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[¶1.] 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.1 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
[¶2.] 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. McGann, 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 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 reinterpretations. While commodifying literature into usable and reusable elements, this format 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 self-improvement.
[¶4.] 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.1
[¶5.] To a great degree, these collections parallel seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 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 between individual readers and general literary culture.15 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.
[¶6.] 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.17 By juxtaposing multiple examples of similar texts, scribes inscribe différance: the creation of significance by the deferral of a central text or meaning, so that all examples of thetopic 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.
[¶7.] This dynamic intensifies with the growth of a book trade that professionally commodifies 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 Authority, 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 différance, 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.
[¶8.] 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.
[¶9.] 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 information 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.
[¶10.] 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" thirty-seven 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.
[¶11.] 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 & Morall. 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 various 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).
[¶12.] 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.26 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
[¶13.] 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:
[¶15.] 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.
[¶16.] 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 Aristus, 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.
[¶17.] 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 malé agendo. in doeing nothing at all, or things impertinent, or things that are evill" (i). While this saying reproves Grocer for his own 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.
[¶18.] 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.32 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.35 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.
[¶19.] 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 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
[¶20.] 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.38 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 "confut[ation 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:
[¶22.] 2. Tim, III 16.
[¶23.] All Scripture is given by the Inspiration of God, and is profitable for Doctrine, for Reproof, for Correction, for Instruction in Righteousness.
[¶24.] 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, 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.
[¶25.] 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 Revelation, 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."41 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.42 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.
[¶26.] 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 thesetexts, 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.
[¶27.] 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 Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, and his friends. In savaging the poet laureate, John Dryden, 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 source-book 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 recontextualization 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.
[¶28.] 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 himself--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.
[¶29.] 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 1/2-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 ś1 5s. or ś1 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.
[¶30.] 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:
[¶32.] 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 thoughts" from Locke, discusses the difficulty of concentrating and expanding the mind, and the second, from The Independent Whig, comments "on glories of English toleration." 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.
[¶33.] 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.
[¶34.] 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 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. 1, 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.
[¶35.] 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 example, 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.-
[¶36.] 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:
[¶38.] 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.
[¶40.] 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.
[¶41.] 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.
[¶42.] 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 most accomplisht Persons" including "the Witchcrafts of their perswasive Language," this manual includes:
[¶44.] 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.
[¶45.] 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 entrée 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.
[¶47.] 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.
[¶48.] As this and other poems indicate, the audience for this book occupies at 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:
[¶50.] 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.
[¶51.] 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 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 characterize 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.
[¶52.] Josua Poole's English Parnassus: or, A Helpe to English Poesie exemplifies this shift.65 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 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.68 In his "Proeme," Poole describes the purpose of his book:
[¶54.] 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:
[¶56.] According to Poole, poetry can raise social status.
[¶57.] In quantifying literary language, The English Parnassus also perpetuates contemporary ideas about literary topics and modes of discourse. The sixty-two 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 -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."70 While some sources are named, most excerpts remain unattributed, serving as building blocks rather than unique cultural documents.
[¶58.] 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
[¶60.] 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.
[¶61.] While Poole's English Parnassus included a rhyming reference section, 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 A 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 ACCOMPLISHMENTS 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-Dictionary"--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.
[¶62.] 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, Dialogues, Epigrams, Anagrams, Acrosticks, Choice Letters, with their Answers, 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."75 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 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.
[¶63.] 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.76 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.
[¶64.] 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, &c. Of Princes, Philosophers, Statesmen, Courtiers, and Others; Out of several Antient and Modern Authors. For the pleasureable Entertainment of the Nobility and Gentry of both Sexes.79 His preface differentiates between the two elements:
[¶66.] The Diverting Part (made up of witty Jests, smart Repartees, and pleasant Fancies, Intermixt with the former, and most of 'em above the strain of popular Wit) aims at nothing but Innocent Mirth.
[¶67.] Miege articulates the cultural battle in the late Restoration between a literature based on courtesy or love and one primarily moral by claiming his collection is "free from obscene and prophane Expressions, too frequent in other Works of this kind." While his "Collection may serve to frame [the] Minds [of Youth] to such Flashes of Wit as may be agreeable to civil and genteel Conversation," it is also digested under "proper Heads." His cultural guide attempts to marry courtly or classical wit, saturated with reverence for the Stuarts, to a puritanically informed use of literature as an allegorical source of meaning. This collection aims not primarily at perpetuating a literary structure of genres and distinctions, but at establishing a moral hierarchy of sentiments. By using the format of commonplace organization under "Heads," however, Miege molds his exemplary argument to the logic of "variety." "History" and "Morality," concepts predicated on narrative, are fractured into "Sayings," equivalent to, if different from, the diverting genres of jest, repartee, and so on. Thus material for moral improvement elides into literature read for diversion or used as a social display of literary mastery.
[¶68.] As Miege's book turns cultural and literary information into material for conversation, so many eighteenth-century anecdote collections reproduce the witticisms of literary and political figures. As late as 1789 in Dublin, Anecdotes, Bon-Mots, and Characteristic Traits of The Greatest Princes, Politicians, Philosophers, Orators, and Wits of Modern Times promises cultural information through anecdote in order both "to throw new light upon the character of several nations" and "to inspire the minds of youth with noble, virtuous, generous, and liberal sentiments," as the title page promises.80 These collections of anecdotes intersperse scandalous gossip and wonder tales with familiar chestnuts, sayings, and facts about "great" figures. Here, the emphasis lies openly on learning through reading rather than imitating by speech, yet both books exhibit the overlap between learning language and cultural literacy. As late as 1775, conduct literature typically used the commonplace formula. Principles of Politeness, and of Knowing the World. By the Late Lord Chesterfield represents the highly popular text of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son as an education in gentility that blends literary and social skills.81 Like commonplace books, this volume indexes the original text for easy use: its material is "Methodified and digested under distinct Heads" and "Contain[s] Every Instruction necessary to complete the Gentleman and Man of Fashion, to teach him a Knowledge of Life, and make him well received in all Companies." It also welcomes a wide audience since it is "FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUTH, Yet not beneath the Attention of any."
[¶69.] While courtesy books and wit manuals educate their readers through the presentation of verbal formulas in imitation of courtly taste, these formulas are identified as specific genres. By concentrating on the topics of love and pleasure, these books identify gentility with courtly sexual attitudes while portraying the mastery of language as the key to social expertise and as a pleasure in itself.82 Indeed, the traditional names skip from courtesy books to collections: The Beau's Miscellany (1745), for example, which instructs its audience on politics, gossip, and literary taste, borrows its name from The Beau's Academy (1685), which outlines methods of complimenting and procedures in polite company. Courtesy books also reproduce examples of popular forms that appear in separate collections: songs, jokes, epigrams, and short literary genres. While promulgating literary distinctions, they also provide an education in a wide spectrum of contemporary taste attractive to a correspondingly wide audience. This association of linguistic play with an education in gentility and the rewards of social power is picked up by the producers of literary anthologies, who also borrow the format of short and independent pieces linked loosely by theme or tone to attract the audiences accustomed to courtesy books and poetic handbooks.
[¶70.] By identifying gentility and power with writing and reading, especially writing and reading love poetry, these books contributed to the cultural tensions surrounding the uses of literacy. One "companion" explicitly distinguishes reading for pleasure from reading for morality while itself actually mimicking the most popular form of female reading. Addressed "To the Right Virtuous and Honourable the Ladies of GREAT BRITAIN," this Companion for the Ladies-Closets: Or, the Life and Death of the Most Excellent the Lady _____ uses the format of an exemplary tale modeled on the readers' own "Conversations and Lives" to inculcate morality.83 The preface declares, "too many of Your fair Sex, so accustom themselves to reading of light, frothy Novels, Romances and Plays; that their Appetites are pall'd, and even dead to things more solid and serious." As an alternative, this book offers pious readers a self-definition as women of internal beauty. Here, it is the choice of reading that determines the character of the subject; moreover, it is this choice that cultivates the reader.
[¶71.] Another example closely contemporary with the Companion for the Ladies-Closets illustrates the subordination of instruction in "courtesy" to entertainment that so disturbed the author of the Companion. Containing five verse tales, Miscellanious Poetical Novels or Tales, Relating Many pleasing and instructive Instances of Wit and Gallantry in both Sexes: Suited to the Belle-Humeur of the Present Age is elaborately "Adorn'd with Sculptures" and recounts colloquial folk stories laced with contemporary social concerns about marriage, contract, property, and behavior.84 Despite its title, this book exemplifies folk "wit" rather than court courtesy. The fourth tale, of "The Cobler," recounts the story of drunkard Dick and his young wife, Jenny. Dick falls into debt and borrows from the local rich man, "Neighbour Stitch," but cannot repay his debt. When Stitch solicits Jenny in return for it, the couple execute a plot in which Dick hides in the closet as Stitch meets Jenny by appointment; as soon as she secures his note of hand, Dick jumps out threatening Stitch with his "try'd Stappado," and the discomfited Stitch returns home "by weeping cross." While Stitch is defrauded, intimidated, and mocked, some of the town find Jenny the fool:
[¶73.] This anticlerical conclusion condemns the sexual "wit" of the town while applauding the "wit" of Jenny and of love. By contrasting the "wit" of "Ladies" and "fine Madams" with Jenny's quick repartee, furthermore, this "novel" valorizes verbal exchange over learned culture. As a sentimental narrative, it thus exemplifies the kind of reading condemned by the Companion for Ladies-Closets, and countered by the formal, titular catalogs of wit books.85
[¶74.] Wit books, poetic handbooks, and literary dictionaries document the transition to a society in which cultural literacy relies on writing and reading, the processes increasingly mediated by print. In this period, publishers issued a burst of literary collections of wit and wisdom, humor and pleasure, marketed primarily as sources of individual and social enjoyment, although often moralized in addition as instruction. In order to reach a wide audience in turbulent times, most--although by no means all--printers and booksellers kept the contents politically neutral or cautious, but these books nevertheless sell elite culture by identifying literary pleasure with stylistic comparison. This identification defines the consumer of literary culture whose subjective as well as social posture is established by print. These books create an audience and constitute a generic precedent for the literary anthology.
[¶75.] Many collections of "conceits," riddles, or proverbs appear in the early decades of the seventeenth century. The audience for these collections encompassed not merely the general public but also gentlefolk who, as Tessa Watt demonstrates in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640, may have derived from several generations of readers already familiar with the small pamphlets on politics, classical myth, plays, poetry, and ballads from at least the Renaissance. Watt traces one source of miscellanies in the volumes of aphorisms, merriments, and pieties of the 1620s; while distinguishing between practical miscellanies and Elizabethan compilations by Nicholas Breton of love and pastoral, Watt characterizes miscellanies by their incongruous tonal medley, from the pious to the irreverent.86 Many of these books imitate Erasmus's Adagia, a potpourri of maxims and excerpts from classical texts accompanied by interpretative essays, first published in 1500 but continually revised until his death in 1536.
[¶76.] Printed collections of moral or religious literature contribute to the definition of the reader by print. These early "miscellanies" flourished before the Restoration and adapted classical genres such as epigrams, epitaphs, and maxims to moral purposes. Exploiting the tradition of pious writing for women, they also helped to bring female readers into printed culture.87 For example, Thomas Urquhart's Epigrams Divine and Moral supplied versified moral maxims under instructive titles.88 In 1698, Nahum Tate attempted to revive this tradition by moralizing the contemporary rage for collections of poetry in Miscellanea Sacra: Or, Poems on Divine and Moral Subjects, which promises "The Reformation of Poetry, and [The] Restorat[ion of] the Muses to the Service of the Temple."89 This collection of 140 pages lists 62 entries, including hymns, dialogues, sermons, psalms, and soliloquies by such varied authors as "A Young Lady," Dr. Jeremy Taylor, King Charles I, and Tate himself. Like many editors of collections, Tate boasts that his version of literary culture will reform society.
[¶77.] Many contemporary books instructed women on how to behave. With titles incorporating such words as "Cabinet" and "Ladies Library," these volumes contain household hints and advice on managing drunken husbands, lazy servants, and other domestic problems. Hagiographic women's "lives," like Nathaniel Crouch's Female Excellence, or The ladies glory (1688), also supplied secular narratives imitating the lives of the saints. Now, however, other kinds of conduct book appear that characterize women as readers. Thomas Amory's Memoirs: Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain, despite advertising "Remarks on the Writings of the greatest English Divines," describes the beautiful Marinda Bruce in sensuous detail in a letter from an anonymous visitor. Approaching her quietly, this narrator observes the way her unconsciousness of his proximity as she stands enraptured by great poets adds to her "charms of an angel," for she lives more in an ideal world than in the world of the mundane:
[¶79.] By her absorption in an imaginative text, this woman exhibits her spirituality. Thus reading enhances beauty, and appropriate female behavior includes reading.
[¶80.] Light literary collections also attracted wide audiences, particularly through the form of the chapbook. As popular booklets retelling heroic, classical, or comic tales, chapbooks supplied amusing, sometimes edifying, tales to schoolchildren, and often thus to their parents. The French historian Lucien Febvre nearly forty years ago analyzed a similar series of entertaining and instructive literature promulgated throughout France in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century as the Bibliothèque bleue, observing that these popular books forged an audience ripe for other literature.91 In Small Books and Pleasant Histories, Margaret Spufford charts the course of these popular stories through the provinces and towns of seventeenth-century Britain to argue that these texts supplied a common background of fiction for youths and adults, provincials and servants. As simplified versions of history and myth, they appealed to partially literate readers who needed very little formal education to understand them.92 The same is true of many literary collections in the following century that supply both poetry and prose tales to a readership which could include country and servant audiences.
[¶81.] By far the commonest collections, however, are specialty books that provide multiple examples of a specific genre, bound as a revelry of verbal games that tease and tickle the reader's wit, memory, or linguistic flexibility.93 These include complimentary "flowers"--collections of literary conceits about love--as well as anthologies of particular genres, including the compendia of proverbs that Tessa Watt discovers in the late Renaissance and popular volumes of short, memorable genres traditionally used to express wit: books of adages, aphorisms, anecdotes, maxims, riddles, acrostics, jests, epigrams, and epigraphs. Although these collections advertise the specificity of the genre they provide, the distinctions among these short formulas are often purely a matter of the printer's convenience. Like Josua Poole in categorizing "epigram" in The English Parnassus, what one editor dubs a "jest" another might call an "epigram" in order to preserve the idea that he offers stylistic variety within the same genre. William Oldys, for example, prefixes to his Collection of Epigrams "A Critical Dissertation on this Species of Poetry" designed to teach the reader how to appreciate the contents as examples of style. After declaring that "The
[¶82.] Just as these volumes of verbal fun supply quantities of examples of specific--if overlapping--literary forms, so they follow a remarkably consistent formula. Like the "cabinet" or "library," books of literary fun or profit that mix genres, these collections of generic wit arrange their literary tidbits in compartments, often organized for reference, like commonplace books, by an elaborate index.95 This format severs each reprinted literary item from its original context and recontexualizes it with new pieces according to its use or to the stylistic category of genre. It also invites the reader to compare examples of the genre. These presentational and organizational traits also characterize the literary anthology and urge a method of reading by stylistic comparison.
[¶83.] Of these collections of literary pleasure, perhaps the most prevalent is the songbook. Indeed, many songbooks use the title "miscellany," like Ramsay's popular Tea-Table Miscellany, which ran to four volumes from 1723 to 1737 and was reprinted throughout the century.96 Songs, moreover, were featured in virtually all eighteenth-century poetic collections; indeed, many hastily compiled miscellanies append song collections as an additional feature. Printed anthologies sprinkle native and classical songs liberally among their other occasional verses, translations, or prologues. Songs are a pervasive and vital element of literary collections for several reasons. Some of these are the same reasons that the form was popular in itself. Many eighteenth-century songs merely set new words to familiar melodies, inviting thereader to match fresh, often topical contents with traditional tunes, and thus update his or her social stock at little cost to the mind or purse. Songs, like anthologies, thus provide a method of communication with a group. This combination of the novel and the known is also one of the distinctive features of the anthology, a form used by booksellers attempting to cast their net widely enough to catch all levels of readers. Topical songs, moreover, date quickly and so require the reader to purchase fresh lyrics in order to keep up with the current fashion or news. This rapid obsolescence is no less appealing to anthology producers than to chapmen, although later in the eighteenth century it is the very transience of these dated songs that appeals to the audience for nostalgic collections of "fugitive" literature. Indeed, as native or oral traditions become subjects of fashionable interest, anthologies and collections like J. Roberts's Collection of Old Ballads serve up songs as tastes of bygone community that the isolated reader can savor, rather than as material to display at future social gatherings.
[¶84.] Yet another kind of song collection merits brief mention here: the "drollery." Collected from plays suppressed during the antitheatrical days of the Interregnum, these volumes of songs and prologues surfaced during the Restoration with a strongly Royalist flavor. Oral, theatrical, and popular, drolleries vaunt topicality and humor, commenting on current issues and supplying in printed form the illusion of a shared encounter at the playhouse. Harry M. Geduld notes the popularity of similar kinds of verse collections in Elizabethan times: "Such volumes as Tottel's Miscellany, Davidson's Poetical Rhapsody, and England's Helicon were compiled with the simple intention of entertaining readers with pastoral, lyrical, and occasional poetry."97 Many Restoration drolleries, however, also emphasized topicality: Aphra Behn, who edited a literary anthology, for example, also edited The Covent-Garden Drolery and other collections of contemporary theatrical verses.
[¶85.] Songs exploit variety, the ruling principle of the collection. They express moods from the satirical to the elegaic; dialects from the Scottish to the South Country; and topics from the idealistic to the prurient. As Thomas Crawford remarks in Society and the Lyric: A Study of the Song Culture of Eighteenth-Century Scotland, songs weave between "oral" and printed forms, blending English, Irish, and Scottish idioms; while they span high and low subjects, ballads tell especially of love, marriage, sex, longing, and drinking, often with comic or satirical "realism," especially regarding women. Songs thus link folk tradition with literate culture.98 In literary collections, these songs are contextualized as examples of folk or oral style, of différance, rather than appearing as expressions of social community; accordingly, even as they stress the variety of their selections, anthologies prefer ballads to narrative songs that rouse the reader to social action. The eighteenth-century ballad tended to stress lyrical repetition over narrative progression, evoking a mood rather than a story--partly, perhaps, because stories were flourishing in other genres.99 This emphasizes style and allows quick apprehension by the reader, both features that would recommend the song for the anthology.
[¶86.] In literary anthologies, native ballads jostle other verse forms, which contextualized this way appear to be versions of songs, especially classical pastorals, elegies, and anacreontics. All of these forms celebrate individual, physical or internal response, although the tone of this celebration shifts from the cynical to the sentimental as the century proceeds.100 Such a medley permits readers to contrast the stylistic features of different kinds of songs while also seeing their own experience or local identity represented in the collection.101 In more highbrow anthologies, songs complement the lyrics of some of the lighter classical imitations, draw a larger audience, and leaven stylistic formalism with casual funning or familiarity. The themes, imagery, and form of these songs also helps to contextualize--or recontextualize--the more demanding verse of the high poets.102 At the same time, this format represses any solicitation to social action implied by the genre or language of contemporary songs. Brief, oral, and social in nature, songs bridge the gap between "high" literate culture and "popular" oral culture, both part of the miscellaneous mix.
[¶87.] These various books trained readers in how to compose, interpret, and evaluate literature and literary language: how to read, write, and compare. Anthologies, commonplace books, collections of songs and poems, courtesy and writing manuals, "wit" and jest books all contain short or shortened literary forms. This brevity makes literature, especially poetry, accessible toa widening audience and draws attention to language rather than narrative, to style over story. While all these books promise audiences gentility andsocial power, they mark the transformation of this power into a literate skill that can be learned. As Crane notes, in the late Renaissance and Restoration, these forms were compiled by printers rather than authors, and this initiated the shift from a literary culture controlled by readers to one controlled by editors.103 In this print culture, literature becomes a body of discrete elements that can be mechanically reproduced once conventional stylistics are learned: literature can now provide power through the pleasure of language. These books trace the shift from cultural instruction through verbal formulas to instruction conceived of as the mastering of writing and reading.
[¶88.] As titular catalogs, dictionaries, and books of generic exercises show, literature and literary language were becoming commodified. The amplification of terms characteristic of literary collections' title pages, indeed, also marks the new style of advertising, where many more is much better.104 By these presentational techniques, culture was sold and exchanged in units, which function as parts of a construct resembling, but historically different from, what current critics call cultural literacy. This literacy depended upon intertextual contrast, on reading for difference--a skill promoted by the unique use of literary allusion of the most influential Restoration poet, John Dryden--in contrast to reading for social pertinence. In a modern context, Wlad Godzich has defined the alternative to this kind of literacy: "Here culture is not an intersubjective paradigm, a structure which could be abstracted, formulated, and offered up for reading itself. It is rather a set of textual operations which must be read, which inscribe our historicity in relation to its own."105 In the Restoration, however, as literature became fare for new readers with different purposes in reading, collections and anthologies use literary interrelationships to set up meanings. In place of "historicity," these books vaunt contemporaneity; they attempt to print the day.
[¶89.] These developments facilitate the production of a new form of collection, the literary anthology. Anthologies exploit the cultural appetite for novelty, variety, and cultural literacy promoted by cheap printing. They therefore participate in the general transformation facilitated by print culture of the nature of authority and authorship that Elizabeth Eisenstein has analyzed.106 This process derives from the tradition of books in the vernacular that blossomed in the early Renaissance. As John Feather has explained, the printing of uniquely English publications, notably in law, established both audiences and traditions that persisted throughout the early history of the book trade.107 As printing increased, these audiences replaced the socially prominent patrons of a feudal system of publication and, in effect, occupied the role of patrons themselves. At the same time, they were increasingly defined by print culture itself.
1 See McKitterick, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe; Aers, Hodge, and Kress, Literature, Language and Society in England; and Olsen, Literature as Recreation.
2 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 2-41.
3 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 miscellanies, yet he acknowledges that collections allowed the circulation of verse to a coterie of readers and established textual conventions that influenced interpretation.
5 See Tanselle, Libraries: Museums, and Reading, 16, 28-29, passim.
6 Grimsted, "Books and Culture," 187-230; see also Chartier, "A Comment on Mr. Grimsted's Paper," 231-32.
7 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.
9 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.
11 See Boffey and Thompson, "Anthologies and Miscellanies," 279-315.
12 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.
14 Boffey and Thompson, "Anthologies and Miscellanies," 295, 282-83.
15 Boffey and Thompson argue that miscellanies are highly idiosyncratic compilations "influenced 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.
17 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.
18 Derrida, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference; see also Scholes, Structuralism in Literature.
19 Crane, Framing Authority, 173-74, 135, 90-92.
20 Ibid., 14-15, 4-6, 38-64.
21 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 organizational method rather than contents.
23 Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. 6, chap. 11, p. 304.
24 Huntington MS 30309, fol. 27.
25 Huntington MS 93.
26 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 represented 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 transcriber (159).
28 London, 1651. Newberry Library.
29 Louis, introduction to The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle, 107-8.
30 My thanks to Mary Robertson of the Huntington Library for help in reading the hand.
31 Louis observes that most commonplace books were not primarily literary but rather interspersed 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 Watt, 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 Education, 153-54.
36 Small, The Printed Word, 9, 32, 35; Love, Scribal Publication, 11.
37 McKeon, "Politics of Discourses," 35-51, esp. 45.
38 London: Edw. Jones and John Churchill, 1697. Newberry Library.
39 Locke, An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul's Epistles, quoted in McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 46-47; see also Chartier, The Order of Books, 11-12.
40 London: Printed by I.B. for Roger Iackson, 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.
44 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.
46 Bell's Common Place Book, for the Pocket: Form'd generally upon the Principles Recommended 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.
48 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.
50 For an analysis of this framing, see Benedict, Framing Feeling.
51 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.
52 This print was published by Vernor, Hood & Sharpe, Poultry, 1 March 1810.
53 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.
55 Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness.
56 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).
57 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 163 and passim.
58 The 3d ed. (London: James Rawlins).
59 This distinguishes such books from later "conduct" literature that emphasizes behavior; see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 62-63, 81-88, 100, 206-7.
60 For discussions of the construction and the relationship of the conjured reader to the narrator, 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.
62 John Shirley, ed. (London, 1683). Clark Library.
63 Wits Interpreter, The English Parnassus, or A sure Guide to those Admirable Accomplishments 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: "I. The Art of Reasoning, A new Logick; 2. Theatre of Court ship, Accurate Complements; 3. The Labyrinth of Fancies, New Experiments and Inventions; 4. Apollo and Orpheus severall Love-Songs, 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 Alphabeticall 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."
64 Rose, Authors and Owners, 13.
65 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), 215-16. In Literature and Revolution, Smith observes that writers were reworking classical genres even during the Commonwealth.
66 or, A Short, Plaine, 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).
67 Culler, "Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook," 859.
68 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 relationship of aesthetic concepts to social developments, see Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic.
69 Charlotte Lennox mocks this linguistic quantification of abstract ideals when in The Female Quixote Glanville scorns Arabella's invitation to discuss "Beauty and Love" by listing clich‚s, 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.
71 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 Gulliver's Travels, in which the king of Brobdingnag characterizes Gulliver's account of English history as "an Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments; 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.
72 See also The Art of Poetry made easy, and embellish'd with epigrams, epitaphs, songs, odes, pastorals, from the best authors (London: J. Newbery, 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.
75 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.
76 Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 4; Hunter, Before Novels, 285-88.
77 London: T. Norris, at the Looking-glass on London Bridge, n.d. Clark Library.
78 Thomas Bayly, Witty Apophthegms delivered At Severall Times, and upon Severall Occasions, By King James, King Charles, The marquis of Worcester, Francis Lord Bacon, and Sir Thomas Moore. Collected and Revived [sic] (London: Edward Farnham, 1658). Of the 168 pages, King James received 48 (1-22); Charles 49 (23-48); Worcester 53; Bacon 184; and Moore 31. Newberry Library.
79 London: William Lindsey, 1694. Newberry Library.
80 Whereas entire volumes of such anecdotes proliferate in the late century, many earlier forms include scandalous tales or witty sayings. The contents of this book of anecdotes include both generic witticisms, such as "Bon Mot of a Clown" or "A medical anecdote," and specific tales about Voltaire, Dr. Young, Lord North, and the like. Mills Memorial Library.
81 Dublin: United Company of Booksellers, 1775. Myers points out that novels such as Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison contain conversations modeled on those in conduct literature; see The Bluestocking Circle. Anthologies of the 1790s and later, such as George Wright's Lady's miscellany (1793) or The Polite Preceptor (1807), package literature as lessons in behavior.
82 See Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness. This conflation of linguistic and literary education flourishes well into the nineteenth century--for example, Lessons in Elocution: Or, a Selection of Pieces in Prose and Verse for the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking. To Which are prefixed Elements of Gesture. Illustrated by Four Plates: and Rules for Expressing, with Propriety, the Various Passions Etc. of the Mind, by William Scott (Leicester: Printed by Hori Brown, 1815). As the title indicates, this is both a literary primer and a lesson book. It comprises five parts: "I. Lessons in Reading. II. Eloquence of the Pulpit. III. Eloquence of the Senate. IV. Eloquence of the Bar. V. Dramatic Pieces," which last includes dialogues, speeches and soliloquies. This volume prints selections from the same poets and periodicals that dominate literary anthologies: Pope, Milton, Gay, Cowper, the Spectator, the Tatler, the Mirror, the Rambler, Hooke, Dodsley's Fables, Knox, Sallust, Walker, Burgh, Blair, Johnson, and Hume.
83 London: J. Downing, 1712. Preface signed "A.B." Newberry Library.
84 London, John Nutt, 1705. Clark Library.
85 For a thorough treatment of the cultural resistance to novels, see Hunter, Before Novels, 66, 72, passim.
86 Watt, Cheap Print, 10.
87 Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, 54.
88 Epigrams (London: Bernard Alsop and Tomas Fawcet, 1641). See also Urquhart's Theological Miscellanies (London: James Young, 1645), which is translated from Latin. Both are in the Clark Library.
89 All short pieces, suitable for children as well as adults, these are authored by about a dozen different hands.
90 With a Variety of Disquisitions and Opinions relative to Criticism and Manners; and many extraordinary Actions, 2 vols. (London: Johnson and Payne, 1769), 1:3-4.
91 Febvre, The Coming of the Book.
92 Godzich notes the simplification of learned culture in Spanish chapbooks in The Culture of Literacy, 85.
93 The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL) documents the explosion of these forms of miscellanies in the Commonwealth and early Restoration periods.
94 A Collection of Epigrams, collected and edited by William Oldys, 2 vols. (London: J. Walthoe, 1727), 1: preface. Both this and the second edition, published in 1735, are prefaced by this essay. Mills Memorial Library. See also A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs, ed. Jay Ray, 4th ed. (London: W. Otridge, S. Bladon, W. Cooke, W. Harris, etc., 1768), which contains "the most celebrated Proverbs of the Scotch, Italian, French, Spanish, and other LANGUAGES. The Whole Methodically Digested and Illustrated with Annotations, and proper Explications. . . . To which is added (Written by the same Author)
95 Despite their names, "libraries" and "cabinets" do not include literature of more established cultural weight than less grandly titled collections. Sir Richard Steele's Ladies Library, examined in chapter 3, on the contrary merely follows the formula of a "companion" by including advice, not literature.
96 See Crawford, Society and the Lyric, esp. the "Select List of Song Books and Miscellanies," 216-17.
97 Geduld, Prince of Publishers, 87-88.
98 Crawford, Society and the Lyric, 6-7. Crawford distinguishes among "art songs," which give new words to old tunes, "artificial songs" produced for Vauxhall or Ranelagh, and "popular" songs, the conventional compositions of writers (8-9). While these forms overlap, it is true that anthologies generally include only "art songs"; this accords with the miscellany's aim to sell stylistic sophistication. Crawford also notes work songs, songs of "general plebeian protest," and "action-lyrics," songs commemorating political or social events--but again these scarcely ever appear in collections, whereas anacreontics and ballads saturate them (159).
99 Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, 207-14.
100 Crawford observes that "Every sub-group of [eighteenth-century Scottish] culture produced more songs on love than on any other subject," but even before Scottish ballads attracted the public, miscellanies had included a high proportion of poems on love, both native songs and classical imitations--albeit these were often misogynistic rather than sentimental (Society and the Lyric, 16).
101 Booth notes the function of songs as reinforcing identity through immediate communality in The Experience of Songs (15-16). He also observes the crossover between oral and literate culture, sentiment and satire, in Gay's ballads from The Beggar's Opera (117-18 and passim).
102 Dugaw, Warrior Women.
103 Crane, Framing Authority, 167.
104 Briggs, "`News from the Little World,'" 29-45.
105 Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, 54.
106 Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2:454.
107 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 2, 12-15.
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 several passages even in our Age and Memory, where thou shalt find many of them to be Divine, many Morall, some Satyricall, 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
Whatsoever is contained in SCRIPTURE, Respecting Doctrine, Worship or Manners, is reduced to its Proper Head: Weighty Cases Resolved, Truths Confirmed, difficult Texts Illustrated, and Explained by others more plain.
It is not solely for the Divine, the Lawyer, the Poet, Philosopher, or Historian. . . . It is for the use and emolument of the man of business as well as of 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 agreeable knowledge, in a manner peculiar to themselves, while they are following their accustomed pursuits, either of profit or pleasure. (2)
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.Courtesy and Writing Right
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
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)But I have spoken my fill,
Of my Lovely old Gill,
And 'tis taken so ill,
I'le throw by my Quill.
(St. 7, p. 110)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)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)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)
The Design of this MISCELLANY is, both to Instruct and Divert. The Instructive Part, consisting of Wise and Ingenious Sayings, carries along with it a great deal of good History and Morality. In which Sayings the ancient Greeks, whilst Learning flourished amongst them, excelled to admiration.
A bluff Church-warden, says one day to Jenny--
"Faith, Girl, amongst Friends, thou wert a childish Ninny,
"To cough at all, before the Feat was done:
"Fail not next time: and wisely hold your Tongue.
"But after all, Child, dids't thou not do so?
"For 'twas the way to please all three, you know.
"Ah, Sir, says Jenny think you that in me,
"As much Wit, as your Ladies have, can be.
(Note, two fine Madams more, beside his Wife,
Stood by) "I could not think on't for my Life.
"Doubtless, your Wife, for you, thus plays the Trick:
"But foolish I, ne'er thought it for my Dick."She had a volume of Shakespear in her hand, as I came softly towards her . . . and her attention was so much engaged with the extremely poetical and fine lines which Titania speaks in the third act of the Midsummer night's dream that she did not see me till I was quite near her. She seemed then in great amazement. She could not be much more surprised if I had dropt from the clouds.90
Notes