Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies 9780691193977, 0691025789, 9780691602059, 9780691656434

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Making the Modern Reader

Making the Modern Reader CULTURAL MODERN

MEDIATION

LITERARY

Barbara M.

P R I N C E T O N

ANTHOLOGIES

Benedict

U N I V E R S I T Y

P R I N C E T O N ,

INEARLY

N E W

P R E S S

J E R S E Y

Copyright © 1996 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benedict, Barbara M Making the modern reader : cultural mediation in early modern literary anthologies / Barbara M. Benedict, p, cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-691-02578-9 (cl ; alk, paper) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism— Theory, etc. 2. English literature—Early modem, 1500-1700— History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3- Literature publishing— Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. Literature publishing— Great Britain—History—17th century. 5. Books and reading—Great Britain—History—18th century. 6. Books and reading—Great Britain—History—17th century. 7. Editing—Great Britain— History—18th century. 8. Editing—Great Britain—History—17th century. 9. Literature and anthropology—Great Britain. 10. Canon (Literature) I. Title. PR441.B38 1996 028'.9'094109033—dc20 95-53313 C1P This book has been composed in Times Roman Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America by Princeton Academic Press 1 3 5 7 9

10

8 6 4 2

Princeton Legacy Library edition 2018 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-60205-9 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-691-65643-4

For Mark, my banquet of delights

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

INTRODUCTION

The Various Feast Producing Early Collections

3 19

CHAPTER ONE

Collecting Culture before the Restoration Renaissance Compendia Courtesy and Writing Right

34 35 51

CHAPTER TWO

Reading and Heteroglossia in the Restoration Reading and Carnival: Rochester and Behn Reading and Authority: Dryden and the General Reader

70 73 88

CHAPTER THREE

Discriminating Readers in the Early Eighteenth Century Gender and Miscellanies: Steele and Women in Literary Culture "Praise with Profit": Pope and Publishers

109 111 127

CHAPTER FOUR

Reading Systems in the Mid Eighteenth Century Authoritative Collections: Dodsley and Eminent Ladies Reading Identity: Novel Forms of the Anthology

153 157 165

CHAPTER FIVE

Reading for Oneself in the Late Eighteenth Century Guides to Culture Children's Anthologies

182 183 198

CONCLUSION

The Private Possession of Culture

211

Chronological Listing of Early Anthologies

223

Bibliography

229

Index

243

PREFACE

RESEARCHING another topic in 1988, I stumbled across many books in the British Library featuring snippets of the texts I was seeking. Titled miscella­ nies, they bore several inviting features. As nonce versions of "fine" literature, they demonstrated the way packaging represents texts for different kinds of readers; as versions of chapbooks, they documented the cultural transmission of literature; and as bundles of literary choices, they promised to shed some light on the way literary hierarchies are shaped. This started me on a hunt for their forebears, during which I have received much help. For a fellowship in 1993—1994, I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, and for grants and fellowships I thank the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Newberry Library, the Mills Memorial Library, Trinity College, and the St. Anthony's Hall Foundation. My thanks go also to the members of the spring 1994 Eighteenth-Century Workshop at the University of Chicago. I am grateful to the editors of ELH and Eighteenth-Century Life for allowing me to use some material previously published in articles. For energetic encouragement, I am very grateful to J. Paul Hunter and Claude Rawson; my thanks go also to Thomas Bonnell, Richard B. Sher, George A. Starr, Kevin L. Cope, Jim May, Don Farren, Howard Weinbrot, Alden Gordon, Terry Belanger and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, Margaret Doody, Tony Macro, Margaret J. M. Ezell, Claudia Johnson, Charlotte Stewart-Murphy, Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz, Linda McKinney, and the staff at Trinity College. Mary Murrell at Princeton University Press has been most helpful; the errors in this manuscript are my own. For a patience that passed understanding a long time ago, and for ceaseless humor, attention, and gentle suggestions, I give my great thanks to my husband, Mark Miller.

Making the Modern Reader

Introduction

THE VARIOUS FEAST

ANTHOLOGIES, miscellanies, and collections of poems and stories have

formed a central part of literary culture for two hundred years. They are read in schools and universities, and both editors and authors profit from them since, by widely disseminating a vetted selection of texts, they popularize editorial judgment as well as authorial invention. In helping to form and reform canons, confirm literary reputations, and establish taste and cultural literacy for generations of readers, such books offer much information about the way people wrote and read literature and about the role of literature in culture, yet they have received virtually no critical attention until recently.' This study sets out to remedy part of this neglect by examining the development of literary collections during the period when they became a printed genre directed to a diverse readership, from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. By analyzing the way these collections shape and are shaped by the cultural contexts in which they were produced and by explicating the kind of reading they invite, this book argues that literary anthologies mediate between individual readers and literary culture. This mediation redefines readers* subjectivity by representing literature as art and reading as a critical activity. Anthologies sell texts of choice and the choice of texts. Eighteenth-century literary miscellanies are early forms of literary anthologies. Anthologies are conventionally defined as volumes containing a historical survey of English literature, and they are thought of as being compiled by editors from canonical material. Miscellanies, in contrast, are understood to be bundled together from contemporary, fashionable material by booksellers. Although anthologies purportedly differ from miscellanies in scope, Ihe forms are not fundamentally different. In his study of Jacob Tonson, Harry M. Geduld distinguishes early miscellanies from anthologies by stipulating that miscellanies include "more or less heterogeneous . . . writings by three or more contemporary authors," but the historical instability of The anthology of essays in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, edited by Griffiths and PearsalI, explores medieval miscellanies; Ezell has looked at some eighteenth-century liter­ ary collections in Writing Women's Literary History·, Raven has examined early novels includ­ ing some collections in Judging New Wealth·, see also for the treatment of related serialized publications and topics in the nineteenth century, Altick, The Presence of the Past and the ceaselessly valuable English Common Reader. The argument opposing collections for corrupt­ ing culture appears in A Pamphlet against Anthologies by Riding and Graves. 1

4

INTRODUCTION

the categories of heterogeneity and contemporaneity and the frequency of paraphrases and classical translations blur this distinction.2 The category of history, moreover, is merely one of many fashionable rubrics under which literary material was collected, albeit it remained one of the most popular and enduring after the middle of the eighteenth century; the claim of historical sweep does not alone distinguish the "anthology" as a distinct genre from the "miscellany." Rather, anthologies and miscellanies constitute the same genre because they share means of material production, processes of compilation, audiences, and forms that define their cultural functions. They are compiled by individual booksellers and readers who collect printed pamphlets and assemble them into makeshift volumes; they are also compiled by booksellers and editors who collect manuscript and printed works and issue these in single volumes as printed anthologies. Both "miscellanies" and "anthologies" describe a form, shaped by readers and mediated by booksellers and editors, that works to define contemporary cultural literacy and the attitude of the reader of printed literature. The format of these books prompts the formation of a canon: a demonstration of refined choice. This may seem paradoxical since collections defer hierarchical rankings because they have no apparent system of distinguishing good from better texts. Their traditional organization, however, implies a hierarchy. Miscellanies and anthologies organize literature into categories for comparison. Imitating the bundles of multiple examples of genre that booksellers gathered together on the basis of their similarities, anthologies embody the principle of clustering together different but similar items. They thus presuppose that all their contents are alike enough to be compared, yet tinalike enough to spur readerly evaluation. By beginning with a text that defines the genre and then arranging entries to emphasize contrast, these books stimulate readers to compare, judge, and thus rank the separate items. This ranking fosters the cultural desire for a canon: a consensual hierarchy of contrast and comparison, an order that extends beyond individual taste, a systematic classification of excellence established by professionals. Anthologies categorize literature by kind and by quality. These books embody the dialectical relationship between private readers and a professionalizing literary culture, a relationship largely determined by historical conditions. Because miscellanies embody the literary choices of individual readers and booksellers, they transmit particular tastes to general culture and thus document the influence and impact that individual readers have on forming literary values. At the same time, however, printed anthologies transmit cultural ideas to individual readers and booksellers, helping to determine the way literature was read—especially through including texts that describe and discuss reading. During the period from the Restora2

Gcduld, Prince

of Publishers,

87-88.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

5

tion to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the relationship between individual readers and what was becoming professional literary culture changed considerably, and these changes transformed the way people read and understood reading. As Roger Chartier has argued, cultural transmission is a complex phenomenon in which texts move up, down, and sideways through different pockets of culture and different uses.3 Nonetheless, the shifts in the methods of production, packaging, prefatory rhetoric, layout, contents, and forms of the anthology during this period record a significant shift in the relationship of the individual reader to literature. After the civil war (1642-1649), literary culture centered on the Restoration court and theater, but a new, gradually professionalizing and powerful kind of publishing bookseller sprang up to take this culture to new readers. These booksellers produced anthologies that mediated between the traditional manuscript culture of the court and the new public by providing a mixture of classical and contemporary material. As a genre predicated on disseminating literature to mixed audiences—audiences, moreover, that had recently been rent by civil and religious differences—these anthologies provided a space, if only symbolically, for the productions of all members of society. In this space, different literary languages and genres that represented or embodied different readers and traditions were juxtaposed. Even readers ignorant of Latin and Greek were invited to compare translations to define themselves as culturally literate. As Shaftesbury ironically notes in his essay "Of the nature, rise, and establishment of Miscellanies," authors of miscellanies needed only "a little Invention, and . . . Common-place-Book Learning" since "A Coherence, a Design, a Meaning, is against their purpose" and oppressive to "the airy Reader."4 By promoting the literary values of novelty and topicality, by prefatory rhetoric invoking variety, by a page layout that differentiated each item of the contents but eschewed conventional literary decorum, and by including public and privately circulated poems, these books invited readers to participate actively in the construction of literary interpretation. Indeed, by soliciting contributions and information from their audiences, they constructed their readers as participants in literary culture itself. As the book trade grew increasingly professional and powerful, the form of the anthology and its corresponding ideal reader changed. During the first half of the eighteenth century, printers typically commissioned professional authors to compile anthologies representing the latest fashionable style. As weapons in cultural competition and as cultural commodities, these collections proclaimed their new principle to be quality, rather than variety. Their elegantly regular page layouts and profusion of pieces about reading and 3 4

Chartier, "Comment on Mr. Grimsted's Paper," 227-28. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3:4, 6-7.

6

INTRODUCTION

praising literature invited readers to exhibit their discrimination by learning the language of criticism, admiring the control of form, and reading for the stylistic expertise of the poetry. Although readers were still invited to submit pieces to anthologies, these invitations served rather as advertisements than as opportunities. In the second half of the eighteenth century as authors gained copyrighting power, publishers of anthologies abandoned contemporaneity and novelty as their central criteria; these had become the attributes of the novel- Instead, they advertised anthologies as collections of the works of individual authors who exemplified timeless morality. By the mideighteenth century, indeed, critics and booksellers represented current taste to a widfe audience who thirsted to acquire a knowledge represented by reading English literature—contemporary works, in contrast to Greek and Latin classics,3 In the absence of formal differentiation between their entries and the length and similarity of their contents, these anthologies presented native literature as the coherent reading experience of a consistent ideology. The anthology now represented a seamless fabric of social and national values for private readers. These changes in the anthology create and reflect changes in the role of the reader: from that of a collaborative participant in forging literary culture to that of a recipient of commodified literature who reads poetry to train his or her moral response,6 Restoration readers are conjured as members of a cultural circle within which camivalesque reversals become possible. They are rhetorically invited to interpret literature as part of a cultural conversation in which they are participating. Readers of the early-eighteenth-century anthology, however, are conjured as informed consumers, discriminating buyers who display their cultural power by selective—albeit extensive— purchasing. Anthologies solicit them to interpret literature according to its aesthetic expertise and emotional force, and their posture as critical but responsive judges, in turn, represents their cultural power. By the end of the century, readers are characterized as engaged in an enterprise of cultural and moral self-improvement that entails the interpretation of literature by its moral content. Despite the replacement of classical translations by British verse, these readers are no longer direct contributors to anthologies but rather recipients of a professionally mediated and systematized literary culture who identify the social value of self-discipline with literary merit. In this process of defining the reader's role, anthologies help to mold both the reader's subjectivity—his or her imaginative interaction with the text— and the literary values that lead to a canon. These, indeed, are reciprocally related. As anthologies reprint material in different settings and according to Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, 10. In A Pamphlet against Anthologies, Riding and Graves deplore this phenomenon, arguing that anthologies forestall critical choice and homogenize literature. 5

6

THE VARIOUS FEAST

7

different principles, they strip it of its historical and political contexts. Texts become dehistoricized, depoliticized, and hence "timeless," immortal, or, in other words, eternally contemporary. Eighteenth-century anthologies publicize and proliferate critical values and thus facilitate the constant reformation of a cultural consensus on literary merit. While such a result favors booksellers wishing to squeeze profits from old copyrights, it also helps to construct a way of reading literature that places a heavy burden on individual readers to reconstruct meanings from their own contexts. Of course, readers change the way they read throughout their lives, moving, as one sociologist argues, through the roles of player, hero, thinker, interpreter, and, finally, pragmatist who combines elements of each of the other roles as circumstances warrant.7 As compilations of multiple works, moreover, anthologies particularly invite not only repeated use for different ends but a wide range of different uses by different kinds of readers—children, poets, rural families, schoolmasters, middle-class women, and others. Even while they continue to accommodate these different uses and readers, however, by the end of the eighteenth century, anthologies typically present their texts in a fashion especially hospitable to a particular kind of reading. Chosen and prepared by authorities, these texts appear as immaculate vessels of cultural value, not works in context or transition: it is the reader's task to demonstrate his or her discrimination, his or her internal culture, by "taking in" the text, a process that proves the correspondence between his or her values and those embodied in the culture. If in one sense the readers of late-eighteenthand nineteenth-century anthologies are passive, in another, depending on the extent and nature of the editorial mediation, they must expend enormous energy in converting decontextualized material into meaningful experience, in choosing for themselves what has been chosen for them. This enforced process of imaginative engagement simultaneously defines reader and literature as culturally elite. Literary collections often contextualize their contents by means of prefaces written by the editor, be this the printer, the bookseller, or an author. Although there are many different kinds of literary collections, which are put together in a variety of ways, the generic term that early booksellers preferred for most, if not all, of them, is miscellany. In his Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson traces the term miscellane to the Latin for "a dish of mixed corn," a definition that echoes the derivation of satire from the Latin satura, "a dish filled with various kinds of fruits" or a "medley."8 So popular was this term that Tonson literalized it in his frontispiece to the fourth volume of Dryden's Miscellanies in 1694 (see fig. 1). In his Essay Upon Satyr, Appleyard1 Becoming a Reader, 14-15, passim. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (1635). Johnson corrects the mistaken root of satyr in his Dictionary of the English Language. 1 8

Fig. 1. Frontispiece of Dryden's Annual Miscellany: for the Year 1694, M. Burghers sculp,, 19 cm,, fourth part of the six-volume Miscellany Poems (London: Jacob Tonson1 1694). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This engraving depicts the year as a Muse crowned with the laurel wreath of poetry and holding a cornucopia inscribed "The Annual Miscellany" of fruits symbolizing the various and plentiful contents of the volume. The putti playing musical instruments identify these poems as classical, lyrical, and amorous.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

9

reprinted in Charles Gildon's Miscellany Poems Upon Several Occasions, M. Dacier links the two terms etymologic ally." The jumbled quality of this dish conveys the unordered, perhaps disorderly, quality of the literary anthology itself and introduces several of the key tropes that booksellers and printers used to tout their collections. Like the satura, literary collections offer the reader fresh fruits: nonce publications, and current, topical, even ephemeral poetry and prose, written in the latest popular style. As the technology for producing literature and disseminating it quickly develops in the early eighteenth century, novelty becomes the mark of fashion. 10 Anthologies exploit this fashion by providing current culture and providing it fast. Printers and booksellers almost always represent the early literary miscellany or anthology as a feast, a collation of fruits gathered in one banquet to suit a variety of tastes. While claims of heterogeneity and contemporaneity often signify only that the material has never before—or not recently, or not legally—been published, the metaphor of a feast reveals the cultural logic of the collection. While harking back to the word's etymology, it reinscribes the paradoxical independence yet community of miscellaneous readers. Similarly, the less common Greek term anthology, meaning a collection of flowers, marks simultaneously the distinction and the unity of the contents, the flowers garlanded within the volume." Thus Restoration and eighteenth-century booksellers emphasize that the various feast of the miscellany or anthology is designed to invite the reader not only to select those particular fruits that appeal to his or her palate, but to join the banquet. The feasting image celebrates the cultural commonality of reading, the participation in a community, even while lauding the active integrity of individual readers. By exploiting the problematic dynamic of reading—which, as Colin Campbell explains, is at once a private and a communicative act—this discourse preserves a flexibility that can accommodate rapid changes in audience and literary fashion. 12 Through such imagery and discourse, anthologies contribute to the development in the eighteenth century of a new social role for literary analysis: they provide one of the vehicles by which literary criticism becomes an ' London: Peter Buck, 1692. 10 In Before Novels, Hunter documents the ambitious, urban tastes of an eighteenth-century audience eager for mobility, commerce, and change (76-79); for his analysis of the passion for novelty, see chapter 5. Hunter also notes the emphasis on contemporaneity in the 1690s (171 — 72). " Samuel Johnson defines anthology as, primarily, "A collection of flowers," and lastly as "A collection of poems" in his Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "A collection of flowers of verse, esp. epigrams, by various authors" (1:60). The English titular translations of the term often use garland to stress the editor's role in weaving the separate blossoms into a whole. 12 Campbell, "Understanding Traditional and Modem Patterns of Consumption," 40-57.

10

INTRODUCTION

arena of cultural self-examination.13 Equally important, they represent literary culture as commodities to be consumed. By endorsing the differences among individual readers' tastes, the metaphor of a feast validates as the criterion for judgment not so much informed opinion as the instinctive response of each particular reader. This criterion anticipates literary sentimentalism, becoming a tenet central to criticism by the time of Samuel Johnson.14 In encouraging readers to examine each entry independently, it also turns the process of reading the volume into an exercise in stylistic comparison, while the volume itself becomes a celebration of choice and plenty. The authors whose works the anthology prints are also shown to have different tastes. Restoration anthologies, for example, juxtapose translations of the same Latin verse by different authors that highlight their independence of style and language, and later anthologies until the midcentury employ similar organizational techniques. By contextualizing or recontextualizing poems and prose vignettes and thus creating fresh relationships among words, languages, and genres, Restoration anthologies allow competing, even oppositional, voices or discourses to be heard within the same printed arena, echoing the heteroglossia that Mikhail Bakhtin has examined in.the novel.13 These books set language in a context that refashions it in a manner similar to that seen by Mikita Hoy in modern popular culture, by setting up new resonances between categories that, until the cultural shifts of literature's professionalization in the early eighteenth century, resist or explode the fixity of "canonism.'"6 By validating individual responses to culture while permitting conflicting voices equal space in the book, collections invite all readers to participate in the feast. Any reader who has or wants taste—and who does not fit into one of those categories?—by purchasing the book enters the feast and belongs to the community: desire is the only qualification for the consumption of this literary culture. Literary miscellanies and anthologies become an avenue to criticism for an audience that might earlier have been discouraged by the demanding and senous attention that poetry can require." Through the metaphors of plenitude, diversity, and feasting, collections celebrate the wealth of the culture from which they draw and encourage See Eagleton, The Function of Criticism. Weinbrot maintains that the notion that "Response is all" flourished with Johnson and Percival Stockdale in the middle of the eighteenth century, marking a gradual Romanticization of taste, but even in the previous century this criterion was important; see "Samuel Johnson, Percival Stockdale, and Brick-Bats from Grubstreet," 121, 125, passim. Campbell associates this sensibility with the response to pleasurable consumption in "Understanding Traditional and Modem Patterns of Consumption" (48- 49). 15 See particularly Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagina­ tion. 16 Hoy, "Bakhtin and Popular Culture," 771, 781. " Hunter, Before Novels, 86-89. 13 14

THE VARIOUS FEAST

11

readers to consume it. In its elevation of appetite to cultural capital, the metaphor of consumption is significant. Literary miscellanies and anthologies, indeed, promote the commodification of literature itself in the period when consumer culture is now thought to have begun.18 They stimulate the production and consumption of poetry by encouraging people to join the enterprise of printed literature, not only by buying books, but by writing or collecting and submitting verse themselves. Through the common eighteenth-century device of subscriptions, poets and hacks even induce readers to participate in their rankings of contemporary poets and poems. Early collections also propel the fashion for topical verse by supplying it quickly and relatively inexpensively. As the eighteenth century draws toward the nineteenth, however, and periodicals, novels, and series take over the functions of the miscellany, the metaphor of feasting gives way to that of fleeing in books labeled traveling companions, asylums, or hospitals for fugitive verse. This rhetorical shift not only promotes the uniqueness of private tastes but also signals the decline of the early form of the miscellany, for it expresses the dissolution of the peculiar dialectic between community and individuality that defines the early genre. With the change of metaphor comes a change in the form and function of the anthology itself. In their prefaces, titles, and advertisements, the printers, booksellers, and editors of literary collections also boast of the variety of their "corn." Such discourse serves several purposes. Clearly, heterogeneous contents may attract multiple audiences—high and low, refined and simple, conventional and quirky—and thus sell more copies. At the same time, editors acknowledge that this variety also refers to quality by confessing that they depend on their customers for copy. Although their claims of variety are sometimes only rhetorical, they serve to excuse or, sometimes, to veil the unpolished texts included in the collection by proclaiming the novelty of the contents, still wet from the author's pen or crisp from his closet collection. In addition, they advertise the egalitarianism of the booksellers' principles of inclusion, which are purportedly determined by the reading public, and even, later, of the British tradition of a free press. By admitting that the collection is uneven, booksellers erase or conceal their own editorship, presenting the book as a virtually unmediated text of texts, freshly open to the reader's eye: it is the reader's feast. Typically, the bookseller Samuel Briscoe further maintains that "tho' the Reader may not understand every particular passage, yet there are other things in them that will make him sufficient Amends."19 By declaring that the collection is diverse, and that if all the contents cannot please all the readers, assuredly everyone will find something he or she 18 In "Coming Up for Air," Agnew outlines historians' current relocation of consumer culture in the early modern period (22). " Briscoe, preface to Familiar Letters (1705), l:i.

12

INTRODUCTION

likes, booksellers appeal to the proud heterogeneity of the English people who are flattered into indulging their independent judgment within a consensual context.20 The emphasis on variety, moreover, inscribes diffSrance in the Derridian sense: a dislocation of meaning that traces value in the dynamic comparison, contrast, and differentiation between similar or opposing forms and messages. In the early anthology, differance rationalizes replication and finesses poor quality: it serves as a directive to readers to peruse for pleasure rather than for definitive meaning, particularly in the collections of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. This fluidity of meaning encompasses many meanings, hence many readers. The rhetorical boast of diversity, furthermore, opens the way both for discussion and for hierarchy. Such language promotes anthologies as literary carnivals that accommodate disparate literary quality or qualities and that even overturn conventional literary hierarchies; it also underscores their social dimension as products of the readers' particular historical moment.51 Readers thus remain individual while concurring in the latest fashion. Such prefatory discourse empowers them to trust their own opinions of the literature while it simultaneously draws them together as a public joined in the cultural activity of literary judgment. Eventually, however, when response ousts sociability as the moral arena of literature, this discourse changes. Later-eighteenth-century prefaces in contrast to those of the earlier period typically represent collections not as opportunistic publications but as works of social art. Addressed to critical readers, they advertise the quality of fheif contents and their editor; they explain these contents as examples of the finest culture, selected and censored according to refined principles at once aesthetic and moral. Some use footnotes or, late in the eighteenth century, contextual explanations or biographical sketches. This editorial work redefines the contents as a more or less coherent body of work selected on consistent principles that illustrate social values. In both early miscellanies and the anthologies of the late century, editors urge that their selections will "reform" English culture. While early editors confine this reform to the improvement of poetic and linguistic values, later editors like Oliver Goldsmith indicate that moral advancement is their goal. This discourse not only advertises novelty but also represents literary culture as the locus of progressive thought, the site of social change: literary values become social values. Such rhetoric also fosters the developM In "Enlightenment Canon Wars," Weinbrot argues that the later-eighteenth-century English "canon" reflected the diversify Chat characterizes the English literary tradition: 70-100. Dryden celebrates the mixed modes of English drama in Of Dramatick Poesie (1688), while Defoe's True-Born Englishman (1701) satirically attacks hypocritical English prejudice against for­ eigners. 21 See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, and Castle, Masquerade and Civilization.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

13

ment of authoritative anthologies that help to establish a critical climate hospitable to the formation of a historical canon of English authors and works. The physical appearance of the anthology also indicates the way in which compilers expected it to be read. As Roger Chartier has observed, "texts are not deposited in books, whether hand-written or printed, as if in a mere recipient. Readers only encounter texts within an object whose forms and layout guide and compel the production of meaning."22 From the Restoration, most anthologies fit snugly in diminutive octavo or duodecimo sizes rather than in folio or quarto, suggesting that instead of lining the shelves of a gentleman's library with them, readers might have carried these books on journeys, casually left them accessible, or handed them to others. In the early eighteenth century when page decoration was still fashionable, a row of printer's ornaments may head the first, most important selection of an anthology, while few or none may appear in the rest of the volume, but often each item is separated from the previous one by a printer's line, or "rule." Separate items invite short, disconnected reading experiences. Usually, it is only those edited by fashionable authors that bear frontispieces, and these, like those in Tonson1 s and Fenton's collections, generally depict scenes of feasting, revelry, and classical inspiration. Such illustrations portray the contents and the genre of the anthology as a general introduction to cultural pleasure. Once Thomas Bewick creates the technique of "wood engraving" in 1778, by means of which illustrations could be cheaply and finely reproduced in great quantities, every anthology features detailed frontispieces, headpieces, and tailpieces. By illustrating emotional scenes from the literature in the anthology, these decorations prompt sentimental responses to the reading. One of the central changes in the anthology concerns the use of names to identify authors. During the early period, most poems in collections are anonymous, while some poems are attributed by authorial initials, meaningful only to readers already familiar with the author's work or the circumstances of the collection's production. There are several reasons for this anonymity. Most obviously, before the revision of copyright practices, booksellers did not sell works by author as much as by topic or form, so advertising by name was not the best policy. Booksellers who bound together miscellanies from extra stock would not bother to reprint looted literature merely to identify an author made newly anonymous by the deletion of a title page; they probably believed that some selections were famous enough to be easily recognized anyway, and if others were not, names would scarcely help to sell them. Some booksellers and many amateur edi22 Chartier, Frenchness in the History of the Book, 13. McKenzie repeatedly makes this point also; see, for example, "The Book as an Expressive Form," in his Bibliography and the Soci­ ology of Texts, 1-21.

14

INTRODUCTION

tors also lacked the author's permission to print their names, while some contributors intended their submissions to remain anonymous (see fig. 2). Avoiding naming an author also facilitated piracy and dodged detection. By the midcentury, however, as authors paradoxically won more power in the literary marketplace and yet, because of their increasing numbers and access to print, lost general recognition by the audience, anthologies proliferated and began to function as guides through a cluttered literary culture. In these literary collections, booksellers boast of their authors on their title pages. These changes mark the beginning of a cultural desire for an English canon. The period from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century creates a distinct shape for the literary anthology. The Renaissance and early seventeenth century lacked two of the essential elements that parent the anthology: the multifarious volume of printed literature facilitated by cheap printing and the growing, literate audience. Only in a culture with enough prestigious publications to make choice a real issue will a form that promises judicious selections flourish. Only readers with the opportunity and means to read for amusement or to raise their status in society by mastering "literate culture" will purchase the luxury of print.23 Despite similarities to earlier commonplace books and anthologies, only in the Restoration does the literary anthology form a printed genre in the sense of addressing a particular desire in the audience by means of a specific form enabled by historical conditions, and even then it remains so unstable and expansive that it easily co-opts or mutates into other forms, like the periodical, the school anthology, and the series. Earlier anthologies, like Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and Renaissance sonnet collections, do not attempt to mediate their fine literature for a wider readership. Most important, the processes by which the literary anthology was created and organized distinguish it as a particular form. Compiled largely from preprinted materials and designed primarily but not exclusively for a new, nontraditional audience of -gentry and "middle classes" interested in-reading for cultural advancement and pleasure rather than for pragmatic ends, eighteenth-century anthologies adapt themselves to new tastes and fashions with a flexibility denied to virtually any previous genre. This flexibility determines the cultural function of the anthology as mediator between readers and printed literature. After the end of the eighteenth century, the literary anthology intensifies its pedagogical role to produce versions for children, while still packaging high culture for private consumption; periodicals and novels supply the topical literature and assume the mediation between readers and literary culture once served by the eighteenth-century form. 21 Olsen notes the overlap between rationalizing reading for pleasure and for moral profit in Literature as Recreation; see also Quintero's Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art, which examines the way Pope was read by explicating the formulaic rhetorical strategies that mediate between newly ambitious readers and the poet.

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16

INTRODUCTION

The methods of making, advertising, and classifying anthologies help in part to explain how particular authors and works became canonical in the history of English literature. The difficult questions of how and why particular poems were canonized and the process of canonization have attracted a great deal of recent attention, but this attention has focused almost exclusively on two aspects of the process: the skillful negotiations of printers, booksellers, and authors in controlling the market and authorial reputations, and the political and social support of particular authors and styles, leading to the prominence of literature exhibiting particular kinds of ideology. 24 Clearly, publishing booksellers like Tonson, Lintot, and Dodsley who built exclusive relationships with best-selling authors and owned their copyrights could promote, print, and advertise their authors widely, regardless of whether these authors were patronized by the Crown, like Dryden, or maneuvered their own reputations, like Pope; the authors they sponsored were thus doubly likely to be canonized. Although authors often published poems first in heterogeneous anthologies and then, if they were successful, transferred them to their singly authored works, as Pope did with The Rape of the Lock, sometimes printers or pirates reversed the process. As Howard D. Weinbrot has observed, the "canon" in the eighteenth century remained, nonetheless, flexible and diverse. 25 Indeed, in some ways it is premature to talk of a "canon" during this period since the distinction between central and peripheral authors and kinds of literature constantly shifted. Not only were prose forms— the periodical essay, the novel, and books of biographical anecdotes— encroaching on the cultural prestige and centrality of poetry, but sentimental, proto-Romantic principles were diluting neoclassical literary criteria while sentimental, Scottish, "ancient," and folk or rustic verse in freer forms was transforming classical genres like satire, panegyric, and georgic. As a genre that quickly supplied the latest fashionable literature, moreover, the early anthology resists efforts to historicize or date its contents into established "canons." The examination of anthologies of the Restoration and eighteenth century also demonstrates that more authors and works were hugely popular than have survived the selections of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New historical and feminist criticism has also examined the exclusion of literature that had once been popular, See Bonnell7 "John Bell's Poets of Great Britain" and "Bookselling and Canon-Making"; Keman1 Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson·, Zwicker, Dryden's Political Poetry and Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry·, Corman, "What Is the Canon of English Drama, 1660-1737?"; Deutsch, "The 'Truest Copies' and the 'Mean Original.'" Patey examines the shift in aesthetic theory to embrace disinterestedness as an element in creating a canon in "The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon." 25 Weinbrot, "Enlightenment Canon Wars," 79. 24

THE VARIOUS FEAST

17

finding social causes for the formation and rearrangement of the canon to delete women, regional, working-class, and other authors.-6 Anthologies contribute in several ways to the dialectical movement of canon construction and deconstruction that marks the eighteenth century. They disseminate particular texts by making copies of fashionable works reasonably affordable and by recycling unsold copies with additions sewn into them. At the same time, by grouping unknown publications under the rubric of a famous name, either accurately or not, and by providing expansive and flexible envelopes for pirated pieces, they continually test the limits of an author's popularity and authority. Anthologies also facilitate the formation of an English canon by continually stealing from each other, and thus recontextualizing literary works and introducing them to fresh audiences in fresh ways. By reappearing in contexts other than their original pamphlets, these works often appear in enough contexts to lose their historical specificity of meaning and to become popularly understood as "universal"—a central criterion in eighteenth-century literary theory. Anthologies thus form a vital link in the transformation of particular poems from the novelties of the day to staple features in the English canon. New contexts renew the contents. As vehicles for the commodification of literature, anthologies perpetuate the consumerism of the eighteenth century. Books, however, had earlier become a part of consumer culture. Traditionally, indeed, booksellers like John Almon sold a variety of the commodities pertaining to literate culture in their shops. In his autobiography, Almon notes that he commenced as a bookseller by opening a shop "for books and stationary," and in his catalogs he advertises literature in the same roster with other fashionable writing accoutrements. 27 As James Raven has documented in Judging New Wealth, literature increasingly is represented in culture as a commodity that embodies the buyer's social power. When the periodical with its advantage of steady, regular publication assumes the literary character of the anthology in the midcentury, however, the anthology blends its discourse of novelty into claims of lasting value and increasingly attends to the physical nature of the book as a status object for middle-class consumers. By expanding into series identically sized, organized, and bound like the volumes of a gentleman's library in a country house, these later anthologies present literature as a symbol of gentility. By encouraging disconnected dipping and skipping, Restoration and early-eighteenth-century literary collections invite a particular kind of read26 Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History·, Kaplan and Rose, The Canon and the Common Reader; von Hallberg, Canons. 27 Almon, Memoirs, 16.

18

INTRODUCTION

ing appropriate to an age in which literature was becoming commodified. Many critics have argued that the, form promotes casual, even careless, habits of reading by substituting the literary equivalent of "sound bytes" for thorough, imaginative engagement in the experience of reading, and by perhaps even endorsing the perception of quick contrasts, Locke's "wit," over the more profound analyses that judgment offers.28 For example, in 1893, George R. Humphrey mourns: I have known few instances of students being made out of readers of miscella­ nies. This class of literature begets loose, desultory habits of reading, and the idea that the study of a given subject is the height of monotony. . . . Can a book published, as a commercial speculation only, at one penny, and containing sixty-two articles and stories, added to one hundred and thirty-five various para­ graphs, be all true?25

Certainly anthologies popularize a way of reading, as well as a kind of literature, that differs from that of the Renaissance. While examining Pope's annotations of the reissued Restoration anthology A New Collection of Poems relating to State Affairs (1705), W. J. Cameron points to inkblot evidence and marginalia to suggest that Pope read the collection "cursorily," perhaps returning later for a more thorough reading.30 Although this is surely a common pattern, anthologies particularly invite both of these uses: reading for quick effect, and reading for critical judgment. The German historian of reading Rolf Engelsing has identified the former as a shift in the eighteenth century from an "intensive" model of reading, in which readers thoroughly study a few texts, to an "extensive" model, in which they more rapidly con a wider variety of material.31 Anthologies of the eighteenth century bridge these two models. They promote "extensive" reading by promising many pieces, not great ones; nonce, not timeless, texts; the latest, not the best. Moreover, they show few marginalia that might testify to a reader's intensive examination. At the same time, the brevity and mnemonic literary devices of much miscellaneous literature and the organization of anthologies suggest that readers might have memorized some of the contents and certainly absorbed their critical values. Readers are enabled to use anthologies in either way because these volumes include texts that readers use in both ways. At the same time, the prefaces, packaging, and contents direct readers in how to appreciate literature defined as art. 28 Sitter describes Locke's ideal of wit in a fashion analogous to Shaftesbury's definition of the miscellany, as a quick, various "assemblage of ideas" for immediate entertainment; see Arguments of Augustan Wit, 49-88, esp. 52. ™ Humphrey, "The Reading of the Working Classes," 693. 30 Cameron, "Pope's Annotations," 291-94. 31 DeMaria, "Samuel Johnson and the Reading Revolution," 86-89, 101.

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PRODUCING EARLY COLLECTIONS

Early collections were produced in several ways. Early miscellanies were batches of printed material that booksellers tied together to be sold at trade sales or public auctions as lots.32 These groupings indicate the way printed collections also were compiled and arranged. Begun in 1676 by the bookseller William Cooper, auctions were a profitable method of selling books that classified them by subject and format.33 Their catalogs group two or three separately printed pamphlets for a single price, while listing larger parcels as "Bundles of Stitcht Books and Pamphlets." Under this rubric, pamphlets of the same format (folio, quarto, octavo, or duodecimo) are bracketed together if they share an author, topic, theme, or genre. As in printed anthologies, Latin books usually remain separate from English bundles, which are far more prevalent since the authors of the topical and ephemeral publications printed in pamphlets used the vernacular in order to have their works widely read.34 Such bundles comprise collections of doctrinal treatises, speeches, political tracts, ordinances, "weekly news" or periodicals, and sermons. Some genres are very common. Cooper asked only 3s. 7d. for "Twelve volumes of several Sermons bound together" by different authors—scarcely a price to fuel the hopes of Henry Fielding's Abraham Adams, solemnly expecting a hundred pounds for his "nine Volumes of Manuscript Sermons."35 By facilitating the categorization of literature into genres including what would be called ephemera, the catalogs of these auctions reveal the organizational principles behind booksellers' groupings and indicate the way readers were expected to purchase, read, and think about this literature. In these catalogs, three closely interrelated principles organize the bundles: genre, topic, and, least important, a crude chronology. Where possible, Cooper prefers to organize his bundles by genre—for example, parceling together a "Collection" of fifty broadsides of death poetry in English and For an account of the sale of books by auction in England, see Hobson's foreword to Munby and Coral, British Book Sales Catalogues 1676-1800, xviii. 33 Curwen, A History of Booksellers, 386. 54 Some collections—notably J. Husbands's university anthology, A Miscellany of Poems. By Several Hands (Oxford, 1731) containing Samuel Johnson's "London" in Latin—include a few Latin verses, but these are almost always matched with their English translations as stylistic alternatives of a specific genre, as in Cooper's "Collection" of "Obsequies, Elegies, Epitaphs, etc." " William Cooper, Sale Catalogues, 1:376-84, nos. 46-157; 394, no. 28. Since several entries have two prices in the margins in the same script, I have assumed that the second is the revised sale price. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, bk. 1, chap. 16, p. 73. Of course, Adams is hawking manuscript, not printed, sermons, so that even if a publisher or bookseller agreed to finance their printing, they would shrink to less than nine volumes. 32

20

INTRODUCTION

Latin, containing "Obsequies, Elegies, Epitaphs, &c."36 Genre could be loosely construed, as indicated by the combination of A Joyful Message of the Kingdom of Righteousness with English Proverbs, a coupling that reveals the interconnection between form (biblical paragraph) and subject.37 This pattern mirrors that of the printed collections Cooper also advertises, like the fivepenny Help to discourse; or a miscellany of merriment by W.B. and E.P. (1620), Cambridge Jests (1674), or the sevenpenny Oxford Jests (1675). Both these books and Cooper's bundles suggest that readers collected and compared multiple examples of similar material to contemplate or master the rules and variations of one genre, and that they skipped between unconnected items rather than either shifting between different sorts of literature or engaging in long stints of reading. Short genres invite such stylistic exercises, whereas single-narrative prose or poetic works induce a different sort of reading. Edward Bysshe, indeed, suggests that the collection of extracts in his Art of English Poetry "may divert and amuse you better" because the parts have no "connexion . . . to keep the Mind intent, and constrain you to any length of Reading."35 Later anthologies continue to invite this sort of casual reading. In Restoration and eighteenth-century collections, notably Dryden's six-volume Miscellanies for Jacob Tonson (1784-1709), editors include multiple examples of similar genres, even several translations of the same Latin poem. Despite their claim of heterogeneity, Restoration and eighteenth-century miscellanies and anthologies echo the generic or stylistic specialization of early miscellaneous bundles. Under the pressures of sorting pamphlets for the sale, differences in genre sometimes collapse beneath the similarity of subject. Should there be an insufficient number of items of a given genre for a bundle, Cooper gathers material of a similar topic together, often presenting opposite sides of a contemporary issue, as in the coupling of Jo Standishes Treatise against the Protestation of Rob. Barnes (1540) with A Confutation of Jo. Standishes Treatise against D.R. Barnes.3'1 Although topical collections clearly resemble generic ones, some bundles are quite diverse: TWelve merry Jests of the Lying Widow Edyth, very old. A merry Play between the Pardoner and the Frere, very old. Manner of Consecrating Bishops, Priests, Etc. Lond. 1559. A Pillar of gratitude to the King and Parliament for restoring Episcopy, 166). John Ogilbyes relation of the King's Entertainment through London 1661. Bishop Ushers Mystery of the Incarnation of God, London 1645, with seven more of Episcopy Etc. (371, no. 18)

* 1:221, no. 338; 217, no. 83; 221, no. 346; 370, no. 16. 37 Auction Catalogues of Books, "Rev. Dr. Lazarus Seaman's Library" 120, no. 55. 18 Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry, iii. 3® "Rev, Dr. Lazarus Seaman's Library" 115, no. 44.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

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This folio packet contains material of a vaguely episcopal nature, ranging from joke to catechism. Booksellers continue this practice as they assemble topical material for nonce miscellanies, pamphlets issued for a particular, present occasion, by slipping in dated or reprinted pieces to swell their collections. In gathering all the available material on an issue, regardless of its contradictions, booksellers eschew open partisanship. Likewise, in their posture as servants to the public, they often disavow political or moral—but not literary—bias. Even Edward Bysshe, whose "handbook for poets" scarcely contains polemical material, avers, "I have upon every Subject given both Pro and Con whenever I met with them . . . and if both are not always found, let none imagine that I wilfully suppress'd either; or that what is here uncontradicted must be unanswerable" (x). 40 This does not always mean that collections are nonpartisan, of course. In his introductory essay to the collection of pamphlets he edited with William Oldys in the Harleian Miscellany, "Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and Fugitive Pieces," Samuel Johnson argues that the miscellany demonstrates the English tradition of a free press, yet the collection is strongly anti-Catholic. For booksellers, this neutral stance is profitable: it accommodates differently minded readers, allowing a greater audience to participate imaginatively in the anthology. In a similar fashion, as Tessa Watt argues, seventeenth-century "pieties" preserved a middle-of-the-road morality that could be stretched to include Puritans or Anglicans. 41 By including contradictory material, booksellers advertise themselves as all things to all readers while simultaneously touting the plenty and hospitality of a print culture that welcomes divergent views. 42 Finally, Cooper uses contemporaneity or age to unify diverse materials, although this is always his last organizational principle. To Restoration booksellers, literary material, generally, is either old or new, but Cooper does admit a gray area between these poles. Accordingly, in the catalogs for 1676-1779, Cooper often lists the material in his bundles chronologically, perhaps to appeal to collectors like Samuel Pepys, so that more recent publications are often grouped together even while the catalogs of the following decade generally highlight popular titles at the expense of chronology. 43 Es40 In "Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook," CuIier maintains that Bysshe is writing solely a poet's handbook, but Bysshe's preface indicates that he invited general readers to peruse hts commonplace book to enjoy fine style. In his rival Complete Art of Poetry, Gtldon1 himself editor of several important miscellanies, substitutes "Design" for Bysshe's emphasis on "Colouring" but does not directly attack the idea that poetry is the skillful use of language, rather than a moral action or resource. 4! Watt, Cheap Print, 10. 42 See Barrell and Guest, "On the Use of Contradiction," 121-43; for a more general discus­ sion of the ways in which contradictory signals may be overlooked or seen as ideologically coherent, see Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 41 Auction Catalogues of Books, "Rev. Dr. Lazarus Seaman's Library" 115, nos. 44, 55; "D.

22

INTRODUCTION

pecially in bundles exclusively of recent or contemporaneous English verse, this loose chronological organization also supplements subject to identify the kind of contents each bundle holds and hence works as one of the criteria that define genre. Thus Cooper's Bundle of Poems, consisting of translations of Virgil and Ovid, with poems by Pasquin, Surrey, and others, constitutes a miscellany of imitations and translations ranging in date from 1570 to 1642, while another more contemporary bundle consists of elegies, epigrams, satires, and translations by Jonson, Harrington, John Taylor, and others from 1618 to 1660 (395, nos. 48, 49). Item 216 comprises "Several Poems of Bert. Johnson [sic], Coryat, Sir John Suckling, &c. to the Number of 34, with Bishop Andrews Poem on the praise of a POT of Ale," for 6s. 2d. (4° 389), all poetry from the late Renaissance categorized as light, vernacular verse. By including dates and representative titles, each bundle correlates date and kind. This organizational tension between chronological and thematic principles also appears in printed anthologies of occasional works, themselves compiled by booksellers contemporary with the poets, which often slide a dead poet among the recent ones to bulk up—or class up—the collection. These organizational practices persist until the end of the century. As late as 1792, the bookseller J. Deighton advertises several miscellanies of his own compilation as Poems, Etc. Some he anchors with a poem made famous by critical acclaim and reproduction: Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1751) heads one quarto miscellany of Latin and English verses; Dyer's The Fleece (1757) opens another of exclusively native poems, including two by Churchill, for 4s. half-bound. Others, expanding to fifteen items, mingle translations or thematically similar works with topical poems and tracts.44 To form a sheaf of largely loco-descriptive verse, including georgics and pastorals, Deighton grafts Denham's Cooper's Hill (pirated 1642) onto a collection of poems by John Philips including Blenheim (1705), Sir Richard Blackmore's "The Kit-Cats" (1708), and John Beaumont's long "Bosworth Field" (1629), as well as others "by eminent men," for 2s. 6d. Selecting mainly satire for another miscellany, he assembles an unattributed compendium of Jabez Hughes's translation of Claudius's Rape of Proserpine (1714, reissued 1716 and 1723), John Dennis's "The Battle of Ramilia [i/c]" (1706), John Philips's The Pretender's Flight, or a Mock Coronation (1716), John Freke's The History of the Insipids (1709, attributed to Rochester), Rochester's "Upon Nothing," and others for 2s. (188, nos. 7207, 7208). These miscellanies are chronologically organized but thematically grouped. Thomas Kidner's Library" (6 February 1676) 30, no. 21; "Gisberti Voetii" (25 November 1678) 251-66, nos. 46, 75 (British Library). 44 Dcighton Catalogue (British Library), 46, nos. 1530, 1531; 48, nos. 1534, 1538. 1

THE VARIOUS FEAST

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From pamphlets, private miscellanies might be produced. Purchasers of "Bundles of Stitcht Pamphlets" or other books who desired to protect or to display their literary purchases could commission binders or booksellers to bind their private selections of plays, poems, or tracts together, thus creating personal literary anthologies or miscellanies that made ephemeral literature seem permanent (see the customer ordering binding in fig. 3). Such miscellanies follow no particular organizational principle: Fredson Bowers notes the complexity resulting from the "frequent lack of any set order in the sections, casual binding or special binding for customers who already owned certain parts, and later arrangement or sophistication."45 These private collections of popular reading document individual participation in the fashionable culture of particular historical moments. Early bound collections presuppose a wealthy reader with a library, whose participation in culture might also have taken more directly political forms in government. Once bookselling and publishing become high-volume, more impersonal businesses later in the century, however, customers, especially those of modest means and unsure or inexperienced at literary selection, bought booksellers' miscellanies, and these form the clearest link between auctioneers' bundles of books and printed anthologies. Booksellers fairly often compiled their own volumes from unbound sheets of pamphlets in their shops.4* As members of "congers," associations of booksellers who shared copyrights, or of less formal partnerships, shopowning printers and booksellers may also have traded books—not merely copyrights—so that they could offer their customers a greater number of titles,47 By attaching an unsold or pirated pamphlet to a current one and adding a new title page, booksellers recontextualized their stock. When title pages appear on these volumes, as "the publisher's advertisement of the book," they indicate the way books were marketed, although not necessarily the way they were originally conceived or assembled, since title pages and prefatory material were printed last to accommodate changes.48 Especially in the case of "built- books" made up of miscellaneous writings, they serve to emphasize the most widely selling, popular contents, in contrast to indexes, which list all the texts in the volume.49 When they did not order title pages and prefaces printed as part of the new book, indeed, booksellers often comBowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, 44. Gaskell, A New introduction to Bibliography, my thanks to Terry Belanger. 47 Bernard Lintot's 1714-717 Catalogue of Books, Sermons, and Pamphlets includes titles by authors whose works he did not own, at least until financial problems curtailed the publication; see Foxon's introduction, iii, 48 Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, 125; my thanks to Terry Belanger. "" Pollard, Last Words on the History of the Title-Page, 28-33. Like miscellanies, title pages blossom with the broadening of the literary market, but Pollard does not mention the rival function of indexes. 43

46

24

INTRODUCfION

Fig. 3. "Irish Binding for the Caricature Magazine." Woodward del. Hand-colored etching, 21.8 x 32.7 cm., 15 April 1808. Courtesy of the Print Collection, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Illustration for Thomas Tegg's five-volume Caricature Magazine (1807-1821). The

bookseller Thomas Tegg (1776-1845) published miscellanies, magazines, and, after the 1774 copyright decision, a series of fashionable novels in miniature, all identically bound and finely illustrated. This print satirizes both the profiteering bookseller seeking to bind the ephemeral Caricature Magazine in the popular, aromatic, and fine Russia calf, and his Irish customer who confuses the country with the product, preferring local Dublin binding to keep the jokes fresh.

missioned printers to make separate title pages to be inserted or "tipped" (glued) into the front of their assembled miscellanies . 50 These articulate the booksellers' informed idea of how to unify the contents and to present them in the current literary market. In his examination of the marketing of printed books, Graham Pollard has remarked that "in the usual course of trade a book will never be printed until someone thinks that it can be sold. " 51 The same is true of miscellanies: they were unlikely to have been compiled unless the bookseller had reason to believe they would sell in the new format. "" Maslen . An Early London Printing House, IS3-64 . " Pollard , quoted in Edwards and Meale, "The Marketing of Printed Books," 95.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

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Some perhaps were even designed for collectors in the same way that "early numbers of eighteenth-century periodicals [were] reprinted so that subscribers [could] complete their sets." 52 Probably some booksellers intended to deceive naive buyers by packaging certain compilations as single-author collections; other volumes, however, serve as representative anthologies of a particular style, genre, or topical treatment at a time when the valorization of authorial originality still lay in the future. 53 The processes by which miscellanies and anthologies were assembled demonstrate the interdependence of audiences, booksellers, and printers during the Restoration and eighteenth century. During the seventeenth century, as distribution of books to the provinces became essential for profit, publishing changed. 54 Instead of being the province of printers alone, it became the cooperative endeavor of two professionals: the printer, traditionally referred to as the publisher, who owned the shop in which the text was set in type and produced, and the bookseller, a new kind of entrepreneur who owned the copyrights and specialized in distributing the book. Sometimes, in addition, an editor—critic, author, or entrepreneur—would find, arrange, and present the contents. While some early books bear the printer's name in the phrase "Printed by," many carry only the bookseller's imprint in the phrase "Printed for," although some imprints bear both names. As this practice shows, printers increasingly lost prestige during the eighteenth century, becoming craftsmen or even laborers rather than independent businessmen; nonetheless, many who grew successful became booksellers in their own right, serving as both printers and copyright-owners. In addition, authors or editors serving as producers of books are sometimes termed "publishers" in imprints. These classes of work were closely tied with one another so that the men and women performing these jobs were as much working together to create a market as competing against one other to dominate it. Consequently, anthologies reflect the consensus of many "publishers" rather than the decisions of individual readers with access to a publishing mechanism, no matter how powerful the reader might be. Although a number of printed anthologies, like other eighteenth-century books, were the result of subscriptions, many booksellers solicited their customers for material in printed pleas in prefaces and advertisements. 55 For example, in his preface to the two-volume Familiar Letters (1705), mainly written by Rochester to Henry Savile, Samuel Briscoe notes that, "Upon the " Foxon, introduction to Catalogue, v. " Rose, Authors and Owners. 54 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 38-42, 60-63. 55 Alston, Robinson, and Wadham, Eighteenth-Century Subscription Lists, introduction.

26

INTRODUCTION

Noise of this Collection, several Gentlemen have been so kind, as to send me in Materials to compose a Second," which has led the enterprising Briscoe to accumulate some items for a third to be printed shortly if "those Gentlemen that have any curious Letters by them . . . are willing to oblige the Publick" by sending them to him.56 Anthology editors like Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Sir Richard Steele, James Ralph, and Alexander Pope asked their friends for contributions. According to the traditional discourse of bookselling, indeed, it was readers who provided the rationale for collections by demanding and supplying a particular sort of reading matter. The prefaces of anthologies characterize this as material that requires only fleeting attention, about which the reader can quickly pass judgment. Indeed, even before novelty bows to the nationalistic nostalgia of the late eighteenth century, the anthology as a printed genre geared to an anonymous audience favors particular kinds of literature, which are repeatedly anthologized for practical reasons. These are short poems that allow room for more, separate pieces; love lyrics, attractive to readers young and old; and verse that either conveys mood, be this light or solemn, paints vivid pictures, or plays with language—pleasures accessible to more readers than cerebrally philosophical, purely topical, or polemically political poems. Prefaces tout these as the readers' choices. This evidence shows Restoration and early-eighteenth-century readers directly entering print culture by helping to determine which books, letters, or poems were published, and therefore which authors, genres, styles, and subjects would become canonical. Even as the increasing importance of the editor in the eighteenth century corresponds to the declining power of readers directly to influence literary culture themselves by proposing specific tLexts to be printed, readers as buyers retain their power to prefer or reject selections into the nineteenth century, even while these choices are shaped by cultural circumstances." To whom were these printers and booksellers aiming their collections? Such a question raises the vexed issue of who could read at all during the Restoration and eighteenth century. In reviewing current research on the literacy of the early modern period, J. Paul Hunter points out that literacy for both sexes leaped forward in the early seventeenth century but stagnated in the eighteenth/8 Hunter, furthermore, argues that although women wrote less often than men, they might read or be read to quite as often. David Cressy similarly notes that although little is known about literacy from 1720 to 1760, evidence proves a significant jump in the number of people who could at least sign their names from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries; he also cautions, however, that, apart from local pockets of literacy, the only participants in the literate culture of the seventeenth cen56 57 38

Briscoe, preface to Familiar Letters, 1 :i—ii. Crane, Framing Authority, 185. Hunter, Before Novels, esp 66-67; see also Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

27

tury were the "cultivated elite," urban men and women of the haute bour­ geoisie who led a fashion in reading as in other consumer habits.5" The publication statistics drawn from the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Cata­ logue (hereafter ESTC) support these conclusions: Alvin Kernan observes a dip in the number of publications issued in the middle years of the eighteenth century, suggesting again that the reading public remained stable or even waned during this period.60 As Richard D. Altick and Jon P. Klancher have shown, literacy and the demand for books burgeoned again toward the end of the eighteenth century.61 Henry Curwen notes nonetheless that although the first circulating library was founded by Wright of the Strand about 1730, by 1770 only four existed in London.62 Thus the audience for literary collections changes throughout the period under study, becoming greater and more diverse (except during the middle of the century), more largely female, and more middle-class. These changes shape changes in the anthology. Whereas the early literary miscellany or anthology offers through a small, centralized band of literary producers an accessible, printed resbrt to a growing audience, midcentury collections diversify to stimulate a stagnant readership with prose and amateur collections, while the late-century anthology offers a historical survey of literary culture for a wide, varied audience. Within these broad categories, however, there remain specific kinds of readers. The practice of sewing together surplus or topical pamphlets assumes a clientele who wish to buy several pieces and who probably do not own any, or at least many, of the texts in the collection. Different material also posits different readers: collectors who desire older poetry, wealthy gentry completing libraries, and fashionable consumers of an increasingly commodified culture. While some customers may have hired booksellers to purvey whatever the bookseller thought important, others may have hired them to collect what the customer found important, although these categories must have overlapped substantially since from 1714 to 1774 on average only fifty new works were patented annually.63 These customers might include country readers, commissioning a bookseller to send them all the literature on a recent scandal, and urban buyers whose libraries and tastes the bookseller knew, as well as general readers. Some miscellanies might result from the cooperative discussion between a customer or several customers " Cressy1 "Literacy in Context," 305, 314-15, 317. 60 Keman, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, 60-61. I am deeply indebted to this book. 61 Altick, The English. Common Header; Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audi­ ences. See also Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, 60, 164-65. 62 Curwen, A History of Booksellers, 423. Ian Watt dates the first circulating library at 1742 and suggests a rapid spread of such institutions in The Rise of the Novel, 42, 55. Other scholars date circulating libraries as early as the Restoration. 63 Plant, The English Book Trade, 92.

28

INTRODUCTION

and the bookseller.64 Many, although not all, collections were also relatively affordable, given the high price of books. Since it was cheaper to purchase one anthology than editions of all the works it contained, even if skillful booksellers charged more for them than for single-authored volumes, in fact as well as reputation miscellanies and anthologies were generally cut-rate books. Their prefaces, furthermore, suggest that their readership was widely inclusive. Because they came to these texts from other collections of poetry, jest books, and courtesy literature, this audience included both women and men, both the young and the mature, both the experienced and the neophyte. Anthologies turned them all into critical readers. This book analyzes the way Restoration and eighteenth-century literary anthologies present literature to produce meaning in different cultural climates and the way they define readers to consume it.65 By tracing its formal changes, I argue that the literary anthology bridges diverse social groups by showing them how to read fashionably. It does so by recontextualizing literature to neutralize political messages, elevate style as morality, and, by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, package literature as a consistent, moral narrative available to the solitary reader. In the process, the reader is redefined as a critical judge of quality. Although literature is written, compiled, produced, and read by individuals whose decisions affect the popularity and influence of particular authors and works, this book argues that taste—including their taste—is the result of market forces, and that the history of the anthology, the very genre that publishes literary consensus, definitively proves this. This argument echoes that of Horkheimer and Adomo and Pierre Bourdieu in maintaining that literary history reflects economics, politics, and material culture.66 While editors and booksellers are also themselves readers and thus agents in forging literary taste, I here analyze the ways in which these individuals enact or embody cultural forces—including advances in technology, new marketing strategies, and changes in audiences, literary politics, and consumption habits—rather than exploring their personalities. Similarly, 1 do not examine the individual histories of authors but instead the way they were sold to the public. Indeed, I am specifically concerned with refuting the traditional emphasis on the individual genius of writers as the sole determinant of their stature in the canon. In its place, I argue that the history of the anthology demonstrates the growing control of the self-definition of readers by a rhetoric tuned to mass production in an increasingly anonymous market. While 64 For the intimate relations between booksellers and their clients, see Benedict, '"Service to the Public,"' 120-46. 45 For an exploration of the importance of different, particular historical audiences, see Rose, "Rereading the English Common Reader," 47-70. M Horkheimer and Adomo, "The Culture Industry," 120-67; Bourdieu, Distinction.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

29

these changes reflect the emergence of the bourgeois ideal of self-discipline married to class ambition that Peter Stallybrass and Allon White diagnose in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, the creation of a mass literary market selling literature cheaply to untraditional audiences also demonstrates the democratization of literary culture. Anthoiogies represent high literature for a mass audience, in the process, they depoliticize it.6' Much—perhaps all—literature contains what might be called propaganda: this can support patrons and patronage, advocate religious resignation, charity, or pilgrimage, endorse or condemn patriotism, or criticize the state, among other attitudes. A political agenda, indeed, drives such genres as panegyric, georgic, elegy, and particularly satire. The latter is especially prevalent in the eighteenth century, when cheap printing made the publication of the political strife between Whigs and Tories profitable. Readers, however, historically are not always invited or induced to recognize or receive this level of meaning. In the period I examine, literary theory increasingly encourages them to disregard political text or subtext in favor of style; anthologies specifically facilitate this process by decontextuaiizing and recontextualizing selected works. In the process, they define what it means to read literature and what it is to be a reader. Particularly in my treatment of commonplace books in chapter 1 and pedagogical series in the conclusion, I explore this aspect of literacy by examining the ways in which readers' subjectivity is fashioned by a print culture devoted to showing the reader him or herself, an approach to cultural history indebted to the innovative work of Stephen Greenblatt.68 As this history of the anthology from the Restoration to the Regency shows, the influence of individuals on culture and vice versa is dialectical. This dialectic appears in the heteroglossia of diverse voices that sound in the single text of the anthology.m An enterprise of this kind entails several assumptions. Perhaps the most glaring is the question of cause and effect: do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste? My answer is that they always and inevitably do both. It is in order to improve their profits that the printer and bookseller bind together poems or passages which have already proven their popularity, but, conversely, the packaging and juxtaposition of these works ineradicably affects the reader's understanding of them. It changes the expectations and tastes of the audience; it influences the youthful authors who peruse these miscellaneous works in preparation for writing their own. The reproduction of printed works in a different context invariably modifies the meanings of 67 For a lucid discussion of the ways in which literary practice and interpretation involve politics, see Rabinowitz, Before Reading, 1-12. M Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. m Bakhtin, Problems of Dosloevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination,

30

INTRODUCTION

those works. In the case of anthologies where booksellers or editors affix prefaces providing up-to-date rationales for their selections, the recontextualization creates self-conscious readers. A second problem involves the distinction between "high" and "popular" works. In this book, I use the term popular to denote a work that was read by a broad section of literate people, in contrast to a "high" work which deliberately appealed to the traditional audience for literature: leisured, educated scholars and gentry. I base this distinction on price, presentation, prefatory rhetoric, and the sophistication of the literature in the work. It might be argued that this is a circular definition: the miscellany per se defines or redefines its contents as popular since it sells literature in a relatively cheap form. So, indeed, it does, but variations of presentation, contents, price, and length serve to distinguish different anthologies on a sliding scale of popularity. If no anthologies that I examine reached the "top" and were presented, as was Beattie's Minstrel, to Their Majesties in gilt-picked, redbound leather, many of the texts that first appeared in them do, and some— notably those produced by Edmund Curll—fall perilously close to the "bottom." Most, however, paddle in the middle, mixing texts only moderately challenging with others that are not quite coarse. The varying level of this ideal mean itself reflects the variations in literary taste and sophistication of the historical audience. Much scholarship recently has examined these different aspects of literary culture. I am indebted to Arthur Ellicott Case's early Bibliography of En­ glish Poetical Miscellanies, 1521-1750 for help in locating overlaps and debts, but this splendid descriptive bibliography does not approach questions of cultural analysis. Work by scholars of the book trade, such as Terry Belanger, Michael Treadwell, David McKitterick, D. F. McKenzie, and David Foxon, however, has revealed the importance of the mechanics of production on both specific texts and literary culture.70 While I am indebted to the burgeoning field of book history, I depart in this book from the methodology of individual case studies for an overview that locates the significance of booksellers' practices in their products. Indeed, I implicitly take issue with current book trade scholarship for ignoring the contents of the books produced by firms or individuals, and for neglecting the role of the consumer in fashioning the market. In contrast, indeed, to most book studies, parts 4 and 5 of Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, explore the book as a commercial product, although they still underrate the significance of what a book actually contains. Adopting a different approach, scholars of cultural history and of mentalite including Rolf Engelsing, Roger Chartier, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Robert DeMaria have ™ McKitterick, "Bibliography, Bibliophily, and the Organization of Knowledge," 29-61; McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

31

been scrutinizing the historical changes in the way people read literature, an approach epitomized by Robert Darnton's analysis of sentimental response in "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity."71 As these studies show, books inhabit two spheres of meaning. They are material objects, consumer goods, that circulate in the world of commerce and symbolically represent cultural value.72 But they also have "use value," helping to disseminate ideas, influence people, and mold culture itself. This book seeks to link these two spheres of literary culture by examining the way anthologies serve simultaneously as vessels and as vehicles, as objects imbued with meaning and as mediators disseminating meanings. Although it is one thing to buy or borrow a book and another to read it, literary anthologies are designed to bridge this gap: they have low status as a literary form, but their indexes, page layouts, organization, and contents ensure easy but guided reading. The investigation of these books must, therefore, entail an analysis of the way contemporary audiences read them. James Raven in Judging New Wealth similarly attempts to marry book history with cultural studies by documenting the commercialization of books and their role in promoting consumer culture, but Raven eschews "reception theory," preferring to summarize the narratives of his novels rather than to analyze the writing or reading of them.73 My study, however, by linking texts to their physical and social contexts, examines how these books embody cultural meanings. The contexts of anthologies necessitate a study not only of the bibliography of particular texts, but of the way editions reshape the meanings of their contents.74 This book concentrates on what economists call the "demand" or consumer side of the literary culture of anthologies, the way they were received and read, largely leaving the "supply" side—the story of the relationships among particular printers, congers, booksellers, and authors—to be told by other scholars. In doing so, it follows the practice of Neil McKendrick, whose revolutionary treatment of commercialization in eighteenth-century England helped to relocate the origins of consumer culture.75 Nonetheless, the relationship between the production and the consumption of literary collections is highly dialectical: first, because readers help to produce miscellaDarnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 215-56; Chartier, Cultural History, The Culture of Print, and The Order of Books·, DeMaria, "Samuel Johnson and the Reading Revolution," 86102. 72 See Bourdieu Distinction. 1 73 Raven, Judging New Wealth, 5-6. 74 See McGann, The Textual Condition and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism on the definition of a text as a body of meanings in process. 75 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society; see also Brewer and Porter's introduction to Consumption and the World of Goods, 1-15. As Agnew points out in "Coming Up for Air," McKendrick views Wedgewood as a "midwife" of the consumer culture he brought about (24). 71

32

INTRODUCTION

nies as well as consuming them, since booksellers and printers compile miscellanies from material requested by readers or remaindered; and, second, because the cultural interplay between the producers and consumers of anthologies is so steady and so rich. By examining the discourse, packaging, and contents of literary anthologies, and by explicating the way the anthology's context organizes the reception of these contents, this analysis explores this interplay and reveals the role of the genre in eighteenth-century literary culture. This approach resembles that of Alvin Kernan, who in his groundbreaking Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson sees the eighteenth century's literary criticism, creation of a canon, and shift in aesthetic taste as the result of the capacity of the printing press to multiply the production of books, so that "the need of print for copy . . . created writers." As a result of this new means of production, which erased the need for patronage and, at the same time, promoted new critical criteria valuing readers' responses and independent judgment, Kernan argues, the cultural role of the author changed from that of a courtly dilettante to that of a selfconscious, middle-class, and independent businessman.76 While literary anthologies bear out many of Kernan's conclusions, they also testify to the key role of readers and critics in determining what literature was read and written. Kernan underrates the extent to which readers themselves shaped the books they read, or inherited a tradition of critical evaluation. In contrast, Mary Thomas Crane examines these issues in Framing Authority, but her admirable study of Renaissance collections does not go beyond the early seventeenth century. A further word is needed to clarify my organization and linguistic usages. Although the chapters follow a chronological path that is important to the argument, sections within each chapter define subgenres of the anthology that often transcend neat, chronological divisions. Both university anthologies and children's anthologies, for example, flourish throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, although I locate one in the late Restoration and the other in the late eighteenth century. It is the nature of miscellanies and anthologies to look backward and forward even while they advertise themselves as utterly contemporary, for the current is the junction of past and future. Literary taste itself, moreover, mutates gradually, with many a throwback on its way to a new ideal. My principle has been to discuss definable forms of the anthology at the period when they first appear as significant publications in order to examine their relationship with contemporary print culture. The term print culture signifies the culture of print, including traditions of how texts appear in print as well as what texts are printed, whereas printed culture refers to the literature and other texts that are printed. Although booksellers and printers typically refer to their produc7t. Kernan, Priming Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, 74, 226-36, passim.

THE VARIOUS FEAST

33

tions as "miscellanies" and that term is significant for the genre, I have used the terms collection, anthology, and compendium where necessary in order to clarify the distinction between volumes of preprinted material sewn together—miscellanies—and collections printed in a single run. I have also noted where necessary in the footnotes the current location of the volume being examined and shelf marks in cases of ambiguity. In each chapter, I have selected anthologies by central figures in the history of English criticism whose success gave them wide audiences and influence over their publishers, and ones that were popular, as evidenced by frequent editions, long runs, or a high number of republished contents. This book contains five chapters. The first traces the influences of popular versions of the anthology that flourished before the Restoration in establishing the genre as a vehicle for cultural education. Here I argue that anthologies, commonplace books, courtesy literature, and English reference and writing manuals from the late Renaissance to the eighteenth century serve as models for the anthology not only by their presentational techniques but also by promoting native literature as the means for social mastery and by encouraging participation in literary culture. At the same time, they chart the transition from an earlier world of manuscript production to one in which the reader's subjectivity is defined by printed literature. The second chapter, centering on Restoration court anthologies, university collections, and poetic handbooks, examines the selling of classical and English literature as contemporary, topical, and novel in a climate that sought to reconcile diverse readers by celebrating aesthetic variety. This print culture grants readers the authority to judge literature for themselves. In chapter 3, I trace the new values of elegance, exclusivity, topicality, and balance that define readers as discriminating consumers of fine art, using works by Steele, Pope, and Curll. The fourth chapter chronicles the result of the professionalization of criticism in the midcentury collections designed by powerful critics and booksellers that centralize literary values and rank authors: here, readers are conjured as concurring with the critical consensus. In the final chapter, I examine collections that bridge youthful and adult audiences by defining reading as critical training and moral improvement. In the conclusion, by looking at Jane Austen's views of collections, 1 suggest that early-nineteenth-century anthologies present the experience of reading literature as the possession of public values. This book demonstrates that early anthologies mediate between readers and print culture by defining reading as the private self-conscious enactment of elite criticism.

Chapter One

COLLECTING CULTURE BEFORE THE RESTORATION

THE printed anthologies that appear in the Restoration appeal to an audience

already familiar with several kinds of similar books preceding them. As recent studies have shown, pre-Restoration literature fulfilled many functions, including formal and informal instruction in professional and religious matters and both personal and social entertainment.' Of the different books that answered these needs, three particularly contribute to the form and ideology of the literary collection. The earliest are medieval and Renaissance anthologies and commonplace books, collections of sayings or verses transcribed from many sources into one text. Like printed anthologies, these collect and condense literature for private or classroom use, serving as cultural cribs and personal libraries. Second are the more common books of literary or linguistic instruction, including courtesy books, wit manuals, poetic dictionaries, and grammars that teach readers to speak, read, and write; these share with printed anthologies the function of educating readers to master the forms of literate culture.2 Finally, collections of short literary genres designed for memorization, social display, or recreation, especially those exhibiting humor and skill such as books of aphorisms, epigrams, jests, riddles, and songs, also resemble anthologies of mixed genres by their emphasis on stylistic differentiation.3 While these earlier books are produced in different ways from the Restoration and eighteenth-century printed anthology, they share important features with it.4 As Jerome J. McGann1 D. F. McKenzie, and G. Thomas Tanselle have argued, all books demonstrate their "meaning" by their format—the details of their presentation—as well as by their contents.5 In these early books, this format combines visual signals from traditional and new literary culture. By their distinctive practice of separating previously published literature into small chunks of reading matter and arranging these ' See McKilterick, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe·, Aers1 Hodge, and Kress, Literature, language and Society in England", and OIsen, Literature as Recreation. 2 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 2-41. 5 In The English Poetic Epigraph, Scodel recounts the critical acclaim of brevity in the late Renaissance (50-85). 4 In Scribal Publication, Love emphasizes the distinctions between printed and scribal mis­ cellanies, yet he acknowledges that collections allowed the circulation of verse to a coterie of readers and established textual conventions that influenced interpretation. ! See Tanselle, Libraries: Museums, and Reading, 16, 28-29, passim.

COLLECTING CULTURE

35

according to the principles of the new text or context, each of these literary genres characterizes literature as composed of quantifiable, malleable, even mechanical units. These units, furthermore, are presented as responsive to new or personal recombinations and reinteipretations. While commodifying literature into usable and reusable elements, this forrnat allows both the traditional, intensive study of a few texts, and the new, comparative survey of many that a burgeoning literary market would increasingly promote. Indeed, this fragmentation also characterizes the re/presentation and republication of learned texts in anthologies for a "popular" readership from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth.6 This simplification allows readers to use this literary material in any one of several ways. They may memorize passages, read them aloud, apply them in the manner of psalms, or con them casually in the manner of jokes. Such a flexibility suggests the wide use that Restoration and eighteenth-century publishers, like their twentieth-century counterparts, hoped their anthologies would receive from new and traditional readers of literature.7 It also sketches a particular way of reading that reflects a new institutionalization of individual readers' power to construct meanings or to transform or appropriate previous socially or conventionally authoritative contexts, even while this power is mediated by editors.8 While blending aphoristic morality and lyrical entertainment, these forms all demonstrate the ways in which the manipulation of language and literature entails social power, and they all offer literary language as the means to cultural selfimprovement. RENAISSANCE COMPENDIA

Elizabethan anthologies are the earliest precedent of the eighteenth-century anthology. Since they were produced before the advent of the cheap printing press, in a period when relatively few people could read, they are far from a popular form; indeed, they, like other contemporary books, are a luxury commodity, not a direct source of the printed anthology.9 Nonetheless, several of the various means of their production, their organization, and the kind of reading they invite parallel those of miscellanies and later anthologies.10 Fashionable in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these 6Grimsted, "Books and Culture," 187-230; see also Chartier 1 "A Comment on Mr. Grimsted's Paper," 231—32. ' Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, 124-25. 8 In Framing Authority, Crane suggests that editors wrest interpretative power from readers as anthologies become "mass"-produced (167), but this model is too simplistic to explain the dynamic interaction of readers and editors in a period when readers contributed literary works as well as opinions to anthologies. 5 Bell, "The Price of Books in Medieval England," 332; Pearsall, introduction to Griffiths and Pearsall, Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 7. 10 Harris, "Patrons, Buyers and Owners," 163-99; Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading.

36

CHAPTER ONE

anthologies constitute collections of "booklets" of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury verse, compiled into manuscripts by professional editors to please both individual and corporate readers. As Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson have explained, such composite anthologies, like many later collections, recontextualize their material by grouping these booklets "according to source or to subject" even as they retain for the convenience of the scribe the formal divisions between one booklet and the next." Although many anthologies include drama, speeches, and prose, some specialize by collecting only poetry, carols, religious verse, or the works of one poet. Several of these anthologies are organized not only by genre but even by topic, some grouping secular or amorous verse around a central section, often of Chaucer's works, while other anthologies satisfy family tastes with solely moral and didactic literature.11 By selecting from contemporary literature only that which pleases the readers' taste, this procedure represents literary culture in individualized form, yet even in this early period, professional reproduction limits this individualization. As Carol M. Meale has shown, scribes "increasingly came to rely upon reproducing a set combination of texts within units which, although self-contained and relatively inexpensive to produce, could be collected together by a purchaser to create a more substantial 'library.""3 The consequent standardization of format and contents represents a compromise between the owners' desire to make particular choices and the need of the trade to facilitate efficient, inexpensive production. In this way, Elizabethan anthologies professionally personalize printed literature for their owners and anticipate the eighteenth-century dialectic between the book trade and the individual reader in determining literary culture. To a great degree, these collections parallel seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury literary anthologies in contents, organization, audience, and function. Elizabethan anthologies appear in a variety of physical sizes, as do eighteenth-century anthologies, and for similar reasons. Available as large or small as the finances of their readers and producers require, they provide a practical and "relatively cheap means of marketing more expensive books." If their audience remains smaller than that of the eighteenth-century form, it is nearly as varied, including provincial and city folk as well as "both discerning, wealthy readers, and . . . those of lesser means."14 As a new production made of previously printed material, anthologies mediate See Boffey and Thompson, "Anthologies and Miscellanies," 279-315. Ibid., 279-80. This radial organization also characterizes Dryden's Miscellanies, as Sloman has explained, and indicates that these books are read as extrapolations on moods and themes, not sequentially as protonarratives; see Dryden: The Poetics of Translation, 85. 13 Meale,"Patrons, Buyers, and Owners," 220; see also Bell, "Medieval Women Book Owners," 741-68. 11

12

14

Boffey and Thompson, "Anthologies and Miscellanies," 295, 282-83.

COLLECTING CULTURE

37

between individual readers and general literary culture.'5 By concentrating on contemporary texts, moreover, these collections celebrate current taste, while the flexibility allowed by individual compilation makes that contemporary culture accessible to diverse readers with idiosyncratic interests. Insofar as these anthologies expand as scribes add verses or insert quires, they also resemble many eighteenth-century miscellanies that accumulated topical pamphlets or lost outdated gatherings or sections as their booksellers reissued them from printed stock.16 By retaining blank leaves between groups of booklets, moreover, these anthologies reinforce the discreteness of each separately produced booklet. In modified form, this feature also appears in Restoration and eighteenth-century collections, where printed collections evoke assembled miscellanies by setting off their long or important items with a separate title page, often including a spurious imprint, and by reproducing the original sequence of the booklets. This technique reinscribes the independence of each entry and represents in the new book the trace of the original, printed production. Both Renaissance and Restoration and eighteenth-century compilers thus counter the personalization of the anthology with an evocation of the authority of the source. In their format and their dynamic compromise between the desires of readers and the requirements of compilers, medieval and Renaissance anthologies anticipate the dialectic that marks the later anthology. This dialectic pulls between the demands of individual taste and those of social convention, and between the fame of particular authors and general fashion. By merging the individual choices of readers into a single text, these early scribes and secretaries documented the formation of a corporate identity for their readers. As part of an elite group of fashionable readers, the "consumer" of an anthology came to be defined, in the fact of owning or the process of reading, by his or her choice of literature. This choice itself is reasserted in the organization of anthologies." By juxtaposing multiple examples of similar texts, scribes inscribe differance: the creation of significance by the deferral of a central text or meaning, so that all examples of the 15 Boffey and Thompson argue that miscellanies are highly idiosyncratic compilations "influ­ enced by local, practical, domestic, or even political considerations" (ibid., 292), whereas Harris and Meale emphasize the professionalization of the process; see Griffiths and Pearsall, Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 2-7. 16 Boffey and Thompson, "Anthologies and Miscellanies," 295. While any new edition of a text contains changes, both Renaissance and eighteenth-century miscellanies and anthologies add or delete separately produced booklets or pamphlets, whole units of literary production. Although the earlier anthologies also included single poems transcribed by hand, very few of the collections produced during the eighteenth-century age of print show such additions. " Saenger points out the privacy of reading and comprehension, promoted by the new small format of books, and the importance of presentation in defining meaning in "Books of Hours and the Reading Habits of the Later Middle Ages," 141-73.

38

CHAPTER ONE

topic or genre represent treatments in relationship to each other.18 Even the "centrality" of Chaucer is undermined by an organization that presents other texts as both like and unlike his work, so that any definition of an essential stylistic quality is infinitely postponed and compounded. Texts thus become meaningful in anthologies as contexts for other texts; their readers consequently become readers of language and for language at the cost of reading for "literature" or moral application. In addition, the multitude of examples of simultaneously similar and different texts advertises the wealth of contemporary literary production. In the processes of reading these examples and of discriminating among them, readers of anthologies enact their choices and so reestablish, if only imaginatively, their individual relationship to literary culture. This dynamic intensifies with the growth of a book trade that professionally commodifles literature. Like later collections, Renaissance anthologies influence contemporary printers, booksellers, writers, and readers. As collections that disseminated contemporary verse and thus helped to establish literary fashion, earlier anthologies provided the motive and model for such compendia as Songs and Sonnets (1557). This book, known, like later anthologies, by the name of its editing producer as Tottel's Miscellany, popularized the works of Surrey and Wyatt. By using the Cambridge scholar Nicholas Grimald as contributing editor, Tottel sealed the book with elite authority: this was an authoritative edition of new, approved verse, not a readers' compilation. In contrast, cooperatively compiled collections disseminated both new and tried texts to a range of readers. In Framing Au­ thority, Mary Thomas Crane argues that such books were used in public school classrooms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to teach humanistic values, including the skills of "gathering," or collecting and thereby evaluating, literature, while they also influenced the canon and literary values by promulgating short literary forms.19 Similarly, Restoration and eighteenth-century anthologies feature poems that exemplify genres, that instruct readers on how to admire poetic skills, especially translation, and that model the way to evaluate poetic merit. While they enfranchise individuals over literary culture by commodifying literary information, both cooperatively produced kinds of books "justify language" by presenting the mastery of literary language and values as the means to social improvement.20 By learning how to locate meaning in textual relationships, by experiencing differance, readers learn how to distinguish elite from common culture. Even while these anthologies represent texts as a training in moral contexts, they train their readers in literary differentiation. 18 Deirida, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference·, see also Scholes Structuralism in 1 Literature. " Crane, Framing Authority, 173-74, 135, 90-92. 5,1 Ibid., 14-15, 4-6, 38-64.

COLLECTING CULTURE

39

Despite these similarities, the differences between the two forms reveal the role of a complex book trade of cooperating professionals as one of the central conditions enabling the assembled miscellany, transcribed collection, and scribal anthology to conjoin as a printed genre in the Restoration and the eighteenth century.21 Although often compiled by professional scribes, Elizabethan anthologies are not mass-produced as are printed books by professional printers and booksellers. Hence, the preferences of individual readers, clear enough to a bookseller taking his customers' commissions, could not be incorporated into new anthologies and disseminated as quickly to become a part of—indeed, to help to create—evolving public taste. Thus although Elizabethan anthologies recombine literary elements for individual readers and shape literary values, they do not transmit the readers' responses into printed culture. Elizabethan anthologies, moreover, served single readers or small groups, whereas the collections of the later period disseminate topical texts to a wide audience. While some readers compiled or ordered individual anthologies for their own use in the eighteenth century, most of the audience bought literary collections as books like any other: this audience allowed its literary desires to be defined by texts produced by professional booksellers. By making personal taste a common commodity rhetorically revered, later anthologies streamlined, generalized, and professionalized the individual reception of literature. If collections of printed literature bound into anthologies resemble early forms of the anthology, commonplace collections also negotiate between authoritative printed culture and personal taste. Originally a rhetorical term signifying a passage or sentiment that could be generally applied in locus communis, the "common place" by the seventeenth century came to mean a "striking or notable passage, noted, for reference or use, in a book."22 During the Renaissance and later, individual readers put together their own commonplace anthologies by copying from other books into manuscripts patches of text that appealed to them, organized by references of their own design. Most entries record author and text, thus preserving the authority and prestige of the original source while assisting the reader to memorize the inforu For accounts of the early book trade, see Feather, A History of British Publishing and The Provincial Book Trade·, Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 22 Oxford English Dictionary (1971, 1985), 1:693; Louis, introduction to The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle, 100. The OED cites uses by Swift, Steele, Pope, and Johnson, all employing the term to denote a referential memory aid with moral purposes. As a verb, the term signifies both "to extract 'common places' from; to arrange or reduce to general heads and "to furnish with commonplaces or authoritative quotations," a meaning prevalent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This concept of place evokes the etymology of topic from topos, as a "place" to which readers might have recourse for purposes of self-persuasion, my thanks to Tom Bonnell. "Commonplace book" means a book in which important passages were recorded to be remembered or referred to (694). In his Dictionary, Johnson defines it as A book in which things to be remembered are ranged under general heads, emphasizing organi­ zational method rather than contents.

40

CHAPTER ONE

mation or verse he or she finds important. Nonetheless, these "commonplace" books allow readers to reconstitute printed literature according to their particular interests. By including passages on special subjects or deleting displeasing texts or sections, readers assert the primacy of their personal taste over current literary culture. They themselves become the "center" of the book: the locus of meaning from which the collected texts differ. Henry Fielding satirizes this process in Tom Jones by explaining that, although the Parson tells it as a moral reproof of quarreling, the narrator will omit "the famous Story of Alexander and Clytus" because "I find that entered in my Common-Place under Title Drunkenness."23 The narrator categorizes it as one kind of story, the Parson as another. Commonplace books sanction the selection of passages made significant by personal experience and conscience. Many commonplace passages urge contentment and console the reader on the imminence of death, while also containing traces that indicate the particular character of the possessor. One book dated ca. 1670, for example, lists under "Precepts of liveing" thirtyseven short, numbered verses in couplets, seldom exceeding six lines, that turn the commandments into memorizable verse. These adjure the reader to love God, revere his or her parents, think and act justly, honor king and country, and value friends over gold, among other sentiments.24 The writer, however, interrupts this sequence with a forty-line adjuration, as item 35, to "Fly Drunkenness," which ends with a pun on the drunkard, whom "I'd rather count a Hogshead than a Man." The unusual length of this section suggests that the writer has a particular—perhaps pressing—interest in the topic, or liking for the verse: he is selecting from available sources passages that speak particularly to him. While reorganizing printed literature to meet personal interests, however, seventeenth-century commonplace books also reflect its influence in defining personal morality even as they invite individual interpretation of textual meaning. In his Dayly Observations both Divine & M or all. the First part (1657), Thomas Grocer mixes his journalistic entries with extracts from Richard Flecknoe's poems, Robert Herrick's Phylosophers Banquet, Howell's Dialogues between Sole and Body, Jeremiah's Lamentations, The Christian Soldier, and others.25 While most passages are culled from pious or moral works, as Grocer's title suggests, a few derive from popular sources, like the "Anagram of a Wife" (208). Thus Grocer defines for himself the moral content of the literature available to him. The public sources he uses both shape and are shaped by the private context of his own experience. Similarly, before listing the "Precepts of liveing" gathered from var23 24 15

Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. 6, chap. 11, p. 304. Huntington MS 30309, fol. 27. Huntington MS 93.

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ious sources, the book dated 1670 opens with a transcription of Sir John Denham's The Progress of Learning, a stylistic as well as moral model for the rest of the verses, and it concludes with a section of translations of Horace by A.C., which echo the solicitations to contentment and moderation of the Precepts, featuring as the final item "A Thought of Death" by T. Fr., combining prayer and plaint (fol. 48). This interrelationship between private and public contexts often appears even in the organization of information in these books. By beginning with a critically acclaimed, contemporary poem, filling the center with shorter items, and concluding with translations, the 1670 commonplace book mirrors the design of most miscellanies and anthologies; each section, moreover, is separated by horizontal double lines resembling printers' rules. Despite his admixture of transcribed sources and personal reflections in which quotations are sometimes embedded, Thomas Grocer also imitates the format of printed books. He lists his excerpts separately on a page preceding his title page that, like a table of contents, includes both thematic headings, like "pleas for old age," and sources, like "Maxy's Sermons." Moreover, he writes only in one direction so that the book must be read conventionally from left to right. In contrast, many commonplace book compilers number and write on the pages of one side of their set of bound leaves, and then turn the book over and upside down to begin freshly from the back, a thrifty practice that allows twice as much information to be recorded.M Grocer's and other compilers' re-creations of the appearance of printed books evoke the authority of print to lend a public clarity and conformity to private compilations.27 One of Grocer's sources, in fact, was itself a printed commonplace book. Grocer brackets nine items in his index and labels them "Gleanings" in the same fashion that William Cooper and other booksellers represent miscellanies in their auction catalogs. This refers to Robert Groves's anonymous 1651 Gleanings: Or A Collection of some memorable passages, Both Antient and Moderne, Many in relation to the late Warre, which itself attempts to "commonplace" all of life: I have therefore indeavoured in this Book, to give thee abundance of Delight, by giving thee abundance of Variety. Thou shalt find in one peice a Collection of all variety of men, from the Scepter to the spade. And that not taken from the repeated Traditions of outworn Antiquity, but the greatest part collected from See Huntington Ms 31191, a collection wrapped in fourteenth-century vellum stripped from a copy of Britton and written in a secretary's hand; also HM46323, dated 1630-1640. 27 In Scribal Publication, Love argues that writing rather than printing conveyed or repre­ sented authority in the seventeenth century, but where manuscripts reproduce printed texts, as here, authority resides in the original source, albeit reconstructed or deconstructed by the tran­ scriber (159). 26

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several passages even in our Age and Memory, where thou shalt find many of them to be Divine, many Morall, some SatyricaJl, but all Remarkable, Witty, and Profitable, and which is presumed will give thee far better satisfaction both in the Novelty, and the choycehesse of it, then any Book which in this nature hath hitherto been extant.28

Mingling anecdotes, jokes, prose stories, religious thoughts, a sonnet "Upon Canterbury's Great bell," and a three-page verse epitaph upon the duke of Hamilton, Groves's volume supplies cultural as well as moral information according to the two principles of the anthology: variety and novelty. At the back, a 10-page table to its 168 pages lists the contents chronologically, as they appear in the text, by subject, first line, and title. This information is thus available by precise reference. In form and content, this book provides the model for Grocer's commonplace book. As collections of literary language, these commonplace books entertained but also instructed their owners in linguistic skills. Cameron Louis argues that the literary items in Robert Reynes of Acle's commonplace book, gathered from twenty different authors, include two types: public passages "for recitation or performance" and private entries—parables, precepts, admonitions, and so on—for moral contemplation.29 In seventeenth-century commonplace books, however, these functions collapse into one another since the formulaic language of the selections invites both memorization and recitation, and since their contents often exemplify styles of versification, particularly of translation—a social skill as well as a personal pleasure. The 1670 commonplace book contains a verse translation of a letter from Horace to Flaccus Aristus1 opening "Health from the lover of the country me, / Health to the lover of the city thee," as well as several Latin epigrams and verses from Martial and others accompanied by English translations (fol. 37), These items model not only how to live but how to talk and write about it— as well, possibly, as how to construe Latin. One not unusual collection dated between 1590 and 1610 contains items of practical, moral, and social use: recipes, epigrams, and a series of moral verses that repeat a linguistic formula, epitomized by the opening couplet, "What wisdom now what better life / than pleaseth god to send" (fol. 19, lines 1-2).30 While easy to memorize, this language lends itself as well to recitation. Literary language also informed personal style, as item 4 of Thomas Grocer's Dayly Observations demonstrates: "A Common, too Common a thing it is for men to spend their strength (as one saith) nihil agendo, or alind agendo, or male agendo, in doeing nothing at all, or things impertinent, or things that are evili" (i). While this saying reproves Grocer for his own 28 M 30

London, 1651. Newberry Library. Louis, introduction to The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Aclet 107-8. My thanks to Maiy Robertson of the Huntington Library for help in reading the hand.

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laxity, it also serves as a Latin crib: the period following the Latin suggests that he provided his own translation, and he does include a few Latin verses in the rest of the book. In the combined poetry and law commonplace book A new years guift presented to my father and Mother by my Brother Thomas Calverly, a second child dedicates the volume to his parents with his own verse, composed in imitation of the love poetry that he includes by Ben Jonson, Donne, Carew, Sir Henry Wotton, and others. Similarly, the Fowler commonplace book combines poetry from many members of the family. By containing multiple examples of particular sorts of language, these books serve in part as reference manuals for their owners. Since readers must copy the text themselves, these books also encourage study, work, and memorization while compelling readers to organize information, even literary information, into pragmatic, topical categories.31 Indeed, most commonplace books copy accounting books by listing topics in columns and cross-referencing sources and subjects," In both method and message, these books celebrate individual authority and social and moral independence—the ability of the woman or man alone to use language, to judge value, and to determine morality—in confutation of Aristotelian scholasticism and traditional methods of learning.33 These are values honored not only by Protestant belief but also by empirical science, especially evident in the theories of language and epistemology that emerged after the Restoration.34 The Puritan belief in the virtue of reading God's word, financed by the Commonwealth, also promoted the promulgation of pamphlet literature aimed even at the least literate while stimulating efforts to increase general literacy.33 As an exercise of personal morality, moreover, the keeping of commonplace books complemented the Protestant enterprise then strengthening as the crisis of civil war approached. This intellectual climate contributed to the commercialization of commonplace books in the late seventeenth century as printed guides to culture. No longer transcribed records of private tastes, these books are digests of important works, especially, in the wake of the Commonwealth, religious texts and the Bible. They point not only to a widening readership who wished to use printed literature in ways different from those of their ancestors but also 51 Louis observes that most commonplace books were not primarily literary but rather inter­ spersed literature with other kinds of information (introduction to The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle, 103). 32 In this they resemble Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century spiritual autobiographies; see Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, and Watt1 The Rise of the Novel. 33 Swiderski points out the political nature of learning language in Teaching Language. 34 See Hunter, Before Novels, esp. 167-224. 35 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 22; Lawson and Silver, A Social History of Educa­ tion, 153-54.

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to a broadening and diffuse printed culture.36 In modeling ways of reading and understanding that do not depend upon prior education, they retain the ideological signature of the reader's independent construction of meaning. As Michael McKeon has argued, moreover, poetry had become legitimized since the Renaissance as an aesthetic complement to spiritual contemplation.37 At the same time, by defining the reader's inquiries and attitudes, these books mediate subjectivity, coaxing readers to think and feel like those conjured by their rhetoric. In this process, they perform a social function by negotiating between individual and common values. John Locke's A Common-place Book to the Holy Bible: Or, the Scriptures Sufficiency Practically Demonstrated exemplifies the use of the authority of print to define and reconcile spiritual and social values.'8 The Preface "To The Reader" promises to resolve both internal and social dilemmas by making "facile and easie, what seemed inconquerably arduous and difficult": not only the knowledge of God and the self, but also the "confutation of] Gainsayers." The means of achieving this power lies in the organization of the book whereby the printed authority is rearranged to place the reader at the center of meaning. As well as sections on the Scriptures, the qualities of God, and the ways of worship under "Several Heads . . . and their Subdivisions," the text contains "An Alphabetical Table To the Whole Book" that begins with the adjurations "Abide in the faith ..." and "Accept Rebukes. ..." This index organizes the text by headings placed according to "common" categories that address the reader's posture—abiding, accepting, in short believing—rather than the Bible's story. As the title page asserts, this printed source can answer personal questions: Whatsoever is contained in SCRIPTURE , Respecting Doctrine, Worship or Man­ ners, is reduced to its Proper Head: Weighty Cases Resolved, Truths Con­ firmed, difficult Texts Illustrated, and Explained by others more plain. 2. Tim, III 16. All Scripture is given by the Inspiration of God, and is profitable for Doctrine, for Reproof, for Correction, for Instruction in Righteousness.

As a reader's digest, the book reproduces quotations under compressed labels, targeting "profitable" rules of religious and social behavior, "worship and manners." Print "reduces" Scripture into separate, recombinable texts that simultaneously invite communal and private readings. Indeed, Locke himself had second thoughts about the invitation to personal interpretation that this format offered. In 1707, he reproved the "separation" of God's word into "Fragments" as facilitating competing and contradictory opinions, 36 37 18

Smaif, The Printed Word, 9, 32, 35; Love, Scribal Publication, I J. McKeon, "Politics of Discourses," 35-51, esp. 45. London: Edw. Jones and John Churchill, 1697. Newberry Library.

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based on individual "Interest."39 As Locke's concern elucidates, the format of the printed commonplace book negotiates readers' desire for freedom of personal application, and for an umbrella rationale supplied by the editors. In their ability to expand, printed commonplace books of the Bible and of other sources demonstrate the flexibility that anthologies and miscellanies share. The second edition of The Rich Cabinet, for example, contains a "varietie of Excellent descriptious, exquisite characters, witty discourses, and delightfull Histories, Devine and Morall Together with invectives against many abuses of the time: digested Alphabetically into common places. Whereunto is annexed the Epitome of good manners, Beneventa."40 In his preface to the reader, the printer justifies his new edition as more perfectly proofread and typeset than the earlier one, as well as updated. Biblical commonplace books can accumulate the cultural commentary of new periods, or reframe texts to accommodate new perceptions or dogma, and do so into the nineteenth century. James Strutt's A Common-Place Book to the Holy Scriptures, or A Collation and Digest of the Doctrines of Revela­ tion, for example, includes not only "An Ample Collection of Correlative Texts, common-placed under appropriate heads, illustrative of the Several Articles of Revealed Religion," but also "Copious references to parallel and consimilar Texts and passages, annexed to the Scriptural Citations" with "Occasional definitions, remarks explanatory and critical, and observations by way of inference from and improvement of many of the most important subjects.'"" A reference source, interpretative key, and critical commentary, Strutt's digest supplies not only text but also context; indeed, the context defines the text. Like Elizabethan anthologies and later collections, it groups different discussions of a key theme around a central passage, educating the reader in both concept and conversation. These books gave readers "something to say," a form of personal control over public culture."2 They also both reflected and reinforced the role of print in mediating meanings, and in establishing the interdependence of printed texts in constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing these meanings. During the Restoration, a further form of secular commonplace book reproduces this relationship between private and communal meanings conjured by print: the literary "key." As commentaries on fashionable texts, these books sell communal cultural literacy by supplying authoritative interpretations of topical works.43 By satirizing the obscurity or inaccuracy of these 39 Locke, An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul's Epistles, quoted in McKenzie, Bibli­ ography and the Sociology of Texts, 46-47; see also Chartier, The Order of Books, 11-12. 41 London: Printed by I.B. for Roger Iackson 1 1616. British Library. 41 London: J. Hatchard and Son, new ed. 1836. Newberry Library. See also Horwood's introduction to A Commonplace Book of John Milton, xi. 42 Crane, Framing Authority, 13. 43 Zwicker notes their popularity in Lines of Authority, 5-6.

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texts, several such keys co-opt the public authority of print to thrust derided authors into despised idiosyncrasy. Thus they express contemporary tensions over who controls printed culture: elite groups who reinvent it to suit their private ideas, or common readers, serviced by booksellers and printers. One example particularly demonstrates the use of the commonplace form to challenge elite culture. In 1671, a parody of contemporary tragedy entitled The Rehearsal appeared on the London stage, written by George ViJliers, the duke of Buckingham, and his friends. In savaging the poet laureate, John Drydenj for formulaic writing, Buckingham excerpted passages from several of Dryden's plays, so that, in a sense, Buckingham's text is a parodic anthology in itself. Once printed in the following year by Henry Dring, it became a part of generally accessible print, and as a kind of sourcebook of poetic conceits, it impinged on the territory of booksellers. A year later, the bookseller Henry Brome issued A Common-place-Book Out of the Rehearsal Transpos'd, containing, "Digested under these several Heads," a satiric explanation of Buckingham's "Logick, Chronology, Wit, Geography; Anatomy, History, Loyalty. With Useful Notes" that condemned the play as plagiarism.44 The author adopts the format of a key to Buckingham's text in order to condemn the play's allusive, and thus exclusive, density, even while he also advertises the plays from which Buckingham drew his quotations. By using this formula, he co-opts the functions of the commonplace form as a reference work, a critical account, and a recontextualizadon of difficult material that makes it accessible for common use. This author employs the form to fight the social and legal battle between common and privileged, public and private culture. Brome's pamphlet also equates print with power. In the commentary "Concerning his Title-Page," the author defends printed culture from what he represents as the arrogant rearrangements that Buckingham employed. Conceding that "The Worthy Author, that he might not seem a plagiary, doth . . , call his Book, The Rehearsal" in order to remind readers that all the good "Flowers" were "taken from others," he then attacks Buckingham for usurping the "Authority" of the original texts by "minting" or transposing them, a violation that he equates with counterfeiting or treason (1—2). Until the play was published, of course, the question of plagiarism could not have arisen, nor could literary language be commodified into coinage, as it is in the rhetoric of this pamphlet. Documenting the text's conversion from elite, oral culture to printed, public culture, regulated by property rights and commercial laws, this pamphlet locates legal and regal authority in "authorized" printed texts.45 The author of this pamphlet—probably Brome him" I have examined the copies at the Newberry Library and the Huntington Library. The preface excuses publication of these notes on the basis that since previous refutation of The Rehearsal in a work called Rosemary failed, this "Trifle" is still warranted. 45 For analyses of the transferral of authority from written to printed culture, see Ong, Orality and Literacy, also Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson,

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self—here wrests authenticity and authority from Buckingham and his coterie and gives it to the professionals of the book trade. Similarly, in the early eighteenth century, the bookseller Edmund Curll, supported by his own friends in the trade, published "keys" to The Dunciad and other works to attack Pope and his coterie, and to assume control over the authority of print themselves. As intertextual texts, these keys, like anthologies, promote printed literature as the means to extract or to create meaning from culture. A hundred years after Brome's pamphlet, another bookseller uses the form again to mediate between individual subjectivity and public culture, but in this case the culture to be mastered already abounded in authoritative printed collections, keys, anthologies, and guides to literature. In 1770, the entrepreneur of literary anthologies John Bell printed a blank commonplace book—a bound volume of blank pages with prefatory directions for use and indexing.46 Despite being devised "for the Pocket," this 4 l/2-by-7-inch book well over an inch thick is defined in the "Advertisement" as the "larger work" of the "Library Common-place Book" and seems intended to be written in and read at a desk, rather than carried about with the owner. Lavishly bound in vellum, with "elegant copper-plate" and "superfine paper," it is designed to translate manuscript instantly into fine, printed culture, at a high cost: five quires cost £1 5s. or £1 if bound in parchment. Including both a printed preface and blank pages for manuscript entries, the book features a variety of typefaces like those in a manual on penmanship, or those used in contemporary book design. These include cursive scripts, calligraphy, capitals, printing, and shading; each line is printed in a different style to indicate the range of individual impressions a commonplace book can record. By publishing a form of blank manuscript as a book, Bell sells customers the illusion that they can participate in printed culture, both as writers and as readers of their own identity. Whereas Renaissance commonplace books empower readers over culture by allowing them to reshape printed literature to complement their own subjectivity, Bell attempts to shape his readers' subjectivity to fit print. Even while it invites readers and writers to customize culture, Bell's Common Place Book defines the audience by defining its desires.47 In instructing purchasers on how and why to keep a commonplace book, Bell conjured a divided subjectivity in them, which separates a self desiring improvement from the self pursuing "accustomed" tasks: It is not solely for the Divine, the Lawyer, the Poet, Philosopher, or Histo­ rian. . . . It is for the use and emolument of the man of business as well as of Belt's Common Place Book, for the Pocket: Form'd generally upon the Principles Recom­ mended and Practiced by Mr. Locke (London: John Bell, 1770). Permission to quote from Case MS A .15 .087 is kindly granted by courtesy of the Newberry Library. 47 For a parallel discussion of internalized and institutionalized structures of censorship and identity, see Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, esp. 203-32. 46

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letters; for men of fashion and fortune as well as of study; for the Traveller, the Trader, and in short for all those who would form a system of useful and agree­ able knowledge, in a manner peculiar to themselves, while they are following their accustomed pursuits, either of profit or pleasure. (2)

It is the private side of these readers and writers, the side that wishes to incorporate systematic culture into themselves, that Bell addresses. He suggests, moreover, that, no matter what their public role, print offers this culture to all, even though each differs from his or her fellows. This ideal fusion of individual and private desire with published literature appears in Bell's illustration of how to index entries alphabetically. He provides examples both for the "Student, or man of reading" and the "Traveller, or man of observation." The student's two samples of indexing under T include complete publication information to allow quick reference. The first, a quotation "on disposal of ihoughts" from Locke, discusses the difficulty of concentrating and expanding the mind, and the second, from The Independent Whig, comments "on glories of English ioleration." Both illustrate liberal principles. In turn, the conjured traveler, whose words begin with A, notes "Augsbery: Its public library," to be cross-listed under "library," and "Arundel." In this case also, the public print in a library satisfies private desire. Both examples make printed books the context of experience: it is literature that defines identity. Indeed, advertising the book as "Form'd generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practiced by Mr. Locke," the preface reiterates Locke's definition of a commonplace book as a "repository" which keeps ideas that the memory loses. Bell thus emphasizes as the most important feature the index, which is a Lockean alphabetical graph that corresponds to the text by key words.48 As Bell observes, "the choice of proper words" determines how useful such an index will be; hence he recommends that the owner use his or her "most familiar" language rather than the Latin that Locke suggests, since "though it may possibly answer the purposes of the learned, [it] is by no means adapted to general use" (3n). To illustrate his alphabetical procedure, Bell uses "Beauty" and "Epistle," terms that significantly suggest the private pleasures of looking, reading, and communicating.49 This book defines identity as the solitary desire for improvement. This index, however, reveals the fissures between writers' subjectivity and the ideal subjectivity promoted by Locke, Bell, and the tradition of printed literature. The literary works popular during the last half of the century acknowledge the fragmentations of identity entailed by the sentimental 4H Bell, however, retains all the letters in the key words. This graph has been cut out by the owner, indicating that he or she perhaps wished to use it in another context, 49 These also suggest a female audience, since epistles were favorite female reading at this period.

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apprehension of the world in time. Novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747), and especially sentimental fictions such as Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1768) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771), portray the hero's moments of consciousness as isolated, incomplete, or contradictory, but these separate moments are connected by the narrative.50 Anthologies of literary "Beauties," popular at the same time, likewise present a single indexing scheme to organize excerpts from many texts into a coherent whole. These printed texts model the system for recording identity by discriminating literary differences that Bell, a publishing bookseller, markets for his customers. Bell's mass-produced commonplace books, however, represent identity as a literary construct, designed for the reader rather than the writer: consistent, immutable, and rational. The Newberry copy of Bell's Common Place Book demonstrates this vehicle's failure to accommodate an identity changing in time as readers alter their motives for and methods of reading.51 The regular script, thinning ink, and repeated sources suggest that this owner completed almost all of one set of entries in one session with a bound copy of the Guardian, vol. I, nos. 20-21, at her side, adding excerpted passages from Gibbon's Decline and Fall later. In obedience to Bell's suggestion, however, this owner acts as traveler as well as reader, changing her focus to natural history in the latter half of the manuscript, and indexing wampum, steam, language, canals, colonies, and the rainbow. Entries are organized by neither alphabet nor subject. The great majority of leaves, including the final fifty, remain blank. All, however, are hand-numbered, though in an inconsistent fashion: in some cases, both sides of the page are numbered, in the manner of printed books; in others, only the recto page bears a number, in the fashion of manuscripts. Several pages have been cut out, including the index, and only a few scribblings appear at the top of any of the entries. Clearly this reader could not find the time or maintain the formidable effort of critical selection required to fill the book. Not only does the literary model of identity fail, but so too does the linguistic model provided by print. A concept that may seem to define a text at one time, and therefore appear appropriate as the term to index, may seem subordinate to a different idea and a different term at another. If users borrow the index terms from their reading, their very language is being defined by sources that may be in conflict, rather than being integrated by independent thought. The Newberry copy of Bell's Common Place Book, for examFor an analysis of this framing, see Benedict, Framing Feeling. Hugh Walpole suggests that readers grow from reading for "fun" in youth, to reading for "education," to reading for "love," or for oneself, in maturity in Reading: An Essay. Appleyard elaborates these distinctions in Becoming a Reader, esp. 14-15. 50

51

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pie, shows that the owner attempted to follow Locke's recommendation by using a shorthand cipher for all but the key words. She recorded references to interesting facts about foreign and domestic manners, prominent subjects in the periodicals she used. While the customs of the Turkish, Germans, Dutch, Japanese, Canadians, and Canadian Indians appear separately recorded, however, two general entries appear for "Manners," while separately listed comments are culled from the Guardian on "courage" and "meekness." These distinctions preserve the categories established by the books the owner read, and document her absorption of the differences they established. In her system of categorization, furthermore, "language" is separated from "Manners," "colonies," and separate countries, and hence defamiliarized by the printed context in which the user encountered it. Rather than making the language her own, the very medium she is using is derived from printed authorities. It seems likely that one owner at least was a woman because she—or someone—has pasted a hand-painted fashion print of "London Dresses for March" on page 172, at the end of the book.52 In the end, words fail her, and it is, in fact, a print that shows her herself. While both commonplace books and anthologies originate as private compilations by individual readers, by the eighteenth century they have become part of printed literary culture. This culture shapes or reshapes the use of language to express subjectivity or personal experience. When Robert Beere composed a manuscript book in 1745, for example, he imitated the contents, forms, and language of contemporary collections, even adorning his lyrics with small ink drawings resembling printers' ornaments.53 Although he wrote many of the verses himself and gave the 369-page book to his wife for her private pleasure in an act of extraordinary devotion, throughout he addresses conventional, public subjects—poetasters, vanity, and political parties, as well as love—by means of the popular genres of pastoral, epigram, ode, and lyric.54 Even his humorously modest valediction addresses a general reader using an idiom derived from his reading of Shakespeare: I took Pen, Ink, and Paper too, And wrote these Lines, with much ado; If they are not to your Desire, Consume them straitway in the Fire: But if in them you take Delight, I have my wish; And so Good-Night. (369) 5Z 53

This print was published by Vemor, Hood & Sharpe, Poultry, 1 March 1810. Huntington MS 106.

54 For an account of the historical appropriation of genres that also addressed the "imagined and projected" reader, see Conte, Genres and Readers.

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This delightable "you" is the reader of printed "Desire." Like Rosalind in Much Ado about Nothing, reading Orlando's love lines on trees, this conjured reader retains an independent taste, separate from the writer's. At the same time, her private response signals her identity as the correspondent created by a print culture that addresses a generalized, faceless customer. COURTESY AND WRITING RIGHT

Renaissance anthologies and early commonplace books demonstrate ways of using general literature for individual edification, but other instructional books help readers and writers to master the literary skills that could win them social power.55 Two of these particularly concern literary education: courtesy books, which promote "polite" language, and handbooks on poetic composition, which teach purchasers to read, write, and judge literature.56 While courtesy literature originates in the Renaissance, by the Restoration it has become a guide not to social interaction as much as to linguistic culture. These books define sociability as the mastery of literary differences refined by print. Although courtesy books are not a "source" for the anthology, they offer a parallel model of the way to instruct readers in the use of stylized language. These texts sprang up in response to the new courtly culture of the Restoration, which replaced the Puritan plain speaking of Cromwell's Commonwealth with a Continental politesse. At this time, it seemed, at least, that polite manner might overcome mediocre birth and win royal favor and social power. This polite manner demanded precisely the skills derided during the puritanical era of the Commonwealth: a deportment that spoke of aristocratic ease, aesthetic discrimination, amorous dallying, and self-conscious, sophisticated language. This courtly taste for linguistic irony, moreover, fostered verse whose allusive style and delicacy boast the exclusivity of author and reader as fellows in an elite circle.57 For those readers who did not belong to the court, however, the formulas of politesse could be memorized. Courtesy books represented the language, topics, and skills that constituted an elite discourse including poetic composition. Some, therefore, combine courtesy with instruction in poetry. For example, The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence, Or, the Arts of Wooing and Complementing, popular enough to reach a third edition in 1685, portrays as the key to culture flirtatious manners, "As they are managed in the Spring Garden, Hyde Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent places." Depicting "the Deportments of the Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness. Chartier, The Order of Books, 20. Cressy observes that reading and writing were taught separately in schools in Literacy and the Social Order (21-23). 51 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 163 and passim. 53

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most accomplisht Persons" including "the Witchcrafts of their perswasive Language," this manual includes: Addresses and set Forms of Expressions for imitation, Poems, pleasant Songs, Letters, Proverbs, Riddles, Jests, Posies, Devices, A-la-mode Pastimes; A Dictionary for the making of Rimes, Four hundred and fifty delightful Questions, with their several Answers. As also Epithets, and flourishing Similitudes, Alphabetically Collected, and so properly applied to their several Subjects, that they may be rendred admirably useful on the sudden occasions of Discourse or Writing. Together with a new invented Art of Logick, so plain and easie by way of Questions and Answers, that the meanest capacity may in a short time attain to a perfection in the ways of Arguing and Disputing.58

This blend of commonplace book, dictionary, literary anthology, and social guide lists its contents at the back so that the reader can use it as a reference manual. Addressed in individual prefaces to the "Reader," to women, and to "Youthful Gentry," it outlines ways, not only of speaking, but of reading and writing literature. The literary contents of this book create a reader whose social identity is defined by print.59 By delineating appropriate topics and modes of conversation and composition, these verses provide the reader imaginatively, if not actually, with an entree into elite circles and literary culture. Most poems praise communal consumption, especially of love and drink, although "In Defiance of Sack" excoriates drinking and the literary praise of it in favor of another pleasure: food. What a Devil ail our Poets all, For drink, for drink thus always to call? And nothing goes down but drink, Friends, whether are your stomachs flown? That you the noble food disown, That better deserves your ink. (St. 1, p. 106)

While ostensibly criticizing current literature, this anacreontic on "Surloin," "Brisket," and "Leg of Mutton" exemplifies the primacy of linguistic representation over individual desire. This writer and his readers assert their appetites by means of literature, and these appetites establish their voices in current printed culture. Thus their identities in print derive from their difference from conventional tropes, a difference that paradoxically and simultaneously reaffirms the significance of the original epicurean genre. As this and other poems indicate, the audience for this book occupies at 58 The

3d ed. (London: James Rawlins).

» This distinguishes such books from later "conduct" literature that emphasizes behavior; see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 62-63, 81-88, 100, 206-7.

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once the position of reader and writer. As models of ways to compose, these songs presuppose that the reader is—or will be—the writer, "I," while they also speak to a conjured third reader, "you." This third reader is a member of the exclusive society into which the audience for this book imaginatively enters by virtue of sharing the bonhomie declared in the poetry.60 "In Defiance of Sack" identifies "you" as the reader conjoined with other poets whose "ink" would be better spent praising food. In the next poem, however, "you" is a reader and society critical of the writer, "I." After entertaining the company with a virtuoso display of lewd rhyming dependent on idiomatic pronunciation, the speaker abandons his role as jester to rejoin the circle of listeners; But I have spoken my fill, Of my Lovely old Gill, And 'tis taken so ill,

ΓIe throw by my Quill. (St. 7, p. 110)

The author of "The Old Gill" not only "speaks," exploiting the flexibility of an oral form by stretching rhymes according to dialect, but also writes. In both roles, he must accommodate the audience's response by recombining the formal conventions to include self-mockery as he throws down the pen. By this gesture denigrating his own composition, he resumes his role as a member of the audience and indicates his membership in the privileged circle of readers and respondents who are licensed to evaluate literary performance. The rhetorical strategies of these poems thus instruct the audience not only in rhyming and writing but also in elite attitudes to literary entertainment. Printing allows the dynamic of social exchange to be regularized. In presenting verbal formulas as keys to social mastery, several manuals organize courtly compliments and interchanges in columns, sometimes printing dialogues like verb declensions in a ritualistic sequence. This format also permits readers to identify poetic devices. Individual phrases like "Her Navel is Love's Hesperides" or "Her Ears are watchful Centinels, that let no Words of weight pass unregarded" are listed as separate units.61 As building blocks for compliments, these units instruct readers in how to identify the literary language of metaphor, as well as how to use it. This transition between verbal and written "courtesy" is exemplified by The Compleat Courtier; or Cupid's Academy, Containing an exact and excellent collection of all the m For discussions of the construction and the relationship of the conjured reader to the narra­ tor, see Iser, The Implied Reader, also Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism. For a theoretical discussion of the triangulation of desire, see Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. 61 The Triumph of Wit; or, Ingenuity Display'd in its Perfection, edited by John Shirley, 5th ed, (London, 1707). Newberry Library.

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newest and choicest songs, poems, epigrams, satyrs . . . in a most pleasant and pathetick strain, fitted and prepared for all capacities.62 Through this education in contemporary literary style, the manual trains its audience not only as courtiers but as readers. Corresponding to the shift from oral to printed culture, some "courtesy" literature is thus transformed from a guide to social interaction into a guide to literature. Indeed, the Restoration form of the courtesy books is the poetic handbook that teaches readers to enter society through printed literature rather than speech. Like courtesy literature, these "wit" manuals sell social power and cultural literacy, but they charac terize this power as mastery of the skills of writing. For example, the Wits Interpreter, or the New Parnassus (1655) demonstrates the overlap of verbal and social instruction by presenting itself as a "Guide" to "Accomplishments" that include speaking, acting, and writing.63 Mark Rose has suggested that whereas during "the early modern period it was usual to think of a text as an action, not a thing," the print culture of the Restoration and eighteenth century commodified literature.64 Wit manuals of the period reflect this relocation of social power by transferring social action to the literary realm. Josua Poole's English Parnassus: or, A Helpe to English Poesie exemplifies this shift." Poole had previously published The English Accidence, a Latin grammar that advised parents to teach their children to use their knowledge of their native tongue to write Latin, before learning to read it.66 The English Parnassus goes a step further. Here, Poole treats English literature in the same fashion as Latin by discoursing on the rules of composition, including a dictionary of rhymes and epithets, and excerpting exemplary passages from a variety of authors. As A. Dwight Culler observes, this 62

John Shirley, ed, (London, 1683). Clark Library.

Wits interpreter. The English Parnassus, or A sure Guide to those Admirable Accomplish­ ments that compleat our English Gentry, in the most acceptable Qualifications of Discourse, or Writing. In which briefly the whole Mystery of those pleasing Witchcrafts of Eloquence and Love are made easie in the following subjects, by I.C. (London, 1655). This book contains: "1. The Art of Reasoning, A new Logick; 2. Theatre of Court ship, Accurate Complements·, 3. The Labyrinth of Fancies, New Experiments and Inventions; 4. ApolJo and Orpheus severall LoveSongs, Epigrams, Drolleries, and other Verses; 5. Cyprian Goddess, Description of Beauty ·, 6. The Muses Elizium, severall Poeticall Fictions; 7, The perfect Inditer, Letters Ala-mode; 8. Cardinal Richelieu's Key to his manner of writing of Letters by Cyphers. As also an Alphabet­ ical Table of the first Devisers of Sciences and other Curiosities; All which are collected with Industry and Care, for the benefit and delight of those that love ingenious Enterprises." " Rose, Authors and Owners, 13. ω

" London: Tho. Johnson, 1657. Huntington Library. A second edition appeared in 1677. See Cox, "Notes on Rare Books" for Josua Poole's English Parnassus (1657), 21*1—16 In Litera­ ture and Revolution, Smith observes that writers were reworking classical genres even during the Commonwealth. "or, A Short, Plains, and Easie way, for the more speedy attaining to the Latine tongue by the help of the English (London: R,C, for Henry Seile, etc., 1646).

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format encouraged students, each of whom owned his own copy of the privately printed text, to rearrange fixed units of language to make poetry just as they did with Latin.67 At the same time, this list of references, like the lists in courtesy manuals, mechanizes literary culture into separate units. Writing poetry no longer demonstrates who you are—Renaissance gentleman or, according to the ideology of organic art, Romantic genius—and instead constitutes a proof of what you can do.'8 In his "Proeme," Poole describes the purpose of his book: In all their sports they shall the Poets play, And make the Birch, prevented by the Bay; For they shal need no Masters to rehearse Long tedious precepts of the lawes of verse, In them so printed shall those lawes be seen, As if they had the lawes of Nature been. (Lines 27-32)

Punning on "print," Poole suggests that poetry turns students themselves into art books by imprinting them with a moral, social, and cultural education that replaces "Nature" with the "lawes" of verse. Moreover, they become their own "Masters" and, indeed, masters of others: Let these enjoy their humours, whose descent, And blood's the best and onely argument That they can use to prove them Gentlemen; Whilst by the raptures of your learned pen Your sweet pac'd numbers and harmonious layes You get the solid and enduring praise, And shew your worth and birth by a divine, And better far than your forefathers line. (Lines 317-24)

According to Poole, poetry can raise social status. In quantifying literary language, The English Parnassus also perpetuates contemporary ideas about literary topics and modes of discourse. The sixtytwo adjectives for "Love," for example, ranging only from "Officious, doting, obsequious, inflam'ing" through "marrow-boyling, tyrannous" and "jealous-winged" to "passionate," almost form a list of synonyms (127-28).69 Culler, "Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook," 859. Arguing that the creation of authorial rights entails the commodification of literary works, Rose notes that the first English interest in authorial rights occurred in 1642, shortly before Poole published this book; see Authors and Owners, 13. For a fuller discussion of the relation­ ship of aesthetic concepts to social developments, see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. 44 Charlotte Lennox mocks this linguistic quantification of abstract ideals when in The Fe­ male Quixote Glanville scorns Arabella's invitation to discuss "Beauty and Love" by listing 67

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Poole illustrates his rules using a collection of exemplary excerpts, gathered from over sixty authors, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Milton, but primarily drawn from contemporaries and arranged alphabetically by topic from "Abel" to "Zoilus." These reiterate the critical spirit of his adjectives: the five passages on love, for example, open with "The pleasing tyrant" from the fashionable Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by George Sandys, who had died the previous year (374). Such excerpts suggest that Poole, like other seventeenth-century schoolmasters, preferred his students to avoid "lovebooks" in favor of "book love."™ While some sources are named, most excerpts remain unattributed, serving as building blocks rather than unique cultural documents. The book also concentrates on short genres, for the same reasons as later anthologies do: they allow room for more examples, greater quantity, broader "variety." In the identification of genres by form and topic in his first section, Poole defines "epigram" as a "facetious kind of writing . . . of a vast extent," comprehending Epitaphs, Characters, Emblems, Devices, Motto's, Hieroglyphicks, Definitions, Aphorisms, Distributions, Paradoxes, Rebus's, Problems . . , dictionem, Ecomiasticks, Vituperatories, Scoffs, Sarcasms, Jeers, Jests, Quibbles, Clinches, Quippes, Bulls, Anagrams, Chronograms, Acrosticks, Criticisms, in a word whatever is of Succint and concise Poetry, on what subject soever, handsomly couched and worded. (Preface)

By specifying these variations on the epigram, Poole multiplies and refines literary distinctions.71 As is the case with collections of literature, these differentiations are meaningful only by contrast with one another, and this contrast appears primarily, if not wholly, in printed literary handbooks and anthologies, not in the social or conversational use of repartee. Through the practice of excerpting patches of verse from longer speeches or poems, all of literature becomes epigrammatic for the reader: easy to memorize, and easier than an epic, at least, to reproduce. The identity thus created by the format of excerpting both imitates and reinforces the literary distinctions that Poole enumerates. While Poole's English Parnassus included a rhyming reference section, cliches, and she retorts by endorsing the fine distinctions raised in the "Conversations" on these topics in the romances she reads (149-50). 70 Cressy. Literacy and the Social Order, 22. Jonathan Swift uses this technique of amplification—a version of what Derrida would call "redoubling" of meanings—in several places, most notably perhaps in bk. 2, chap. 6, of Gul­ liver's Travels, in which the king of Brobdingnag characterizes Gulliver's account of English history as "an Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banish­ ments; the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, and Ambition could produce" (107). See Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play," 247-65. 71

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later "dictionaries" combining linguistic and cultural instruction were separately published. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the children's booksellers John Newbery and George Kearsley, among others, issued Λ Poetical Dictionary; or, the Beauties of the English Poets, Alphabetically Displayed as an exemplary anthology of native style. 72 The six-shilling Ladies Dictionary; Being a General Entertainment For the Fair Sex, for example, records in a dictionary format "The VIRTUES AND ACCOMPLISH MENTS of your Sex," including female topics, interests, frailties, and examples of greatness.73 Like the popular Flora's Dictionary, a handbook of meanings attached to flowers and their arrangements, this Ladies Dictionary adopts the trope of a linguistic guide for a concealed, female discourse. Such "dictionaries" allow both social satire—as in dictionaries for political and fashionable timeservers, like Mary and John Evelyn's "Fop-Dictionaiy"—and escape from the meanings attached to the dominant discourse, be this political, masculine, or moral.74 Simultaneously, as lists of linguistic units, these books also define meaning as a comparative literary exercise. Since youths were not their only audience, these books provided more than instruction, and it was in determining their various contents that printers and booksellers established themselves as cultural mediators. In The Triumph of Wit; or. Ingenuity Display'd in its Perfection, John Shirley offers "the softer Sex" and "the younger Sort," among others, entertainment with a litany of genres that again inscribes difference on literary language in order to appeal to several kinds of reader: "Poems, Pastorals, Satyrs, Dia­ logues, Epigrams, Anagrams, Acrosticks, Choice Letters, with their An­ swers, Epitaphs, Posies, Titles of Honour, and Directions, Complimental Expressions and Addresses: Also Directions relating to Love and Business, and the Newest, Best, and Exactest Collection of Choice SONGS." Addressed "to either Sex," part 2 contains guides to love and beauty, while the final section offers "the Mystery and Art of Canting"15 These contents offer readers "choice" choices. In his preface, Shirley articulates another value— one that came, with "Variety," to serve as the signature for the anthology: novelty. In order to advertise his own volume, he argues that wit requires constant updating: "So in the Days of CHAUCER, the Men of that Age concluded the succeeding Writers must be silent when his Works appeared; but 72 See also The Art of Poetry made easy, and embellish'd with epigrams, epitaphs, songs, odes, pastorals, from the best authors (London: I. Newbcry, 1746); this schoolbook, part of Newbery's enterprise to publish a multivolume children's encyclopedia, was republished throughout the 1760s and 1770s. 73 "A Work Never attempted before in English. Licens'd and Enter'd according to Order" (London: John Dunton, 1694). 74 London: R. Bentley, 1690, Clark Library. 73 The Triumph of Wit: or, Ingenuity Display'd in its Perfection; Being the Newest and most Useful Academy. In Three Parts. [1688] 1735. Newberry Library.

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even the following Age was convinced, That their Fathers laid too great a Stress upon his WRITINGS; though 'tis true, they are to this Day held in much ESTEEM, yet more for their ANTIQUITY, and the good MEANING of the Author, than for any excellent Style or accurate Fancy that adorns them." Setting out to revise poetic values, Shirley attacks the "centrality" or "canonization" of Chaucer in favor of a contemporary literary aesthetic that stresses polished linguistic style. This wit is hospitable to any reader, but it is a skill that can be learned only through reading, and, furthermore, through reading material gathered by a professional editor. While wit books generally serve as cultural cribs, they differ in the degree to which they define wit as a literary rather than a social activity. This distinction resurrects the quarrel between a mode of reading that seeks diversion, associated with Charles II's court and classical literature, and a Puritan mode that seeks moral or practical improvement.75 The Wits Cabinet: A Companion for Gentlemen and Ladies contains ten sections, most of which advise the purchaser on ways to manage daily life with "wit" or cleverness, including directions on dream interpretation, physiognomy, palmistry, "The Right Preparation for Cosmeticks," and how to "counterfeit divers precious Stones."77 It also contains a courtesy section, "The Whole Art of Love, with the best Method of Wooing," directions on "Good Behaviour" for both sexes, plus, at the end, riddles and "A Choice Collection of the best Songs." Although this "cabinet" favors the practical over the pleasurable, it still defines "wit" not only as pragmatic art but also as linguistic and literary mastery, the knowledge of compliments, letters, and songs. While these genres are geared to fulfill current social functions, they also construct meanings in relationship to the other linguistic and literary exercises in the book. Similarly, anecdote collections combine models of elite conversation or behavior with entertaining epigrams. In 1658, the reader could listen in on the informal domestic, philosophical, and political conversations of powerful figures by reading Thomas Bayly's Witty Apophthegms.78 This book vaunts its editor's cultural mediation, for the preface declares that its contents exemplify wisdom and discretion and give its authors undying glory despite the ungrateful age in which the reader lives. Thirty-five years later, Guy Miege blends historical instruction with literary entertainment in Miscellanea: Or, a Choice Collection of Wise and Ingenious Sayings,