objectivity of paper raises as many doubts in the public’s mind as it allays, and his gestures to paper as self-­evident are compromised by the authorial maneuvers he makes in his own efforts to translate his writings into print. This makes Hume and Beattie interesting counterparts in a debate that asks readers to test their “common sense” in relation to writing as a technology whose visibility works both for and against the idea of a world that can be known, and whose acknowledgment as medium simultaneously empowers the perceiver and disturbs that sense of power. In terms of this study, the chief aim of this chapter is to show that two

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writers who draw attention to the tools of their trade for different reasons both end up participating in a culture of consciousness about print mediation. In doing so each also increases, sometimes in spite of his authorial intentions, the reverence readers feel toward publication as an uncontrollable process. The second aim of this chapter is to connect this eighteenth-­century case study, and the contradictory moods it involves, to the more recent case of post-­structuralism. I am keen to reverse the sense that post-­structuralism can shed light on the implicit ambiguities of eighteenth-­century epistemological debate, and to look instead at the way Hume and Beattie’s debate anticipates and sheds light on the ambiguities inherited by post-­structuralism. Hume’s and Beattie’s texts can be read, I will argue, not just as appropriate objects for post-­structuralist readings alert to the resistant qualities of writing, but also as a screen on which two different critical tendencies of post-­structuralism, toward relativism and toward a literary version of technological determinism, were played out in eighteenth-­century terms. Here I build, in other words, on the connection I promised in the Introduction, between eighteenth-­ and twentieth-­ century formations that combine reflexivity with a mood of technodeterminism. My reading of Hume differs from the notable literary readings of his work published over the last decades. John Richetti, Jerome Christensen, Leo Damrosch, and Fred Parker have all pointed to the performative contradictions in Hume’s philosophy and to the paradox by which Hume’s lively style of questioning makes doubt itself reassuring. Rather than seeing eighteenth-­century skepticism as an expression of philosophical problems that can only be solved in the realms of culture or social practice, these readings construct the rhetoric of eighteenth-­century philosophy as its own cultural bulwark against statements of doubt and relativism. Christensen’s Practicing Enlightenment, to draw on the most elaborated example, builds a strong case against naïve readings of Hume’s revolutionary and skeptical projects by focusing on the way Hume’s literary practice, and the self it projects, contend practically with the claims he makes in theory: In Hume, rhetoric is both the sign of logical contradiction or inconsistency and the device for putting inconsistency to work. It is because of the inexorable failure of rationality either to work on its own terms or to account satisfactorily for the behavior of humans in society that rhetoric becomes inevitable, not merely as the expression of the failure of rationality, but as the remedy for its lapse.3



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Richetti’s argument shares Christensen’s emphasis on the fact that, for Hume, “writing is the ultimate and sure relation, providing almost in spite of his relations as a thinker a persuasive tendency to stabilize or at least to ground in relationships the unruly perceptual relationships his thought so intensely explores.”4 Fred Parker raises this argument to a more general level, suggesting that all “sceptical thinking involves . . . ​an essential tension or doubleness: a power of affirmation that emerges from, without denying or transcending, the inadequacy of intellect to master the fluidity and variousness of things.”5 These critics distinguish the literary event as articulation from its meaning, but they are less attentive to the immediately apparent oppositions between writing and speaking, or between the singularity of writing acts and the reproducibility of print.6 Parker, for instance, locates Hume and Locke’s “power of affirmation” at the level of discourse and narrative sequence while allowing that the realm of “things” is conceded to doubt by empiricism. In this critical framework, Hume is seen as giving up on a relation to the material world in order to rescue his text’s rhetorical dimension; the effect of his skeptical reasoning is to carve out a space in which rhetoric comes to the rescue of a society deprived of metaphysical answers. My focus, however, is on the way Hume and Beattie acknowledge writing as part of a metaphysical solution in which the book, the culture of print, and that of public reception play the role of ballast in the skeptic’s boat in much the way previous critics have argued rhetoric does. Hume and Beattie both unsettle and restore meaning in the same well-­handled stroke of the pen by making paper and ink part of their reader’s sensory environment. Writing on paper comes into view in their different forms of argument not just as rhetoric but as the reality of mediation. My approach is in part as an acknowledgment of new work in the history of the book, where critics like Roger Chartier take issue with post-­structuralism precisely for its inattention to the specificity of writing in its material forms. Hume and Beattie are much more interested in the technologies of writing than in a disembodied ideal of discourse or communication. By investigating the way that eighteenth-­century skepticism forecasts our contemporary, deferential stance toward the media, this chapter also questions the assertion that either theory or book history move beyond, or grasp from outside, the condition of the text. The relationship Hume and Beattie model, between a popular awareness of the way print mediation works and a simultaneously felt sense that mechanisms of mediation are objectively given, is one that book historians and post-­structuralists propagate rather than deconstruct. At the end of this chapter, then, I turn briefly to writings by the twentieth-­ century’s most prominent post-­structuralists, Derrida and de Man, both of

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whom are fascinated with the material autonomy of writing. De Man’s Aesthetic Ideology (1996) and Derrida’s Paper Machine (2001) explore what de Man describes as the way that “the phenomenality of the linguistic sign can, by an infinite variety of devices or turns, be aligned with the phenomenality . . . ​of the signified toward which it is directed.”7 In other words, once writing it is understood as ink and paper and print, it can appear and behave as part of the world we once imagined it only represented. In these accounts, writing turns out to be specific in its historical and material character, distinguishable in its materiality from the world of discursive indeterminacy that Derrida and de Man helped define. But in this form, language also enters the post-­ structuralist debate as a complex concession to the materially and historically given, and takes shape as part of a material world that twenty-­first-­century literary scholars have rediscovered and prioritized. The consciousness promoted by theorists of their material practice and product becomes in this constellation just what it was for Hume and Beattie at different and distant moments: a way of stabilizing the mood of epistemological doubt their work helped generate. These competing philosophical formations are related by the interest of their authors in writing as something that can be presented as given even as we comprehend how it works, and by their participation in making a world one can touch without necessarily knowing how to shape.

Hume on Reading Writing and reading serve Hume as important models of how perception works. Hume inherited his view of language from Locke, who declared words “empty sounds” to which we consent meaning, and described as purely voluntary the imposition “whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea.”8 Locke, to the ridicule of his critics ever since, from Swift to de Man, deemed this a messy process, with the autonomy of the sound or mark compromising the perfect communication of thought regardless whether this happened in speech or writing. Hume, however, attributes a more positive role to writing as that which confounds the theoretical purity of ideas. Dividing up “all the perceptions of the human mind” into “IMPRESSIONS” and “IDEAS” in the opening sentence of the first book of Treatise, and drawing on his readers’ association of “IMPRESSION” with the technology of print, Hume suggests that the material quality of the “impression” has a special significance. The material evidence of these italicized words having been impressed more forcefully than others into the page—­an observation confirmed



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in the definition that follows, of impressions as the “livelier” and “more forceful” category of perception—­allows Hume to employ the physicality of his own text to illustrate the case he wants to make: By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion. (7) In contrast to Locke, Hume cultivates a definition of language as having a physical incarnation that can be seen and felt and will cause visceral responses independent of the ideas it generates. With his opening gambit, Hume acknowledges the fact that his reader is a reader, holding a particular edition of a book, and subject to a socially defined set of skills and procedures, rather than part of the circle of friends Locke imagines as his first audience. For John Sitter, it is this isolation behind the screen of print that makes Hume typical as a mid-­eighteenth-­century author.9 This print-­mediated setting is central to Hume’s argument to come, which concerns the more abstract question of how it is that impressions generate ideas. Locke had suggested that in the realm of language this happens arbitrarily and with various degree of success according to our agreement about their meaning. For Hume, however, the relation between written forms and the understanding they produce helps to explain a relationship between impressions and ideas that is indirect but nonetheless causal. His argument that impressions are not organically related to ideas remains counterintuitive when it comes to most fields of perception. It is difficult to believe that the taste I have of the pineapple is not absolutely related to the impression I have when eating it, or that the pen I hold does not correspond absolutely to the idea it produces in me of a pen. In connection to writing, however, it is easier to see that words physically unrelated to the ideas and the sounds they represent play an important physical role in producing these ideas. While the idea that the “reference of the idea to an object . . . ​[is] an extraneous denomination, of which it itself bears no mark or character” is hard to accept in the case of most organic matter, it is generally accepted to be the case of the relation of writing to the images and experiences it generates (18). And this disconnection, between a written sign and its object, is of course even stronger in the case of print, where not even a tremble of the hand disturbs the non-­relation, say, between an arrangement of letters and their description of a tragic event.

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The reading of published writing works, then, as an example of the complex causality Hume ascribes to everyday experience because it models the way that all perceptions stand at one remove from the thing itself. For most, complains Hume, “those very sensations, which enter by the eye or the ear, are with them the true objects, nor can they readily conceive that this pen or paper, which is immediately perceiv’d, represents another, which is different from, but resembling it” (134). By drawing attention to “this paper,” Hume invites readers to think of themselves having already mastered a complex distinction between the sign and its referent. Even the terms of Hume’s complaint conjure up the dynamic and ungraspable relationship between the words, “this paper,” the printed paper that the reader holds, and the paper on which he once wrote. For the reader, this point is a matter of perceptual as well as rational realization. References to “the paper, on which I write at present,” illustrate the fact that the environment Hume shares with his reader is not available to sense perception (127). With them, Hume enlists as evidence of the case he is making the promiscuous correspondence between what we actually see (the words, “this paper”), the paper to which these words refer (which differs from reader to reader and from author to reader), and the coherent and consensual ideas of paper formed in spite of this confusion. Acknowledging writing in its elusive physicality enables Hume to put it to work as the perfect analogy for the way that all impressions correspond to, but are not identical with, ideas. In this new constellation, pineapples and pens can be shown to correspond in their reality as loosely, but also as concretely, as typeset to images and arguments. Hume goes on in the Treatise to use reading several times to describe the unavailability of the world to pure perception. He holds this to be the case, for instance, of space and time, which on his account are just as murky as perceptions as they are as ideas. In order to illustrate this, Hume advises readers to “put a spot of ink upon paper, fix [their] eye upon that spot, and retire to such a distance, that, at last [they] lose sight of it; ‘tis plain, that the moment before it vanish’d the image or impression was perfectly indivisible” (24). Shortly afterward, Hume reverses the point, inviting readers to retire to such a distance, that the spot becomes altogether invisible; you will find, that upon your return and nearer approach the spot first becomes visible by short intervals; and afterwards becomes always visible; and afterwards acquires only a new force in its colouring without augmenting its bulk; and afterwards, when it has encreas’d to such a degree as to be really extended, ‘tis still difficult



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for the imagination to break it into its component parts, because of the uneasiness it finds in the conception of such a minute object as a single point. (32) In context, these examples contribute to the case Hume is mounting for the fact that both our perception and understanding break down into infinity at a certain point, launching us into a realm beyond time and space and thus failing to provide any absolute understanding of the world. But even in the midst of this skeptical argument, the physical reality of reading enters through these examples as an anticipation of Hume’s more constructive, lifelong role as an advocate of the socialization that occurs through print. Spots of ink on paper cohere into letters and dissolve back into patterns of ink as they slide out of focus. Our limited perception of time and space also highlights our physically limited, but finely tuned, capacity to read words on the page. This captures what may be described as Hume’s central argument as a social philosopher, which is that it is only “reading” in its wider sense that renders the world habitable. If reading is understood as a sort of homing-­in, a tuning of the mind to the information it wants to decipher, then it is reading that Hume links to every routine activity. Reading a room that we enter, or a noise that we hear involves the same training and the same suppression of unnecessary information requisite to reading pen-­strokes on the page. Writing, for instance, contains “a certain order by which the lines run along from one point to another, that they may produce the entire impression of a curve or right line; but this order is perfectly unknown, and nothing is observ’d but the united appearance” (41). The practical comprehension of pen strokes or typeset requires that we learn to sideline such detail, cultivating an attitude to writing akin to that at work in our general comprehension of all information. Hume applies this argument in calculated tones of self-­deprecation to the larger level of his own philosophical text, anticipating the way in which it will make its way into the lives of readers only because of their efficient “carelessness” toward its more contentious claims. He trusts his readers to “read” the Treatise’s argument with the same efficiency they read its print, pointing out in advance that “Carelessness and in-­attention alone can afford us any remedy [to skeptical doubt].” “For this reason” argues Hume provocatively, “I rely entirely upon them; and take it for granted, whatever may be the reader’s opinion at this present moment, that an hour hence he will be persuaded there is both an external and internal world” (144). This framing of philosophy as a form of reading partitioned off from everyday experience is not without rewards for Hume. The example of careless reading draws attention to a sloppy,

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habitual relation to the world that is nonetheless highly effective, perhaps never more so than in the sophisticated operation of interpreting a piece of writing. The receipt of a letter, for instance, becomes an example of the way readers form complex ideas as a result of their ability to process objectively incoherent impressions: I receive a letter, which upon opening it I perceive by the hand-­ writing and subscription to have come from a friend, who says he is two hundred leagues distant. ‘Tis evident I can never account for this phenomenon, conformable to my experience in other instances, without spreading out in my mind the whole sea and continent between us, and supposing the effects and continu’d existence of posts and ferries, according to my Memory and observation. To consider these phenomena of the porter and letter in a certain light, they are contradictions to common experience, and may be regarded as objections to those maxims, which we form concerning the connexions of causes and effects. (133) In order to get the most out of his friend’s letter, Hume must forget the technologies by which it has made its way to his study; he must dismiss the possibility that the friend has not in fact written it, and he must minimize his awareness of the time that has lapsed since it was written and the things that may have occurred to change the truth of the letter in this time. “The letter writer,” argues Bruce Redford, is “a magician-­actor who works on his audience by sustaining the illusion of physical presence. Consequently the truest letter, we might say, is the most feigning.”10 This does not mean that there is nothing objectively true about the letter—­it simply suggests that the rational reader works hard to forget the material details of writing as he or she reaches out to grasp the letter’s objectivity as communication. While Hume seems to be shaving away at the substance of material life with such arguments, reinscribing, as Christensen puts it, “the disturbing within the customary,” he returns frequently in the Treatise to the affirmative case for “reading” as an activity that vindicates our practical intelligence in relation to the disorientating, material here-­and-­now of the letter.11 He uses this dynamic to great effect, for example in his “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). Reading, rather than listening to music or viewing art, serves as Hume’s chief example in what seems at first to be described as a rather fuzzy activity of discernment. The essay begins with an impasse: cognitive knowledge of the external world, while theoretically possible, is unverifiable, and judgments of



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taste (or impressions), while theoretically verified by definition of their subjective nature, can never attain the status of a standard. But Hume finds a way around this impasse by again suggesting that in practice, reading delivers all kinds of objects of taste on which we agree. His examples of judgments of taste refer, somewhat unconventionally in the terms of aesthetic discourse, to the way readers judge the kinds of literature circulating in the commercial realm: “whoever would assert an equality of genius and eloquence betwixt Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a molehill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.”12 These comparisons involve lining up Ogilby, the cartographer whose verse translation of Aesop made his reputation as a bad poet, with Milton, whose work was widely available in eighteenth-­century editions, and Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Progress was an early bestseller, with Addison, whose periodical essays were familiar to most readers through the highly popular Spectator. Taste, Hume seems to suggest, involves looking at the stuff in your hands. Hume’s explicit reference to essays as articles of taste brings his own essay into view, presenting readers with a text that must strike them either in the manner of Bunyan or Addison; the essay must become an occasion of popular agreement or must recede, like Bunyan’s religious writings, to a less prominent place in the fashionable public sphere. Rather than being simply a description of the standard of the taste, the essay asserts its own presence as a litmus test for the kind of reading it defends. Looking more closely at the conventions of writing itself, Hume suggests, will only illuminate the unreliability of perception. But this concession allows Hume to deliver the here-­and-­now of his own text into the reader’s lap with a certain aplomb, securing himself against her failure to appreciate it by suggesting that its legibility depends on the ongoing work of discernment rather than its innate quality. Conviction about texts arises in Hume’s final account from reading as a convention that requires training and focus and a calculated engagement with the materiality of the written. Hume has attracted the ill-­will of his critics because of the way he uses this logic to set up a test of good judgment without risk to himself. A reader who has taste will like his essay, while one who doesn’t like it is simply not engaging well enough with it: this is a trap that shares its structure with the one designed by the tailors in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where it is only the child who can’t ‘read’ the social transcript who escapes the pressure of good taste. Judgments like Christensen’s are warranted: “Hume’s work can be effectively opposed only if it is regarded

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not as a series of propositions but as a literary practice aimed at attaining a reputation exempt from contingency.”13 Yet the risk Hume takes by making his own writing visible as the object lesson in his theoretical argument is real enough in drawing attention to words in their social reality, making books culturally familiar as media rather than invisible instruments for the transmission of ideology. Despite the case he makes for the importance of forgetting the strokes of the pen and the physical history of the letter in arriving at their content, Hume brings his own books into focus as something to be encountered in exactly these material terms, as evidence of a process graspable in its material and even economic complexity. If Hume imagines his reader being able to suspend such knowledge at the end of the day, when she lapses into the habits of taking the world for granted, it is only after having first encouraged her to visualize language in terms of the full range of material practices that deliver it to her. These practices involve, in the examples we’ve seen Hume using, the physicality of the pen strokes and the force of the printer’s block, the institution of the post office and transport as a way of moving writing around, and the forms of education and training that support literary preference. Hume invokes, in other words, an eighteenth-­ century version of the mediated setting Gitelman and other media theorists describe for the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. This picture makes writing something more than materiality. Through writing, Hume suggests, social and institutional arrangements take shape on the page, and they can be discovered there by the reader attendant to her own preferences and actions as a handler of paper.

Beattie on Paper Beattie’s purpose in drawing his reader’s attention toward writing appears much more straightforward. His Essay sets out to defend the commonsense, defined from the outset as that which “acts on our will, whenever its object is present, according to an established law” and which, doing so in the same way for the majority of people, may be called common (45). Beattie prides himself on achieving this sensibility for his writing, first of all, though his prose, which he keeps bare of all but the minimal degree of metaphor, and free of the ambiguity he dislikes in Hume’s writing. In his diary, he reports proudly on the fact that “Burke spoke of the style of the Essay on Truth in the highest terms of approbation, and gave it such point of preference [over Hume], in point of variety, harmony, force and ease, as must have flattered the



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most exorbitant of vanity.”14 Despite the widely acknowledged superficiality of Beattie’s argument, even his critics tended to testify to the accessibility of his prose. Joseph Priestley’s 1774 response to the Essay characterizes it as well meaning and clearly written despite its general shallowness.15 Kant offers perhaps the most compelling evidence of the way Beattie was greeted by other philosophers. Writing in the “Prologemena and Metaphysical Foundation of Natural ­Science,” Kant describes Beattie’s argument as “nothing better than an appeal to the verdict of the multitude; a clamour before which the philosopher blushes, and the popular writing scornfully triumphs.”16 At the same time it is likely that Kant was entirely indebted to the German translation of Beattie’s work for his first, and perhaps his only, exposure to Hume, whose argument was delivered in lucid enough form by Beattie for Kant to read it sympathetically.17 Prose, then, was one instrument in the battle in which Beattie engaged with Hume, and perhaps the only one with which he was acknowledged to have made the world seem most accessible. But Beattie’s critique of skeptical philosophy as polluted with metaphor and productive of “confusion of thought, and indiscretion of comprehension” did not target Hume alone (19). In his typically clear terms, he also takes aim at Locke, indicting him for using language originally intended to “express the qualities of matter” to describe the soul. Above all, argues Beattie, Locke’s making it a “favourite” maxim to describe the human soul as a tabula rasa “betrays our great modern into several mistakes”: The human soul, when it begins to think, is not extended, nor inert, nor of a white colour, nor incapable of energy, nor wholly unfurnished with ideas . . . ​nor as susceptible of any one impression or character as of any another. In what respect then does the human soul resemble a piece of white paper. (158) It seems from this attack that Beattie might refrain from using the image of paper himself. But in fact the critique helps to signpost Beattie’s other campaign to make his texts appear self-­evident, which involved his references to paper as metonymic, congruent with the clarity of his prose, and supportive of his restoring language to its role as an “expression of matter.” Paper comes to hand in this capacity as Beattie’s favorite illustration of the objective existence of matter in the world: Thus, I just now see this paper, which I call the external object: I turn away, or shut my eyes, and then I see it no longer, but I still

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believe it to exist; though buried an hundred fathoms deep in the earth, or left in an uninhabited land, its existence would be as real, as if it were gazed at by a thousand men. (272) Beattie’s example is clearly awkward: by the mid-­eighteenth century, print was making it likely that a thousand men could gaze on a daily basis at the same text without testifying to the existence of any single page. There is also nothing certain about the materiality of buried paper. In fact, given the close association of paper in the eighteenth-­century with recycled rags, which were in turn associated closely with plants that grow in and return unheeded to the earth, the terms of his example could not be less fortunate. But Beattie takes the risk of introducing paper in its materiality because it allows him to index something that his reader immediately perceives, and thus to reinforce the function of his prose as no more than a labelling of the world to which it is attached. Once referenced, paper, however uneasy its substance, presents itself to sight. In this spirit, Beattie wishes ardently that all prose had the material integrity of the paper on which it was printed. When he charges Hume’s readers with supporting his conclusions only because they are “printed on a good paper and with an elegant type,” he is objecting to the fact that flighty prose like Hume’s should be allowed to stand on such socially sanctified ground. The point here is not materiality proper, because good paper and elegant type function as social hieroglyphs. But Beattie fantasizes about Hume’s words being reduced to their real materiality, as a result of which their appearance of respectability would fall away and they would be handled “like counterfeit bank-­bills,” rejected at the bank and by a paper-­maker, who would “allow me more handsomely for a parcel of rags” (326). Beattie wants prose and its materiality to line up and is offended by the idea that they don’t in Hume’s case, where insubstantial texts hide behind the deceptively solid weight of expensive paper and binding. In Beattie’s mind, the alignment of prose with paper was designed to illustrate the foundations of a reality that just wouldn’t go away, even from skeptical discourse; to identify Hume’s argument as out-­of-­step with the material residue of its transmission. At another point he makes the same move, turning to paper to reassure his readers of the evidence of memory, promising “that I dined to-­day, and was in bed last night, is as certain to me, as that at present I see the colour of this paper” (92). Yet here the effect backfired, for invoking the colour of the paper before him as a quality of which he can be absolutely certain rendered Beattie vulnerable to public ridicule. In 1765 Kames had used paper to describe what happens when a sheet of paper thought to be white is



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compared to one of purer white. The experiment compels us to acknowledge, he argues, “that our emotions have an influence even on our eye-­sight.”18 Thus in his review of Beattie’s Essay, Priestley points out the mistake of Beattie’s example: of this [paper] he makes a great parade, as of some very serious business; but I shall not argue the matter seriously with him, because I take it for granted he has seen optical experiments, and therefore cannot possibly differ from me except in words. I shall only observe with respect to the subject, that the vulgar are easily brought to acknowledge their mistake, and never fail to express their surprise, as at a real discovery . . . ​when they are shown pieces of white paper assuming all the colours of the rainbow by means of a prism, without any real change in the paper.19 Priestley attests to the fact that paper was widely associated with optical uncertainty and that in using it Beattie problematizes his own gesture of exemplification. Beattie’s other examples of paper as an object that will remain in objective existence “a hundred fathoms under the earth” and of paper as an object that will never pass muster as a counterfeit banknote, are equally problematic. Both cases conjure-­up the problems of paper as a form of currency that was widely perceived in the 1770s to lack the permanency and intrinsic value of the signs it was being called on to represent in the realms of literature and money.20

Hume and Beattie on Books When Beattie references print, his object-­lesson becomes even less self-­evident. His Essay reworks a scene from Hume’s Treatise that asks readers to imagine the arrangement of books and papers in Hume’s chamber. Just before receiving and reading a friend’s letter, Hume returns to his room after an absence and finds that his “books and papers present themselves in the same uniform manner, and change not upon account of any interruption in my seeing or perceiving them” (194–­95). From this we infer that they have an external existence and a form that endures even without witness. But Hume goes on to note that the fire in his room has changed in his absence and the letter he is about to receive presents no such picture of its own physical continuity. Hume’s point, in which his own papers become chief objects of suspicion, is that our belief

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that the papers in our hands and on our shelves haven’t rearranged themselves is no more than convention. Even though we don’t generally hold this to be the case, papers, books, and words on a page could conceivably rearrange themselves without our registering it; and the chances of them doing so as manuscripts are transformed into print are high. This, as we see shortly, is a point of enormous significance for Hume as a published author who described the Treatise as writing consisting of “loose bits of paper” and as “many a quire of paper” while confronting what he saw as its catastrophic mutation into the public realm.21 Beattie’s version of the same scene reverses the perceptible events: “I left my chamber an hour ago, and now at my return find a book on the table, the size and binding, and contents of which are so remarkable, that I am certain it was not here when I went out, and that I never saw it before” (156). Beattie then imagines himself investigating the appearance of the book by asking his porter if there have been any visitors and considering whether the book might not have arrived through the chimney. Once these possibilities are ruled out, he concludes that a miracle must have taken place. Whereas Hume has invoked the appearance books give of being stable entities in order to point out that this belief is a form of fiction—­if we have no guarantee of our desk being the same desk from one moment to the next, we have even less guarantee of the words between the covers of a book being the same from one incarnation to the next—­Beattie invokes the appearance of books as magical agents in order to argue that even here a divine explanation is more likely than a straight absence of causality. For most eighteenth-­century readers, Hume’s case is strengthened in its association with print as something that does conceivably come and go unheeded before one’s eyes, while Beattie’s introduction of texts as objects that follow logical trajectories only complicates his case for common sense. As we saw in the case of it-­narratives, the printing and the circulation of printed papers easily appeared to eighteenth-­century readers as a random process, endowing papers with life at junctures where they were unchecked by and excessive to authorial intention. This idea of print as something of a miracle is reflected unwittingly in Beattie’s image of the writer’s chamber as a place where books appear without apparent explanation, escaping all known forms of causality. Beattie has frequently to work against the grain of this popular suspicion of print merchandise in order to claim books as illustrations of causal logic. His argument for the trustworthiness of memory gets played out, for instance, problematically in relation to reading:



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Some months ago I read The Treatise of Human Nature, and have at present a pretty clear remembrance of its contents; but I shall probably forget the greater part of it in a short time. When this happens, I ought not, according to Mr. Hume’s theory, to believe that I ever read it. As long, however, as my faculties remain unimpaired, I fear I shall hardly be able to bring myself to this pitch of scepticism. No, no: I shall ever have good reason to remember I read that book, however imperfect my remembrance may be, and however little ground I may have to congratulate myself upon acquaintance with it. (95) The cheek of this example wins Beattie some points, allowing him to imagine what it might mean to take seriously Hume’s suggestion that reading involves a species of carelessness, but it also introduces an element of uncertainty to his logic. While we may want to say with certainty that we did all kinds of things we can’t remember doing, reading is hardly of the same order as sleeping or eating in this regard. One of the main traits of reading as an activity is that it leaves no physical trace behind: books are not marked in obvious ways by their consumption and even when their pages become torn, stained, or dog-­ eared, their contents remain replete and unmarked by their consumption. An eighteenth-­century audience, newly conscious of the occurrence of reading as a purely entertaining activity, would have found it all the more questionable whether reading a book that one doesn’t remember counts as an activity as all, let alone one in which memory can be discounted in favor of fact. Beattie’s disingenuous treatment of print and paper as self-­evident objects puts him at odds with a more skeptical reader but it does pick-­up and carry through Hume’s anxiety about the role of style and appearance in shaping readers’ responses to printed texts. “When I am convinc’d of any principle,” argued Hume of philosophy, “ ’tis only an idea that strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence” (72). Hume has little theoretical investment in the causality Beattie deems irrefutable: “The true question,” he states, “is whether every object, which begins to exist, must owe its existence to a cause; and this I assert neither to be intuitively nor demonstratively certain” (49). Yet, when it comes to his own practice as an author, Hume experiences the trials of publishing in harsh terms precisely because of the way errors crop up, seemingly without cause, in published editions of his work. His long correspondence with his publisher William Strahan, beginning in the 1750s when new editions of his

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philosophical writings appeared, and ending on his deathbed in 1776 (from which he writes to suggest a few last changes to his philosophical pieces), communicates the frustration, sometimes amounting to despair, that haunted Hume as an editor who failed to control the physicality of writing. Without blaming Strahan directly, Hume routinely instructs him to amend errors in printing and remedy mistakes in his work: There are only two Errata which are material, those on pg 455 and 459, where your Compositor has made me say the direct contrary to my meaning. I know, that such Mistakes are altogether unavoidable; but yet, if it were not too much Trouble, I could wish, that they were corrected with the Pen, before publication.22 Successive letters from Hume show that he found receiving his works in print an unusually unpleasant experience, accompanied by what he describes in one letter as a feeling of “disgust” at their appearance.23 In this mood, Hume took editing very seriously, characterizing himself as the only author alive to care so much about how his works looked after their first publication, and remarking “this power, which Printing gives us, of continually improving and correcting our works in successive Editions..[as] the chief Advantage of that Art.”24 Only in 1772 does he finally declare himself pleased with the newest editions of his essays and history, priding himself specifically on their paper and print and the lack of errors they display rather than on their newly adumbrated content.25 For someone who had described reading as a productive form of inattention, and who had emphasized the impossibility of referencing “this paper” in print, Hume’s investment in the style and presentation of his own words is perhaps surprising. On the other hand, it captures well the spirit of frustration in which he felt the implications of post and print as processes that really did intervene in his writing process. Overcoming the accidents of mediation—­ for it is clear that, while Hume often vents his frustration on Strahan and his compositors, he sees print as a technology that leaves chance a large role to play—­requires what Hume himself characterizes as a fanatical form of editorial vigilance. But it also prompts his feeling that, in the end, authors do not truly oversee their work. In 1773, Hume describes “that abominable edition [of the Treatise]” as “one cause why I have thrown aside my Pen forever.”26 This attitude recalls Hume’s earlier point that even books and papers that appear constant in their spatial relation can be suspected of having mutated in one’s absence. These accounts of books moving independently thus converge in terms of



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Hume and Beattie’s biographies as writers who struggled to achieve different kinds of control over their published work. In 1776, just as Hume was laying even his editorial pen aside for ever, Beattie travelled from Scotland to London to oversee the reception of his Essay and to secure for himself a literary pension from the King. As the beneficiary of his text’s surprising success, Beattie had every reason to be more enthusiastic than Hume about the twists and turns that a work might take away from its author. Beattie discovered, however, that his Essay was already perceived and judged in spaces where he found no easy bodily admission. The journal Beattie kept during his time in London shows that the good reputation his book had earned brought him only indirect social rewards. Johnson, for instance, had written to Boswell, “Beattie’s book is, I believe, every day more liked, at least, I like it more, and look more often at it,” but Johnson met Beattie only irregularly during his visit.27 Under these circumstances, Beattie spent several nervous months in the city canvassing the opinions of his supporters before venturing to ask for the pension that he desired. The Essay champions simplicity and ridicules the idea of philosophy becoming a form of decorative paper and print, yet Beattie, whose health was poor and productivity limited, was forced in London to acknowledge his own work in exactly these terms, as a material extension of his consciousness over which he could claim no direct control. In 1777, a year after his time there, he approved “at the desire of his friends” an expensive quarto edition of his work. His decision to do so was incongruous with his dismissal of the men who “attend to the operations of the mind . . . ​with some metaphysical books in their hands, which they read with a resolution to admire or despise, according as the fashion or their humour directs them” (156). This decorative edition of his work was a concession to the discrepancy between words and their medium that Beattie had found so repulsive in the case of Hume’s “counterfeit” texts. By printing his own words in a form designed only to generate superficial approbation, Beattie relented both to his own financial need and to the public’s willingness to buy paper and print as a sign of more than “this paper” on which words had first been written. Thus, just as Hume’s commitment to there being no rational justification for imputing causality to the world is complicated by his desire to line up his published works in exact accordance with his thoughts, Beattie’s theoretical commitment to the self-­evidence of his own arguments is complicated by his concessions to the importance of print as a form of social influence. Beattie’s short career as a literary celebrity suggests that, whatever his disagreements with skepticism, in substance he concurred with Hume’s moderate line about reading and writing as forms of causality more convoluted, but also more

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socially productive, than the pure transmission of thought. Mediation becomes for both Hume and Beattie the line of compromise; the irrefutable corruption of thought in its materiality as writing and then as print. In Hume’s case, this compromise includes returning as an editor to a fairly simple notion of causality, and in Beattie’s, indulging the idea that philosophy is a complex species of sensation, after all. Despite their public enmity toward each other’s arguments, Hume and Beattie were forced in practice to agree that writing evades the logic of causality and to concede to what had been Hume’s theoretical point all along: that we need only think about ink and paper in order to see how dependent our ideas of necessity and causation are on custom rather than sensation, and thus to concede to their mediation being a process ultimately beyond reason.28

De Man, Derrida, and Word Processors Hume, we have seen, did not openly celebrate the unpredictable properties of writing when it came to his own publications; in fact he worried actively about print as something that could be mismanaged and might elude his command. This celebration of writing as something that could intercept or even counteract the intentions of the writer came later, and is due largely to the twentieth-­century critics who have found in Hume’s rhetorical and professional practice evidence that his skepticism was also a socially constructive, rhetorical performance. In this spirit, the literary commentary on Hume in the last years relates skepticism to post-­structuralism by suggesting that proponents of both schools acknowledge and work with elements of discourse that are extraneous to meaning. Such an approach elevates writing itself over the intentions of the author, enabling, for instance, de Man’s groundbreaking insistence that Locke, despite his expressed abhorrence of rhetoric, found himself plagued and tantalized by its presence in his Essay.29 In a similar mood, twentieth-­century readers find Hume buoyed up by the conciliatory effects of discourse despite his famously divisive points of argumentation. Once they are read in this way, both post-­structuralist and skeptical arguments appear invested in the possibility that the relationship between doubt and reassurance can be played out at the surface of the page. Rather than imagining language as having come into increasingly sharper focus in the last centuries, thereby causing other forms of certainty to recede from twentieth-­ century philosophical discourse, the twinning of post-­structuralism and skepticism suggests a prevailing complexity, evidenced in the spirit in which Hume



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and Beattie were read side by side and in the way post-structuralists have pulled forward and tugged back at the presence of the page in the reader’s hand. William Walker has observed of de Man’s critique of Locke that it “fixes the deck at the outset in order to establish a particular order in Locke’s treatment of words which enables a narration of ever mounting ethical tension, epistemological difficulty, tropological disfiguration, and linguistic uncertainty.”30 More accurate and truer to Locke’s Essay, Walker contends, would be a description of his language as persuasively figurative at some places and not so at others. His reading of Locke suggests that eighteenth-­century readers felt this oscillation. But more importantly, it suggests that de Man is also subject to it in wanting to reveal the slippery and unreliable nature of language while making it the ground for a new species of belief. In the case of Hume, I have argued that the juncture at which paper comes into focus in a text denying epistemological certainty has much in common with the juncture at which Beattie invokes the page, only to have it recede from view. Both philosophers work with the fact that the medium of print is distinct from the one of manuscript, and both use this distinction in different ways to handle—­to obfuscate, and to amplify—­the unruliness of their own texts. The consciousness of mediation is an instrument in an epistemological debate that cuts both ways, for and against the accessibility of the page in our hands to our understanding and control. Applied to the twentieth-­century case, this eighteenth-­century debate highlights the temper in which de Man and Derrida animate writing as an object of epistemological uncertainty even as they suggest new ways that writing is the most important basis for our encounter with the past. In his posthumously published essay collection, Aesthetic Ideology (1996), de Man repositions his own arguments about the excesses of rhetoric to focus specifically on the “historical, material event at the origin of the text.” This event, his editor points out, is “a material insertion whose stutter of sheerly mechanical enumeration is somewhat legible in the sentence that says what it is ‘we are ­actually saying’ here.”31 De Man is captivated, in other words, by a form of aesthetic experience embodied in writing as a physical activity that both has and does not have a “here.” What he read in 1979 as the rhetorical excess of Locke’s Essay as a piece of writing where words are always slipping away from real entities, is now celebrated as the way all writing has a real, material manifestation. De Man’s last reading of Hegel and Kant suggests that for both philosophers memory involves a form of notation or inscription that makes a material impact upon the world quite different from thought or speech. “We can

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perceive the most fleeting and imagine the wildest things without any change occurring to the surface of the world, but from the moment we memorize, we cannot do without such a trace, be it as a knot it our handkerchief, a shopping list, a table of multiplication.”32 This “actualized system of notation,” argues de Man, is what enables our relationship to the past: because of writing, a “conscious forgetting of consciousness” can occur that makes the results of even our own thoughts appear alien. This argument recalls the process Hume and Beattie reference as the drama that moves print across their desks, making books in their physicality into agents that precede their authors into the chambers of the king or “disgust” them as they arrive in new editions. De Man celebrates this kind of alienation by making it the cornerstone of aesthetic experience and assuming it as a process that must apply to philosophical writing itself. At times, this means that de Man puts a distance between the material event of the text and the cognitive experience of the reader that even the aesthetic relation cannot overcome: “the bottom line, in Kant as well as in Hegel, is the prosaic materiality of the letter and no degree of obfuscation or ideology can transform this materiality into the phenomenological cognition of aesthetic judgment.”33 Yet his domain of inscription, recognized by the editors of a recent collection of essays on de Man’s work as suggesting a “palpable horizon of the material and the real” that coincides with recent “pragmatic” scholarly turns, turns out, of course, to be less absolute than these more pragmatic scholars might wish.34 De Man does not simply repeat Beattie’s mistake of invoking the “prosaic materiality of the letter” while all the time infecting his case with a field of examples unable to provide the self evidence it requires. De Man’s project, like that of Derrida, is to show simultaneously the irreducibility of writing to anything less than material and the fact that all forms of materiality are infected by the problematic of inscription, which makes the material basis of reality like the retina: impossible to see. This problematic is best illustrated, even today, using the example that Hume and Beattie both favored. “To write down this piece of paper (contrary to saying it),” observes De Man, “is no longer deictic, no longer a gesture of pointing rightly or wrongly, no longer an example or a Beispiel, but the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace.”35 Making paper into an example of common sense, de Man argues, erases that act of forgetting on which we rely when words on paper are encountered as something more than a sign of our own intention. If we are made to remember paper, the world will make less sense, not more. Hume is right in these terms to use writing as his key example for illustrating the fact that giving too much attention to



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materiality undermines the solidity of any object. As long as the attempt to remember this forgetting is taking place, writing will always be visible only as immateriality: the words “this paper,” as Beattie discovered, will always open up more problems than they solve, illustrating, as de Man puts it, “the uncertainty of ever saying the only thing one wants to say, namely the certainty of sense perception.”36 And yet Beattie is right too, in de Man’s terms, in the impulses that direct him to the phenomenon of the sign as a site of agreement about the existence of the external world. Writing about de Man’s late turn to the materiality of writing, T. J. Clark argues that he does no more than dramatize a deeply held, and commonsensical, assumption about the nature of signs and their power: the belief that signs or statements are part of a world we know through the senses—­a world that is already “experienced,” made up of perceptions, intuitions, acts of consciousness—­onto which the sign opens, or to which its belongs, or from which its derives its ultimate substance, its actuality as audible and visual stuff.37 While de Man is well aware of the unsettling consequences of invoking paper and pen as evidence of this point, he takes what would be Beattie’s side against Hume in wanting writing to be more like the world it describes, and less a symptom of the way the world itself needs reading. De Man and Beattie both subscribe to a phenomenology that “implies not more and not less than that the process of signification, in and by itself, can be known, just as the laws of nature as well as those of convention can be made accessible to some form of knowledge.”38 De Man and Beattie appear at this juncture as participants in a tradition of philosophers’ invoking writing as an instance of the given, rather than the made. In other words, although all the texts discussed in this chapter subject writing to rational scrutiny, they also place it beyond the control of the reader and writer. In de Man’s terms, this becomes a conscious willingness to forget the consciousness that brought writing to bear on the page: The thought of material occurrence, something that occurs materially, that leaves a trace on the world, that does something to the world as such—­that notion of occurrence is not opposed in any sense to the notion of writing. But it is opposed to some extent to the notion of cognition.39

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The stance de Man describes here makes the exercise of looking closely at the mechanics and technicalities of writing compatible, not with reason or rational protest, but with the exercise of recognizing its technologies as historically determined. It is closely related to the paradox explored by it-­narratives that use a commercially viable form of reflection to promote paper’s position of non-­agentive superiority. The circuit of reflection that results in a recognition of the material world is opposed, as de Man points out, to the notion of cognition—­and certainly to cognition as an axis of human control over the given. De Man maintains, then, a double focus equivalent to the one Hume and Beattie represented for eighteenth-­century readers. On the one hand, he brings writing into view in order to argue that meaning cannot be grasped cognitively, and on the other he invites the investigation of writing in its self-­ identity, as proof of material reality. Derrida’s Paper Machine maintains this bi-­focality on a grand scale. All the essays in this collection revolve around the claim that writing on paper characterizes the distinctly modern form of human subjectivity. Writing on paper is so constitutive of the way selves have functioned over the last three hundred years, Derrida claims, that it is only now, as the primary scenes of writing become electronic, that it is possible to recognize paper as having enabled modern versions of consciousness. Casting himself as a writer whose work coincides with the late history of paper, Derrida looks back at both his own career and at modernity in general from the perspective of an electronically mediated future: What is happening to paper at present, namely what we perceive at least as a sort of ongoing decline or withdrawal, an ebb or rhythm yet unforeseeable—­that does not only remind us that paper has a history that is brief but complex, a technological or material history, a symbolic history of projection and interpretations, a history tangled up with the invention of the human body and hominization. It also reveals another necessity: we will not be able to think through or deal with or treat this retreat without general and formalized (and also deconstructive) reflection on what will have been meant . . . ​by being-­beneath, the submission or subjectedness of subjectivity in general.40 Derrida’s point is that the technologies of writing cannot be examined in their historical effects without also recognizing that these technologies determine the shape of thought itself, in all its historical and material contingency. If we



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look closely at the way we write, Derrida is saying, we will discover that our writings write us. This claim should be familiar, and not just as one that is core to the post-­structuralist project. It is also a close relative of those Hume makes when he shows that bringing writing into focus too sharply entails a skeptical erosion of our most commonsense assumptions about what it means to be human. Better, Hume warns, not to look too long at the material condition of letters or at the pages of the letters in our hand, lest we should feel too vulnerable to a world beyond our comprehension. Derrida ventures this point in an essay structured by a sweeping historical vision: paper is in abeyance as the framework in which selfhood, embodiment, and consciousness have been understood, and by turning to it now, Derrida suggests, we use the electronic selves we are becoming as a platform from which to deconstruct the paper selves of the past. His invocation of paper makes the absolutely reflexive move, from which Hume pragmatically withdraws, of suggesting that a proper view of mediation would pull the plug on all we can claim to know, but it does so at one remove, from the perspective of a new epoch where paper is no longer the medium of selfhood, and where the selves that fade historically in their “being-­beneath” are distinct from our newly digitalized selves. But Paper Machine also contains an essay on the word processor in which Derrida applies this reflexive scrutiny to the selves we are today. He could not, Derrida claims, write without his Macintosh computer. In this moment, Derrida resembles Hume as a writer who dares to explore his own practice of composition as something that becomes more alien under scrutiny. Like Hume at the point where he entertains the possibility that the printed texts in his study have mutated in his absence, Derrida imagines his own electronic writing as a “theatre of prosthesis,” returning words to us as a show we can watch.41 While all writing produces such a show, the process speeds up in the case of word processing, which “sends us back the objectivity of the text” at a new rate: “The computer installs a new place; there one is more easily projected toward the exterior, toward the spectacle, and toward the aspect of writing that is thereby wrested away from the presumed intimacy of writing, via the trajectory of making alien.”42 The impulse driving Derrida’s description of his own words as an alien form of materiality, a theatre, is a skeptical one, dedicated to exposing the promiscuity of writing as a partner to thought. It is reminiscent of Hume’s conjuring up of the possibility that his books and papers have moved in his absence from his study—­a scene which, in this light, seems strangely proleptic in a story told before the age of word processing. And yet, the confessional spirit in which Derrida draws attention to the

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electronic manufacture of the text mediating the argument we are reading is also kindred to the one deployed by Beattie against Hume’s skepticism. Here we can recall Beattie’s claim that if the books in his study have moved, it is more likely to be a miracle that moved them than the non-­sense of Hume’s world without causality. With this argument, Beattie confers a solidity upon the medium of paper, which his examples converge on as the thing in his reader’s hand. His confidence is underscored by the material here-­and-­now of a page that can be invoked: who in their right mind is to refute the existence of this page, he asks, even if he cannot view it as a product of known causes? Derrida’s gesture to the reign of the electronic text over our own thought shares with Beattie’s this playful confidence in his own communicative practice as one that leaves a physical trace behind. If the words on his page move around without his knowledge, they can nevertheless be rendered more solid in their electronic presence by becoming a point of reference in a text which is increasing likely to be read in digital form. Derrida’s heralding of the alienness of his writing becomes in this moment a display of his consciousness of the commonsense with which it will be read. Derrida’s world, finally, is a world in which the eye of common sense as well as the breath of skepticism come to rest upon the materiality of the word. We register cerebrally our “being-­beneath” the writing technology of a new age, but viscerally we are in the domain of Beattie’s Essay, with its confident invocations of its own medium as an intransient reality. My point in this chapter has been that these moods, of doubt and reassurance; of skepticism and common sense, line two sides of a single page. Reminding you of the paper on which this text is written, and the ways in which it is mediated, cannot but function as a reminder of the distance my words have travelled from my thoughts, suggesting with each keystroke the possibility of their mutation and corruption and social construction. This reference is evidence of the impossibility of my control over writing in the first place; the difference between the “this” of my page and yours. But such references also serve as reminders of the here-and-now of our shared material existence and of the future in which pages and files, not thoughts, will be discovered by future generations of readers. In this spirit, my gesture to this page can be a powerful and prophetic one; but not without signposting at the same time the limited power that writers have to shape the material world. The dynamic that might be understood as the future of any page, as the subjection of rationality and desire to other forms of material contingency, is one Hume, Beattie, Derrida, and de Man anticipate—­and to which they already resign their texts.

Chapter 4

Sermons Written on the Screen of Print

Remediation and the Trial of Dr. Dodd As the last chapter suggested, one of the things that has made paper visible in the twenty-­first century is what Derrida calls its “withdrawal” from the scenes of writing and reading.1 In place of the reality of paper, we are left, Derrida argues, with its figurative legacy. His point coincides with the case made more empirically by media theorists for the way the book and the letter “withdraw” from our lives but remain visible through remediation as newly conspicuous signs of writing, fundamental to our understanding the digital interface in terms of “mail,” “pages,” “fonts,” etc. This chapter and the next take up these insights as they explore the way remediation made people more conscious of how writing was made in the eighteenth century. Specifically, I describe two inscription technologies, manuscript and graffiti, participating in making printed texts both more and less visible in their manufacture and circulation. These next two chapters come back along different routes to the question raised in the introduction, of how a text that announces its own human and material constitution can also stimulate the idea of media autonomy. Why should a text that makes the origins of writing in human labor its subject also help suggest that media are irreducible to human agency and intention? Theorists of remediation can be usefully concrete in their answer to this question, for the phenomenon they describe involves by definition both clarification and obfuscation of technology as a historical and social process. Remediated technologies appear on pages and screens in ways that make them appear newly available as content, but they also contribute to the ongoing mystification of the medium that is being used to represent them in this way. As a description of the way representation works, remediation can also suggest a misleadingly impersonal process; one in which the development of

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media provides its users with inevitable, objectively determined glimpses of the technological process. This approach sidelines the possibility that such glimpses can be staged to provide certain effects, and motivated by local concerns, rather than the overarching desirability that each new medium appear natural. The eighteenth-­century campaigns in this chapter and the next draw attention to the handmade-­ness of texts for specific reasons, and with conservative effects. In this chapter, for instance, the point of making readers aware of writing is that it helps suggest the integrity of a cleric and distract attention from the real conditions of print publication. The consciousness of mediation in this setting is not just an effect of technology, but part of an ideological project in which the visibility of writing is enlisted to suggest that even texts without authors can have writers, and then to graph this suggestion wilfully onto the surface of the printed page. With this process in mind, I turn to a cluster of publications from 1777 that appeared as coverage of the trial of William Dodd, a clergyman famously hanged that year for forgery. Dodd was a well-­known figure in London before his crime and execution. He had graduated from Cambridge in 1749 and edited one of the century’s major anthologies, The Beauties of Shakespeare (1752), before embarking on a high-­profile clerical career. He was involved in the popular charity for “fallen” women, Magdalen House, where he led services at which “reformed” women were presented to view. In addition to running his own chapel in Bloomsbury, which was attended for a time by some of London’s most fashionable society members, Dodd published poetry, works of divinity, and the titillating novel, The Sisters, mentioned in the first chapter. For two years in the late 1760s, he was tutor to Philip Stanhope, nephew and heir to the fourth earl of Chesterfield, a position that brought him into close contact with Chesterfield and raised his own profile as a man of means. During this period, Dodd was criticized for his luxurious lifestyle and for seeking to bribe his way into a valuable living in the church. Cowper represented him as loose in morals and in manners vain, In conversation frivolous, in dress Extreme, at once rapacious and profuse; Frequent in park with lady at his side, Ambling and prattling scandal as he goes; But rare at home, and never at his books, Or with his pen, save when he scrawls a card.2



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Dodd was also satirized in Samuel Foote’s play The Cozeners (1776) as a clerk “with a cambrick handkerchief in one hand, and a diamond ring on the other”; he “waves this way, and that way; and he curtsies and he bows and he bounces.”3 Dodd’s real notoriety came, however, when he was caught for having forged a bond in the name of his old student, now the fifth earl of Chesterfield, for 4,200 pounds. The bond securing this debt had already passed muster, and Dodd was in possession of the money, when suspicion was aroused about the authenticity of the document: After the money had been obtained, and deposited, Mr. Manly, who acted as attorney for Mr. Fletcher, observed upon the bond a very remarkable blot; there was no particular effect I believe in this blot, it was in the letter e, in the word seven . . . ​Mr. Manly, seeing this, it struck him with something singular; he spoke to Mr. Fletcher about it, and told him that this bond had a very odd blot in it; there were some strokes above and below the bond, that had a very singular appearance; one cannot very well tell, but they looked to be done with a pen; there are some scratches as if it was done, or attempted to be done on purpose.4 As these notes from the trial suggest, one effect of the investigation was that attention fell quite sharply on the question of where Dodd’s pen had been. This was not just because his crime had been one of forgery. Dodd quickly admitted to having forged the bond and so there was no pressure on prosecutors to prove this. Rather, writing came into focus in Dodd’s case because his character as an author and a cleric was up for discussion, and a more general assessment of his professional sincerity was involved in deciding his fate. Both camps in the Dodd trial took note of his career as a writer. His supporters claimed that he was a man of integrity who had worked hard and generally lived up to the doctrines he’d delivered in the pulpit and his theological works. For his detractors, however, his crime made all he had ever written into a form of forgery. An account of his life, written while he was still on trial, includes excerpts from his earliest poetical works and his sermons and claims to “show, in opposition to many groundless stories, that his life had not been wholly spent in idleness and dissipation.”5 Another account of Dodd’s death, by the Newgate ordinary the Rev. John Villette, describes him working in his last weeks of life to revise and improve a book of devotions for the use of prisoners, and includes a letter in which his recommendations were written.6 His Thoughts in Prison (1777), a long and derivative poem, published as a

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curiosity rather than a work of literary merit, is a series of meditations whose material existence accounts for each week of his imprisonment after the initial verdict had been passed. Even though Dodd was on trial as a clergyman, in many ways it was his life as a writer that was being scrutinized by professional writers, diarists, and other clergymen with literary ambitions, and by a reading public implicated in one of the biggest media sensations of the decade. In this atmosphere, the generic or moral categories that might have made his writing discernable to a pious audience were overturned as writing itself became evidence of character. The proliferation of writing about Dodd went far beyond the presentation of what he was actually penning in his cell. Most famously, Samuel Johnson stepped in to write letters and a sermon in his name, adding to the volume of writing being circulated as the work of Dodd.7 New editions of his older works, accounts of his life, and collections aided the rapid circulation of his name. According to Walpole, “every unfavourable anecdote of his life was published.”8 The effect, as one nineteenth-­century biographer puts it, was a “flurry” that “has in it something almost lurid.”9 Although Dodd’s status as a writer was being questioned, writing about him was being produced at a rate that blurred any orthodox approach to his work. The sermon he was said to have written in prison, for instance, and which so many were reading, was thoroughly reframed as a novelty on sale to the public through the popular press. Strangely, just as this output of printed material concerning Dodd became notable, the quality and effect of his handwriting received a great deal of attention. A new kind of virtual logic made it possible that the sermon written for him by Johnson could be represented as a handwritten document found in his cell, resonant with descriptions of the pen-­work involved in the fatal bond. Witnesses testified to Dodd’s writing having been widely known in the town, drawing attention to the scandalous fact that Dodd was on trial as a gentleman. Various pieces of writing said to have been found in Dodd’s cell at the time of his death, as well as the sermon he had delivered on the eve of his execution to his fellow inmates, were appended to accounts of his life and trial.10 Letters imagined written by him were received as evidence of the hand that had sinned now being all too eager to repent; 23,000 signatures were collected as part of one record-­breaking petition designed to restore to Dodd the credibility his forgery had lost him. Efforts were made to reclaim the bond as Dodd’s personal property and to emphasize that it had now been canceled.11 And, much to the outrage of his supporters, his personal effects were sold before the final hearing of his case, resulting in “the most confidential and



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secret letters of his cabinet . . . ​(being) exposed to general view, and rendered subjects of illiberal animadversion.”12 For most of those following the case, there were no actual examples of Dodd’s handwriting to be seen. But the eyes of his readers were trained on the script evoked as evidence of his virtue as a sincere and industrious clergyman: one fan, visiting his cell at Newgate after his death, the cell having been preserved as a tourist attraction, reports on kissing his desk and inkstand.13 The image of Dodd’s handwriting drew attention away from the promiscuous and highly impersonal screen of print on which these accounts were circulating, on which his looseness and corruption had come to light, and through which his career as an author had taken shape. This, at least, is the argument of this chapter, which is not just about Dodd’s trial, but about a range of texts in which the integrity of some of the century’s most widely exposed and commercially ambulant religious writing was settled at the surface of the page. In making this case for the appearance of sermons in particular, I have in mind the way eighteenth-­century cultures of professional authorship and reading for entertainment helped keep sermons on the move as highly popular reading material throughout the century.14 Sermons acquired a new aspect in this setting as potentially market-­driven and instrumentally written productions. Even as public suspicion about their genesis and sincerity was aroused, however, they were invested as surfaces and objects of meaning; not only as works authorized by the reputation of their authors or their religious content, but by the character they acquired as printed objects, souvenirs, and private property. This idea goes against the grain of the general understanding that, as print swept away more material ways of classifying and understanding courtly letters, immaterial ways of understanding the authority of texts came to ­dominate the classification of texts. It is widely understood, for instance, that the modern conventions of authorship, professionalism, and authority arose once documents ceased to be physically connected to the person who wrote them. The history of print in this sense is a history of our finding methods to secure the authenticity of writing that do not rely on the specificity of its medium.15 This account of print resonates in some respects with what I have to say about commercially circulating sermons as evidence of the vitality print introduced to a traditionally defined sphere of writing, and of the turmoil this created for those trying to work out how to read religious writing under these new conditions. Once Dodd was on trial, his sermons were distributed as curios, publishers’ merchandise, and evidence of his character, rather than as spiritual advice. Under these conditions, his readers had many ways of appraising such

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work, the range of which is suggested in the scramble of opinions about his merit. Some of these involved modern techniques of sorting writing according to immaterial categories, namely the way Dodd’s writings were being reclassified in their printed incarnation as either literature or theology or the work of a single, scandalous author. But these crucially immaterial strategies for making words into literature or theology only came fully into play in later decades. In the 1760s and ‘70s when Dodd was writing, readers and authors were also ­experimenting with alternative ways to secure the identity of a piece of writing. The case I will make for the importance of handwriting as visible to readers of popular religious material in print is quite specific to these decades, before the professions of literature and the clergy were fully distinguishable as careers or disciplines. In this climate of vague and often productive confusion over the identity of pieces of writing, amplified by the media event of Dodd’s trial, readers appeared interested in conceptualizing the cleric’s page as a way to pin down the sincerity of its author. This approach to the published writing of clerics can be connected to the fact that real sermons stood out as handwritten objects against the backdrop of print. But it was also used to appraise printed texts, suggesting that people were keen to prove and secure the bodily commitment of preachers as writers at just the point where writing had ceased to provide such an index to the body. Counterintuitive as this may seem, it is this possibility I want to explore, and through which the paradox by which Dodd could be made to seem a hand-­writer in print begins to make sense. This chapter and the next therefore have much less to do with the realities of handwriting than with the theoretical ways in which the relationship between two media—­in this case handwriting and print—came to be understood. For a long time, the accepted view of print capitalism has been that it trumped and replaced manuscript culture. More recently, however, studies in the history of the book have introduced various perspectives from which it appears that manuscript culture actually thrived and acquired new meaning once print was established. Peter Stallybrass has pointed out that printed forms actually introduce through blanks to be filled in the need for unprecedented amounts of handwriting.16 Tamara Thornton, following Michael Warner, has argued that print and its perceived disassociation from the physical process of its execution: endowed handwriting with a unique set of cultural meanings and function. For if print was defined by its disassociation from the hand, the body, and the corporeal individual that created it, then



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handwritten matter necessarily referred back to the hand, the body, and the individual in new ways.17 Thornton’s point can be drawn out in relation to the writing and representation of actual sermons. But the idea of remediation also signposts an alternative route by which literary critics can approach texts, not only as objective forms that come to light as being written either by hand or printed, but as screens on which these operations are staged. The consciousness of mediation is part of a process that both exposes and obfuscates writing as a human process. In these terms, the idea that Dodd and many fellow clerics were being positioned as writers of the hand need not take us beyond the world of print; tracking the ways clerics’ handwriting came to prominence is one way of tracking the search, not for an alternative to print, but another way of seeing it.

The Anglican Clergy (not) Writing Sermons To understand the kinds of scrutiny to which Dodd was subject as a writer and the reasons his handwriting played a part in rallying public sympathy for his case, we need first to understand the situation in which he found himself as an Anglican cleric in the 1760s and ’70s. It is widely understood that support for the Anglican clergy, if not necessarily the church, was at a low ebb at the time.18 By mid-­century, Anglican clerics were recognized by many as dissolute, lazy, and at times corrupt: “the majority fawned for preferment,” writes E. P. Thompson, “dined and joked (under sufferance) at the tables of their patrons and . . . ​were not above accepting a tip from the squire at a wedding or christening.”19 Specific forms of anticlericism included popular reaction to individual clergymen (like Dodd); public concern over issues of nonresidence and pluralism (the holding of multiple curacies); and a suspicion that the process of preferment was unfair.20 Satires of Dodd, the “Macaroni Parson,” as he was known before his arrest, were only part of a chorus of critique that targeted this corruption. In addition, clergymen such as the one described by Crabbe—­“Fiddling and fishing were his arts: at times / He alter’d sermons, and he aim’d at rhymes”—­were being ridiculed for their sedentary and unproductive lives.21 Edward Gibbon complains of the “monks” at Oxford, by whom he was educated as a teenager in 1750s, as “decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder; their days were filled by a series of uniform employment;

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the chapel and the hall, the coffee-­house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied to a long slumber.”22 Devout Anglicans worried specifically about the inability of such men to capture the imagination of the congregation in ways Methodist preachers were proving able to do. For Johnson, the problem was the overly complex and affected style of preaching country parsons still used.23 For Oliver Goldmsmith, whose “Of the English Clergy and Popular Preachers” was published in the Ladies’ Magazine, the problem was more one of presentation: their discourses from the pulpit are generally dry, methodical, and unaffecting; delivered with the most insipid calmness; insomuch, that, should the peaceful preacher lift his head over the cushion, which alone he seems to address, he might discover his audience, instead of being awakened to remorse, actually sleeping over his methodical and laboured compositions.24 These concerns about the energy and commitment of preachers were taken up in tracts suggesting practical reform. “An Essay on the Action Proper for the Pulpit” (1753) stresses how important lively preaching is to the impression a sermon leaves on congregation members: “is it possible that any of you can seriously think a whining Voice, an awkward stiffness or an unmeaning motion in the Pulpit, are the best means to recommend Christ’s religion?”25 Much of this critique focuses on the relation of the parson to the sermons delivered once, and often twice, on Sundays as well as on public holidays and religious occasions. As the most personal and theatrical part of the liturgy, sermons were an opportunity for the preacher to demonstrate his mettle as a writer and orator. But they were also a considerable effort to compose, and were very rarely written from scratch, at least not without a view to wider publication. The question of what sermons were and how they were to be judged, both as performances and as published works, thus grew more complicated and involved increasingly secular concerns over the course of the century. Dodd’s last sermon, written by Johnson, preached in Newgate, and published in sensationalist accounts of his life, is just one example of how far many sermons were drifting from orthodox church context. Then there are Sterne’s sermons, published as the Sermons of Yorick after the initial success of Tristram Shandy, decorated with a flamboyant portrait of Sterne, and sold as a fashionable item on the literary marketplace. The sale of Dodd’s and Sterne’s sermons shows that readers were increasingly willing to buy the works of a recognized celebrity author. But both cases



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also illustrate how awkward it was to apply the category of original author to the writer of sermons. Sterne’s sermons, which he had never been particularly successful at preaching, quickly proved to be much more derivative than his fiction and Dodd’s best selling sermon, as we know, was not even his own work. From an orthodox perspective, there was nothing particularly scandalous about sermons not being original works of composition. The line the church took on sermon writing emphasized the genre’s conventional form, partly as protection against the immediacy of spiritual experience, and suggested strict guidelines for composition. In Hunter’s view, which holds Sterne and Swift up as examples, behind Anglican sermons “are recognizable conventions and habits of mind, and in them is careful if undistinguished writing.”26 Proof of this spirit is an abundant literature advising young clerics to write sermons by imitating, at least for a period of tutelage, what others had written. Given that most eighteenth-­century clergymen began their careers as curates rather than as students of divinity, copying and culling the work of another clergyman was a commonplace activity.27 The clergymen of Cradock’s Village Memoirs (1774) urges his son, who hopes to be ordained, to study Taylor, Clarke, Sherlock, Warburton, and Hurd and use them as models to make his own sermons short and entertaining.28 In this case the advice is offered to a relatively privileged young man, already working as a private tutor in London. But country curates, most of whom had access to small parish libraries, were even more likely to welcome the advice.29 Anthony Moore suggests that pupils: Read the best Authors works, and those along, ‘Till by Degrees you make their Rules your own; Nor think it means sometimes to steal a Grace, Or imitate in proper Time and Place; All have not Parts on Eagle-­wing to soar, And trace out paths that ne’er were trod before; Content, with Patience to your Lot submit, And study to improve what they have writ.30 In addition to ensuring the continuity of Anglican tradition, this kind of writing practice assumed that pious texts could appropriately infect the style that young authors themselves developed as they imitated them: [One] practice, which I would recommend to young Divines, is, before they sit down to compose a sermon, to read some of the best

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authors, who have treated on the same subject; to close the books and endeavour to throw the matter into that order, which appeared most perspicuous and pleasing. Reading different authors upon the subject will give a variety to their idea; and, by writing without the books before them, the expression will at least be their own.31 A different line of advice, which sometimes also pushed the merits of imitation as a positive form of moral contagion, recommended simply delivering sermons others had written. The most famous, if somewhat glib, version of this advice comes from the widely cited Spectator 106, where Mr. Spectator suggests that country clergymen might be given “a present of all the good sermons which have been printed in English” and advised to read these from the pulpit.32 Although this position became hard to reconcile with the celebration of original composition later in the century, in 1756 Sandeman still asks quite seriously: “What person of common sense would not rather hear a sermon of Sherlock, of Secker, of Porteous, or of Blair, than the trite unconnected jargon, with which we are generally assailed by the most popular preachers in the metropolis?”33 And the fervently religious Jonas Hanway responds to inscriptions he finds in a country graveyard in a similar mood: “The peasant may say why should I not write my own poetry, as well as the curate his own sermon?” he muses, “both of us might be much better supplied by other people.”34 A 1753 handbook advises young clergymen “not to trust at first to their own compositions, but to furnish themselves with a provision of the best sermons, which learned divines of our church have published.”35 And Boswell’s closest clerical friend, William Temple, echoes unscrupulous Parson Barnabus of Joseph Andrews, who tries to “borrow” a funeral sermon from Parson Adams (“for I am this very day to preach a funeral sermon, for which I have not penned a line, though I am to have double price”) and admits he “does not look upon borrowing a good sermon sometimes of Barrow or Jeremy Taylor as a Theft.”36 In reality, most clergymen of the eighteenth century probably used a combination of these techniques, taking sections of existing sermons and imitating the canon in composing new passages to be inserted. One satirical poem of 1764 suggests “some steal a Page of Sense from Tillotson, / and then conclude divinely with their own.”37 This kind of mixing is implied in the account James Woodforde, Norfolk parson and diarist, gives of himself “making” sermons to be delivered on singular occasions. He records himself getting up in 1764 at two o’clock in the morning “to get or make a sermon for Farmer Bertelet’s funeral this afternoon” and finishing it by noon.38 The considerable effort of “making” a sermon seems to exclude the use of an existing text, but



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it admits of a whole spectrum of other possible activities, from transcribing a well respected sermon, to paraphrasing, embellishing, or excerpting existing sermons in ways that change them without making them entirely anew. In The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, a reverend who oversleeps on the morning he must preach simply calls for his own production from the previous week: “Bates, give me the sermon I preach’d last week:—­ ‘Twill do again, I’m too late to vamp it.” “Aye, says Bates, the Charge is good; but won’t you put in fresh Primings.”39 None of this was shocking to eighteenth-­century audiences. But it helps to underscore how the typical critique of poor sermonizing targeted the relation of the parson to his words, rather than his failure to produce original thought or expression. Goldsmith is explicit about this when he sums up public demand as simple: sincerity and assurance are what make a good preacher. Although he admits to these being “trite” qualities, he maintains that they are in fact the only ones that really matter.40 Notes on the assessment of applicants for preferment around this time support Goldsmith’s case, with “zeal” and “character” as well as reputation, sincerity, and general worth favored above learning or even rhetorical ability.41 Although such demands might seem “trite” in their emphasis on appearance and character over argument or education, they are actually highly difficult to satisfy, for they suggest that clergymen must be visible as sincere presenters of a canon they have inherited, not one they have made themselves. This is a context very different from the one in which sincerity was and is used as part of the Protestant tradition, as a way to promote the alignment of language with the emotional states of the individual. For Keane, this Protestant version of sincerity is a cornerstone of modernity, a concept that contains within it whole ideology of language: The idea of sincerity . . . ​seems to propose a hierarchical relation between . . . ​words and thoughts, since the thought seems to come first and thereby determines and imposes a limit on the words. The concept of sincerity thus seems to assume a clear distinction between words and thought, as parallel discourses (interior and exterior) such that they could or could not match up.42 Here sincerity involves a “metadiscourse” that suggests language is something the individual shapes and controls as an expression of interior discourse. Goldsmith’s use of the term, on the other hand, assumes no such thing. Although he may hope to bring Anglican clergy up to scratch with the Methodists as

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enthusiastic performers, he never recommends that their rewriting of texts reflect their own beliefs. In this sense, Goldsmith confirms what the author of the “Action Proper for the Pulpit” describes as the clergy’s “living habit”; an ideal striving “to enter into the genuine spirit of everything they recite or read, to feel each Passion, and to have each Idea strongly transfused into their own Minds.”43 This Anglican project of sincerity has much less to do with a private self and its governance of language through conscience than with the perceptible adherence of the self to words that already exist in the public domain. Rather than being an ideology of language in which the emphasis falls on speaking what one thinks, it becomes an ideology of language in which performers learn to think along authorized lines with the appearance of passion and intensity.

Author-­Clerics Practically speaking, this ideology of language excludes the logic of sincerity, for it suggests that people are made by the words they use. This logic is more common to religious traditions than the alternative ideal of the expressive individual. As Keane demonstrates, it is the Protestant idea that language might originate or deviate from the self that is modern. And yet the application of the term “sincerity” to Anglican use of traditional written forms—­forms that would “transfuse” themselves into the mind of the speaker—­does suggest a new fear among Anglicans in the eighteenth century that discursive practice might occur insincerely. This appears possible, Goldsmith and Johnson point out, partly because the now overly secure Anglicans are being shown up alongside the enthusiastic and plain-­speaking Methodists, which puts them under pressure to appear, if not to be, more “sincere.” More important for the argument I want to make, however, is the fact that “sincerity” and “insincerity” enter the vocabulary to describe the Anglican clergy’s relation to words at just the point where many Anglican sermons and tracts are circulating through and being written for the market. When it comes to Anglican theology itself, the modern field of insincerity—­and thus the context in which it becomes meaningful to demand sincerity of those using authorized forms of writing—­is market-­driven publication. The phenomenon of professional writers taking over the production of Anglican texts worries Goldsmith. In his Citizen of the World, an author boasts: “I have actually written last week sixteen prayers, twelve bawdy jests, and three sermons, all at the rate of sixpence.”44 “Powers of the Pen” (1766) describes the



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lowest kind of work going to “scripture merchants.” After praising the pens that have served Shakespeare, Sterne, and Voltaire, Lloyd describes sermons and divine tracts being pumped out by the dozen by the “Doctor Expositor” from his dunces, whom he enlists in the industry by declaring “Your fortunes, now, my Boys, are made”: Then from benneath his cassock drew The sable Feathers forth to View; Then thus—­“Altho’ your brains are lead, “These Quills, my Lads, will get you bread; “Scripture’s your Point—­build on that Base, “And eat the Bread of Paraphrase—­ “Perplex, read wrong, and then read right, “make dark, or you cannot make light: “Let Poets wear the Crown of Bays, “A Belly-­full surpasseth Praise.—­ “The Miracle of Loaves shall You “Exhibit to the World anew; “And of the Bible ‘twill be said, “Each Chapter is a Loaf of Bread.”45 The poem suggests somewhat humorously that writing sermons and other kinds of divine tracts has become such a mercenary exercise that sermons are almost indistinguishable as items from the food they earn. But when Lloyd wrote criticizing the Anglican clergy for their corruption and sloth he identified an underclass of hirelings whose publications propped up an unproductive clergy, creating a division of labor between those who wrote and those who spoke for the church that was central to the perceived problem of clerical insincerity.46 The obviously insincere hero of one mid-­century novel, the Adventures of the Rd. Mr. Judas Hawke (1751), is able to assume “a cushion-­ thumper’s place,” for instance, because, when it comes to sermons, “tho’ the Dog has not, or ever wou’d have, brains enough to make one, he might buy as many at an old stall for half a crown, as wou’d last his life time.”47 What was new in this scenario was not the publication and sale of sermons or scripture but the production of such works by laymen responsive to the literary market.48 In the seventeenth century, sermons were regularly printed to commemorate an event or a successful service. But until authorship itself became a profession, there was no doubt that such publications were a measure of their authors’ success in the arena of the church, not of writing as

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a skill that could merit its own publicity, or of a good argument being randomly made to provide readers with the material they wished to buy. By the late eighteenth century, however, the mercenary hack ­writer had undermined the logic of this assumption, and the idea that writing or even reading aloud a good sermon would ensure some correspondence between the performer and his text had been eroded by the new logic of writing as something routinely being produced “insincerely,” for money. This was one of the reasons it was so important in the public’s mind to work out where the motivation for a man like Dodd to write Anglican texts actually came from, and why revisiting his texts at the time of his trial can be described primarily as an assessment of their sincerity. Without the logic of the professional writer in view, there was little doubt that his religious texts had to be read as in some way congruent with his character; as having shaped it, if not as having expressed his core beliefs. With the logic of the market in view, though, his works could be read as part of a professional portfolio, produced by a writer who had chosen the words he wrote instrumentally. Dodd, along with Sterne and the other clergyman of the 1760s and ‘70s who wrote fiction, including several mentioned in preceding chapters—­Coventry, Jenner, Kidgell—­put under pressure the old idea that a good clergyman would be shaped by the words he read, spoke, and wrote because they built careers at a time when this new, insincere relationship of the professional writer to his work was clearly in evidence.49 They became part of a new tribe of clerics described by Lloyd as living “as if life’s business was to write/learned materials for a school-­boy’s kite.”50 The case of John Kidgell, introduced earlier as author of The Card, shows that such careers could become scandalous. Although he was not condemned for his novel, Kidgell met universal disapproval when he became embroiled in a highly controversial effort to discredit John Wilkes, co-­author of the “Essay of Woman,” a pornographic satire on Pope’s “Essay on Man.” While Wilkes had printed the poem for private circulation, Kidgell, in the guise of censor, nudged it into public view. His “A Genuine and Succinct Narrative of a Scandalous, Obscene, and Exceedingly Profane Libel, Entitled, An Essay on Woman” (1763) was greeted with outrage, not just because of the content of Wilke’s material, but because it proved how far Kidgell was willing to overstep his clerical role to make money.51 “The public is not at a loss to guess at your motive commencing author upon this occasion,” writes one critic: Everybody ascribes it to the same motive which sets so many pens in motion; namely a desire to levy a sum of money upon the public,



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by the common method of striking the eye by a Taking Title Page. Your Narrative is universally looked upon as a catch-­penny. How is the dignity of the cloth prophaned by such practices?52 Most agreed with this verdict, and Kidgell ended up in exile in France. If a layman deserves rebuke, Kidgell’s critic points out, “how much severer rebuke does the Clergyman deserve, who, forgetting his sacred function, descends to the lowest articles of prostitute scribblers for a little dirty gain?”53 But Kidgell’s case did not establish the rule: in the late eighteenth century it was clearly possible to be both a fiction writer and a cleric. The Sedan, an it-­narrative of 1757, defends a cleric who has been run down unfairly by bishops for having “wrote a tragedy or two . . . ​intended to enlarge the mind, and propagate virtue.” In this scenario, literary writing is presented as congruent with sermon writing, having the advantage that “poems are read and read again: sermons seldom reach further than the day they are preached on.”54 Given the presence of this kind of argumentation and his financial success in the first years of his literary pursuit, it appeared natural for Dodd to continue with his literary ambitions under the auspices of his safer profession. He is described neutrally by Boswell as “former prebendary of Brecon, and chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty; celebrated as a very popular preacher, an encourager of charitable institutions, and author of a variety of works chiefly theological.”55 It was really only by the nineteenth century that his fictional pursuits appeared at odds with his religious duties. By then, his Victorian biographer cannot imagine how his congregation members were able overlook his foppish, flirtatious 1767 “Book of Poems” and the inappropriately erotic nature of The Sisters: How the laborious curate of West Ham could issue such a production and not forfeit the favour of his faithful parishioners and the patrons of the lectureship of St. Olave’s, is a riddle only to be solved by the free temper of the age. The ecclesiastical barometer was never registered so low . . . ​six years later the Bishop of Gloucester was so delighted with the two first volumes of “Tristram Shandy,” that he took them round the fashionable world.56 In the late eighteenth century, however, the problem of credibility facing Dodd and Sterne was still one of two competing ideologies of language working together with uncertain results; one the Anglican belief in language as something that shapes its speakers, the other a modern belief that language, and writing in particular, is answerable to the internal thoughts of its author.

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The case of the Rev. John Trusler, a direct contemporary of Sterne and Dodd and partner with Dodd in one of his Bloomsbury chapels, illustrates vividly the kinds of confusion that arose when these two ideologies were put to work at the same time. After being forced to procure ordination by his father, Trusler had accepted a London curacy and became assistant to the king’s chaplain in 1761. By his own account he struggled while fulfilling these roles to find the leisure to pursue the kind of entrepreneurial writing schemes for which he felt himself better fitted: “I am convinced,” he argued, “that in making me a clergyman, my father spoilt a good layman.”57 In the end, Trusler became successful as an author and printer, publishing more than forty of his own works, including books on table manners and gardening, an almanac, editions of prayers with words italicized so as to make them easier to read aloud, two novels, a dictionary of rhymes, and an autobiography, the second part of which he repressed.58 Much of what Trusler has to say in these works is in perfect accord with the orthodox line held by the Anglican church on education: by learning to write and speak well what others have written, the curate learns to be the kind of man the church requires. Thus, his lessons in elocution or annotated books of prayer can be seen—­and were described in his own terms—­as genuine efforts to help clergy meet the standards of their establishment. The focus on performance was just what Goldsmith expected from men of sincerity. But this became more problematic when Trusler, who saw writing as his main line of professional achievement, began to package his advice on the topic as something to be sold in secular form on the literary market. Typical of his books of advice, all of which target either the clergy or the middle-­class man hoping to improve his station in life through economic or rhetorical improvement, is Trusler’s emphasis on the bootstrapping operation by which small adjustments in behavior can produce material results. This seems to have been both his personal mantra and his practice as an editor and publisher. One of his most successful projects was an edition of Chesterfield’s letters to his illegitimate son, much condensed, indexed, and cheaply produced for a middle-­class reader. While London’s elite were reading the full edition of these letters with horror at the forms of hypocrisy and dissemblance they recommend, recoiling at their privileging of superficial refinements over deeper forms of moral and religious education, Trusler’s readers were offered Principles of Politeness (1775) as a serious and practical primer in improving one’s speech, behaviour, and literacy. In his novel Modern Times, or the Adventures of Gabriel Outcast (1785), Trusler went on to explore what this lesson might look like if the church were one’s field of professional ambition. In the opening



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chapters, Outcast is characterized, like Trusler himself, as a boy who likes letters, and who finds his way into the church as an avenue for expanding his literacy. While a young man, he is employed by a clergyman “too indolent to write his own sermons” and set to work writing out stolen copy: Having purchased a pair of manuscripts, which he could not well read, my business was to transcribe them, and then to throw in a passage or two which he occasionally penned on a slip of paper, as his leisure moments from hunting, drinking, and the card table would admit. Indeed I frequently helped him out, very often adding some passages of my own; so that he would often say I should make a very good parson.59 In this capacity as amanuensis, Outcast learns to transcribe sermons, which his employer delivers as his own, and to produce the kind of language that will please a congregation. But when he goes on to become a preacher in his own right, Outcast does so without any sense of being impressed with the language he has learnt to use. Taking the “stock of sermons” he has acquired by writing for an employer, Outcast approaches his career in the church much as he would a career on Grub Street: “Being furnished with all the requisites of a modern parson, namely a few sermons, an iron gray suit, and a stock of impudence . . . ​I applied to Mr. Snuffle, in Paternoster Row, for employ.”60 As one of the priests that Mr. Snuffle pimps out at piecemeal rates to parishes and institutions, he establishes himself as a man of reputation and builds a career as a preacher, traveling to a country parish where he almost succeeds in marrying a rich heiress by introducing himself into the community as a man of high station. This semi-­autobiographical narrative confirmed the public’s worst suspicions about the clergy. On the basis of Trusler’s autobiography, Gabriel Outcast can be read as exposing conditions in the church in a fairly valiant spirit of reform. But Outcast also demonstrates that laziness and nonchalance may not be the worst qualities in a cleric; worse still are the instrumental careers of men like Trusler himself, whose energetic and creative use of the discourse he inhabits fails to become a “living habit.” Although Trusler and his character come across as effective preachers, their claim to professional success is perverted by the way both openly handle language as a thing to be used and sold, rather than “transfused” in any way into their minds. One of the most interesting things Trusler did as a printer and editor, however, and the enterprise for which he is now best known, may have worked

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to correct the disturbing impression he gave elsewhere of the clergy having adopted a purely instrumental relationship to the words they used. In 1769, ten years after having reluctantly taken orders, Trusler stumbled on a scheme that combined his literary and pecuniary interests with his efforts to make the Anglican clergy more effective. He sent circulars to every parish in England and Ireland offering for sale 150 sermons at 1 shilling each in a type designed to look like handwriting.61 By the use of these sermons, he proposed saving the clergy the trouble of study and subscription while offering them the advantage of appearing before their parishioners as the writers of an attractive hand. At first view, Trusler might seem only to encourage lazy clergymen to pass off as their own the works of other authors. But it is clear that this was not the chief effect of the sermons Trusler was selling, most of which would have been recognizable as part of an established Anglican canon. In general, Trusler quite openly acknowledges his disdain for original composition, advocating an approach to writing in which he positions himself as the compiler, not the author, of words: “My reader must consider this work . . . ​like that of a gunsmith or a watchmaker; the iron and silver is not his own, but these are the least part of that which gives the value, it lying wholly in the workmanship, and making up.”62 The trick to the sermons he has made is simply their appearing handwritten when they are not. Using a civilité type, unfashionable by the eighteenth century except in legal forms, Trusler has produced a document that must have strongly suggested to the parishioners who saw it that their clergyman was “making” his own sermons. Cowper confirms that this is the area of deception in which Trusler trades when he writes in “The Task” of him cheating the eyes of his critics: “He grinds divinity of other days / Down into modern use; transforms old print / To zig-­zag manuscript, and cheats the eyes / Of gall’ry critics by a thousand arts.”63 Trusler’s sermons were designed, in other words, to convince parishioners that their pastors were writing while leaving unsettled the issue of whether they were indicting. This raises the question of what it is that congregation members saw when they looked at a handwritten sermon. What did it mean that words appeared as a manuscript? One possibility is that it made the quality of a preacher’s handwriting visible as he walked down the isle or stood at the pulpit, and thus improved his general estimation as a man of letters. Thornton claims that this could happen “at a glance” as “a fully literature stranger could evaluate the social significance of a letter—­from a male? a female? a gentleman? a clerk—­simply by noting what hand it had been written in.”64 The idea that script suggested to eighteenth-­century readers (or viewers) the character of a writer is not far-­fetched. As a matter of quality and social status, handwriting



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was something Trusler thought hard about. His edition of Chesterfield’s letters to his son carefully extracts and condenses scattered points concerning writing: “the writing,” states Chesterfield in the original, “of a genteel plain hand of business is of much more importance than you think.” At one point, he suggests Stanhope find a writing tutor in Paris, and at another he urges him to think of handwriting as one of the areas of his appearance over which he has total command.65 In Trusler’s edition these remarks are consolidated and embellished: To write well and in a correct, and in a pleasing stile, is another part of polite education. Every man who has the use of his eyes and his right hand, can write whatever hand he pleases. Nothing is so illiberal as a school boy’s scrawl. I would not have you learn a still formal hand-­writing like that of a school-­master, but a genteel, legible and liberal hand, and to be able to write quick . . . ​language should flow from the pen, as naturally and as easily as it would flow from the mouth.66 But even if this demonstrates the attention Trusler gave to writing as an important area of appearance, the sermons he was selling were unlikely to have made their main impression as handwriting of a particular style. Seen from afar as handwritten documents, Trusler’s sermons were more likely to have had a general aura of manuscript; to have been broadly visible as offset against the realm of print and suggestive of the time a clergyman had spent at his desk. What Trusler’s fraud demonstrates most significantly is that Anglican sermons were visible as objects, and that this field of visibility was important enough that even the laziest clergymen were willing to pay to secure their sermons’ appropriate part in it. Johnson, whose approach to sermon writing was very different from Trusler’s, seems to have recognized the important appearance sermons made as manuscripts. Johnson is known to have written more than forty sermons in his lifetime—­as well as the one he wrote for Dodd—­but he never delivered these himself. Instead he sold them at 2 guineas apiece to clerics, or, in the case of his friend John Taylor, took part in a collaborative writing process for which he took no formal credit. The temper of Johnson’s work on these sermons is recorded by Boswell, who cites his opinions about sermon writing as more mechanical than other kinds of writing. In 1780, for instance, Johnson advises a young clergyman to try writing his own sermon now and again, assuring him that on the whole, the form is not demanding.67 He carries this observation through in his boast that: “the composition of a

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sermon is not very difficult . . . ​I myself have begun a sermon after dinner and sent it off by post that night.”68 So far is Johnson’s view of sermon writing from the idea of creatively inspired, individual authorship with which he is normally associated that Martha Woodmansee uses it to prove that the “author-­effect” did not extend to all regions of eighteenth-­century writing. Pointing out that Johnson was a frequent ghostwriter of and collaborator on sermons, she argues that Even as he helped to create the modern myth that genuine authorship consists in individual acts of origination, by orchestrating from behind the scenes this expose of a fraudulent attribution of it, Johnson was himself participating in a mode of writing which put this notion of authorship in question.69 What Woodmansee does not describe is the last stage in Johnson’s composition of these sermons, the one securing Johnson his removal as author from their material form, which was their transcription by the men who would deliver them into their own handwriting. Sitting for what must have been between one and two hours in Johnson’s study, the buyers of his sermons would copy them out before Johnson destroyed the original in their presence.70 There are practical explanations for this transaction. From the buyer’s perspective, it ensured the fact that his authorship of the piece would not be definitively called into question and, from Johnson’s, it ensured his anonymity. This logic shows up in the letters Johnson wrote to Dodd in his cell, where he encloses a letter to the King that he has written on Dodd’s behalf, but which he insists Dodd transcribe quickly and return to him.71 The practice also makes it possible to imagine transcription as an exercise in which the writer becomes familiar with the text at hand, as well as having some opportunity to amend it. The sermon Johnson wrote for Dodd was clearly Dodd’s own document in this sense, and contained in its final form sections Boswell’s notes make distinguishable as Dodd’s own additions. Less pragmatically, however, Johnson’s practice of diligently having the sermons he composed transcribed by other clerics also suggests that their circulation as manuscript was a significant part of their future life. In most of his writing, Johnson foresaw the future of his words quite differently, as print. Johnson’s manuscripts were famously proximate in their correctness and their legibility to print copy. His style, Alvin Kernan argues, developed in anticipation of his words being printed: although he obviously wrote by hand, he did



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so with printers and with the readers of print in mind, writing clearly and precisely so that even his handwritten statements had the aura of being set off from the flux of everyday language.72 His sermons, however, were destined to project a different impression as the script of non-­professionals. By this logic, Johnson’s willingness to write sermons casually and for other people, in conventional forms, was aided by the knowledge that these manuscripts would disappear without a trace back into that linguistic flow from which most of his writing was removed, as the material compositions of the men who bought and delivered them. Woodmansee’s point about sermons being a form to which Johnson contributed, but not as an author, becomes even stronger in light of their material transformation into sheets of handwriting intended to impress those who saw them with a sense of labour very different from the kind Johnson himself practiced as a writer for the press.

Doing Penance These are contexts in which how a cleric wrote appears to have mattered. But describing them is only one step in imaging the cultural setting in which the fact that a cleric wrote also became matter for scrutiny, with more generalized representations of handwriting providing an aura of character that print alone could not convey. This takes us into more complicated terrain, away from the materiality of handwriting, faux or learned, and back to sermons as compositions mediated by print yet legible as signs of writing by hand as an activity. The sermon that turns up in Tristram Shandy offers one example of how the logic of remediation might work in such a case. The scene in which it appears, a famous one from the second book of the novel, stages the confusion of a group of readers—­Tristram’s uncle Toby, his servant Trim, his father Walter Shandy, and the Catholic male midwife, Dr. Slop—­over the identity of an Anglican sermon that appears between the pages of a book, Stevinas, which this audience is consulting on the topic of battleships. The “found” sermon is read aloud to the party by an emotionally affected Trim, who is periodically interrupted by the opinions of his listeners. Arriving without generic or authorial indentification, the sermon’s reception at the level of the plot closely anticipates the questions a reader of Tristram Shandy will ask of the same document as it is presented as part of the novel. How did it get here? Who wrote it? How seriously can I read it? And yet, Sterne well knows, the appearance of the manuscript and the attendant mystery of its origin also highlight the difference between a handwritten and

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a printed document. Behind Yorick’s sermon stand a character and a set of reasonable, if whimsical, causes for its unruly appearance. But if the reader of Tristram Shandy is being directed to look for these same causes for the way the printed page she is reading appears in her hand, she is being deliberately and tantalizingly misled. In other words, although the appearance of a sermon within a novel raises questions akin to the one Yorick’s fictional audience ask of his sermon, the mystery of a printed document’s existence is bound to differ from that of a manuscript. The confusion over how Sterne’s published sermon should be greeted was the direct result of the successful circulation of his writing in print. “The Abuses of Conscience,” interpolated into Tristram Shandy after having been ten years in print as a pamphlet, was the first of Sterne’s publications.73 It was put in print again in 1766 as part of the second collection of the Sermons Mr. Yorick.74 In this format it became part of the industry surrounding Sterne as a literary celebrity, supported by a long list of subscribers augmenting what Sterne describes to Garrick in 1765 as “a lucrative writer’s campaign”: “Shandy sells well—­I am taxing the public with two more volumes of sermons, which will more than double the gains of Shandy.”75 Although Sterne introduces this third incarnation of “The Abuses of Conscience” by begging “pardon of those . . . ​being made to pay twice for the same thing,” he seems to revel in the potential for endless generic repackaging of the same material.76 It is difficult to read the sermon in either of its secondary manifestations, as part of the plot of a novel, or as the work of a fictional character from this novel, as anything but a story of its paragraphs’ adventures in the world of print; as an it-­narrative in which the sermon, long silenced as a text, has found its voice as an object. With this resemblance in mind, Blackwell describes the way the sermon’s “powerlessness to control its trajectory” recalls the fate of inanimate narrators.77 This physical visibility of “The Abuses of Conscience” as an object adrift in the world of print is echoed imperfectly in the story Tristram Shandy tells of the sermon as a peripatetic manuscript. Ostensibly, after writing “The Abuses of Conscience,” Yorick forgetfully slipped his composition between the pages of Stevinas, which he borrowed from Toby, before sending the book back to its owner. Once read aloud by Trim, the sermon is reclaimed by Yorick and placed in the pocket of his coat. From here it falls through a hole in the lining and is trodden into the mud before being “raised up out of it by a beggar, sold for a halfpenny to a parish-­clerk,—­transferred to his parson,—­lost for ever to thy own, the remainder of his days” (126). Soon afterward the parson who has bought it delivers it.



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Can the reader believe, that this sermon of Yorick’s was preach’d at an assize, in the cathedral of York, before a thousand witnesses, ready to give an oath of it, by a certain prebendary of that church, and actually printed by him when he had done,—­and within so short a space as two years and three months after Yorick’s death. (126–­27) The fictional story of Yorick’s sermon as a rogue document that has made it into print thus intersects with the history of Sterne’s own sermon of this name. The difference, however, is that Yorick’s work as an author has been circumscribed by his work with the pen, whereas Sterne has worked a printed copy of his own composition back into his manuscript, which he has launched once more into the world of print. Print disqualifies the sermon we are reading from being investigated as a single object—­from being “this paper”—­yet the episode of its fictional appearance tauntingly invites us to launch such an investigation into the object we handle. Handwriting also becomes significant in the context of Yorick as a character who mirrors Sterne on almost every count. The difference is that Yorick’s literary legacy appears in the context of Tristram Shandy as a collection of copiously annotated manuscripts, while Sterne’s consists of a collection of published volumes. This doesn’t prevent Sterne from investing Yorick, like his fictional predecessor, Pastor Adams, with literary ambition. On the back of one of his sermons Yorick writes knowingly, “—­N.B The excellency of this text is, that it will suit any sermon,—­and of this sermon,—­that it will suit any text” (386). A Sentimental Journey, in which Yorick becomes an author, expands this idea of Yorick’s literary ambition and spells out the trajectory that will lead Yorick from sermon writing toward sentimental narrative as something to be published: “whenever I have a more brilliant affair upon my hands than common, as they suit a preacher just as well as a hero, I generally make my sermon out of ‘em” (148). But in Tristram Shandy, where Yorick’s credibility as a fondly regarded eccentric and divine is established, his work is conspicuously handwritten, and this turns out to matter fundamentally to the way his sincerity is tested. The collection of sermons Tristram claims to own are manuscripts annotated by Yorick in the guise of literary critic. Significant portions of the novel describe the notes Yorick has added to his own sermons, acknowledging their partial originality, or commenting on their merit as performances. One in particular, composed by Yorick for the funeral of Le Fever, testifies to Yorick’s pride in his sentimental production:

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The funeral sermon upon poor Le Fever, wrote out very fairly, as if from a hasty copy.—­I take notice of it the more, because it seems to have been his favorite composition—­It is upon morality; and is tied up length-­ways and cross-­ways with a yarn thrum, and then rolled up and twisted round with half a sheet of dirty blue paper which seems to have been once the cast cover of a general review, which to this day smells horribly of horse-­drugs.—­Whether these marks of humiliation were designed,—­I something doubt;—­because at the very end of the sermon, (and not at the beginning of it)—­very different from his way of treating the rest, he had wrote—­ Bravo! The other notes he uses in assessing his own compositions include the Italian musical terms “moderato” and “so, so,” as well as this self-­congratulatory “Bravo” Tristram claims sheepishly to have found (387). The description of this sermon reads like an advertisement of its future appearance in print. And yet, like “The Abuses of Conscience,” which appeared as a manuscript in a “fair hand,” this sermon is meticulously represented as a work of penmanship. Tristram homes in on the writtenness of the document as a redemption of Yorick’s character from literary vanity: the “Bravo,” he claims, was not written offensively, being “two inches, at least, and a half ’s distance from and below the concluding line of the sermon, at the very extremity of the page, and in that right-­hand corner of which, you know, is generally covered with your thumb.” And, he goes on, it is wrote besides with a crow’s quill, so faintly, in a small Italian hand, as scarcely to solicit the eye towards the place, whether your thumb is there or not;—­so that, from the manner of it, it stands half excused; and being wrote, moreover, with very pale ink, diluted almost to nothing, —­tis more like a ritratto of the shadow of a vanity than of vanity herself. (387) And then, at the last moment, Tristram claims the “Bravo” has after all been scored through. Sterne’s attention to handwriting could be understood here as a parody of the attention paid publically to clergymen’s handwriting. But the discussion of Yorick’s handwriting nevertheless brings character to the surface of the page at just the juncture where the sermon seems most likely to lose its authenticity as a pious document, or to appear visible as print merchandise. The virtual and elusive presence of Yorick’s handwriting operates in



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this respect as a counterweight to the real fate of his sermons as printed commodities, impossible to pin down in their authenticity or physical presence as works of writing.78 By a similar sleight of hand, Sterne also presented print as proof of his presence at his desk. In this context, it is also worth noting that, to protect his book from piracy, Sterne autographed the beginning of the first and second editions of volume 5 and the first editions of volumes 7 and 9 of Tristram Shandy. The common understanding of Tristram Shandy as the eighteenth century’s most print-­savvy novel, written with an eye to its success on the market, makes it easy to overlook Tristram’s frequent reminders of his work’s origins in handwriting: And this moment that I last dipp’d my pen into my ink, I could not help taking notice what a cautious air of sad composure and solemnity there appear’d in my manner of doing it.—­Lord! How different from the rash jerks, and harebrain’d squirts thou art wont, Tristram! To transact it with in other humours,—­dropping thy pen,—­ spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books,—­as if thy pen and thy ink, thy books and thy furniture cost thee nothing. (194) While Tristram frequently refers to himself as the manager of a printed book, Sterne holds onto the advantages of positioning him as the wielder of pen and ink. In the first place, this posture functions in the case of both Tristram and Yorick to account for what their bodies are doing as they describe various scenes. Tristram Shandy is a text designed to evidence Sterne’s own hands being, as it were, on the table: he can write about the sexual exploits of his characters because his own body remains squarely in view as a writing body. The activity of writing provides an alibi similar to the one that objecthood provides in the it-­narratives discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Yorick’s writing a preface in an old coach may conjure up images of masturbation, but finally it is only writing: it works quite literally as a way of keeping the author’s hands in view, symbolically accounting for his presence.79 Sterne’s reliance on handwriting sheds light on the way the documents surrounding Dodd’s trial appeared. Dodd had been widely seen by his critics for many years as having written too much in too secular a vein to be read as sincere. His forged bond was received in this spirit as an eruption of his writing’s promiscuity; of his failure to make his sermons and religious writings the “living habit” that Anglicans expected their clergy’s conventional forms of discourse to become. In this climate of criticism, handwriting—­as Johnson and

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many of Dodd’s more ardent supporters perceived—­was fetishized as evidence that he had poured his own heart into his compositions without thought of publication or sale. Once his crime was acknowledged, handwriting stood for all his forged bond wasn’t: sincerity, penitence, authenticity. The most interesting aspect of this media campaign to make Dodd a writer, however, is that it shows how loosely actual handwriting was connected to the perception of the handwritten document in the later eighteenth century. In the general climate of concern about writing as something that Dodd had done too much of as well as too little of, his script came into view on the screen of print as an image that his supporters and detractors could scan for signs of his sincerity and intention. But the production of this image took place categorically in print: like Sterne and Trusler’s careers, Dodd’s was made and undone within the field of print and its commercial circulation. As his signature and writing were described in print, and his handwritten productions were reproduced in print, a process was underway that Kevin McLaughlin describes having its endpoint in Romantic discourse, whose “aesthetic mediacy . . . ​requires that the subject become the objective support for a medium that exceeds subjective limitation.”80 The publicity surrounding Dodd’s trial can be understood in this sense as remediating through commercial print culture his work as a writer. The screen of print on which Dodd’s character was publicized and scrutinized brought this work into view as an activity that could be read as more or less sincere in its presence as a sign. But the texts in which his compositions were exposed as objects and products of labor rendered secondary inscription techniques visible while allowing others to remain unscrutinized. Ironically, to perceive the written materiality of Dodd’s letters from prison as they appeared in the newspaper, or of Trusler’s sermons, readers had to actively forget the real context in which they appeared. The activity of scrutiny in which readers in this scenario were engaged took them further from the kinds of bodily contact and evidence that handwriting suggests even as it delivered these in virtual form. All the examples discussed in this chapter therefore belong to a realm of consciousness about writing whose specific effect is to encourage readers to invest the manual labour of inscription with meaning, even as they rely on print to conjure up the image of the writer at his desk. The crisis of the Anglican Church challenged readers to approach pious texts as singular and material, even though the need to secure them this status was the direct result of their commercial production and reproduction, and thus proof of their physical inaccessibility as writing. In the larger scope of this study, this suggests that it is perfectly possible for consciousness about mediation to skirt the real facts



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of a text’s production. While a great deal of thought was given in the 1770s to the way sermons were written by individuals, this kind of debate functioned, irrespective of its outcomes, as a distraction from the way sermons were being printed and consumed. But the case of eighteenth-­century sermons also shows that nothing about printed pages makes them unsuitable as occasions for thinking about mediation. In fact, it shows that it is where people were looking at printed pages most closely for evidence of their having been written that they were most liable to forget their constitution as made objects.

Chapter 5

Gray and Mackenzie Printing on the Wall

Looking at Sentimental Writing On a real eighteenth-­century Greenwich window, left intact by pure chance and now held in an archaeological collection in London, one can read the misspelled but clearly etched inscriptions of three window cleaners:

Wm Cavells Cleand these Windows May 20 1742 in the 5 Year of his Aprantiship I John Wilkinson Cleand this Window Auugust 8th 1781 I SJ Letton cleand this Window in the Last year of his Apprentishp August 6 1794

John Wilkinson, the second of these writers, accompanied his name with a small picture of himself, adding to the sense that these words protest against rather than announce the window cleaning. There are other things that make these inscriptions worth looking at: repetition suggests that the second two writers rely on the first inscription as their template, unsure of the words’ spelling or perhaps even of writing itself. The inescapable labor of writing on glass, enabled in this case by the tools of the glass-­cutter’s trade rather than



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the diamond pen popular among wealthier eighteenth-­century graffiti artists, works against the idea of graffiti as a casual impulse. As autobiographies, these inscriptions seem to ask with de Man whether “whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-­portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”1 Worth noting, too, is how dramatically these men are separated by time. Wm Cavell’s words wait nearly forty years for the chance appearance of Wilkinson, and SJ Letton must have written in the certainty of Cavells being already dead. But one might also note that time has worked in their favor. SJ Letton is confident enough of his own spelling to correct the words “August” and “Apprenticeship” as they had been spelled earlier in the century. The suggestion of progress in the history of literacy competes with the striking effect of the etchings’ failure to extend to the present as living voices of their writers: the window’s physicality offers as much evidence of what could not be said, and of what has gone missing, as it does a sense of access to the past. This chapter looks at the way printed literature in the later eighteenth century paid homage to such inscription. In principle, this literature might be read as completing the work that graffiti cannot do by fully describing conditions of marginal existence, cultivating allegiances broader than those available to working people, and securing through print a more dialogic existence for the voices of men such as Cavells, Wilkinson, and Letton, whose abilities expand the boundaries of the reading public. Historically speaking, the movement of words from walls and windows into print can be described as evidence of a growing public sphere.2 But from the 1750s through the 1780s, authors cautious about the powers of print to deliver and create more inclusive forms of meaning idealized graffiti and inscription as forms of writing. Even as Thomas Gray’s and Henry Mackenzie’s work spearheaded developments in print and its commodification, these authors explored ways to make their work visible in the field occupied by graffiti, where writing spoke to the ultimate failure of human design. Unlike the printed pages that traveled around eighteenth-­ century Britain, words cut into glass and stone could not be directed. Even when they originated in human intention, they remained objects testifying to the situation in which they were written and awaiting the accidents that would bring readers to them. The anthologies, poems, and novels discussed in this chapter experiment with transferring this sense of limitation to the printed page. Whereas writing on the wall was supplanted over time by other ways of disseminating words, in the cases I discuss here print was explored as a strong wall to write on weakly; a surface offered to the reader neither as the full expression of a thought, nor as a direct act of communication, but as

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material evidence of what could not be said and of the way objects could not be controlled. The texts I’m concerned with imaginatively put print in the same category occupied by stones, walls, and windows, as surfaces difficult to manipulate and direct. This discussion extends the one begun in the last chapter, of print as a technology used to remediate other forms of writing. In the case of Dodd and his contemporaries, remediation involved not just an uptake of one technology on the screen of another, but also a transfer to print of the impression of manual labor. The previous chapter showed how this allowed sincerity to be attributed to texts seen as handwritten and connected with the work of penmanship despite their printed form. But it also showed that this was more than a historical or technological process. When handwriting was celebrated, this was because readers and writers were actively invested in seeing—­and not seeing—­the labor of writing: texts were written so as to direct attention and imagination to the surface of the page. This chapter moves further in the direction of thinking about the ways that print became visible as print in the process of remediating other technologies. I do not argue that readers were prompted to look at printed pages as if they were inscriptions, but rather that a particular mode of reflexivity about print allowed writers to present pages as inscription-­like, and thus made it credible for published works to index their own limitation, abandonment, and susceptibility to random recovery. We could say, in terms bequeathed to us by Walter Benjamin, that such pages acquired an aura that mechanically reproduced ones seemed to have lost. However, in investing so much meaning in the object itself, their authors also encouraged a withdrawal of human control from the scenes of representation that they staged. Juliet Fleming, writing of inscription and graffiti in sixteenth-­ and seventeenth-­century England, has made a strong case for the distinction between an earlier period where writing was routinely to be found in the world, on glasses and walls and bodies and jewelry, and a later one where it was confined largely to paper. “The notion of a ‘text,’ ” she argues, “represents the assumption that a certain form of historical consciousness has been able to dictate the terms of its own material constraints.” “Inscription” becomes in these terms the text’s opposite, providing a situation where “matter appears to bind thought.”3 Gray and Mackenzie reverse this distinction and explore print as a way to bind thought and introduce into the textual reader’s field of visibility material restrictions upon meaning. In the end, these authors’ fascination with inscription lies not just in its object-­like status as something that can be celebrated in print, but in finding a way to align printed pages with glass



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and plaster as surfaces on which words tell the story of their own impotence. Here, the visual evidence of mediation as a fragile and uncontrollable process becomes entangled with the meanings expressed. Pieces of abandoned writing are among the objects represented most commonly in the sentimental literature of the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s. Continuing, in part, a set of well-­worn conventions, sentimental novels and essays are filled with forgotten manuscripts found moldering in drawers, handwritten notes discovered in the form of wastepaper, and poems and initials scratched into glass, trees, or pathos-­inducing gravestones.4 Sterne’s Yorick, as we have seen, is immortalized in a collection of handwritten documents, which Tristram studies and records as part of his own orthographic project. As the protagonist of A Sentimental Journey, Yorick takes on this role of obsessively and sympathetically reading the disowned and handwritten documents he finds. A “little dirty pocket-­book cramm’d full of small letters and billet-­doux in a sad condition” intrigues him, and he gives to a sixteenth-­century French document “faded and gone off by damps and length of time” and used to carry his breakfast butter as “deep” a reading as Gruter, a Dutch historian, ever gave a “nonsensical inscription” (66, 141). In this sensory environment, writing demands the same kind of attention that Festa shows being given more widely to the cherished objects and characters of sentimental fiction.5 Words are imagined like rings and snuffboxes and dead animals, as objects striking for the way they convey the sad stories of their past. The protagonists of Henry Mackenzie’s three sentimental novels enter this fictional world crucially equipped as readers of such signs. The Man of Feeling is introduced by a narrator who appears in a landscape emptied of its rural inhabitants but bearing evidence of their former presence in the shape of “carving on the bark of some trees,” the “only mark of human art about the place.”6 In this setting, Harley’s manuscript is discovered as a “bundle of papers” used by an unsympathetic curate as wadding in his gun (47–­49). From this manuscript, we learn that its author has carried a small book for the purpose of copying down “quotations from those humble poets, who trust their fame to the brittle tenure of windows and drinking-­glasses” and was himself deeply moved by “an old stone, with the corners broken off, and some dead letters, half-­covered with moss, to denote the names of the dead,” where the grave of a man he has never met is “ciphered RE plainer than the rest” (115).7 Harley’s commonplace book is a collection, in other words, of encounters with writings that appeal to him in their brevity and location as evidence of death and decay. The frame narrative of The Man of Feeling aligns the reader with an editor who rescues a manuscript, which is in turn attributed to a man given to

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collecting abandoned words. At every level, Mackenzie’s fiction endorses the reader’s discovery of disowned pieces of writing, suggesting that the scantest fragments of writing will reward the impulse to look closely for evidence of human failure. Poetry from the middle of the century onward also commemorates a landscape in which writing affects a certain kind of reader. Two of the most popular poems of reflection and retirement in the century, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) and Cowper’s “The Task” (1785), provide early and late examples of sentimental poetry. Both celebrate writing as a poignant sign of inadequacy in a natural setting. The speaker in “The Task” finds an alcove on a hilltop “with injuries impress’d / by rural carvers, who with knives deface / the panels,” and reads these not as statements, but as “characters uncouth and spelt amiss,” ascribing through them a weary pity to authors desperate to leave their mark at any cost (bk 1: l.78–­88). The churchyard commemorated in Gray’s “Elegy” is, we will see shortly, a place where inscriptions are movingly displayed, not just as monuments to the craft of writing practiced by the villagers, but also as signs of the kinds of contact Gray imagined sentimental readers might have with poetry and fiction appearing in print. The interest of successful writers in the forms of literacy that gravestones and abandoned manuscripts can signify is attributable in part to the way the whole sentimental movement is invested in lifting literature from the realm of everyday meaning-­making. That is to say, sentimental writing can be described as paradigmatically invested in framing its own operation as language-­ based, and in distinguishing the emotional revolutions effected by language from those taking place in social and political terms. This is one of the central arguments made by John Mullan in his landmark Sentiment and Sociability (1988), which describes sentiment as having enjoyed its brief reputation as a healthy kind of entertainment in connection with fiction reading before withering into ill repute when it was viewed as a medical condition. In Mullan’s account, private consumption of sentimental novels encourages the reader to join forces with fictional characters like Mackenzie’s Harley and Sterne’s Yorick as lone crusaders of feeling, exiled from the cruelty and indifference of a modern world. Fiction supports the essentially private response to the public spectacles of suffering and injustice that the pages of such novels convey. It does this, Mullan argues, by singling out the reader to participate in an exceptional fellowship from which most members of society appear excluded: “the novel of sentiment in the eighteenth century, committed as it might be to the celebration of fellow-­feeling, elaborates pathos from exactly the disconnection of special experiences of sympathy from dominant patterns of social



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relationship.”8 Although sentimental readers and fictional narrators share a heightened degree of feeling about the victims of poverty and misfortune, they do so through contact with the pages on which isolated narrators write rather than with each other or with fellow beings.9 In such terms, twentieth-­century criticism has equated the cult of sensibility with the high degrees of attention given to representation in the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s. Sensibility is about language and its relation to experience; it is about language’s ability to conjure up experience, but also to distinguish aesthetic experience from practical or political engagement. Most specifically, sentimental fiction becomes part of a distinction between reading and writing on the one hand, and the normal arts of living on the other; and between the potential excesses and indulgences that fictional scenarios unleash and the limits of representation as an art that curbs and contextualizes such effusion. Michael McKeon describes sentimental literature as the triumph of literary fiction as an aesthetic ideal, separated out from the teaching of virtue and freed of expectations of its correspondence to a real world.10 In this context, becoming aware of writing is a conservative counterweight to the promise of realist identification. This argument addresses the fact that readers of sentimental literature were aware of themselves reading fiction, thereby offering one explanation for why many sentimental texts contain scenes of reading. Yorick’s reading a piece of paper on which his breakfast has been delivered, but which turns out to be a sentimental story in its own right, cues the reader to enjoy her potentially infinite responsiveness to paper while also recognizing her engagement with the text as temporally and physically bounded. In these terms, the materiality of the trees and gravestones and scraps of paper that typically litter the sentimental text corresponds to the appearance of books as fictions dispensable to life and politics. An understanding of this dynamic will help the case I make in this chapter for the way writing is figured by Gray and Mackenzie as materially rather than rationally effective. But, whereas the critical contexts described above explain this in terms of the immateriality of the modern, “disciplined” reader’s relationship to fiction as a discourse to be distinguished from real life, I will focus on the real visibility of print as something that could also be rallied to the cause of limiting literature’s political and social impact. Fleming describes the prevailing situation in Renaissance studies prior to the recent interest in material culture as one where critics tended to overlook even the proclaimed relations of writing to the material world. When a Renaissance poem declares itself to be written on a window, she argues, we tend to think of this as “conceited.”11 The figurative reading of eighteenth-­century

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poems declaring their situation has been a little different. Most notably, Geoffrey Hartman has described inscription as an eighteenth-­century poetic form. In tracing a connection between the Romantic lyric and the classical epigram, Hartman describes inscription as anchored in a set of conventions deriving from the Greek epigrams anthologized in the century, and having to do with the poem’s reflection on its own location and address to a lone reader. These are the conventions, Hartman contends, which Wordsworth reconfigures at the level of voice and poetic mode when he shifts the lyric into print.12 But what would a more literal approach to the materiality of writing as it is represented within texts look like? In the case of the sentimental texts I discuss here, such an approach would treat references to marginal forms of writing within the poem, essay, or novel as a clue to the way the authors imagined their published texts as physical things. At a time when bound and printed texts were prominent as expensive commodities and highly controlled as individual possessions, Gray and Mackenzie work hard to make their printed texts appear as objects to which stories of accident and abandonment apply. This involves giving to print the identity of an object situated and vulnerable, as well as the feel of something that has arrived in our hands by accident. Blazoning its status as writing, sentimental language thus provides not only an aesthetic atmosphere in which apolitical versions of sympathy can breed, but a modern sense of the written medium harnessed more strongly to the world of objects than to the thoughts or articulations of people in contact with each other. Novels like The Man of Feeling become screens on which the mediation of writing can be constructed by eighteenth-­century readers as a process distinct from the thoughts and needs of living people. In terms of this study, concluding with sentimental literature therefore raises explicitly the question of how the consciousness of mediation has hampered our belief in human communication as something that might quite directly succeed.

Writing on Glass and Walls Before exploring more specifically what it meant for Gray and Mackenzie to celebrate the physicality of writing in their printed texts, I want to note the actual practice these authors engaged when they peppered their fictional trees and buildings with simple inscriptions. It is obviously difficult, if not impossible, to know just how much graffiti of the kind evidenced by the three window cleaners was visible in the 1700s. We do know that in Elizabethan



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England much more of this kind of writing was probably taking place than literary historians have imagined. Fleming goes as far as to claim that the interior wall may have been the primary scene of writing in the second part of the sixteenth century, with poetry and other kinds of religious and epigrammatic texts widely sanctioned as decoration, and interior surfaces popular as a cheap and available alternative to paper. In her account, these forms of inscription and graffiti were deployed more or less continuously with writing on paper, a surface itself visible in this context as but one place to write.13 Fleming describes these practices as specific to the sixteenth century, suggesting that this culture of posy, graffiti, and writing as interior decoration died out as print and paper became more easily available. But there is evidence that writing on surfaces other than paper proliferated in the eighteenth century, despite the new role of paper as the normalized surface for writing and reading. The sixteenth-­century practice of writing on glass, exemplified in Donne’s “A Valediction: Of my Name in the Window,” certainly continued throughout the 1700s, an era when glass was widely used but did not yet have the property of transparency that made industrially produced plate glass celebrated in Victorian England.14 A well-­known scene from Moll Flanders (1722) offers a good example of how writers moved literally from wall or window to page early in the century. At one point in the novel, Moll has only a little money left from her second marriage and is angling for a proposal from her new suitor. She handles this by telling something close to the truth about her poverty, but under conditions that make it unlikely her words will be believed. This complex performance of honesty takes place at the house where she is staying, where her lover uses his diamond ring to inscribe the words, “You I love and you alone” on the window. Moll reads this, borrows the ring, and writes back, “And so in love says everyone.” “Virtue alone is an estate,” writes he, to which Moll replies, “But money’s virtue; gold is fate.” Growing passionate, the man takes back the ring back and writes, “I scorn your gold, and yet I love,” to which Moll replies, “I’m poor, let’s see how kind you prove.” The man is now enflamed and “with the greatest passion imaginable he held [Moll] fast till he call’d for a pen and ink, and then told [her] he could not wait the tedious writing on the glass, but pulling out a piece of paper, he began and wrote again, Be mine, with all your poverty.”15 The scene underscores the continuity between glass and paper as equally visible surfaces, but ones offering different contexts and physical properties. Paper is relevant at the moment where the exchange becomes contractual because it is more rapidly marked and more portable as evidence, while glass remains a place of coy and collaborative performance distinguished by its fixed, private location and the tedium of marking it.

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The manufacture of “diamond pens” made for writing on glass suggests that glass continued to operate as an alternative to paper well into the eighteenth century. “Diamond-­scribbling” seems to have taken off in new ways with expanding road travel, and was especially popular at the inns along the major road between London and Edinburgh.16 By the 1750s, complaints against graffiti on windows suggest how common the practice had become: “Every man who is in possession of a diamond,” writes David Dalrymple in The World in 1755, “arrogates to himself this privilege of instructing others: hence it is that the panes of windows in all places of public resort, are so amply furnished with miscellaneous observations, by various authors.”17 Dalrymple goes on to classify four kinds of diamond scribblers: those participating in an exchange of political opinion; “historians” recording their presence at such a time and place; lovers who immortalize the name of their beloved on glass; and satirists who, “while dinner is getting ready . . . ​amuse themselves in making out a list of all the faults, real or imaginary, which may be imputed to their acquaintance.”18 Dalrymple’s mocking categories reflect fairly accurately the kinds of writing that authors of the time acknowledged, particularly in the contexts of travel and tourism, which provided the opportunity to write on glass and then record on paper and in print the fact of having done so. The Collected Works of Aaron Hill (1753) includes, for instance, thirteen “Verses written on Windows in Several Parts of the Kingdom.”19 Boswell, returning from a journey North, mockingly describes himself “reduced to that ebb of understanding as to produce a composition which [he] wrote with a diamond pen upon a window.”20 In tone and habit, he keeps company with the likes of Madam Leeson, a courtesan who carries a diamond ring during her travels for the purposes of registering her complaints with innkeepers. At a village in Wexford, she reports, “we could not get a morsel to eat or any kind of lodging; on which I left on one of the widow Breen’s windows the following lines: Tis surely a bore, That a favourite wh___e, Praised by wits for her humour and fun, Should with cash in her purse, As if God sent a curse; Want lodgings in hungry Taghmon21 Noting her own cheek, Leeson invokes the dynamic social situation in which her words stand still. The words in Taghmon wait for readers to find them,



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while Leeson’s published report on the journey allows her to seek a wider audience. The contrast between these two habits of circulation makes even the trivial event of writing on a window during one’s journey worth describing. The pride travelers took in their graffiti was tempered by a critique of the practice that grew louder in the later years of the century, no doubt as many inn windows became cloudy with scratches, and by the end of the century it was illegal to write on public property. For some readers before this point, graffiti was already seen simply as graffiti, regardless what it said. In Humphry Clinker (1771), Jerry points out to Lismahago “a curious epigram, which was engraved on one of the windows of the parlour where we sat.” Lismahago responds by explicitly refusing to read the political doggerel: “ ‘it is vara terse and vara poignant; (said he) but with the help of a wat dish-­clout, it might be rendered more clear and paspicous.”22 The Times complained in 1788 about “those who have transferred the filth of their polluted minds to [the] seats in Kensington Gardens.23 In the British Magazine in 1783, a poet grumbles about the accumulation of graffiti on the inns along well-­travelled roads, particularly on the road between London and Edinburgh: “No more in study need your hours be lost, / To dub you poets—­only travel post; / Before you’ve jolted to your second stage, / You’ll feel infected with the rhyming rage.”24 And Graves, getting the joke that Lismahago misses, publishes in an anthology his performative protest against window satires in Bath: “The lines so dull, the instrument so bright! / What evil genius tempted thee to write? / Ah let that Brilliant sparkle in a ring; / A diamond pencil is a dangerous thing.”25 Running alongside such derision of graffiti as a practice is a limited sense that writing beyond the page might provide access to sentiments unlikely to appear in print. A second satire from 1755, published in George Colman’s The Connoisseur, claims to be the production of an author whose sole source of erudition has been the walls and windows of London, where “every ally teems with instruction.” “Orator Higgins” has learned to write by “conning over those elegant monosyllables, which are chalked out upon walls and gates, and which . . . ​are generally enforced and explained by curious hieroglyphics in caricature,” and to read by gleaning what he can from the handbills and magazine covers on display in the street. He shuns, in fact, the idea “that learning is only to be acquired in the closet, and by turning over a great number of pages.”26 This piece gives a strong sense of graphic and lewd verse and writing appearing in a setting where books and journals were beyond the means, or needs, of a new class of semiliterate writers. Lisa Foreman Cody suggests that writings in charcoal, mud, chalk, wax, and feces added to those found on glass, making up a socially diverse spectrum of eighteenth-­century graffiti

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equivalent in many ways to what Fleming documents for the early modern period.27 The possibility of seeing graffiti as a form of expression for Britain’s poorest writers explains some of the investment of sentimental authors in registering its presence. In “The Task,” such writing is acknowledged both as a scar on the landscape and as the upshot of every writer’s wish to leave some kind of mark in the world. Cowper connects even the badly spelled carvings of “clowns” to the lofty thought: “so strong the zeal to immortalize himself / beats in the breast of man that even a few / Few transient years won from the abyss abhorred / Of blank oblivion, seem a glorious prize” (bk 1: l.283–­85). In all these forms of writing on walls and glass, there is a phenomenon in play that connects eighteenth-­century graffiti to the sixteenth-­century category of ‘posy,’ which Puttenham enlists to describe cases where the material embodiment of words constrains their utterance while also giving it its force.28 In 1771, Lessing discussed this same category of writing in his essay on the Epigram, where he insists that “the true inscription of is not to be thought of apart from that whereon it stands, or might stand.”29 Lessing, as Hartman shows, describes a locodescriptive principle that can be raised to the level of poetic convention. But the “true inscription” that he invokes is defined by the fusion of form and content that occurs when writing refers to its own physical presence. It is typical, for instance, that verses written on glass invoke brittleness; or that a graffito describing social hierarchy addresses its position on the wall. Aaron Hill’s poem does both: Where’ver the diamond’s busy point could pass, See! What deep wound have pierc’d the middle glass! While partial and untouching, all the rest, Highest and lowest panes, shine, unimpressed: No wonder, then! For e’en in life ‘tis so; High fortunes, stand unreach’d—­unseen, the low, But middle states are marks, for every blow.30 The question of where on a window this verse was written is central to the question of its tone and meaning. Placed in the middle of the window, its location would underscore the impression of the middling-­rank as a statistical conglomeration. At a higher (or lower) point on the pane of glass, it would have to be read more impertinently as its author’s laying claim to literary and social distinction. Evidence of how much eighteenth-­century graffiti engaged with its own embodiment can be found in a collection from earlier in the century. The



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Merry Thought or, the Glass-­Window and Bog-­House Miscellany (1731) is de��� voted entirely to the “preservation” of literary curios taken from walls and windows. In four volumes, the fictional editor, “Hurlothumbro,” offers his readers a seemingly random collection of pieces of writing found all over London, many of them scatological, and most of them introduced according to the location from which they are said to have been lifted. “From the White-­ Hart at Acton” or “Found at Three Pigeons, Brentford, in a Window” serve, for instance, the place of titles in the anthology. Although the verses in The Merry Thought vary widely in tone and merit, running through them is the quality that fascinates Fleming, Hartman, and Lessing, of discourse able to reference its own location and materiality and thus to “arrest the reader with the proposition that visual and acoustical matter is structured before writing and speech begin.”31 Hurlothumbro’s “Bog-­House” rhymes tend, for example, to be to be almost exclusively about the connection between writing and defecation, while the words found on windows in the collection routinely reference the “bright” “brittle,” or “slippery” glass that is scored by writing, making its material and location a central point of reference: “This glass, my Fair’s the Emblem of your Mind, / Which brittle, slippery, poisnous oft we find.”32 Sometimes this means that glass, or the diamond or stone used to scratch it, becomes a surface to which fixity is attributed, as in this case: “Glass with a Diamond does our Wit betray; / Who can write sure on that smooth and slippery Way? / Pleas’d with our scribbling we cut swiftly on, / And see the Nonsense, which we cannot shun.”33 A more sophisticated meditation on the properties of glass occurs in a poem from a later anthology, “Written on a Pane of Glass,” which explicitly contemplates the question of its own preservation as writing: When nature’s Sick, and Time grows Old, That which destroys this mighty Mass, Shall turn it to a Globe of Glass: Then shall these lasting Lines appear Like Christal in the Hemisphere, Transparent in Earth’s lucid Womb, Like Insects in an Amber Tomb.34 But most eighteenth-­century epigrams for glass reference the “here” of the window as a brittle space—­“Let others, brittle beauties of a year, see their frail names, and lovers vows writ here.”35 To the lines “Written on a Window at a private House, by a desponding Lover in the presence of his Mistress” and

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suggesting that glass is like the lover’s “slippery” and “poisonous” mind, “Her answer Underneath” returns: “I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass, / Can’t prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass.”36 More generally, a whole range of verses reference their own location by replying to verses around them, reporting what has just happened at the site of writing, or describing the way a lover waits for what is about to happen. “From a Window in Chancery-­Lane” comes, “Here did I lay my Celia down; I got the P—­x and she got half a Crown.”37 These cases where the verses in the Merry-­Thought demark their own physicality belong, however, to the world of print. As we saw with Hume and Beattie, print alters the way the “here” can be deployed in writing because it displaces the writer’s gesture from the immediate environment in which it is read. This introduces the next question, of how the uptake of such explicitly material kinds of writing in the printed anthology changes the reader’s encounter with inscription. First, however, I want simply to note that the reflexive quality attributed to posy and inscription in their older, more literary formations also belongs to popular tradition of graffiti in the eighteenth century. What I’ve suggested so far is the possibility of these writings becoming what Derrida describes as acts or performances that are examples of that of which they write or speak.38 Graffiti’s ability to exemplify the marginality and neglect it describes makes it a model for sentimental writing. This is the quality that Gray perceives in the anthology and that inspires Mackenzie to experiment with print as a material guise for words that continue, like words on glass and stone, to refer to their own mediation.

The Anthology as Situation Hartman has described the eighteenth-­century inscription as “anything conscious of the place on which it was written, and this could be tree, rock, statue, gravestone, sand, window, album, sundial, dog’s collar, back of fan, back of painting.”39 His list precludes paper because it assumes that by the 1700s paper has become a non-­place; a context in which invocations of the here and now are abstracted by print. By this logic, all the inscriptions described above lack a physical situation to which they can refer. With the exception of the window cleaners’ words, they exist as items in anthologies where their inclusion seems to disqualify them as posy. “Written Under a Lampoon on a Window” and “Written on a Window” are, for instance, now well preserved in The Fugitive Miscellany (1774) and “Verses Copied from the Window of an Obscure



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Boarding House in the Neighbourhood of London,” which begin “Stranger, whate’ver though art, whose restless mind/Like me, within these walls, is cribb’d, confin’d,” refer to an imaginary scene rather than to the limits of the pages of The Muses Mirror (1778) in which they appear. “An Epigrammatic Descriptive Impromtu, Written on the window of an inn, at Birmingham” becomes anything but impromptu in Anthony Pasquin’s published Poems (1789) and Thomas Warton’s “Inscription in a Hermitage at Ansley Hall,” published in his Epigrammata (1758), makes inscription seem more literary device than material practice.40 Barbara Benedict’s description of eighteenth-­century anthologies also encourages us to view printed anthologies as non-­settings; containers that hold poetry aloof from the questions of political and material or historical situation by making them into literature. In her account, anthologies enable the first displays of national tradition, with the material equivalence between items licensing their critical comparison. Benedict assumes, in line with Hartman and Fleming, that once poems appear in a printed miscellany, any locations and local agendas they announce are rendered figurative. Entering a new state of preservation as print, texts now describe their physical vulnerability as graffiti, inscription, or neglected manuscript from the safety of their immaterial and multiplied existence. If a fiction of their arrival on the printed page is offered, it is an abstract one of rescue and redemption from singularity. This seems to be the case, for instance, of the way in which frame narratives announce the origins of their text in a discovered manuscript, or Sterne’s narrators record in print their access to precariously preserved documents.41 Yet the interpolation of different kinds of documents within the cover of a novel or anthology also suggests that print itself is subject to the vicissitudes of material life. The vast majority of printed texts read before the mechanical binding of books became standard practice appeared at some time in their life as part of a collection or anthology made of unbound items by an individual reader. This is true of most of the sermons discussed in the last chapter, as well as of the pamphlets, short fictions, and life narratives discussed in earlier chapters. The material surrounding Dodd’s trial is, for example, available today largely in constellations that eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century readers provided through collecting and binding together pamphlets. Many of these collections make evident the personal and even accidental ways printed pages were gathered together as seemingly disparate items, or texts of different vintages and shapes. Jeffrey Todd Knight, who discusses the eighteenth-­century anthologization of Shakespeare’s plays, argues that it was binding, not printing, that

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preserved texts and that in fact unbound printed pages often shared a continuum with other forms of writing as discrete objects subject to permutation, neglect, and recycling.42 This is exemplified in Colman’s Polly Honeycombe (1761), which describes a room where “the third volume of Betsy Thoughtless, the New Atlantis for the year 1760, and the Catalogue of the Circulating library” lie half-­bound, “much thumbed and in a greasy condition” amongst dresses, fans, and gloves.43 Including this library catalogue as part of its own composition, Polly Honeycombe seems to ingest this domestic disarray of papers, as well as to anticipate its own place in the register of carelessly arranged possessions and half bound books. The Man of Feeling, we might remember, opens with two men exchanging the texts they are using as gun wadding. The “medley” of papers the curate carries, which turns out to be Harley’s history in manuscript form, is exchanged for “great part of an edition of one of the German Illustrissimi,” stored in the narrator’s pocket for the same practical purpose. In the exchange, the narrator remarks, both texts are probably “saved,” implying that the two texts, one manuscript and the other unbound print, stand in equivalent danger of destruction. This fear is supported by the jokes of many novels already introduced, which predict the ready recycling of printed pages as their own fate. The real vulnerability and permutability of unbound pages in the eighteenth century meant that even when poems were included in edited anthologies, or interpolated into novels by known authors, the entity of the collection registered the fact that printed pages, too, could be lost and rearranged. The title of the most famous collection of mid-­century poetry, Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748–­58), suggests this possibility. Describing Dodsley’s first edition of the collection as poorly produced and “tatty-­looking,” Michael Suarez argues that the collection was a low budget experiment that used poems Dodsley already owned by right to test the market for such a collection.44 Although it became perceived later as an institution cementing the fame of poets, this first edition of the collection speaks at the surface of the page to print as a state in which words lead the haphazard existence normally associated with manuscript. The Merry Thought also works in this way, to imply the continuum of print with words written in chalk and mud and glass. The pages of the anthology, which contain a disorganized assortment of verses, ostensibly shown in the order they have arrived on the editor’s desk, deliberately refute the idea of an organized and immaterial arrangement for the contents. They gesture instead to verses being gathered, arranged, and answered in the way they are on windows, with successive volumes of the collection laid out for display as if they were new panes of glass



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to be filled in. This effect corresponds to one Seth Lerer describes in the case of a medieval anthology made to resemble writing on a wax tablet: though its “little messages” are transcribed on a page, “their fiction,” argues Lerer, “is that they are songs or notes, and this is the point.”45 Such contexts help to illustrate print’s own history of making singular and vulnerable objects. On cheaply printed and unbound pages, the references to “brittleness” and “frailty” that made words on glass into posy were rendered figurative by their multiplication and circulation. But the effect of posy was also reactivated in a context where print could be perceived as having various accidental futures open to it—­as recycled paper, neglected merchandise, and as material to be included in new, personally bound collections. The printed pages of a collection were not difficult to reference as a vulnerable stage in the material life of words. This does not mean that Mackenzie’s frame narrative rightly equates print and manuscript as equivalent sites of destruction and misappropriation: recycling a manuscript as gun wadding destroys more than recycling a printed text. But Mackenzie may have been right to collapse print and manuscript and graffiti as states of writing the reader could be taught to apprehend sympathetically, as having a life anterior to the vectors of human design.

Gray’s Elegy The presence of real graffiti in the streets and taverns of eighteenth-­century Britain, and the possibility of perceiving print’s kinship with this kind of writing, help explain the complicated stance of one of the century’s least prolific but most celebrated poets, Thomas Gray. Gray’s uneasy relationship to publishing has been documented at some length.46 It is well known, for instance, that he spent most of his life in a reclusive position at Cambridge working on projects that involved translation, notation, collation, and reorganization of words, with very little original composition and no active pursuit of literary fame. His habits as a writer included keeping a commonplace book, which he used to record his own and others writings, and in which he built up a comprehensive system of notes.47 The poetry he did publish, including his sensationally successful “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” was coaxed into the public sphere by his friend Horace Walpole, and circulated, it seems, to Gray’s surprise and mild discomfort, amongst the anonymous public. Once they created a stir in manuscript circulation, Gray wrote to Thomas Wharton of his verses that, he “should have been glad that you and two or three

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more People had liked them, which would have satisfied my ambition on this head.”48 But Gray’s posture of reluctance must be set off against the fact that what he did write he published fairly quickly and to his apparent satisfaction. In 1748, his “Eton Ode”appeared anonymously along with “Ode on the Spring” and “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” in Dodsley’s Collection. On receiving a copy of this text, Gray found fault with the quality of the “whited-­brown paper, and distorted figures” of the pages but otherwise approved the placement and inclusion of his poems.49 And although Gray turned later in his life, when the “Elegy” was well on its way to becoming the most anthologized poem of the century, to styles of poetry less compatible with the market, most of his writing still went into scholarly projects intended for publication.50 Gray’s amply documented unwillingness to become a commercial author can be seen in this respect as having more to do with his stated discomfort with writing as an act for which a creative individual was held responsible than with the appearance of words in print. Understood less as authorship and more as the material curatorship of writing, the publication of Gray’s work in anthologies, his avid use of commonplace books, and a certain kind of secondary scholarship designed for publication sustained Gray in his daily practice. The image of Gray as a reluctant author also productively informs a whole tradition of reading the “Elegy” as a poem whose brilliance lies in its rhetorical evasion of the poet’s creative energy. The authority of the “Elegy,” it is generally agreed, arises from the way the position of the writer is assimilated to the larger effect of nature, the nation, or language itself speaking directly on behalf of the reader. This effect is noted by critics including Samuel Johnson, who, even before the poem’s rich afterlife ensured the truth of his observation, claimed that the poem “abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”51 In these terms, the “Elegy” succeeds so well because it seems barely to have been written at all. This response to the poem as apparently unwritten is reinforced at the level of its plot, which dramatizes the problematic status of writing, authorship and, as John Guillory has stressed, education. The well-­known setting for the “Elegy” is a churchyard in which the peasants Gray commemorates are memorably silent. Dying with restricted access to learning, and without the pomp or grandeur of church ceremony, they appear to leave few traces behind them. The “mute inglorious Milton” and the “Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood” populate a churchyard in which death and illiteracy conspire (or are conveniently collapsed) to silence its occupants: “Knowledge to their eyes her ample page / Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll” (l.49–­50). This



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observation of the condition of illiteracy compounds the effect of the poem as a meditation on the inevitability of death, positioning the speaker and audience to appreciate through silent and atmospheric contemplation a story that appears destined to be poignantly encountered as a story of writing’s failure, even as it is widely read. The “Elegy”’s affinity with these rural poor can be achieved by this logic only through denying its own participation in the sphere of print culture. This becomes evident in the more precise confusion within the poem over the origin of the written form an elegy assumes. Although the speaker begins his account of the country graveyard in the first person, the last third of the poem describes a liminally present youth—­“thee, who mindful of th’unhonour’d Dead / Dost in these lines their artless tale relate”—­and to whom the “Elegy” is now attributed in its entirety (l.92–­93). This is further complicated when the final stages of the poem reveal that the literate youth is already dead and buried in the graveyard, so that the poem’s last three stanzas double as his work and the epitaph engraved on his tombstone, legible only to a passing reader directed to them by a villager. At this point, the gravestone, toward the discovery of which the poem has been directed, becomes a logical impossibility: there is no one in the village who could have written it, and no one except an outsider to read it. In Guillory’s account, this impossibility lies at the heart of the paradox by which Gray renders English accessible and commonplace only at the cost of forcing its reader into an environment in which no education, no common chatter, and no revolution appear possible.52 In order to read the “Elegy,” or its embedded epitaph, one must assume the position of the innately literate aristocrat whose very subjectivity resists explanation. Such, I have suggested, is the framework in which the “Elegy” has been understood from the time of its publication as a poem about the impossible or unnecessary status of writing in the production of common knowledge. And yet, in another perspective made possible by registering the real presence of graffiti and its place in the eighteenth-­century anthology, the “Elegy” can be read as unabashedly invested in the written word. The churchyard in which the poem is set, and where the speaker reflects upon the failure of the deceased peasants to read and write, is actually not unmarked but full of lines of inscription: Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture deck’d, Implores the passing of a sigh. (l.77–­81)

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Surrounded by “uncouth rhimes” and ploughed land, the speaker contrasts the long page of history to the “short and simple annuls of the poor” (l.32). This world in which the poor live and die turns somewhat surprisingly into a world not of oral tradition, but of dense signage, where “th’unletter’d muse” works through writing: “many a holy text around she strews, / That teach the rustic moralist to dye” (l.83–­84). Although the “Elegy” cultivates a feeling of appreciation for those who could not record their own lives, it turns out to be a tribute to those whose failure was not to leave a written record, but to direct, control, or outlive the ones they left. Roger Chartier describes the way “written materials lay at the very heart of the culture of the illiterate and were present in rituals, public spaces, and the work place.”53 His observation resonates with those made by Hanway, entering a country churchyard in 1756 and recording his reaction to the words of the gravestones as the work of those with little more than a mnemonic relation to letters. “Good God!” he exclaims, “What nonsense is handed down to posterity, engraved on stone! ’Tis shameful to a nation that any of their clergy should be ILLITERATE.” Going on with his line of complaint about the inscriptions in which “the unletter’d muse” attempts to engrave his own lines on stone, Hanway presents the following epitaph as evidence of the kinds of writing rustics are tempted to produce: “This world is fill of crooked streets; / Death is a place where all men MEETS: / If life were sold that men could buy, / The rich would live, the poor must die.”54 Occupying a position similar to Lismahago, Hanway refuses to read these lines as a political statement. To him, they speak of the lives and deaths of those excluded from the realms of original composition, for whom writing is an imitative and material art. They are legible in their materiality only as rude attempts at writing by those who cannot anticipate the fact that their words will be “read” by the literate as signs of illiteracy. Bearing this sense of eighteenth-­century words on glass and stone in mind, Gray’s “Elegy” can be seen as sentimentally capturing Hanway’s and Lismahago’s responses to inscription. The sociological explanation for country graveyards filled with misspelt lines, carvings in trees, and epitaphs copied letter by letter by their marginally literate scribes also helps to account for the logical impossibility of the epitaph, and thus to complete the narrative the “Elegy” offers of its own existence. Understood as an arrangement of lines and shapes in stone, the epitaph at its heart can be explained as the work of imitative carving. If it appears at all realistically as an object in a community used to working and living with writing, it is as a piece of emotionally charged handcraft.



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Here rests his head upon the lap of earth A youth to fortune and to fame unknown. Fair Science frowned not upon his humble birth, And melancholy mark’d him for her own. Large was his bounty and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompense as largely send: He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (‘twas all he wish’d) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dead abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose), The bosom of his Father and his God The “hoary-­headed swain” who points the passer-­by in the direction of these stanzas—­“Approach and read (for thou can’st read) the lay, / Grav’d on the stone beneath yon aged thorn”—­may rhetorically cede the poem to a distant community of readers from which he is excluded, but he claims the written object as his own production, and as a sign he understands well enough in reference to the place in which it is written (l.114–­15). Although the swain’s lines suggest his weak cognitive hold on the text, his stewardship points to the fact that he understands the words’ significance. The reality of the swain handling writing as shapes to be carved and reproduced accounts for the epitaph as a piece of writing the villagers have made, copying and transmitting it by way of shapes and implications rather than through any full comprehension of its meaning. More importantly, this helps put the inscription to work in the context of its materiality, where it can be read as words left behind on paper, copied into stone by those who mourn a poet without being able to read his work, and transcribed again by someone who benefits from this craft of transmission. Gray would belong in this context to a culture of writing, but one where there are no agents to put words into motion, and no triumph of human design overriding the material limitations connecting writing to its medium. This scenario corresponds to the one implied in Richard Bentley’s 1753 illustration for the “Elegy.” The frontispiece to the luxuriously produced, Designs by Mr. Bentley, for six poems by Mr. T Gray, depicts the “countryman showing the epitaph to a passenger,” with the gravestone presented by the swain, who holds it proprietarily, while the reader stands respectfully at the

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foot of the grave. The lines of engraving shown in this illustration are not legible, but in outline appear short enough to have been inscribed by someone with little command of language.55 Their appearance elevates inscription over meaning by making the story of the epitaph’s appearance into the moving subject of the poem’s narrative. Read as inscription, the epitaph replaces the scenario by which the literate poet inexplicably haunts and describes the graves of the illiterate peasants into one where the illiterate peasants honor the dead poet by appropriating to their own world of significant objects the words he has accidentally left behind. Whether or not one subscribes entirely to this scenario as a narrative Gray had in mind, the larger point is that thinking about the mediation of writing matters in understanding the “Elegy” itself as series of visual cues; a piece where form and content conspire to make words into objects of interest as much for what they are as for what they have to say. The “Elegy,” Hartman has argued, “ends with an archaic image of itself—­an actual inscription for which the whole elegy provides the setting.”56 As confirmation of this point, it helps to remember that Gray had every reason to expect the poem to appear anonymously and little cause to imagine it becoming a publication to which he would be forced to sign his name. Prior to his success, Gray’s investment in publication had been in the anthology as a form that could put published poems on a continuum with inscriptions by making print into something visibly contingent upon the material life of paper and its collection. In this context, a printed anthology could participate in a process where the transmission of words produced pathos because and not in spite of their visibility as writing: print and stone could be seen alike, as evidence of the weak level of control writers exercised over their statements.57

Mackenzie’s Abandoned Pages The drama of authorial intentions being razed to the ground on which they are written is nowhere more elaborated than in the frame-­narratives of Mackenzie’s three novels. Each of these opens by using the trope of the found manuscript to rehearse the lesson of meaning’s being undercut by material contingency. By the 1770s, Mackenzie’s fictional editors fully embody the project that Sterne and Gray encourage in the ‘50s, of making writing itself a site of pathos. Mackenzie’s work celebrates a landscape systematically emptied of inhabitants but strewn with abandoned pages. It also experiments with ways to situate the printed book within this landscape, and thus to extend the



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fiction of writing’s failure all the way to the scene in which sentimental readers register the weight of the texts in their hands, sensing them as things that have reached them in spite of the market or the author’s wishes. Mackenzie, in other words, connects consciousness of print mediation to the cultivation of respect for a text’s nonhuman movements, and to its status as a monument to the inadequacy of human intentions. He brings this study to a close because he is a modern man of letters; a figure both of heightened sensitivity to the dynamics of print capitalism, and of deep skepticism about the success of human endeavor. The editor of Julia de Roubigné claims to have inherited a bundle of letters from his friend, who has received them as a legacy from his father. This friend explains how his father first came into possession of the letters: “Standing one day at the door of a grocery shop,” he explains, “a little boy passed him, with a bundle of papers in his hand, which he offered for sale to the master of the shop, for the ordinary uses of his trade.” The boy fails to sells these papers to the shopkeeper and is ready to depart when my father desired a sight of the papers, saying to the lad with a smile, that, perhaps, he might deal with him for his book, upon reading a sentence or two, he found a style much above that of the ordinary manuscripts of a grocery shop, and gave the boy his price at a venture for the whole.58 This bundle of letters, ordered roughly but not exactly according to their dates, is then handed down by the editor to the reader, ostensibly in the shape he has received them, with the explanation that he “found it a difficult task to reduce them into narrative, because they are made up of sentiment, which narrative would destroy” (5). Like the “Elegy” and The Man of Feeling, Julia de Roubigné thus presents itself as having a “shape” that will draw the sympathetic passerby into its situation. Tom, the fictional editor of Mackenzie’s second novel, The Man of the World (1773), also finds a series of papers in a box, the culmination of a visit to a village in which he “flew to find out the marks by which even inanimate things were to be known.”59 In this mood, he stumbles upon evidence of the writer’s tragic life even before he reads of it in the written document. Holding the piles of abandoned paper that report at the level of content on the experience of a fellow man of feeling becomes confirmation of a reader’s responsiveness, abandoned pieces of writing testifying to the way men surrender their pages to the hard vicissitudes of fate. In this sense, Mackenzie encourages in

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his fiction the kind of reading that graffiti routinely insists upon, whereby what is seen and what is read report on each other. Reading documents that have been left behind in circumstances of death and despair confirms the tragic scenario they record, of the writer’s failure to make himself understood, or to leave his mark of intention on the world. This scenario expands when we consider Mackenzie as invested in the possibility that even printed words can appear in a frail and singular incarnation, as a sign like the window cleaners’ etchings, of lost communication. Mackenzie’s found manuscripts, and the others that routinely turn up in sentimental literature, have been interpreted in the past as concealing evidence of their origins in human design and commerce. Elizabeth Harries describes the fragments represented in sentimental texts as evidence of “the desire to efface the traces of the controlling hand of the writer, to make a work of art look like a work of ‘nature.’ ”60 This account assumes a distinction between the fictional visibility of an interpolated document or found manuscript and the real visibility of a published and commercially viable document, juxtaposing the former as something desirable for the purposes of sentimental response against the latter as something the sentimental author works to conceal.61 It suggests, for instance, that the window depicted on the front cover of this book will only appeal as an image of something forlorn and forgotten if we forget about the ways in which it has now been duplicated and preserved. Mackenzie, however, tried hard to blur these two kinds of visibility. This involved setting up a reflexive framework for his texts that would make the realities of print mediation visible as forces of nature. Key here is Mackenzie’s obsessive relationship to graffiti as an ideal model of writing. Mackenzie liked graffiti best when it pointed to the loneliness and despair of its writer. At a time when the Highlands were being rapidly emptied of their inhabitants, and Scottish culture was represented in the popular imagination as vanishing into the past, Mackenzie celebrated this landscape as one in which writing was left behind. As he traveled in Scotland, he collected pieces of graffiti in his notebooks, recycling them afterward in his own poetry, journals, correspondence, and editorship of The Mirror (1779–­80). His fascination with graffiti was a way of commemorating a kind of writing alien or prior to print, but it also offered Mackenzie a way to suggest his published work’s origins in a hauntingly frail set of social relations. In 1770, Mackenzie was particularly gratified to find the following verse engraved on a window at an inn:



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Of all the ills unhappy mortals know, A life of wandering is the greatest Woe; On all their weary ways wait Care and Pain, And Pine, and Penury, a meagre Train: A wretched exile to his country send, Long with Grief and long without a friend. Transcribing the lines into a letter to his cousin, Elizabeth Rose, Mackenzie introduces them as “Six lines which I met with on a window at Dalnecardoch, the only tolerable window-­poetry I could find on the road.” He goes on to describe the moment at which he first encountered these lines as deeply moving: “If these are original, which I imagine they are, they were probably (as I devoutly belive’d at the Time I read them) the Production of some unfortunate Native of the Highlands, who had been actually in the Situation they describe.”62 Despite his interest in the figure of the displaced wanderer, Mackenzie insists on the locodescriptive nature of the verse he has found, and expands its lonely setting to include himself, a traveler and a reader of signs, stumbling upon the words of the defeated Jacobite solider in a sentimental mood from which he is now distanced. His accidental encounter with the words in this setting becomes part of the package he sends to Rose. His letter, together with his transcription of the graffiti he has found, reproduces the framing of Gray’s “Elegy” in the sense that it reports on a man of feeling discovering lines that convey their writer’s state of exile and demise. Mackenzie’s package to Rose also includes his rewriting of the verse he has found. “Poor Soul!,” he reflects of the original writer, “’twas all the Expression which the reality of his Grief could allow; I, who could feel it only in Idea, who had Leisure and Safety for the Task, would lengthen it out a little; and accordingly produced an Elegy, which I send you enclosed.”63 Mackenzie asserts that time and paper have allowed him to expand upon the writer’s feelings. But his poem, “The Exile,” turns out to elaborate on the scene of his reading the graffiti, rather than on the thoughts of the person writing it. “The Exile” describes in the third person the return of a Highland native to the village in which he led a small band of Jacobites against the English. In battle, Mackenzie’s clansman has seen his comrades killed and been forced to flee, leaving his village to be sacked and his new wife killed. He returns now with withered limbs in his “Scottish weeds” to a scene of ruin, “where half a column now derided the great / where half a statue yet records the brave,” to die, in the last lines of the poem, on his wife’s long neglected grave.64 This figure, like

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the speaker of Gray’s Elegy, is a sympathetic reader of a deserted landscape. Presented with the time and paper its occupants did not have, the best he can do is elaborate on his encounter with their writing as a sign of death, extending their silence to his own page rather than using it to call them back to life. “The Exile” was published in 1780, in issue 85 of The Mirror. Here the frame narrative Mackenzie built up around the original Dalnecardoch window poem expands even farther as he explains the publication of the poem. As an editor he is besieged, Mackenzie begins, by contributions of poetry he cannot use. This piece, however, has caught his attention in much the way that deserted boxes of papers catch the attention of his characters: “the gentleman from whom I received it says, he has been informed that it was founded on the following inscription (probably written from real feeling) on the window of an inn, situated in the Highlands of Scotland.” Mackenzie then includes the same lines he had sent ten years earlier to Rose, and follows them with “The Exile,” which, he coolly writes, “points out the fatal consequences of such treasonable attempts, and represents the distress of the person described, in a very interesting and pathetic manner.”65 As a result of this introduction, readers encounter “The Exile” as evidence of an elaborate process of transmission. Handed down to a gentleman informed of its original debt to a window poem (of which he somehow has a copy), it has been sent by this fictional gentleman to The Mirror. The editor has then published it neither as poetry, to which he is in principle opposed, nor as Jacobite sympathy, but as a tribute to the afterlife of the verses located on the glass of a lonely inn. It is the story of their unlikely durability, each layer of which becomes the story of a reader’s unplanned physical encounter with the written object in a forlorn situation, which fascinates Mackenzie. The appearance of the “The Exile” in the periodical further extends this story by making the pages of The Mirror into objects that the reader holds in a final, visible encounter with the poem. The narrative Mackenzie tells, and in which he casts himself as slightly sentimental editor, conjures up not just the poem’s original form on glass, but its printedness as an extension of this fragile process of mediation. Just as Gitelman imagines the medium of the cinema extending its materiality to include the ticket, the sprocket holes of the film, and the sale of the DVD, Mackenzie now imagines the medium of the poem including its shape as graffiti, its sympathetic preservation by a gentleman traveller, its journey by post into the hands of an editor, and its appearance in the issue of the journal where it strikes a sentimental reader. The printing of his poem, “The Exile,” is a moving testimony to the weak links in this process and the unlikely scenario by which the poem has continued to exist in the world.



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Mackenzie was so captivated by the idea of a poem radiating its fragility as an object that he sometimes worked backward, from print to manuscript, tree, or glass in order to endow the pages on which his work appeared with fictional origins as the ghostly inscriptions he cherished. For instance, after publishing “Verses, written on a window shutter of a mall countryinn, in Dumfries-­shire, supposed to be written by R. Burns” in the Scots Magazine, he confesses to James Currie that these were his lines: I wrote, almost impromptu, the little Poem in question, and read it the next day at a Gentleman’s House where we visited, from the pencilled copy in my Note-­Book, which I pretended to have taken from the window-­shutter of a little Inn.66 Here Mackenzie reads his own poems as if they were transcriptions of graffiti. But Mackenzie also inscribed poems already published, or written with publication in mind, on material surfaces. In the case of the window-­shutter where he pretends to have found the “Verses,” he explains to Currie that what he actually did was inscribe Burns’s “In Praise of a Young Lady” onto this shutter, making it into a work of graffiti that would cause its readers to speculate on what desperate lover had come to write it at the inn. The most fascinating case of Mackenzie’s building up this kind of ­history for his print compositions begins in 1769, when he mentions in a letter to Rose that “decorating a place by Inscription is scarcely known in this Country; yet it has the Advantage, that it prepares the Mind for that Pleasure which a beautiful situation should produce.”67 Mackenzie followed up this comment on the way travelers can be recalled by words to the immediacy of their surroundings by sending Rose two inscriptions for her Highland estate. He playfully recommends that she enlist the help of “an inamorato in the Neighbourhood, who is used to carving trees and has got a sharp penknife” to help install these verses in the situations he imagines for them.68 One of these proposed carvings includes a frame narrative, prefacing the words of the “Genius of the rural scene” with an address imploring the passerby to stop and read the inscription: Thou who hast traced the windings of the dell, If haply here thy wildered steps are led, Read what the Genuis of the rural scene, As once upon my raptured ear he poured The wildest warblings of his oaten reed, Spoke when he closed his song.

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The scenario Mackenzie imagines for the reception of this inscription underscores its writtenness, both because it is to be carved by a peasant with his own romantic history onto bark, and because the poem reports rhetorically on a writer recording the “song” of the setting. Like Gray, Mackenzie fantasizes about the possibility that a poem will speak out of its situation, as an object left behind in the wake of its author’s intentions. While it is unlikely that these verses ever made it into Rose’s dell, their fictional origins as inscription were instrumental in Mackenzie’s decision to publish them later in his life. Mackenzie’s authorized Works (1808) includes the two poems beneath a frame narrative about their loss and rediscovery on a beach in the Isle of Wight: I had forgotten the two inscriptions, (written for a place which long since changed its possessor, and has lost more than half its beauty,) till they were recalled to my memory by a letter from a gentleman in the Isle of Wight, mentioning that they were found on the shore of that island, after the shipwreck of a vessel, of which he did not mention (or if he did I have forgotten) the name, in circumstances which shewed them to have belonged to one of the unfortunate passengers. Annexed to the parcel was a note, mentioning them to be the productions of the author of the “Man of Feeling.” The incident was singular, though the subject was trifling. I endeavoured, but without success, to trace by what means it occurred.69 This fiction stands in place of the story that Mackenzie might tell of his real rediscovery of the poems he had written in his youth and never published—­a story that would resonate with the one Derrida tells, of “submitting to an arbitrary rule made by a program I hadn’t chosen” or the one Hume imagines, of books that come and go unheeded in his study. The way Mackenzie deploys inscription to explain the survival of the verses in the world during the thirty years since they were written captures his fascination with writing having a life of its own. Because he allows the poems to have existed as inscriptions, Mackenzie can fabricate for them a life beyond his control; a “theatre of prosthesis” in which they are transcribed, annotated, lost, found, and sent back to him, all without his agency. There is nothing so extraordinary about these inscriptions as the chance, physical encounters they have occasioned, and nothing that becomes them like their imaginary form as part of a water-­logged parcel whose owner is buried beneath the sea. This fantasy sustains Mackenzie in one of more his extraordinary efforts



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to imagine the perspective from which his words might be read as signs of his death and disappearance. But it is also hitched through the visibility of graffiti to the reality of pages as things that can convey the aura of being lost rather than found; dead to human intention rather than alive to human will; continuous with etching and manuscript, rather than redemptive of words from their medium’s material fate. Framing his inscriptions with a narrative that describes their material adventure, Mackenzie is not saving them from the clutches of beachcombers so much as he is implying that his collected works will themselves enter the world as printed pages with a life of their own. Anything he writes will come to life, he suggests, as witness to the frailty of human endeavor. In keeping with this fantasy, Mackenzie takes a strange pleasure in reporting to Rose that The Man of Feeling has appeared in print, but “was in Edinburgh some days and actually advertised in the Papers before I knew anything of its Arrival.”70 The newly minted book has, in Mackenzie’s account, washed up in the city with as little calculation on his part as the poems that wash up on the beach. Mackenzie’s frame narratives are fictions that obfuscate the motivations and rewards of professional authorship in favor of scenes of writing and reading where a reader meets unexpectedly with a text in a state of neglect. This fiction puts print on a continuum with other kinds of writing that could more literally claim a “situation”—­particularly, a situation highlighting the absence or inadequacy of social relations. These real cases of graffiti and inscription help Mackenzie to imagine what he was trying to achieve as a professional writer by freeing print of human culpability, and making it available as a sign of loss. Separating themselves from, and yet putting themselves in relation to, the words on stone and glass and the abandoned manuscripts they imitate, Mackenzie’s printed words refer to the mechanically produced page as an event over which authors have no say. In Mackenzie’s fantasy, this makes printed pages into scenes of lost intention, able to transmit the story of their author’s failure—­while at the same time ironically assuring his success in arresting future generations of sympathetic travelers. My hunch is that Gray and Mackenzie would both have stopped to read the words of the window cleaners carefully. They would have liked the accident of their existence, the self-­referentiality of their statements, and the obscurity of their location. They might have lifted them into their texts, which owe much to the real graffiti in eighteenth-­century Britain. Yet, the irony is that while William Cavells could not even aspire to a world in which the sphere of print would open up to him as a writer, Gray and Mackenzie were busy concluding in a world in which print would exceed the intentions of those

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who made it, and would close in upon itself in the way graffiti does, as posy capturing the brevity and limitation of the writer’s lot. Writing of this kind, in print or on glass, belongs in only a very limited sense to the sphere of discourse, for its real calling is as an object—­a package on a beach, a tombstone rudely carved, a manuscript that wraps butter—­alerting readers to the fate of objects, to which all writing, even print, can be imaginatively subjected. Put differently, Mackenzie designs his words for the book historians of his future. He anticipates the moment where someone will stumble upon an old edition of his work and be struck by the history of the pages and their production. The irony, however, is that because Mackenzie uses his own prowess as a writer to pave the way for this moment, he actually relies on the close readers of his discourse to become connoisseurs of his text in its materiality. The case of printed pages drawing attention to their circulation underscores more strongly than those discussed in previous chapters the conservative potential of works that reference their mediation. What emerges here is the possibility that objects can be rendered visible at the expense of the subjects who made them. Words are seen in this way not only by those looking at the past from certain angle, for instance, at the edition or binding of a book, but also in the view of eighteenth-­century authors who exaggerate how powerless authors are over print by suggesting their close relationship to graffiti artists, stone masons, and glass cutters. In cultivating this affinity, Gray and Mackenzie subscribe to the idea of print’s continuity with surfaces on which traces could not easily be owned or directed. Their willingness to imagine writing in these terms relates to the wishes of readers and writers discussed in previous chapters, all of which describe literary situations that privilege the agency of the page or the letter or the genre over the reader and writer. Sentimental texts reveal the darkest side of this willingness to cede control to the medium of print, demonstrating how the story of human intention gets obscured by those promoting the consciousness of writing itself. As the efforts of working-­class writers are represented by educated authors who emphasize the materiality of the badly written word, the story of William Cavell’s mastering writing gets lost. The fascination of eighteenth-­century readers and writers with making the process of mediation visible comes at the cost of underplaying the fundamental ability of people to own that process and use words to shape the world they live in.

notes

Prologue 1. Derrida, Paper Machine, 22. 2. The musical score is included in Toldervy, History of Two Orphans, 1:100. 3. “The Adventures of a Quire of Paper.” 4. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 126.

Introduction: Giving Power to the Medium 1. Lloyd, “The Powers of the Pen,” 28. 2.������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� The most detailed factual evidence for the increase of new and reprinted novels during this period has been produced James Raven in his British Fiction 1750–­1770 and Judging New Wealth. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazine 1740–­1815 provides similarly detailed evidence of the central role of magazines at the time. 3. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–­1740. In this work, McKeon refutes the idea that realism ever provided writers and readers with a discrete sense of purpose. Rather, he claims, it presented an alternative to the kind of naïve empiricism that early eighteenth-­century readers brought to anti-­Romance texts, making the new mood of “realism” a modern alternative to the kinds of voracity it replaced. In this account, fictional reading and writing are seen as the result of an oscillation between belief and disbelief, a conservative settling down to an awareness of language and its genres rather than an intense or singular commitment to narrowing the gap between reality and representation. 4. Hunter, Before Novels. 5.������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Studies emphasizing the conscious consumption of literature as novelty in the eighteenth century include Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel and Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace. See also Benedict, Making the Modern Reader and Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. Here, I would also include Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations for its emphasis on the way realist fictions were consumed as an antithesis to the reality of their readers. 6. Long, The Anti-­Gallican, 232.

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7. Siskin, The Work of Writing, 176. 8. Graves, Columella, or, the Distressed Anchoret, 2: 243. 9. Keymer, Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 17. 10. Gitelman, Always Already New, 8. 11. Griffith, Triumvirate, 162. 12. Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 15–­16. Subsequent page numbers are given parenthetically in the text. 13. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 55. 14.�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� There are several studies that connect the eighteenth century and the rise of literature as a distinct branch of reading. In addition to the work of Siskin, Keymer, Benedict, and McKeon already cited here, see Kramnick, Making the English Canon, and Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon. Mark Rose’s Authors and Owners also makes an important contribution to this history by suggesting the role copyright law played at a time in the mid-­century when the perceived task was “to differentiate authorship from mechanical invention and to mystify and valorize the former” (119). In claiming the 1750s as a decade where the distribution of literature reached new heights, I am diverging from those who suggest that cheap literature really only burgeoned as a product after the copyright verdict of 1774, which deprived publishers of their monopoly on texts. Here I am following the work of James Raven, who has shown, not only that mid-­eighteenth-­century novels were much more likely than publications later in the century to eschew literature’s didactic and moral function (Judging New Wealth, 70–­76) but also that this was a time their production did proliferate. See also Elliot, “The Cost of Reading in Eighteenth-­Century Britain.” Elliot argues that the availability of books in the mid-­century was facilitated by the busy market in second hand books and uses this to refute the argument that books became significantly cheaper after 1774. 15. Lynch, “Novels in the World of Moving Goods.” 16. Raven, Judging New Wealth, 48–­49. 17. Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” 343. 18. I am also thinking here of Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism, which attributes this conscious role to Georgic verse, and whose introductory chapter anticipates in many ways the history of mediation offered by John Guillory. 19. See Derrida, Writing and Difference. 20. Elizabeth Eisenstein set the bar high for this approach with her The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which claims that print made fixity and reproducibility the chief characteristics of the most celebrated Enlightenment texts, whose importance registered through their uniformity of presentation and preservation. 21. McDowell, The Women of Grub Street; Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture and the Eighteenth-­Century Novel. 22. See Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things, and Brown, ed., Things. 23. Keane, “Signs Are Not the Garb of Meaning,” 193. 24. See Gell, Art and Agency. 25. For instance, Julie Park in The Self and It describes the “uncanny” realm that dolls and automata occupied for their eighteenth-­century viewers as lifelike objects, arguing that



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eighteenth-­century novels bring their characters to life in accord with these technologies. And Leah Price has identified the way in various life stages and material incarnations of a text were constructed in the eighteenth century from a book’s own point of view, “From the History of a Book to a “History of the Book.” 26. Barchas acknowledges authorial intention as a problem—­she addresses this only by suggesting a general culture in which books were handled by series of people as prescient objects while backgrounding her focus on the bookmaker’s final product as one over which an author, by definition, lacks control (Graphic Design, 11). Her reading of The Card comes on p. 53. McDowell’s study, which illustrates the multiplicity of people who were central players in the circulation of meaning, suggests much more strongly the awareness by printers and ballad criers of the surface of the page. But there is also a strong disconnect between the women she describes, often as semi-­literate improvisers and tacticians in a difficult industry, and the actual texts she describes, which lack the power or the interest of the agents who handled them. 27. Siskin and Warner, “This Is Enlightenment.” 28. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, xxi; Macpherson, Harm’s Way. 29. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 216. 30. Marx, Capital, 167. 31. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 52. 32. See, for instance, Bennett, Formalism and Marxism. 33. Frow, “The Literary Frame,” 337. 34. Flint, Appearance of Print, 207. 35. A related tendency informs Linda Zionkowksi’s argument about Thomas Gray, whom she reads as opposed to print capitalism and professional authorship. She reads Gray’s reaction to commercial print as a form of alienation, suggesting that he pursued, instead, ideals of “silence, integrity, and self containment.” Zionkowski, Men’s Work, 134. 36. Mark Blackwell, “Hack-­Work.” 37. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 98. 38. Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 33. 39. Stewart, On Longing, 8. 40. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 112. 41. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 74. In the case of Honneth, I am thinking of Reification. 42. For their most succinct articulation of this concept see Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. 43. Gitelman, Always Already New, 2. 44. Ibid., 4.

Chapter 1. Powerlessness as Entertainment 1. The History of Charlotte Summers, 1:25, 28. 2. The Temple Beau, or the Town Coquets, 17.

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3. Cobham, 34. 4. Kidgell, The Card, 1:13. 5. Toldervy, The History of Two Orphans. Music scores are included in the book at 1:101, 2:38, 2:150. Admissions of narrative weakness include the scene in which the narrator announces: “nothing remarkable happened at breakfast. . . . ​Our readers cannot wonder at this, because we shall reserve the character of that gentlewoman for another chapter” (1:151). 6. Goodall, Adventures of Capt. Greenland, 2:4 and Shebbeare, Lydia, or Filial Piety, 1:35. 7. John Shebbeare, The Marriage Act, 33. This joke is taken up in Tristram Shandy, where Sterne challenges readers to “Lay down the book, I will allow you half a day to give a probable guess at the grounds of this procedure” (17). 8. Booth, “The Self-­Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction,” 182. 9. Scott, Agreeable Ugliness, 23. 10. For a general appraisal of the way professional authors were viewed, see Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, 14. The passage from The Critical Review is quoted in Donoghue, “Colonizing Readers,” 64. 11. Raven, British Fiction, 2. Review of The Fair Citizen was published in “The Critical,” July 1757. Keymer, describing the idea that the novel was on the rise during these years as a “teleological error,” also points to evidence “that in the run-­up to Tristram Shandy, the genre was quite widely held to be past its peak, or even burning itself out” (Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel, 55). 12. Raven, British Fiction, 3. 13. In this sense, these decades can be contrasted with the later ones of the century in which more refined marketing strategies would see the increase in new editions, the development of the multiple volume novel, and the emphasis on moral instruction through fiction. 14. Raven, Judging New Wealth, 31. 15. Montague, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3:4. 16. Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little, 45, 108. 17. Robert Folkenflik makes this argument in “Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-­ Century Narrative,” 53. 18. Hunter, Before Novels, 24. 19. Ibid., 237 20. Stonehill, The Self-­Conscious Novel, 18. 21. Iser, The Implied Reader, 45. 22. Preston, The Created Self, 7. 23. Jenner, The Placid Man, 2:250. 24. Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 234. 25. Van Ghent, The English Novel, 88. 26. Park, The Self and It, xiii–­xxx. 27. Keymer, “Sterne and the New Species of Writing,”57. 28. Dodd, The Sisters, 1:32. 29. Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1:11.



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30. Smythies, The Brothers, 1:66. 31. Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 1:11; Fielding, Tom Jones, 60. 32. On the metaphor of coach travel in Fielding see Thomas Keymer, “Readers and Stage Coaches in Fielding and Sterne.” 33. See Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25. 34. Hume, Life, 13 and 2. 35. Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston, 3. See also Sterne’s directive to his readers to look at the cover of Tristram Shandy (1:xvii). 36. I am thinking here, for example, of Julie Park’s The Self and It and the work of Jessica Riskin; see, for example, “The Defecating Duck. “ 37. Deidre Lynch has connected the two technologies by suggesting that: “the novels of this period were as much associated with an emergent idiom of transport, transaction, commercial traffic and social mixing as they were with an idiom for the representation of separate selves” (“Novels in the World of Moving Goods,” 123). See also Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. 38. Farquhar, The Stage-­Coach, a Farce, 14. 39. Cowper, The Task and Minor Poems, Book 1, l. 754–­57. 40. Baretti, A Journey from London to Genoa, 2:9. 41. Bourn, A Treatise upon Wheel-­carriages, 44. 42. James Murray, The Travels of the Imagination, 88. 43. Hughes, The Adventures of Sylvia Hughes, 37; Murray, Travels, 32. 44. Murray, Travels, 2, 4. 45. Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 27. Fielding had other reasons to feel emasculated by coaches. He ���������������������������������������������������������������������� was particularly well qualified to talk of the sense of vulnerability coach travel brought to its passengers: his first wife, Charlotte, like his heroine Amelia, had had her nose seriously injured in a carriage accident. And in 1740 Fielding was sued for debt after having let “divers of coaches, chariots, chaises, horses, mares and geldings” he could not afford, suggesting his unsuccessful attempt to take back the reins of vehicles that continued to both threaten and charm him until the end of his life with a sense of his own powerlessness. See “introduction” in Amelia, xxi. 46. Sterne, The Letters of Laurence Sterne, 346. We might compare this to the demeanor of forbearance displayed by Tristram and Yorick as characters. In the seventh volume of Tristram Shandy, Tristram protests that his “French postillion has always to alight before he has got three hundred yards out of town.” And yet, he continues: “I never think myself impower’d to excommunicate thereupon either the Post-­Chaise, or its driver—­nor do I take it into my head to swear by the living G—­, I would rather go a foot ten thousand times—­or that I will damn’d if I ever get into another—­but I take the matter coolly before me, and consider that some tag, or rag, or jag, or bolt, or buckle, or buckle’s tongue, will ever be a wanting, or want altering, travel where I will” (392). 47. Sterne, Letters, 182. Sterne and Fielding anticipate by nearly a century Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s account in The Railway Journey of the railway traveler “who sat inside that projectile ceased to be a traveller and became . . . ​a mere parcel” (54). 48. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 278.

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49. Gitelman, Always Already New, 84. 50. The Travels of Mons. Le Poste-­Chaise, 15. 51. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 22. 52. Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility, 157. 53. Yorick is not the only sentimental traveler to use his vehicle this way. Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple also describes characters carried by coach though London, “to view the various countenances of the different sorts of people that inhabit it” (171). 54. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89. This argument has been taken up more recently by Axel Honneth, whose Reification applies Lukács’s analysis of reification to the twenty-­first century society and the attitudes that we routinely take to social and historical processes as things we can only contemplate. 55. See, for instance, Barrell, English Literature in History and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 56. I am taking the term “psychic structure” from Schivelbusch, who uses it to describe the relationship between train travel and the nineteenth-­century perspective on the world and the self.

Chapter 2. What It-­Narratives Know About Their Authors 1. Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, 67. His response corresponds to what Lynch describes in Economy of Character as the way “knowing objects are played against the humans who do not know their properties” (99). 2. Advertisement for the Lexus ES330, New Yorker, May 2004. 3. Küchler, “Materiality and Cognition,” 209. 4. Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-­Century Novel, 120 and Douglas, “Britannia’s Rule and the It-­Narrator,” 68. 5. Lynch, “Novels in the World of Moving Goods,” 139. 6. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 140–­41. 7. See Lamb, “Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales”; “The Crying of Lost Things”; “Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales.” 8. Phillips, The Adventures of a Black Coat, 7. 9. Marx, Capital, 143. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 176. 12. Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 13. 13. Miller, “Introduction,” 8. 14. The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoe. 15. Flint, “Speaking Objects”; Blackwell, “Hack-­Work.” 16. Blackwell, “Hack-­Work,” 23. 17. Hayles, “Traumas of Code.” 18. This anonymous piece appeared in Critical Review 52 (December 1781): 477–­80. 19. Information on Johnstone’s life comes from the Dictionary of Literary Biography



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(Gale Literary Databases, 2006). Other information on Thomas Bridges and Helenus Scott comes from Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 20. 20. Johnstone, Chrysal, 1:127. 21. Bridges, The Adventures of a Bank-­note, 24. 22. The Sedan. A Novel, 164; Phillips, The Adventures of a Black Coat, 80; The Adventures of a Cork-­Screw, 53; Kilner (?), The Adventures of a Hackney Coach, 2: 163. 23. The Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoa, 14. In The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes the shoes are admired by their maker “with no less joy, and pride, than a new author does some fresh product of his brain; reading it over, and smiling and laughing at what will cause the purchasing bookseller to sigh and frown,” suggesting, again, the type of author who will meet with little critical praise as he pursues writing as a form of fashionable craftsmanship (39). 24. Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, 58. 25. The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, 1:101, 104. 26. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 108. 27. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Bk. 2, Ch 1. 28. Blackmore, “Satyr against Wit,” 20. 29. Dryden, “Mac Flecknoe, or a Satire upon the True-­Blue-­Protestant Poet, T. S.,” in The Poems of John Dryden, 459. 30. Jones, “Pope and Dullness,” 247. This phenomenon is also described by Brean Hammond in Professional Imaginative Writing in England, which focuses on Swift and Pope as most largely to blame for the prejudice against professional writing (200–­201). 31. Johnstone, Chyrsal, 1:126–­27, 120. 32. Phillips, The Adventures of a Black Coat, 166–­68. 33. Coventry, The History of Pompey the Little, 168. 34. Lynch, Economy of Character, 37 35. Adventures of an Author, 1: 26–­27. 36. Nicholas Hudson, “It Narratives.” 37. Lamb, “Swift, Leviathan, and the Persons of Authors.” 38. Flint, “Speaking Objects,” 221. 39. These terms appear respectively on pages 21, 213, 216, 223, and 218 of Flint’s article. 40. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 101. 41. A later example, “Adventures of a Pen,” pointedly instructs readers to attend to the text they are reading as evidence that paper has survived the scenes the narrator has described. “Adventures of a Pen” was published in the European Magazine, where it appeared in three installments as the offerings of an author purportedly cynical about the times and the fashions for “Adventures.” This author has found “the pen with which [he] had been writing burlesquing the historic mode” undercutting him by describing its own adventures, detailing its life as the property of various corrupt men who make the pen into “the packhorse of the public and the slave of the press, the hireling of booksellers and the drudge of letters.” In the possession of “Mr. Eitherside,” the pen is used to write every possible genre, but always of the kind that is “thrown aside as the evanescent folly of the day.” The author who now owns the pen, however, objects to such fashions, and the pen

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therefore ends its narrative by congratulating itself on having “been the only Pen concerned in the transcription of those moral essays which you have submitted to the candour of the Public, under the figure of DIONYSIUS, in the EUROPEAN MAGAZINE.” This ironic move takes readers right back to the text they are holding, undercutting its fictional author’s stance by drawing attention to the magazine’s evanescence and to the fashionable shape the piece assumes. 42. Joseph Addison, Spectator 367, 101. 43. The Adventures of a Cork-­Screw, x. 44. Stewart, On Longing, 37. 45. In “The History of an Old Pocket Bible” (1812) the narrator stays firmly closed, speaking, as a book “in a most tattered condition. . . . ​A great part [of whose] leaves are torn out, and the remainder so doubled down and soiled, as scarcely to be legible,” about its experience on the shelves of a fashionable bookseller and in the hands of its pious readers (89). 46. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 236. 47. See, for instance, Derrida, Writing and Difference, 10. 48. Robbins, “Commodity Histories,” 454. 49. Ibid., 455.

Chapter 3. The Theory of Paper 1. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 127. 2. Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, 92. Beattie’s argument is a direct descendant from that of Descartes’s Meditations. See also Foucault’s essay on Derrida’s reading of Descartes, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire.” 3. Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 14. 4. Richetti, Philosophical Writing, 222. 5. Parker, Scepticism and Literature, 231. Here one could also look at Cathy Caruth, who stresses narrative rather than rhetoric: with Locke the “claim to be transparent self-­ reflection of “understanding” is a figurative displacement of the actual way in which understanding, in the argument, comes to know itself: that is, as a narrative.” Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions, 32. 6. Roger Chartier makes this charge against Deconstructionist approaches when he argues that its conceptual categories actually impede the perception of empirical differences; see Inscription and Erasure, viii. 7. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 111. 8. See Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 405. Locke has of course been ridiculed by critics ever since, from Jonathan Swift to Paul de Man, for his resistance to language as something slippery, metaphorical. See Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, and de Man, “Epistemology of Metaphor.” 9. Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century England. 10. See Redford, The Converse of the Pen, 7.



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11. Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 15 12. Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, 279. 13. Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 49 14. Beattie, James Beattie’s London Diary, 54. 15. See Priestley, Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry. 16. Quoted in King, James Beattie, 20 (from a letter dated Aug 13, 1772). 17. See Wolff, “Kant’s Debt to Hume via Beattie.”. 18. Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 275. 19. Priestley, Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry, 98. 20. Several recent studies of eighteenth-­century literature and money have pointed to the fascination with and fears about credit that surfaced at this time in relation to the use of paper money as a conflation of the imaginary and the real. See, for instance, Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy. 21. Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment, 52–­53. 22. Hume, Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, 23. 23. Ibid., 155 24. Ibid., 182 25. For a good reading of Hume’s responses to the materiality of print see Adam Budd ‘Criticism, Sympathy and the Problem of Representation.” 26. Ibid., 256 27. August 13, 1772; Johnson, Letters, 186. 28. Hume claims, for instance, “our idea, therefore, of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformly observable in the operations of nature, where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one form the appearance of the other. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we ascribe to matter. Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessary connection.” An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 121. 29. De Man, “Epistemology of Metaphor.” 30. Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy, 48. 31. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 31. 32. Ibid., 108. 33. Ibid., 90. 34. Cohen, Miller, and Cohen, “A ‘Materiality Without Matter’?” xi. 35. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 42. 36. De Man, Resistance to Theory, 42–­43. 37. Clark, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne,” 100. 38. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 108. 39. Ibid., 132. 40. Derrida, Paper Machine, 43. 41. Ibid., 20, 24. 42. Ibid., 25, 27.

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Chapter 4. Sermons Written on the Screen of Print 1. Derrida, Paper Machine, 54. 2. Cowper, The Task, l. 378–­91. 3. Foote, “The Cozeners: A Comedy,” in The Dramatic Works, 29. 4. A Full and Circumstantial Account of the Trial of the Reverend Doctor Dodd, 16. 5. An Account of the Life and Writings of William Dodd, 77. 6. A Genuine Account of the Behaviour and Dying Words of William Dodd. 7. This is recorded in detail by Boswell, The Life of Johnson, 829–­31. See “The Convict’s Address to his unhappy Brethren” in the third edition, cited by Villette, 161–­79. 8. Walpole, The Last Journals, 34–­35. 9. Fitzgerald, A Famous Forgery, 1. 10. Dodd, Thoughts in Prison. This collection was expanded in later editions; a third edition also included Dodd’s “account of himself,” which the editors claim has been finished by Dr. Johnson (196). An American edition was printed by Robert Hodge, Boston, 1777. 11. The definitive account of the trial is still Fitzgerald’s, which brings together all eighteenth-­century accounts. For a description of the petition see An Account of the Life and Writings of William Dodd, 85. 12. This is taken from a column in the Morning Chronicle, 15 March 1777. 13. Howson, The Macaroni Parson, 227. 14. Paul Hunter documents the eighteenth-­century taste for religious reading material and also suggests several ways sermons were packaged to gratify this taste: they could have life histories appended to them, be expanded to guide form, or be rewritten in nonhomiletic prose (Before Novels, 250–­55). 15. Siskin gives this argument a bold form when he suggests that changes in media over the course of the century were fundamental to new systems of thought. His The Work of Writing describes the period when a great proliferation of writing itself—­understood here as a nexus of writing, print, and silent reading—­made it necessary to find new ways of organizing information. This abundance of text, its exponential growth evidenced largely in the arena of writing and about writing, was, he argues, resolved by the introduction of the categories in which we now understand texts to originate: disciplinarity, professionalism, and literature. Key effects of this organization were that knowledge was empowered in particular ways: professionalism emerged as the alternative to literary writing, and literature as an alternative to other kinds of work. The new categories that emerged to deal with the visible surplus of writing therefore emphasized individual labor and character over the constitutive power of writing itself: “The tendency not to engage writing as a productive, material practice arose,” argues Siskin, “from the very set of social relations to which, in the eighteenth century, writing became indispensably related: the organization of work into mental versus physical labour” (24). 16. Stallybrass, “Little Jobs.” 17. Thornton, Handwriting in America, 29. For other work on handwriting in an age of print, Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print, 21–­44.



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18. Recent studies suggest that there was actually high support for the Anglican church in the eighteenth century. See Gibson, The Achievement of the Anglican Church. 19. Thompson, Customs in Common, 32. 20. For a full account of these issues see Gibson, The Achievement of the Anglican Church, 123. Gibson’s general perspective, however, is that the church was not held in such low esteem as previous historians have argued. 21. Crabbe, The Borough, 27. 22. Gibbon, Gibbon’s Autobiography, 33. 23. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 440. 24. Goldsmith, The Bee and Other Essays, 181–­82. In his study of the liturgy at the time, Bryan Spinks confirms the sense that many congregation members were disappointed with their preachers and the presentation of material. See n Spinks, Liturgy in the Age of Reason, 200–­201. 25. Mason, An Essay on the Action Proper to the Pulpi, 13. For a good reading of this piece see Goring, “Anglicanism, Enthusiasm and Quixotism,” 326–­41. 26. Hunter, Before Novels, 249. 27. Gibson, The Achievement of the Anglican Church, 93. 28. Cradock, Village Memoir, 117. 29. See Allan, A Nation of Readers, 170–­74. 30. Moore, An Essay on the Art of Preaching, 27. 31. Sandeman, An Essay on Preaching 30. 32. Spectator, 106. 33. Sandeman, An Essay on Preaching, 33. 34. Hanway, A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston, 53. 35. Quoted in Lansing Hammond, Laurence Sterne’s Sermon, 66. 36. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 123, 120. The Temple anecdote is quoted in Gray, Johnson’s Sermons, 17. 37. Pitt, “The Art of Preaching,” 80. 38. Woodforde,The Diary of a Country Parson, 1: 36 (April 30 1764). 39. The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, commonly called Corporal Bates, A Broken-­hearted Soldier (London, 1756), 93. 40. Goldsmith, The Bee and Other Essays, 184. 41. See Gibson, The Achievement of the Anglican Church, 1427. 42. Keane, “’Sincerity,’ ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants.” 43. Mason, Action Proper for the Pulpit, 59. 44. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, 1: 148. 45. Lloyd, The Powers of the Pen, 33–­34. 46. As the case of Johnson’s sermon-­writing suggests, it was not only writers of this desperate class who wrote sermons for money: The Sedan describes the “younkers at Oxford or Cambridge” who will think themselves well employed by being called on to “make” new sermons for a negligent deacon: The Sedan, 168. Sterne also played a part in the market for written-­to-­order sermons, producing one for John Fountayne, who needed a sermon in Latin for the final stage of his honorary doctor’s degree. See Cash, Laurence Sterne, 245.

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47. Adventures of Rd. Mr. Judas Hawke, 12. 48. James Rigby, writing of the mid-­seventeenth century, and suggesting the exciting new kinds of debate to which sermons are subject as published documents, describes the published sermon that “presents the preacher in a new role, that of author, the producer of a printed commodity that was losing much of its generic distinction and which was being consumed and interpreted in a richly autonomous market.” Rigby, “‘To Lye upon a Stationer’s Stall,” 190. 49.�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Other examples of clerics who participated in the trend for fiction writing included James Penn, author of Surry Cottage (1779) and William Cole of The Contradiction (1796). 50. Lloyd, The Curate, 22. 51. For a full account see Cash, An Essay on Woman (New York: AMS Press, 2000). 52. An Expostulatory Letter to the Reverend Mr. Kidgell, 5. 53. In Cash, An Essay on Woman, 27. 54. The Sedan, 144–­45. 55. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 827. 56. This quote comes from Fitzgerald, A Famous Forgery (15–­16), which also describes the outrage about Dodd more generally (56). 57. Trusler Memoirs of the Life of Rev. Dr Trusler, 79–­80. 58. SeeTrusler, A List of Books Published by the Reverend John Trusle. 59. John Trusler, Modern Times, or the adventures of Gabriel Outcas), 129. 60. Ibid., 136–­37. 61. The dating of this first round of sermons comes from thee Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Trusler, which draws on the second, unpublished part of his autobiography for information. There are no print examples of the sermons he sold this early, but the collection Twelve Sermons from 1796 is held in the British library, and there is the advertisement from 1790 in the advertisement to his works. See St. James Chronicle, 26 Jan. 1769; London Chronicle, 18 Jan. 1770 for early advertisements. His advertisement for the sermons offers “a specimen of the engraving [to] . . . ‌be sent to any clergyman, writing for it by the post (post-­paid), it being printed on one sheet of paper for the purpose.” The advertisement continues: Dr. Trusler begs leave to observe that only 400 copies of any one sermon are, at any time vended; that they do not pass through the hands of booksellers, of course, the clergy may rest satisfied that they can never be too general and if they apply to him, will never interfere, and that, as his collection is selected and compiled by the best authors who wrote for fame, he has culled the flowers of the whole, so that, altogether, it is the finest body of Divinity extant, and the engraving is so large as to be read by any eye. One hundred and fifty sermons are on sale now. Gentlemen may have any quantity at 1s each, or 9d if they take a 100.Trusler, A List of Books, 10. 62. Trusler, Memoirs, 10. 63. Cowper, The Task and Minor Poems, Book ii, l. 358–­65. 64. Thornton, Handwriting in America, 23. 65. Chesterfield, The Works of Lord Chesterfield, 380. 66. Chestefield, Principles of Politenes, 66. It is also through Chesterfield that we know



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Dodd was conscious of handwriting as a measure of character. During the years he was tutor to Philip Stanhope, Chesterfield wrote regularly to his heir and to Dodd. The letters show that his concerns haven’t changed much since the days he wrote to the first Philip Stanhope: he is deeply interested in Stanhope’s dancing, elocution, and French. He has regular praise for the script in which Stanhope’s letters arrive, although he is sometimes concerned that Dodd, whom he knows to be a good writer, has interfered with their composition. Chesterfield’s correspondence from this time also suggests that he and Dodd are in perfect agreement about the style of education Stanhope is to receive, and that Dodd’s own letters must already have passed muster as works of penmanship before he received the post. 67. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1061. 68. This was written to Charles Lawrence in 1780, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, 704. See also Boswell, Life of Johnson, 1060. 69. Woodmansee, “The Author Effect,” 21. 70. Gray, Johnson’s Sermons, 9. 71. Boswell, Life of Johnson, 832. 72. Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print, 158–­76. 73. See Hammond for the argument that most of Sterne’s later published sermons were his most derivative: his first published, Hammond argues, were largely his own work (Laurence Sterne’s Sermons, 45). Melvyn New describes the history of the sermon in his notes to the Works of Laurence Sterne, 2: 170–­87. 74. The second volume of The Works of Laurence Sterne 2: 946. Sterne’s first collection, published in 1760, was so popular that it exceeded the novel in lifetime editions, despite the fact that Sterne gave as his reason for printing his sermons “the favourable reception, which the sermon given as a sample of them in Tristram, met with from the world.” 75. Sterne, Letters, March 16, 1765. 76. Sterne, Sermons, 255. 77. Blackwell, “Hack Work,” 201. 78. Another case where a sermon appears as part of a novel is in the Vicar of Wakefield. Its fictional author, Dr. Primrose, occupies a complex position as a writer. In his professional capacity, Dr. Primrose is associated with postures of leisure and idyllic contemplation: “we had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fire-­side, and all our migrations from blue bed to the brown” (9). Even at the privileged moment of his career when the novel opens, Primrose has no curate and the implication is that he does write his own sermons—­we know he has written two on the topic of marriage. But when he delivers a sermon to his fellow prisoners later in the novel, writing disappears from the scene to suggest that he is capable of spontaneously coming up with words. The sermon he delivers in prison appears, however, in its entirety as the twenty-­fourth chapter of The Vicar of Wakefield, taking on a markedly written form, and referring readers back to the surface of the page. This leaves little choice but to imagine Primrose writing down his own sermon as part of his autobiography, underscoring the fact that by the end of the novel he has been converted to a position that reintroduces writing to the scenes from which it was omitted in the first place. While it is not Primrose’s handwriting itself that matters

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here, the effect is of his character being situated at a desk, firmly connected with writing and “sincere” in the “trite” sense that Goldsmith had imagined for Anglican preachers. The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Robert Mack 79. This may be one of the effects Sterne had in mind when, to protect his book from piracy, he autographed the beginning of the first and second editions of volume 5 and the first editions of volumes 7 and 9 of Tristram Shandy. 80. McLaughlin, Paperwork, 25.

Chapter 5. Gray’s and Mackenzie’s Printing on the Wall Epigraph: This window is from the King William Quarter at Greenwich. It is held in the Museum of London and described in the report, J. M. C. Bowsher, King William Quarter, Old Royal Naval College (Dormitory and Western Exterior), Greenwich, SE10; An Archaeological Watching Brief Report, London, Museum of London Archaeology Service. For another example of an eighteenth-­century window still intact, see Pittencrieff House, Dunfermline, Scotland. Here the writing, which reads “John Forbes, merry little cout,” was probably done in the 1710s, before the window pane was removed to a later wing of the house. 1. de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 69. 2. In defining the Bourgeois Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas noted that it is defined by the literacy of its participants: the eighteenth-­century public he imagined developing over the course of the century is a reading public, determined to put reason to use in a process of critical explication to which texts themselves, as objects traditionally shrouded in the mysteries of the church and value, give way and become answerable to the voices and opinions of readers. But Habermas also claims that it is when private selves are discovered in writing that they become the basis of this public. Understood in these terms, one can see the writing of a man like SJ Letton as something to be celebrated in the spirit of Enlightenment as the proposition of a future in which such selves are legible in and expressed through writing. See Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 36–­37. 3. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 12–­13. 4. In Brooke’s History of Emily Montague names are scored, for instance, in secret on trees in the Canadian wilderness by lovers without hope of a reader for their words, 9, letter cxxxvii . This scenario was so fashionable by 1772 that their discovery is satirized by Richard Graves in The Spiritual Quixote, 18, where Geoffrey Wildgoose fixes his eyes “on a forlorn quarto, that lay upon a lofty shelf, covered with dust, and tinged with smoke within an inch of the margins.” 5. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 67–­69. 6. Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, 47–­48. 7. Toldervy’s The Two Orphans also has a character, Humphry, who is “very curious in reading the inscriptions upon signs, and copying these that he liked” (2:111). 8. Mullan, Sentiment and Sensibility, 34.



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9. The central and related claim of Barbara Benedict’s Framing Feeling is that sentimental texts use formal awareness, narrative convention, and normative demands to “frame” the feelings they represent. The depiction of characters demanding unchecked sympathy is offset by the way an authorial voice remains in control of the narrative’s dynamic; or by the way epistolary exchange demonstrates a practical attrition of heightened feelings as they are tempered by experience. A sentimental novel makes feeling an accessory in a larger project of self-­consciousness control, teaching readers that whenever writing gives them a taste of the real word, it also distances from this world through writing. This is summed up, in Benedict’s terms, as a “dialectic” pitting an awareness of the causality, narration, circulation that constitute the appeal of reading against the static moments of rhetoric and charm that become the “sentimental” goods of this movement. Another critic to have added to this account of sentimental literature as trained on the reader’s self-­conscious development as a reader is Markman Ellis, whose Politics of Sensibility focuses in its key chapters on the convergent histories of sensibility and the novel. For Ellis, anxieties about the more political uses to which sensibility might be put (for instance, in making the case for slaves or prostitutes as objects of sympathy) run alongside anxieties about fiction reading as a morally ambiguous occupation that had to be carefully contained. 10. McKeon, Origins of the Novel, 136 11. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 10 12. Hartman, “Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry.” 13. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 50. By extension, for instance, we can say that paper would not have served in the sixteenth century the metaphorical purpose that it did for Locke, as the perfectly blank page. 14. In Victorian Glassworlds Isobel Armstrong suggests that by the Victorian period glass was associated primarily with transparency and with the traces of the labor process that gave rise with it. Plate glass could be broken in acts of resistance, and was not, in her account, available for marking in the way, thicker, eighteenth-­century glass was. 15. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 106–­7. 16. See Randolph, “Diamond-­Satires in the Eighteenth Century,” 65. 17. Dalrymple, The World , 59. 18. Ibid., 63. 19. This example of glass writing attributed to Aaron Hill is cited in Randolph, “Diamond-­Satires in the Eighteenth Century,” 65. 20. Quoted in Mossner, The Forgotten Hume, 230. 21. Leeson, The Memoirs of Madam Leeson, 132. In 1787 Burns also leaves graffiti as complaint at an inn where he can’t get food: “Who’er he be that sojourns here, I pity much his case, Unless he come to wait upon, The Lord, their God, his Grace” in Burns, Poems and Songs, 271. 22. Smollett, Humphry Clinker, 186. 23. In Cody, “‘Every Lane Teems with Instruction,” 92–­111. 24. British Magazine, June 1783, quoted in Randolph, “Diamond-­Satires in the Eighteenth Century,” 63. 25. Grass, Euphronsyne, 1:107.

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26. Colman The Connoisseur, lxxxvi. 517. 27. Cody, “Every Lane Teems with Instruction,” 93. 28. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 42. 29. Quoted in Hartman, “Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry,” 33. 30. This example of glass writing is attributed to Aaron Hill, cited in Randolph, “Diamond-­Satires in the Eighteenth Century,” 65. 31. Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 27. 32. The Merry-­Thought, 2:26. 33. The Merry-­Thought, 4:27. 34. Winstanely, Poems Written Occasionally by John Winstanely, 37. 35. A Collection of Epigram, CLV. 36. The Merry-­Thought, 2:27. 37. Ibid., 1:16. 38. Derrida, The Postcard, 391. 39. Hartman, “Inscriptions and Romantic Nature Poetry,” 32. 40. Almon, ed., The Fugitive Miscellany, 23; The Muse’s Mirror, 79; Poems: Anthony Pasquin, , F3; Warton, The Poetical Works, 99. 41. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 173. 42. Knight, “Making Shakespeare’s Books,” 304–­40. 43. Colman, Polly Honeycombe, vi. 44. Suarez, “Trafficking in the Muse,” 301. See also Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade. 45. Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” 1259. 46. See, for instance, Zionkowski, Men’s Work and Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-­ Eighteenth-­Century England. 47. Martin, Essai sur Thomas Gray. 48. In Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life, 413. 49. Mack, Thomas Gray, 243. 50.������������������������������������������������������������������������������ See, for instance, James Mulholland’s argument that Gray was much more receptive to publication than critics have suggested. His case rests on evidence that Gray shaped his later poetry to resemble the oral delivery of words, thereby suggesting an attentive audience not guaranteed by print. “Gray’s Ambition.”. 51. In Guillory, Cultural Capital, 92. 52. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 121. 53. Chartier, The Order of Book, 19. 54. Hanway, Journal of Eight Days, 22. 55. Gray, Designs by Mr. Bentley, lxi. 56. Hartman, “Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” 34. 57. This framework explains the spirit in which Gray, grieving a fight with his friend Horace Walpole, wrote his “Alcaic Ode,” a four-­stanza Latin poem, directly into an album that was used as the guestbook for visitors at the monastery Grand Chartreuse in 1741. Like the commonplace books with which Gray always worked as writer, such an album in its lonely setting presented him with an opportunity to make the strokes of his pen resonant



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with the situation in which they were made. Left in a retreat where other travelers would pass and encounter the poem by accident, the first copy of the “Alaciac Ode” has a location in which readers will find it. This effect seems almost impossible to transfer to a world of print, where writing is managed and instrumentalized. And yet, the “Elegy” suggests, Gray saw it as possible to abandon writing to the published pages of an anthology. The effect depends on print as a setting in which to preserve writing in a vulnerable state of material extension. Rather than being the endpoint, publication becomes the afterlife of the collected manuscript, and a forecast of the book’s forlorn presence as object. See Mack, Thomas Gray, 1427. 58. Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, 4. 59. Mackenzie, The Man of the World, 4. 60. Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 94. 61. For example, Marivaux’s The Life of Marianne introduces a manuscript hidden in a corner of a wall, “containing the following history, all writ in a woman’s hand.” But the editor then goes on to explain later in the novel that “you must imagine that she does not write but converse.” Marivaux, The Life of Marianne, B2, 129. 62. Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose, 26. 63. Ibid., 63. 64. “The Exile,” 85, 1780; 167. 65. Ibid. 66. Mackenzie, Literature and Literati, 218. 67. Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose, 49. 68. Ibid., 18. 69. Mackenzie, The Works of Henry Mackenzie, 8:100–­101. 70. Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose, 87.

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Index

Addison, Joseph, 79; the Spectator, 64, 104 Adventures of an Author, 58–­60 The Adventures of a Quire of Paper, 7, 14, 54, 62–­64 anthologies, 131, 133–­37, 139, 142 Appadurai, Arjun, 8, 50 artificial intelligence, ix–­x, 14, 29, 35, 52 Augustan satire, 4, 55, 56 authors, representation of, 53–­54, 56–­61 Beattie, James, 70–­74, 80–­85, 87–­91, 94 Blackwell, Mark, 51, 52, 56, 116 Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, 17 book history, 8, 150, 73, 135 booksellers, 2, 4, 6–­7, 25, 27, 52–­54, 57, 59 Brecht, Bertolt, vii, 12, 13 Bridges, Thomas, 53, 66 Burns, Robert, 147, 165 Cervantes, Miguel de, 2, 23, 25, 31, 33 Chartier, Roger, 73, 140, 158 Chesterfield, Earl of, 96–­97, 110, 113, 162n66 clothing, 48–­50, 27 coaches, 36, 41–­44, 51 cognitive systems, 9, 40, 52, 58, 62, 64–­65, 69 commodities, x, 13, 48–­50, 67–­69, 128 Coventry, Francis, 25, 27, 29, 53, 58, 59, 108 Cowper, William, 37, 96, 112, 126, 132 The Critical Review, 24–­25 De Man, Paul, 73–­74, 88–­92, 94 Derrida, Jacques, viii, ix, 8, 66, 73–­74, 89–­90, 148; Paper Machine, 92–­95 digital technology, xi, 94–­96 Dodd, William, 96–­101, 108–­10, 114, 119–­20, 135; The Sisters, 23, 30, 109 entertainment, viii, xi, 7, 13–­14, 25, 28–­29, 35, 39, 41–­46, 99, 126

Festa, Lynn, 48, 125 Fielding, Henry, 2, 23, 25–­26, 28, 31, 155n45; Joseph Andrews, 28, 35, 55, 104; Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, 38, 39; Tom Jones, 28, 31 Fleming, Juliet, 124, 127, 129, 135 Flint, Christopher, 12–­13, 51, 52, 61, 68 Gallagher, Catherine, 10, 61 Gitelman, Lisa, 5, 10, 18, 41, 80, 146 Goldsmith, Oliver, 102, 105–­6, 110, 163n78 Goodall, William, 22, 28, 29; Captain Greenland, 25, 27, 30, 36 Gray, Thomas, 148, 123–­28, 134, 137–­42, 166–­67n57 graffiti, ix, 122–­24, 128–­34, 135, 139, 146–­49 Guillory, John, 7, 8, 138, 139 hack writers, 1, 7, 49, 55–­56, 60, 65, 107 handwriting, 98–­101, 112, 114, 115–­21, 124 Hanway, Jonas, 32, 33, 104, 140 Hayles, N. Katherine, 52, 69 Haywood, Eliza, 30–­31 Hegel, Georg, 11, 13, 15, 89, 90 The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes, 51 The History of Charlotte Summers, 21, 25, 28–­ 33, 64 Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, vii, 14, 15, 17, 32 Hume, David: Life, 32, 33, 81; on publishing, 85–­86; “Of the Standard of Taste,” 78, 79; Treatise, 70–­78, 80, 83–­88; twentieth-­ century responses to, 72–­73 Hunter, J. Paul, 2, 26, 103 ink, 4, 7, 61, 76, 77, 88 inscription, 8, 89–­90, 95, 104, 120, 122, 125, 128–­30, 134–­35, 140–­42, 147–­49

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Jenner, Charles, 28, 108 Johnson, Samuel, 87, 98, 106, 113–­15 Johnstone, Charles, 47, 53, 56, 57 Kant, Immanuel, 81, 89–­90 Keane, Webb, 9, 105, 106 Keymer, Thomas, 5, 25, 29 Kidgell, John, 22, 32, 108, 109 Lamb, Jonathan, 49, 60 Latour, Bruno, x, 6, 10, 18, 35 The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, 25, 54, 55, 56, 105 Lloyd, Evan, 1, 3, 5, 11, 19, 106, 107 Locke, John, 75, 81, 88, 89 Long, Edward, 3, 22–­23 Lukács, Georg, 12, 14, 17, 45 Lynch, Deidre Shauna, 7, 48, 58 Mackenzie, Henry, 14–­16, 47, 124, 147–­50; “The Exile,” 146; Julia de Roubigne, 143 Man of Feeling, 125–­28, 136, 149, 148; Man of the World, 143; The Mirror, 144, 146 Marx, Karl, 11–­13, 17, 68; Capital, 48–­50, 52 material culture, 9, 35, 50, 127 materiality, 5–­8, 52, 55–­56, 58–­62, 82, 88–­91, 141, 150 McKeon, Michael, 2, 40, 61, 62, 127 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 25, 26 Monthly Review, 60 paper making, 27, 62, 82 paper, 31, 55–­58, 65–­67, 81, 83, 90, 129, 142 Phillips, Edward, 49; The Adventures of a Black Coat, 51, 54, 57–­59, 65 Pope, Alexander, 5, 55 post-­structuralism, vii, 8, 9, 72, 73, 88 preaching, 102, 104–­5 Preston, John, 26 print, 70, 71, 74, 86, 87, 96, 112, 135, 136 prose style, 81, 113

Raven, James, 24, 25 reader-­response theory, 26 readers, 15, 16, 24, 25–­29, 44, 45, 64, 146, 51, 70; frustration, 31; captivity to technology, 37; self-­consciousness, 40, 44; sentimental, 146 reading, 2, 22, 77, 84–­85 remediation, 17, 95, 96, 101, 124 Robbins, Bruce, 67–­69 Scott, Sarah, 24 Sense, common, 71, 80, 90, 94, 104 sentimental literature, 41, 125–­28, 150,165n9 sermons, 63, 97, 99, 102–­7, 114, 115, 163n78 Shebbeare, John, 28, 29, 31; Lydia, 22, 27, 30–­32; The Marriage Act, 22 sincerity, 105–­6, 108, 110, 117, 120 Siskin, Clifford, 3, 10, 160n15 skepticism, 73, 85, 88, 93, 94 Smollett, Tobias; Humphry Clinker, 131; Peregrine Pickle, 25 Smythies, Susan, 30, 36 Stewart, Susan, 15, 66 Sterne, Laurence, 6, 13., 23, 25, 26, 28, 38, 39, 56, 107, 108, 109; A Sentimental Journey, 42–­44, 125, 126; sermons, 102, 103; Tristram Shandy 2, 6, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 33–­35, 39, 40, 55, 109; 115–­19 Stonehill, Brian, 26 Swift, Jonathan, 2, 55, 61 thing theory, 48, 67–­8 Toldervy, William, 22, 36 The Travels of Mons. Le Poste-­Chaise: Written by Himself, 42, 43 Trusler, John, 110–­13, 120 Wikileaks, ix Warner, William, 10, 28

Acknowledgments

Though I have written a book claiming that books are often more our own than we acknowledge, this one really could not have been mine without the help and support of its first readers. Thanks to Adam Frank, Marguerite Pigeon, Martin Ryle, Kate Soper, Alexander Dick, Sandra Tomc, Nicholas Hudson, Mark Blackwell, Bruce Robbins, Adam Potkay, Miranda Burgess, Vin Nardizzi, Tilman Reitz, Joseph Chaves, Julie Park, Clifford Siskin, and Jonathan Lamb for taking the time to read, comment on, and talk about pieces from this project in their early stages. Sandy, Adam, and Alex have done this many times and I will always think of them with great warmth and gratitude in connection with this project. I had the good luck to write most of this book at the University of British Columbia, where all my colleagues and students made thinking a pleasure. In the later stages of the project, I have been just as lucky to encounter the collective and individual wisdom of those in the English Department at the University of Michigan. Sean Silver read and buoyed-up each of these chapters just as they were being finished, in the office right next door. Adela Pinch, Sara Blair, David Porter, Jonathan Freedman, Sarah Mesle, Jeffrey Knight, Zeynep Gürsel, HuiHui Hu, Danny Hack, Gillian White, Megan Sweeney, Elizabeth Wingrove, Lincoln Faller, Scotti Parrish, Marjorie Levinson, and Lucy Hartley all added to my ideas and made Ann Arbor a rich place to be. I am especially grateful to Adela, Marjorie, Lincoln, and Thomas Keymer for taking the time to read this manuscript for the first time as a whole, for the questions they asked, and for the assurance they gave at just the right time that it was a book. As a result of a manuscript workshop, all of them provided notes and ideas that have made their way directly into the chapters and saved me from many mistakes. Lynn Festa and an anonymous reader for Penn Press provided just the kind of instructive, insightful, and comprehending responses one dreams of receiving through years of writing. I’m sorry not to have done them full justice. And Christopher Flint generously agreed that we share our manuscripts at a late stage of copyediting, putting them into a conversation that they belong in together.

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In the longer perspective, I would also to thank Myra Jehlen, Michael Warner, Michael McKeon and Nicholas Rennie, who were my teachers at Rutgers and who did such an excellent job of showing me how to think about eighteenth-century literature that I have been hanging in one way or another on their words ever since. If I was not the best of students at the time, it was only because I was impatient to know as much as they did; these days I accept that that would be difficult. This project has benefited directly from the generous financial support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. With this funding I was able to employ research assistants, Greg Morgan, Rose Casey, and Natalia Naish, who found some of the most important things in here. They will know which. While writing this book I was also the grateful recipient of fellowships at three wonderful institutions: the Chawton House library, the Huntington Library, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Without such practical support this book would quite literally not have been—long may such places and organizations exist in support of the humanities. Two of the chapters here appeared in earlier versions. Chapter 3 appeared as ““The Theory of Paper: Scepticism, Commonsense, Poststructuralism,” MLQ, 71, 4 (2010), copyright 2010, University of Washington; and Chapter 2 as “The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification in the Eighteenth Century,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 39, 3 (2006), Copyright 2006, Novel, Inc. Both of these are reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. I am grateful to those involved in editing and commenting on these articles, in particular to Marshall Brown who worked his special wonders on the MLQ piece. Portions of Chapter 4 appear as “Making a Writer for the Cleric’s Words,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2011), and I am grateful to the editors of this issue for organizing the conference that gave me the chance to try out the ideas from this chapter on such a good audience. It is a great honor to dedicate this book to Maibritt Henkel. In the years I have been writing it, she has become my favorite person to read with and is now well on the way to becoming one of my favorite writers. But for an even longer time Heiko Henkel and Zara Lupton have been reading with me, keeping books alive in the best of ways, and so it’s to them I owe the biggest thanks of all.