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Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast
Of Curll's chaste press, and Lintot's rubric post.
--Dunciad, lines 39-40
[¶2.] New practices and conditions at the beginning of the eighteenth century modified the anthology into a form that defined readers as critics. Since periodical journals and newspapers began to appear even faster than printed collections, publishers used the anthology to sell not merely new literature but the best new literature, particularly poetry, to readers conjured as refined.1 While increased publishing opportunities intensified competition, they also led to the strengthening of congers designed to control the trade; in practice, these congers encouraged writers to form coteries that promoted specific literary values.2 The widening audience to whom these books were aimed included a significant number of women who both represented and enacted cultural consumption.3 By adopting an exclusive rhetoric, professional writers positioned themselves as mediators between high culture and these individual readers, and defined reading as the discrimination of current aesthetic values. In these books, ideal readers are those whose responses mirror the opinions of the editors. These anthologies thus disseminate literary culture as purchasable elitism.
[¶3.] These anthologies position readers as critically aware by involving the public in discussions of literary values. Several conditions prompted this. By the end of the seventeenth century, printers and booksellers had multiplied beyond control, and repeated attempts to stem their licensing by parliamentary acts had failed. Such a change in the number of presses made the congers determined to retain their control of perpetual copyrights by means of auctions open only to members of the trade, yet piracy was still widely practiced and seldom punished, even after the 1709-1710 Act for the Encouragement of Learning that confirmed current copyrights for twenty-oneyears and guaranteed new ones for fourteen.4 This bill, moreover, ignored the "rights" of authors. Indeed, most authors and editors, although not all, exercised less control over the presentation and printing of their material than had their seventeenth-century predecessors, although some like Pope did correct "accidentals" as well as substantives.5 As authors complained about booksellers' avarice, booksellers complained about piracy, and both appealed to the consumer for sympathy or purchasing discrimination. The printed wrangles between Swift and Pope and Curll and Lintot, for example, helped to forge in the audience a self-conscious identity as consumers and an awareness of the process of cultural consumption.6 The huge fashion for scurrilous political satires that peaked during the first third of the eighteenth century further invited audiences to engage as much in governmental as literary politics, indeed to associate the two as parts of print culture. Audiences became aware of their role as participants in the literary world by being, not writers, but consumers of print.7
[¶4.] This phenomenon is particularly powerful in regard to the female audience. Women, as consumers and participants in an increasingly commodified culture, became an important topic and target in literature as it became commodified itself. While periodicals like Addison and Steele's Spectator address their behavior and cultural education, contemporary poetry addresses their skills as readers and writers. Although most of this verse is occasional, specific, and topical, at the same time it sketches general portraits of the reading female. Pope's Epistle to a Lady, for example, although directed to Martha Blount, constructs a general argument about fashionable women.This poem, indeed, reappears in printed collections, where it works partly to demarcate cultivated approaches to reading for female and male audiences, as they distinguish themselves from the satirized subjects of the verse. Similarly, poems such as Pope's Essay on Criticism or Roscommon's earlier Essay on Style direct readers in how to admire literature.8 By their posture of refined reception, these readers are defined as cultured.9
[¶5.] Alexander Pope and the bookseller Edmund Curll particularly stimulated this public engagement in publishing by using the anthology. Not only did Pope publish his extemporaneous, juvenile, and serious work in anthologies, but, like Dryden, he edited diverse collections, notably Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, featuring The Rape of the Lock (1712). In order to frustrate the piratical Curll, he produced with Swift the three-volume collection Miscellanies (1727-1728). Edmund Curll assembled miscellanies and published collections of every variety: compendia of short works by renowned authors like Joseph Addison, Rochester, and Roscommon; compilations of pirated poems; lewd miscellanies; place-name miscellanies in which he publicized the scribal works of would-be members of an elite coterie; and even pamphlets on a vaguely common theme sewn together and titled as "new." Both the tradition of the literary collection and the booksellers' practice of patching together previously printed material made collections the genre of choice for Curll and, in turn, made Curll a prominent, if distrusted, influence on contemporary literary culture.
[¶7.] Although--or because--women increasingly constitute a vital audience, the attitude to them expressed in poetry ranges from sycophantic to misogynistic, even while the volumes addressed to them retain a moralistic stamp.10 Before the eighteenth century, the tradition of literature for women comprised primarily practical advice, spiritual guidance, and conduct literature.11 Volumes printed in the late seventeenth century purveyed morality and cookery with, and partly as, courtesy and love; even as late as 1796, Every woman her own house-keeper: or, the Ladies library promises not literature but "the cheapest and most extensive system of cookery," along with home medicine.12 From the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, women participated in defining aesthetic taste in the literary market. Anthologies that address contemporary poetry to female tastes begin to form a significant part of literary publication, especially if written by elite or fashionable authors. In 1718, Edmund Curll's Ladies Miscellany, featuring Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Town Eclogues and Court Poems, exploits this fashion by presenting elite female literature pirated two years earlier. When he reissued the book in 1732 with the same title, Curll added different "poems, novels, and curious tracts" to draw similar readers with more varied material.13 In 1717, J. Greenwood excerpted verse from fashionable authors for The Virgin Muse, so successful that it reappeared in 1722 and 1731. Both these texts match audience and author by gender. Particularly during the decade from the early 1720s to the early 1730s, and again in the 1770s and 1780s, after the 1774 copyright decision, collections of reading designed for women, "ladies libraries" and "ladies miscellanies," peaked.14 Some of these feature mildly prurient poetry, like Fifield D'Assigny's The ladies miscellany: or, a curious collection of amorous poems, and merry tales (1730) and The ladies miscellany, which promises love letters among other "curious poems on love and gallantry" (1731), while others excerpt contemporary moral and fashionable works.15 Women are both part of, and apart from, the male tradition.
[¶8.] These collections are indebted to contemporary collaborative publications--most important, perhaps, periodical journals.16 As well as the Gentleman's Journal, started late in the Restoration, the Compleat Library (1692-1694) and the Monthly Miscellany: or, Memoirs for the curious (1707-1710) notably used literary metaphors to sell topical material.17 These periodicals, among many others, advertised current, varied reading for all London. John Dunton's 1704 Athenian Spy: discovering the secret letters which were sent to the Athenian society by the most ingenious ladies of the three kingdoms, which features poems as well as letters, for example, explodes the fiction of a purely male literary club and propels women and female responses into the very middle of this male culture.-
[¶9.] Dunton, indeed, possessed a genius for packaging literature. He launched a "monthly Journal of Books," excerpted from The Universal Biblestheque [sic] and the Journal des Scavans, eventually titled The Compleat Library, until competition drove him to collaborate with the bookseller Lecrose in producing The Works of the Learned.18 This enterprise "for the promoting of Learning" advertised books issued by many printers and sold by many booksellers. Dunton testifies in his autobiography to the symbiotic specialization of and collaboration among members of the trade. Although he used seventeen binders in his career, he notes the practical strengths of each bookseller in handling authors and buyers, and in selling literature (339, 341). For example, he declares that Tonson "speaks his mind, (upon all Occasions) and will Flatter no Body" (29), and that Bernard Lintot cannot form compendia as skillfully as Nathaniel Crouch, of whom he writes: "I think I have given you the very soul of his Character, when I have told you that his Talent lies at collection. He has melted down the best of our English Histories into Twelve-Penny-Books, which are filled with WONDERS, RARITIES, AND CURIOSITIES, for you must know, his Title Pages are a little swelling" (282). Such a talent for enlarging titular advertisement, even (or especially) while reducing content, is precious: Dunton recommends the poetical Herbert Walwyn, "the most INGENIOUS BARD (of a Bookseller)," whom "Dryden . . . might call. . .
[¶10.] Booksellers and editors of literature more highbrow than Dunton's also borrowed the discourse, presentation, and distribution of the periodical to sell anthologies both to mixed audiences and to audiences segregated by gender. Sir Richard Steele presumes a mixed readership for the discussions of morality, manners, and sentiment in the Spectator (1711-1712, 1714), where he advertises his guardianship of female culture by listing books for a "Lady's Library," including translations, philosophy, novels, religious commentary, a dictionary, a spelling crib, and The Academy of Compliments, a combination of commonplace book, courtesy manual, and songbook.21 While applauding this taste, Steele portrays Leonora, the proprietor of this library, as a consumer of luxuries who equates books with pretty objects, arranging the volumes by size, and mingling with them a "Silver Snuff-box made in the shape of a little Book" and "several other Counterfeit Books." Steele, however, condemns her preoccupation with "Romances," which "has given her a very particular Turn of Thinking" and taste. In no. 92 (Friday, 15 June 1711), he undertakes to expand this library to a serious collection, with the help of subscribers. After mocking the advertisements of self-interested booksellers and husbands, as well as women who ask for romances, he remarks,
[¶12.] Despite this claim, Steele did not provide an authoritative ladies' library by editing the ancients, but in the form of his modern essays in the Spectator, and by editing contemporary poetry. Nonetheless, here he figures women's literature not as practical but as refined, part of the art of the ladies' closets.
[¶13.] Steele also differentiated between male and female literacy, however. In 1714, he prefaced for Jacob Tonson a three-volume anthology designed to "feminize" literary culture: "The Ladies Library. Written by a lady," attributed to Lady Mary (Hamson) Wray, granddaughter of Jeremy Taylor.22 In the same year, he published a volume of miscellaneous contemporary poetry directed at fashionable readers, called Poetical Miscellanies. Whereas Poetical Miscellanies purveys sexually explicit, sometimes misogynistic imitations to readers conjured as educated in classical literature, The Ladies Library, excerpted from works by Jeremy Taylor, George Berkeley, and other divines, provides women with pious advice.23 As the frontispieces illustrate, this reading comforts women: the first two volumes show a woman reading alone, while the third volume shifts to depicting the woman in domestic life (see fig. 4).
[¶14.] Fig. 4 [on page 115 of print edition] Frontispiece and title page of The Ladies Library, vol. 1, ed. Sir Richard Steele, Louis Du Guernier the Younger (1658/9-1716[?]) dr. and sculp., 17 cm. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714). Courtesy of the Watkinson Library, Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut). This frontispiece portrays an elegant woman reading alone in her library while putti playing beside her signal that reading brings sophisticated, Continental pleasures.
[¶15.] In contrast, Poetical Miscellanies bears a slightly erotic classical scenario of communal revelry (see fig. 5).
[¶16.] Fig. 5 [on page 116 of print edition] Frontispiece of Sir Richard Steele's Poetical Miscellanies, Louis Laguerre (1663-1721) dr., Louis Du Guernier the Younger, sculp. 18 cm. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714). Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Depicting Venus before Mount Helicon, on the steps of a square temple evoking the Forum, surrounded by Graces and flanked by putti rowing on the Thames, this frontispiece transfers the classical motif used in Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems to the city, indicating the transfer of poetic authority from the universities to the professional writers of London.
[¶17.] The Ladies Library provides reading for improvement; Poetical Miscellanies supplies reading for pleasure.
[¶18.] The Ladies Library presents literature triply mediated. The original biblical "text" is interpreted as practical advice by Taylor and others, and portions of this interpretation are selected and edited by "a lady," who hands them to Steele. Despite the "Compiler's" confidence, Steele resorts to further--and to male--authority to vet the selection.24 His preface recounts his giving it to a "Revered Gentleman," George Berkeley, requesting that Berkeley judge its quality and commercial viability, since the "Levity of some of my writings" might compromise Steele's own authority. While concurring with Steele, Berkeley argues that Steele may purvey his reputation to stimulate greater sales, for "its coming out with my name, would give an Expectation that I had assembled the Thoughts of many ingenious men on pious Subjects, as I had heretofore on Matters of a different Nature: By this means, he believes, the Work may come into the Hands of Persons Who take up no Book that has not Promises of Entertainment in the first Page of it" (iv). Convinced by this blend of moral and commercial reasoning, Steele presents and represents this female selection to the public. By its triple mediation, it becomes simultaneously Taylor's and Steele's, conventional and fashionable, moral and novel, private and public, part of a specifically female culture yet authorized by men.
[¶19.] Although this preface advertises the careful evaluation of the material, it conceals the business negotiations that legalized the publication of this lady's private literary choices. In order to sell the volume, Tonson had to purchase copyright shares of the original texts. In his fulminating pamphlet of reprinted correspondence published by John Morphew, rival of Tonson and sometime associate of Edmund Curll, however, Royston Meredith charged Steele and Tonson with pirating Jeremy Taylor's works.25 Scoffing at Tonson's claim that he had paid the copy-money for reprinting from Taylor's works, Meredith complains that although Steele is "so great a stickler for the Liberty, Rights, and Properties of the Subject," he has ignored the "Right and Property every Bookseller hath to his Copies; which [is] the same, with that a Gentleman has to his Estate," and that had just been reestablished by "the Common-Law, the High Court of Chancery, and even a late Act of Parliament" (5, 8). The terms of Meredith's discourse mark the elevation of publishing to a "gentleman's" profession; moreover, the fact of this correspondence's publication documents both the threat that the formula of the collection offered to conventional publishing and the interest of the public in adjudicating literary politics. Steele's Ladies Library elucidates the ambiguous relationship between canonical works and fashionable names, and between theft and recontextualization.
[¶20.] Steele defends the use of advice for men to advise women. Containing a "Variety of the writers . . . as well as of the matter," the book addresses women's behavior, education, and character, since "In Matters where both Sexes are equally concern'd the Words Man and Men are made use of, but the Matter does not for that Reason the less relate to Women, or argue that the Work is not principally intended for the Information of the Fair Sex."26 In contrast to Steele's universalization of literary rhetoric, the compiler condemns the sexism of contemporary literature in a passage that anticipates Virginia Woolf's point in A Room of One's Own.
[¶22.] Musing one Day in this Tract of Thought, I turned over some Books of French and English, written by the most polite Writers of the Age, and began to consider what Account they gave of our Composure, different from that of the other Sex. But indeed, when I dipped into those Writings, were it possible to conceive otherwise, I could not have believed from their general and undistinguished Aspersions that many of these Men had any such Relations as Mothers, Wives or Sisters. (1:1-2)
[¶23.] Quoting from texts excerpted in Bysshe's Art of English Poetry such as Otway's Don Carlos and Orphan, various works by Milton, and Dryden's Aurengzebe, the compiler dismisses the argument that fictional characters are not reliable speakers by pointing out that they all excoriate women alike and therefore accurately articulate male views of women: "if the Author had right Sentiments of Woman in general, he might more emphatically aggravate an ill Character, by Comparison of an ill to an innocent and virtuous one, than by general Calumnies without Exception" (4). After attacking the "canon" of contemporary literature, the speaker relinquishes her favorite French romances and light plays, poems, and novels in order to disprove the accusation that women possess light characters; she disciplines herself now by reading only the works of divines. Like Anne Elliot in Austen's Persuasion, this lady will not allow books written by men to prove women's nature, but they can--perhaps should--change their behavior. Despite these strictures, Tonson lists in his advertisements at the end an entire page of "pocket volumes" of poems, plays, and periodicals. As part of a cultural discussion on what and how to read, this "library" is itself part of the commodification of literature.
[¶24.] Early-eighteenth-century anthologies rhetorically identify women as discriminating buyers. The Flowers of Parnassus: or the Lady's Miscellany, a combination annual and garland, purveys a mixture of popular literature touted as love verse to an audience specified by gender, not class.27 The editor depicts women as those with the character to merit this collection. Dedicating it "To the LADIES of Great-Britain, of what Rank or Station soever; whether Belles or Slatterns, Prudes or Coquets, wise or otherwise," T.G. replaces class distinctions with gender universality and articulates the connection between a form predicated on "variety" and the character of its female audience: "If Ladies, you approve this Ragou, so well adapted to your different Tastes, our own Sex must relish and approve." Reviving the Restoration metaphor of the banquet to characterize his female audience as appetite-driven, variable, and demanding, this preface asserts that it is the appetite for "variety" which links the form to its audience and its subject: women, who may "have no Character at all," but who can use and be used by literature in a myriad of ways.28 As endless topics for literary play and as changing subjects who attract satire, elegy, and ballad, women provide the appetite and the topic for miscellaneous literature.
[¶25.] Steele himself reflects this view of women in Poetical Miscellanies, Consisting of Original Poems and Translations. By the best Hands.29 Published twice that year, the volume opens with the first printing of Pope's "Wife of Bath her Prologue from Chaucer," which, as a literary gloss on a native author that blends tradition and fashion, would become a popular piece in anthologies, as well as other pieces by Pope; it includes verse by Gay, Tickell, Parnell, and Budgell, and ends with Steele's own "The Procession. A Poem on the Funeral of Queen Mary. Written in the Year 1695." By packaging the collection with an erotic frontispiece, Tonson links it to lower-brow collections of love lyrics and sexual jests as well as to fashionable translations of Ovid. As reflected in the fine frontispiece by the French painter Louis Laguerre, engraved by the artist Louis Du Guernier, depicting naked nymphs and putti cavorting by a temple in a pastoral setting, this collection depicts women as the subject of erotic fantasy and classical poetic tradition, rather than as an audience. Nonetheless, female topics begin to encroach on the dominance of epic translations, in the form both of attacks on women's authority in literary culture and of praise of female readers. Steele, partly as advertisement and partly as a mediation between audiences, solicited contributions from his readers in the Guardian 50 (8 May 1713), so his readership included periodical perusers, women and men.30 While celebrating current culture, he attempts to span female and male literary tastes. In its circumstances of compilation, fine packaging, organization, and contents, this collection packages contemporary literature for an audience self-defined as elite.
[¶26.] Steele highlights the exclusivity and high standards of his collection both as a literary and as a social venture by dedicating it to Congreve in terms that equate stylistic and cultural values. As a professional author, Congreve himself bridged elite and popular audiences. Steele opens by comparing this venture with others of the same kind: "I know, indeed, no Argument against these Collections, in Comparison of any other Tonson has heretofore Printed; but that there are in it no Verses of Yours: That gentle, free, and easie Faculty, which also in Songs, and short Poems, You possess above all others, distinguishes it self where-ever it appears" (3-4). Congreve sets the standard not only for comic style but also for the genres in which Steele's anthology abounds, including songs, short poems, and dramatic satire, for Steele praises him also for his "Satyr" of the wealthy libertine, Doris (5). Such language introduces readers to the terms of dramatic praise, as do three other poems on drama in the volume, one by Steele praising Congreve's Way of the World, the others referring to Addison's tragedy Cato. These allusions to contemporary literary figures also advertise the social exclusivity of the in-group whose taste this anthology embodies. Moreover, this group, exemplified by Congreve, exhibits a gentlemanly social style parallel to the literary style that the volume touts: "As much as I Esteem You for Your Excellent Writings . . . I chuse rather, as one that has passed many Happy Hours with You, to celebrate that easie Condescension of Mind, and Command of a pleasant Imagination, which give You the uncommon Praise of a Man of Wit, always to please, and never to offend. No one, after a joyful Evening, can reflect upon an Expression of Mr. Congreve's, that dwells upon him with Pain" (6). Appropriate male behavior is here identified as civility and wit, rather than piety. This "most equal, amiable, and correct Behavior," however, "can only be observed by your intimate Acquaintance" (7). Insofar as Congreve is a member of the inner circle, his style is part of his social demeanor, and part of the private culture of a coterie. Steele's praise hence proves his intimacy with the fashionable elite of literature. It further demonstrates the correspondence between literary and social values.31
[¶27.] Not only is Congreve praised as a model of elite culture, however; so too is Steele himself, and with him the new female readership. In "To the Author of the Tatlers," Laurence Eusden (1688-1730) reiterates the claim of Steele's coterie by declaring, "At last is granted, what we wish'd for long, / The Roman Arts have learn'd the British Tongue," for "Who reads your Works, knows what the World e're knew; / All human Life lies Open to his View" (251-52, lines 1-2, 13-14). As part of Steele's group, Eusden translates Steele's writerly talent into social celebrity. Like his cohorts, Steele's female readers share his sensibility and taste. These urbane literary and personal values are explained in several works. The verses lauding Ambrose Philips's translation of Racine's Andromaque, The Distrest Mother, for example, noting the responses of moved "Mothers" and "Maiden[s]" (213, line 14) in the audience, criticize bloodthirsty playwrights and salute a female taste that accords with Horace's classical moderation:
[¶29.] A few other verses on women, like Parnell's "To a Young Lady, on her Translation of the Story of Phoebus and Daphne, from Ovid," make the female author the subject of her own verse. Here, Parnell turns courtly convention into a literary compliment to the author as he commends the woman's verse for mirroring her self. Declaring that her poem revises the mythic pursuit of beauty by wit in the original since both virtues meet in her, he applauds her reading, her writing, and her posture as a literary consumer.32
[¶30.] Most of the poems on women, however, discuss ways of responding to literature. Seeking to model both the audience and the author, Eusden often prompts or echoes the reactions of the reader, whether idealized or satirized. Indeed, Eusden, who would become poet laureate, is also using Steele's anthology to sell himself. He touts his first venture in print, a Latin translation of Lord Halifax's poem on the battle of Boyne published in a collection the same year, by persuading Steele to include in Poetical Miscellanies his poem to Halifax--so successful a piece of sycophancy that it won him Halifax's patronage.33 He also praises Steele from the perspective of the general reader in "On Reading the Critique on Milton, in the Spectator" (196). In "To a Lady, That wept at the hearing Cato read," he depicts the multiple roles of the reading woman as spectator, spectacle, and example. As the moving sight, the tragedy, she serves as a trope that reinscribes the difference between "us" reading and women reading: "If ever Grief could perfect Form improve, / Euphrenia, weeping, more commands our Love" (225, lines 1-2). Her power to move others by weeping objectifies her as art, rather than working to admit her as a fellow participant in the experience of it, although her personal, or sexual, power is enormous: "How pleas'd Superior Glory to allow, / The world by Caesar, Caesar rul'd by you" (257, lines 28-29). In the final stanzas, however, Eusden uses her response to prove the excellence of the literature:
[¶32.] By identifying sentimental response with fine art, Eusden praises both author and reader for aesthetic discrimination. Suitable reading, sensitive responding, and skillful writing are conjoined.
[¶33.] Despite this praise of Addison and Steele's female readership, Eusden also articulates contemporary resentment against women's encroachments on literature. By his ostensibly occasional verses, Eusden mimics the casual composition of manuscript culture, but in fact his contributions reinforce the literary values of a professional elite, particularly in opposition to those of a spontaneous and unlearned female culture. "On a Dispute with a Gentleman about the Excellence of some of Mr. Dryden's Writings; when a Lady, being ask'd her Opinion, blam'd them" contrasts the ignorant impressionism of the dilettante with the knowledgeable admiration of the dedicated fellow poet:
[¶35.] Ironically, the speaker implies that the conventions of courtship dictate public values: sexual "wit" determines true wit, and irrational idiosyncrasy overrules argument--at least in society, if not in the mind of the speaker. As the final lines explain, "Triumphant Wrong o'er vanquish'd Right prevail'd, / And Beauty won, where Eloquence had fail'd" (219, lines 27-28). As in "To a Lady, That wept at the hearing Cato read," the sexual power that "rules Caesar" ambiguously redefines male values.
[¶36.] Although this compilation helped to define contemporary highbrow taste for genteel readers, it also supplied literature for a later, different audience. In 1729, a version of Poetical Miscellanies: Consisting of Original Poems and Translations. By the Best Hands, "Publish'd by Mr. Gay" a year after The Beggar's Opera, demonstrates a recontextualization of much of Steele's material.34 Containing only eighteen pieces, ten from Steele's anthology, it features anonymous, light occasional verse, including Gay's own poems and some by Dr. Garth, among others, and was published after Gay had made his name in many other collections.35 After opening with three satires, the first by Swift, it excises most of the satirical verses in Steele's volume, shifting to love poems and epigrams, including three verses by Gay, Parnell's "To a Young Lady," and the renowned humorous verse "Upon a Company of bad Dancers to good Musick" from Steele's collection, claimed by both George Jeffreys and Ambrose Philips.36 In this context, fifteen years later, the literary politics of the original publication have vanished. Instead Gay's selection omits all references to the cultural politics of reading; this verse celebrates pleasure.
[¶37.] Many early-eighteenth-century collections educate readers in fashionable style and aesthetic values. Several of these also negotiate contemporary resentment, not merely against women but also against the new cultural politics. Edmund Curll's relative and associate Henry, for example, issued a miscellany of nine lewd pamphlets, adorned with a fine frontispiece and central illustration, called The Altar of Love.37 This book not only exploited the passion for Pope but also inducted readers into sophisticated literary matters, such as ways of organizing literary information and evaluating authors. After Addison's Cartesian "Oration in Defense of the New Philosophy," printed in both Latin and English, and a sixpenny pamphlet representing a literary quarrel between Thomas Hearne and Walter Moyle ($PI1 B-C4 D3, 1-33), Curll sewed in Popeana (B-F4, 1-40), a commonplace book of extracts from Pope's poetry (never published separately). The next item, however, undercuts the very admiration for Pope apparently prompted by Popeana: the two-canto The Rape of the Smock by Giles Jacob. This parody gave publicity to Jacob (1686-1744), who had been attacked in The Dunciad for organizing his Poetic Register; Or, Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets (2 vols., 1719-1720) in an alphabetical "dictionary" style. Its presence here also draws attention to such "potentially controversial aspects" of his book as its ranking of authors.38 Henry Curll as editor thus uses the principle of juxtaposition to prompt readers to judge authors and literary principles. At the same time, by including an imitation of Pope's formula, Curll prompts a crude reading of The Rape of the Lock that explicates Pope's attack on hypocrisy and superficiality, so that Jacob's Rape of the Smock could also serve, like Popeana, as a crib to Pope. Jacob's poem, moreover, is followed by two short songs, the first by Farquhar also attacking triviality, and the second a conventional eclogue (A-E4, 1-32). These similarly represent fashionable forms and themes. Next, Curll provides a translation of Bonefonius's Basia, published in 1722, a compilation of amorous verse (a2 B-G4 H2, 1-52); "The Patch," another mock-heroic poem, combined with an Oxford poem, "The Welch Wedding" (A-F4, i-viii, 1-39); a cluster of Cambridge verses by John Davies headed with "Bury-Fair" (a1 B-C4 D3); Poems on Several Occasions, containing twenty-one occasional and love verses; and, finally, William Bowman's Horatian imitations and translations, "Poems on Several Occasions" (A-O4 P2). In combining collections of verse by university wits with pamphlets of love verse and loose translations on the same themes, this miscellany encourages readers to compare critically applauded and popular poetry. Curll's juxtaposition of Pope with parodies by Giles Jacob and others contextualizes fashionable literary culture for a wide readership.
[¶38.] Such miscellanies mimicked the printed productions of Pope and his powerful booksellers. In doing so, they engaged readers in contemporary quarrels about who really produced literature. Imitating Lintot's collection in which The Rape of the Lock first appears, Edmund Curll's 5s., two-volume Miscellanea (1727), attributed to Pope, was issued the same year as the first volume of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies. By publishing this volume, Curll taunted Pope with piracy; he went still further in including a poem by William Pattison, whom he was supporting and housing at the time, that closely resembles Pope's "Verses to be prefix'd before Bernard Lintott's New Miscellany" in Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (1712). This poem mocks Tonson for selling ossified and outdated literary fashion, symbolized by Dryden, and probably was meant to implicate Lintot, publisher of the new Dryden, Pope:39
[¶40.] Pattison accuses miscellany publishers of promulgating inauthentic poetry designed to earn money, not praise, yet this booksellers' trick makes Pattison's patron a literary producer: poet and publisher are interdependent. In the next stanza, Pattison enrolls Curll in the ranks of poets:
[¶42.] As Pope had mocked Lintot for equating himself on the printed page with his authors, Pattison ridicules the confusion between the producer of words and of print.40
[¶43.] Finally, Pattison mimics Pope by pointing to the materiality of the genre. In his reductio ad absurdum of the trope of literary production to print, however, he equates literary consumption with other cultural consumption:
[¶45.] This poem ironically promotes literary collections as material possessions, displayed through the "Crystal" of a bookcase in a library. The physicality of literature, moreover, makes it equivalent to masculinity. Not only does literature give women pleasure, but it records the pleasure of being handled by women--presumably by swelling. While this pleasure is rare, for women seldom handle books, it is also, if the verse is read sarcastically, "common," in the sense of low. Literary collections thus serve a social function in this world of things by proving power, and gaining elite praise in the laurel and possession of the nymph.
[¶46.] In his mock-panegyric to Curll, William Pattison echoes the common sneer against anthologies. During the first third of the century, authors often regarded them as profiteering ventures by booksellers to defraud poets of their profits. Such productions as Curll's Elzevir miscellany (1715), including "original poems, translations, and imitations" by Rowe, Shippen, Dr. King, Sewel, Hill, Eusden, Broome, and Jones, reinforced this notion, named as it was after the grand old man of publishing.42 At the same time, as some authors knew, these books built the reputations and popularity of Dryden, Pope, and other poets and translators. As the productions of coteries, moreover, they were social, as well as literary, creations. Richard Savage's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. By Several Hands (London: Samuel Chapman, 1726) exemplifies another way in which collections were compiled as social enterprises. As he explains in his preface, a group of friends and supporters including Congreve and Hill subscribed to this compilation to save Savage from the poorhouse and allowed him to include their pieces in the volume. The "List of Subscribers" bears the names of Richard Steele and John Dyer; the contents, 92 items in 312 pages, feature works by Savage, Aaron Hill, Concanen, and John Dyer, among others.
[¶47.] Curll similarly provided a public identity for amateur versifiers by publishing collections of resort verse.43 In these compendia, holidaying gentry and middle classes imitated court culture by celebrating leisure and cultural consumption through verse composed in a coterie. Curll, of course, was not the only bookseller to exploit this market. In A New Miscellany, T.Warner compiled a collection that included the first full version of Dyer's Grongar Hill, along with poetry from "Bath, Tunbridge, Oxford, Epsom, and other Places."44 As he explains in his preface, this poetry already enjoyed local fame:
[¶49.] Like Restoration anthologies, these collections advertise the novelty and private circulation of their contents. This is--in theory--elite verse made public.
[¶50.] These different sorts of books indicate that early-eighteenth-century anthologies and miscellanies assisted and reflected the transformation of literature into a commodity, as well as its transmission to new readers conjured as discriminating buyers whose patronage could make or break both author and bookseller. These booksellers diversified and recombined literary messages to appeal to different kinds of audiences--indeed, to define such audiences and target them as consumers. By mixing highbrow literature with other kinds of literary entertainment, they began the process of recontextualizing poems that helped to rupture traditional generic distinctions, propel poetry into proximity with prose, and depoliticize the reception of literature. Correspondingly, the role of the editor became increasingly significant as a mediator bridging original and new contexts for poetry.
[¶52.] The literary rhetoric of the early eighteenth century began to create a critically self-conscious readership. Journalists, poets, printers, and booksellers argued about what, how, and why to write, print, and publish, and they did so in print itself.45 In poems discussing literary merit, and in polemical pamphlets, this readership was asked to choose among literary styles, or at least among authors, thus helping to validate authorship as elite and professional. Publishing booksellers exploited the readership by enlisting authors to edit anthologies that now advertised consistent literary excellence above variety. As a prominent specialist in contemporary literature, Bernard Lintot (1675-1736) supplied such anthologies. He had already ventured on several collections before publishing works by Pope, including both the Examen Miscellaneum (1702), edited by Charles Gildon, and Fenton's Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems (1708); after his association with Pope became profitable, he issued Poems on Several Occasions by the Duke of Buckingham, Wycherly and other eminent hands (1717), compiled by Pope himself, and became Tonson's partner the following year in several ventures. Correspondingly, Pope also profited from the genre of the printed miscellany. He first appeared in print in the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany Poems, where his Pastorals, following pastorals by John Philips and panegyrics by other authors, were the final item and were thus contextualized as the triumph of the genre. When Lintot issued Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, Pope served as editor and helped to control the presentation and contextualization of his poetry.46 Containing the first edition of Rape of the Lock, this book, first issued in 1712, was republished in 1714, 1721, 1722, and 1726, and was printed again in 1727-1732 for Benjamin Motte, although Pope discontinued his editorship when he left Lintot. Indeed, the fifth edition of 1726 (reprinted in 1727) was the final joint enterprise of Pope and Lintot. During their collaboration, the book changed from an octavo volume of fifty-one poems to two duodecimo volumes containing ninety-six poems altogether, only eighteen of which came from the original edition. While unplanned, "the successive changes . . . suggest one increasing purpose throughout, and one only, namely, the enhancement of Pope's fame."47 This book exemplifies the transformation of the literary anthology into a continuous and a joint venture of author and bookseller.
[¶53.] This collection demonstrates the power of the editor over the contents, over the consequent fame of his coterie, and thus over literary fashion itself. Like Steele and Tonson, Pope and Lintot publicly solicited contributions in an advertisement in the General Post that ran from 8 October to 2 November 1711. Here, Pope recommended the "new miscellany" as a repository of "excellent" pieces by "great" men, "most of which were never printed," adding that, "Those who have excellent copies by them, may command a Place in this Miscellany if sent before the 1st of November to B. Lintott at the Cross Keys in Fleet-Street."48 Despite this public deadline, and after the advertisement was discontinued, however, Pope wrote to Henry Cromwell for Gay's poem to Lintot, "On a Miscellany of Poems," and composed his own in response as he explains in a letter: "His verses to Lintot have put a whim into my head, which you are like to be troubled wth in the opposite page. Take it as you send it, ye Production of half an hour 'tother morning."49 -This spontaneity, plus the high proportion of productions by Pope and his friends, indicates that the public advertisement served rather as a ploy to publicize the volume than as a real invitation to audiences to contribute. Despite the claim that readers might enter the coterie as writers, these anthologies contain the poems of an exclusive group. At the same time, the multiple editions, and the successive deletion of Windsor Forest, its revision to refer to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and its restoration with "Ode to Music" in the 1714 edition show that the form remained flexible enough to support poems in process and even encouraged updating. Pope is both boasting and protecting himself by stressing that he composed the poem in only half an hour. Such casual composition indicates that he did not expect the verse to be rated as serious art. Author and bookseller cooperated to promote the literary values of topicality, novelty, virtuosity, and exclusiveness beneficial to them both.
[¶54.] Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. By Several Hands exemplifies Pope's use of the literary collection to foster both aesthetic values that bolstered his own art and his own dominance over print.50 Norman Ault observes that, as editor, Pope follows the typical principles of local organization: subject, genre or treatment, and author.51 The volume as a whole, however, negotiates between a radial and a linear sequence. Pope varies Tonson's organizational formula in this volume in order to counterpoint serious classical translations with contemporary satire. Beginning with his own long translation of Statius's Thebais, which proves his credentials in translation, followed by a conventional medley of theatrical songs and shorter imitations and translations, particularly of Horace and Ovid, Pope pinpoints the middle of the volume with two poems that comment on the volume itself:first, John Gay's "On a Miscellany of Poems. To Bernard Lintott," and then Pope's own "Verses design'd to be prefix'd to Mr. Lintott's Miscellany." These rationalize the shift from serious translation to light verse. Following them, the second half of the volume contains songs on love, poems of sexual pleasure, and several pieces about reading by Broome, Prior, Gay, Fenton, Cromwell, and others that lead into the final combination of classicalimitation, satire, and vers de societé, The Rape of the Lock.52 Eight pages of advertisements at the back recommend other books of verse and suggest that the audience for this collection also purchased poetry in single-author editions.53 Poems by Pope begin and end the volume, as well as appearing in a cluster in the center as nos. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and then no. 22 linked to no. 21, John Gay's mock-dedication to the volume. Although these last two poems exemplify the spontaneous production both of collections and of their verse, they also show that by this time the form was dominated by a closed or closing circle of professionals. By opening with a serious translation, ending with a long mock imitation, and centering on poems justifying the tradition of the "miscellany," Pope defines himself as the bridge between elite and popular literature. Clearly, this organization features Pope by putting his work in the front, back, and center.
[¶55.] Despite his exploiting the form, Pope expressed ambivalence about the anthologizing power of collections and the way they affect writing, reading, and literary values, possibly to identify himself as superior to contextualization by others. In his Correspondence, he criticizes them as moneymaking, cheap ventures.54 In 1736, he suggests that instead of promoting the professional values of talent, discipline, and expertise, such books encourage a literary politics based on social maneuvering. His attack on the Restoration ethic of amateur versification also indicts collections as vehicles of careless verse:
[¶57.] Pope condemns anthologies for sanctioning sloppy, nonprofessional writing, and, in 1717, he published his Poems on Several Occasions, holding at least twenty-four of his poems, anonymously. Again, in June of 1727, the first two volumes of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies were published as ventures designed to foil Curll, who was characterized as degrading the reputation of both Pope and Swift as well as violating copyright laws by these productions.55 In fact, these volumes demonstrate that Pope desired to use the form of the anthology himself. By advertising, whether justly or not, through implied contrast his own strict standards in choosing material to publish in anthologies and collections, Pope helped to establish the control of a literary elite.
[¶58.] Gay's verses "On a Miscellany of Poems" articulate the social tensions and pretensions of the genre in a rapidly professionalizing literary climate. Fusing bookselling advertisement with allusive literary humor, they position Lintot as a "skilful Cook," directed by his readers to please "each Guest," and "To feast at once the Taste, the Smell, and Sight" (lines 1-6). Gay reiterates the traditional discourse of booksellers and printers by figuring Lintot as a public servant subordinate to the whims of readers.
[¶60.] Although Gay emphasizes the need to please different tastes, the readers whom he conjures are not idiosyncratic: they are critically informed about both the tradition of miscellaneous verse and modern authors, and they appreciate balance. Gay shows this by comparing the names in the miscellany to Buckingham, Congreve, Prior, Waller, Addison, and Garth, thereby constructing a standard of poetic excellence in light and occasional verse. The vehicle itself, furthermore, becomes a heroic enterprise that models traditional English literary value by supplying variety with moderation.
[¶62.] For Gay, the anthology supplies a range of lofty verse and a high culture that mirrors the social scope of epic.
[¶63.] While endorsing balance, Gay judges literary genres. In this anthology, excellence and fashion supersede mere abundance:
[¶65.] Classical authors, Ovid among them, should model literary style for native writers. These writers will thus form a fabric in which variety becomes the constant factor, but a variety of "Classic" poetry:
[¶67.] Expanding British culture to encompass ancient Greece and Rome, Gay represents the miscellany as the apex of literature. In his final classical simile, he suggests that carpe diem rules the publishing trade as it rules the reader: they are joined in the commercial enterprise of new books for new appetites, figured as a reflection of eternal human nature. The exclusive feast of the miscellany benefits both the reader, conjured as the lover parallel to the speaker/author of classical love poetry, and the publisher.
[¶68.] Throughout the verse, Gay nevertheless gibes at the paradoxical materiality of printed culture.56 He acknowledges in his final stanza the importance of appearance in selling even poetry, alluding not only to the trade rivalry with Tonson but also to pirates like Hill and printers like John Morphew, sometime associate of Curll who published Anne Finch's poetry:57
[¶70.] By satirizing inelegant packaging and recommending "successful" or popular poets and legitimate copyright-holders, Gay urges the cooperation of author, reader, and publisher in preserving culture. Together, all can reap profits and praise.
[¶71.] Quick to support this proposition, Pope glosses Gay's poem with a parallel effort, item 22: Pope's own "Verses design'd to be prefix'd to Mr. Lintott's Miscellany." This juxtaposition of poems with contrasting moods mirrors the Restoration practice of juxtaposing different translations of the same poem, and in a similar fashion invites the audience to experience différance. Pope's poem, however, abandons Gay's epic trope and refigures Lintot's collection as part of a popular literature bought by middle-class readers. It also exploits the ambiguous relationships among publishers, authors, and readers, and between printed words and received meanings. In doing so, it both mocks and celebrates the commodification of literature. The poem opens by genially summarizing the chatter of literary consumers whose empty categories reveal the status of books as commodities.
[¶73.] In contrast with these aficionados of book production mechanics--book bindings, settings, and so forth--the down-to-earth speaker declares that he prefers books that he can read. Pope, however, instantly deflates this boast by showing that he can read them because he can see them and because they are written in the vernacular:
[¶75.] As Pope explains, the bookseller who prints large letters stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the author who writes them because this bookseller controls the printing. Indeed, in a later edition, he adds lines praising Lintot's "Character."58 At the same time, Pope implies that Lintot's self-advertisement symbolizes the usurpation of authorial and editorial merit by book merchants. This attack on the commercial self-aggrandizement of booksellers reverses the established hierarchies of book production in the era of print. In fact, until this point, and indeed for some time after it, most professional authors were considered mere workers for hire.59 Their works usually remained anonymous; if they were printed in a collection, they served to provide generic kinds of literary pleasure rather than to model original creation. Pope, therefore, is revising the status of the author in a miscellany, anthology, or collection. In suggesting that the physical equality of bookseller and author depicted on the page by the print signifies their cultural equality as literary producers, he ridicules booksellers' pretensions. By portraying the general reader as a bemused "you" confronted with a dubiously advertised product, Pope characterizes the collection as literature for all folks. At thesame time, these are folks who are sophisticated enough to want to understand the relationship between a book and its cover.
[¶76.] Pope develops his bathetic exercise of portraying literature as physical material by ironically praising "fair" books--books attractive and unread, albeit, perhaps, fairly bought:
[¶78.] In its final carnivalesque mockery of the book trade, Pope's poem works to collapse different levels of readers and literature. Yet he also promotes refinement. He suggests that whereas most readers merely admire luxuries, a few understand the words on the page; while some readers absorb meaning, however, the general populace, when they produce, merely excrete. Pope thus negotiates between general folks and readers--the latter equivalent to Dryden's self-contained theatrical audience--who are represented as elite by virtue of their careful reading. This ideal reader consumes culture mentally, not physically.
[¶79.] Pope addresses the issue of how to read in several other poems in Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. While these reflect Pope's contemporary preoccupation with literary values, they also show the ways in which the anthology, since it comprises a sample of the newest literature, promotes a discussion designed to define the posture of its own readers. Following his "Vertumnus," item 16, "To a Young Lady with the Work of Voiture" (now known as "Epistle to Miss Blount, With the Works of Voiture") associates the art of living a good life with reading. Like Eusden, Pope objectifies the reading woman, but his romantic image of her as another Madame de Rambouillet identifies reading with refinement and high fashion.
[¶81.] Whereas Eusden places women as rulers over conquering emperors, Pope, like Shakespeare, elevates authors over even women. Indeed, reading displays both intellectual and sexual beauty: it is the protosentimental attitude of sensitive reception that defines an attractive reader. His next poems, "Two Copies of Verses, Written Some Years since in Imitation of the Style of Two Persons of Quality," reaffirm the primacy of writing over reading. The first, "On Silence," replaces Rochester's philosophical nihilism with a play on the absence of language, while "To the Author of a Poem Entitled Successio" attacks Elkanah Settle, whom Dryden also satirized for literary inadequacy. In these verses revising earlier poems, Pope portrays himself as a reader supplanted by himself as a writer. For readers excluded from professional literary production, however, informed and receptive reading provides a substitute.60
[¶82.] In manipulating this collection to promote himself, Pope incorporates poems by friends that celebrate approved aesthetic values. Edmund Smith's "A Poem to the Memory of Mr. John Philips. To a Friend," item 19, for example, constitutes a fourteen-page elegy to a renowned poet identified as a colleague. Many of these poems on literary culture play self-consciously with the context of the miscellany to laud the social, sexual, and cultural benefits of reading this material. At the same time, they flatter women as receivers rather than producers of this culture. Fenton's "To a Lady Sitting before her Glass," item 23, concludes with an intertextual pun:
[¶84.] In this context, Fenton's courtly plea for love merges into a plea forreaderly attention. The lady's hard heart and light mind, like the reader's dull eye and superficial regard, undervalue what they see or read, so that this print leaves no imprint. Fenton's "To a Young Lady Reading the Art of Love," like Pope's similar piece, recommends that women read Ovid to condition themselves to receive love; again, literary culture--especially neoclassical literature--provides women with sexual appeal by arousing their responses. The verse "To a Gentleman who Corrected some Verses for me" addresses the same aesthetic values and sexual dynamic from a woman writer's perspective by praising male-engineered refinement.
[¶86.] Male direction shapes and perfects female art: "Confus'd it lay a rough unpolish'd Mass, / You gave the Royal Stamp, and made it pass" (p. 223, lines 15-16). The trope of regal male authority over literary culture reverses Eusden's woman-conquered Caesar: "Hence ev'n Deformity a Beauty grew, / She pleas'd, she charm'd, but pleas'd and charm'd by you" (p. 223, lines 17-18). Here, reading is portrayed as an elegant accomplishment controlled by male professionals.
[¶87.] These poems vaunting responsive reading as elite posture provide the context for the final poem, Pope's first version of The Rape of the Locke [sic], item 48. It appears introduced by a separate title page with an epigram from Martial and the imprint "Printed for Bernard Lintott. 1712."61 While this position announces the importance of the piece and echoes the placement of Pope's Pastorals in Tonson's 1709 Miscellany Poems, it also invites readers to interpret it as a conclusive comment on the literary culture purveyed by the collection. Indeed, Broome's "On a Flower which Belinda gave me from her Bosom," item 12, alludes with a direct reference to the courtly tradition Pope mocks, while item 36, an imitation of Rapin, is a pastoral sent to "Belinda." Pope's Rape of the Lock uses the conceit of hair as a symbol of sexuality, which had already been used twice in other pieces. Furthermore, it follows translations, imitations, and occasional verse, and represents the fusion of these tastes in one form. Both thematically and linguistically, in its condemnation of superficial culture it reasserts the ideals of previous poems in the volume.62 In its allusions and placement, it thus rewards attentive reading.
[¶88.] Pope was conscious of the power of an anthology to sell his name. In the context of the miscellany, the theme and form of the poem hark intertextually to Dryden's Miscellanies, as well as to poems in the volume. Even apart from the implied "Scandal" of Arabella Fermor's courtship, this witty reduction of politics to the dynamics of personal pride simultaneously celebrates Anne's court and criticizes the feminization of culture. Such criticism parallels Dryden's attack on corruption in Mac Flecknoe. Both poems identify politics with stylistics. Pope's transference of heroic action to the court in the metaphor of the card game, however, flattens out the innuendos of political repression that informed the language of the Restoration drollery, for while the poem evokes Mac Flecknoe, it does so as a self-conscious literary imitation. Indeed, The Rape of the Locke in this edition demonstrates the contextual reading Pope expected by its oral rhetoric and emphases. In accordance with the other items, it is printed with many italics, prompting readers to form connections to other verses. This is indicated in a couplet later revised: "And dwells such Rage in softest Bosoms then? / And lodge such daring Souls in Little Men?" (p. 355, lines 11-12). When these lines appear in the beautifully produced 1714 edition of The Rape of the Lock, printed independently with elaborate frontispieces to each canto, they are not italicized. This difference may suggest that whereas the perhaps more mixed audience of Lintot's book used visual hints to associate these images with others in the volume's literature, readers of the separate 1714 edition, whether already familiar with the poem or not, had no use for such cues. Certainly the printing in the 1714 edition makes the poem look less various and more consistent. When Pope later revised these lines in the full version of the poem, complete with the machinery of the sprites, to run, "In tasks so bold, can little men engage / And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty rage?" he improved the meter, but he also changed the rhetoric. The couplet no longer articulates a speech bolstered by Ciceronian anaphora; instead, Pope emphasizes the paradoxical smoothness of this fury, and the verse becomes a contemplative reproach. Recontextualized, it loses its intertextuality.
[¶89.] Pope's typographical revisions show the way printers and booksellers packaged poetry for different audiences. By reprinting The Rape of the Lock without the visual and intertextual jokes signaled by capitals and italics in the first edition, Pope characterized his poetry as cerebral, uniform, sophisticated, and complete in itself: entertainment to be read silently by the educated elite. At the same time, his extemporaneous lyrics, printed with a plethora of visual signals in collections, packaged his poetry for less well trained, popular audiences. Although Pope was clearly a master of this kind of typographical manipulation of meaning, he was certainly not alone in using the physical appearance of print in a book to aid interpretation. Indeed, authors, printers, booksellers, and readers were increasingly aware of the ambiguity of a book's physical status in a literary climate that increasingly valorized aesthetic principles bridging material and abstract meanings--balance, design, and elegance. Markedly, allusion, the stylistic trope of Dryden's Miscellanies, became a liability as well as an advantage for authors, for it demanded a knowledge from readers that limited the audience. One answer was to signal the allusion by a typography that could be altered in later editions.
[¶90.] In his other collections, Pope persisted in using intertextuality. The 1714 second edition of Miscellaneous Poems and Translations not only added to the title page a list of Pope's nine poems but appended the Essay on Criticism at the end. Answering Roscommon's popular "Essay on Translated Verse," itself a reply to Horace's Ars Poetica, this neoclassical reading guide continues the function of instructing readers on contemporary taste. In 1714, his "Salisbury Ballad," which became a staple feature of miscellanies, heads Oldmixon's Poems and Translations, to which William Walsh's Aesculapius; or, the Hospital of Fools is appended. With pieces by Addison, Garth, Rowe, Prior, Yalden, and Hughes, translations by Arthur Mainwaring, and a great deal of theatrical verse, this compendium purveys the literature of Pope's in-group in the style of Tonson's productions. In the volume Norman Ault calls "Pope's own Miscellany" (1717), however, Pope uses the form to publish his juvenile verse. Here, in Poems on Several Occasions, he includes eighty-nine poems of his own, unconventionally eschews praise of his contemporaries, and features several eulogies of The Rape of the Lock.63 This volume again suggests that Pope anticipated an intertextual reading. Ault argues that Pope's imitations of Waller and Cowley in this anthology should be regarded as a single, whole piece, since they are "stated to be by one hand."64 Indeed, the juxtaposition of imitations invites stylistic comparisons, as does the Latin translation of lines from The Rape of the Lock. Furthermore, the thematic consistency of pastorals, love poems, classical imitations, and praise of Pope--including his own "To Mr. Pope on his Translation of Homer"--enforces a reading that compares poems, treatments, and references. Here, too, are poems on reading, notably Hughes's "To a Lady, with the Tragedy of Cato," in which the woman becomes what she reads:
[¶92.] Again, reading defines ideal, or romantic, posture. As this volume shows, Pope used collections to enforce a style of revered reading that glorifies the writer.
[¶93.] Indeed, Pope issued his anthology with Swift partly in order to construct a new authorial persona. This three-volume compilation, the 1726-1727 Miscellanies, designed to confound Curll's piracy, demonstrates Pope's skillful use of the form for not only profit but praise. Prolifically reprinted, it supplied both light and complex material for further authorized and unauthorized English and Irish collections and editions throughout the rest of the century.65 As Richard Carlin has documented, Pope designed the venture to represent himself as amiable. Nonetheless, his rhetoric goes further than this. He appears as a gentleman rather than a professional author:
[¶95.] This rhetoric figures anthologies as social spaces. Even while editing them carefully, Pope and Swift call the volumes "amusements" throughout the preface, a usage noted by contemporaries, while in 1735 Pope deems his contributions to them "too inconsiderable to be separated and reprinted" in his Collected Works.67 Nonetheless, Pope desired some distinctive flavor in each poem:
[¶97.] Pope desires that even his playing should show distinction. In his use of the genre to establish his social persona as well as his poetic identity, Pope begins to transform it into the vehicle that defines literary culture as refinement for popular audiences.
[¶98.] Pope's anthologies did characterize him, but not as he wished (see fig. 6).
[¶99.] Fig. 6 [on page 141 of the print edition] Frontispiece from A Compleat Collection of all the Verses, Essays, Letters and Advertisements, Which Have been occasioned by the Publication of Three Volumes of Miscellanies, by Pope and Company, ed. Matthew Concanen and John Dennis, 52 pp., 19.5 cm. (London: A. Moore, 1728). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This engraving portrays the cloven-hoofed Pope as a satyr who has painfully raised himself above others by means of profiteering publications: Peri Bathous is punningly the basis of a mountain of miscellanies, editions of Shakespeare, and translations of Homer. A monkey pays obeisance to him, indicting those who worship his taste. The words "Hic est quem quaeris" adapted from Martial, Epigrams 1.1 ("Here is he whom you seek"), parody Pope as a public poet and leader. The owls flying about him mock his classical wisdom.
[¶100.] His correspondence concerning these volumes indicates his part in compiling, organizing, and editing them. On 30 June 1727, he wrote to Swift, "we will let the Table alone, & leave room for some new additions to the verses. As to the Poem, which I have to end the Volume, it will take 3 sheets at least; & will take Time till winter to finish it. It may then be published singly first, if proper, I'm sure it will be advantageous so to do. [but say not a word of it to any man.]"69 While retaining a basic structure that accented popular works yet accommodated changes, Pope contrived the publicity and designed the volumes for elegance as well as flexibility. He saved the Dunciad Variorum, which used the same technique of successive changes and was then in the process of being written, for the end of the volume, preferring to expand it rather than clutter the "Table" of contents with new mate
[¶102.] Where Pope is scorned for his love of publicity, Swift is reproached as a gentleman who slipped from his laudable avoidance of the stigma of print. Along with gibes against price inflation, recycling old material as new, and hiding authorship, this letter also charges Pope with a plagiarism reflective of Curll: "It is an easy Matter to keep the dullest Stuff alive by the Art of multiplying Impressions, which consists only in the Variation of Types, Title-Page, Size and Paper. Mr. Curll is so great a Master of this, that I don't wonder at his falling under the Resentment of such People as intended to make a Monopoly of it" (3). According to this writer, there is little to distinguish between professional authors and publishing booksellers.
[¶103.] The increase of anthologies did not escape contemporary notice. A letter in the Flying-Post identifies this growth with the decay of learning:
[¶105.] Although primarily an attack on Pope and Swift, this letter documents that audiences were aware of the way authors could use the collection to transform literary culture into middle-class amusement. Pope is the site of contemporary anxieties about the difference between cheap and elite writing, and about the differentiation of the gentleman-author, the professional author, and the hack.
[¶106.] Despite Pope's desire to control his printed persona, printers and booksellers used his name to sell many compendia. Lintot, as Pope's sometime publisher, issued inexpensive miscellanies that sold Pope as the touchstone of fashionable verse. Eloisa to Abelard. Written by Mr. Pope, for example, a miscellany of melancholy cribbed from Pope's 1717 Works, beginning with two renowned poems by Pope first published there and including seven similarly elegiac pieces, ran to a second edition.73 By combining works by Fenton, Elizabeth Rowe, and Allan Ramsey, and by concluding with Burchet's translation of Ramsay's dialect and an elegy "To Mr. Allan Ramsey, on his Richy and Sandy," Lintot induces readers to compare the elegiac styles of a chain of popular authors.
[¶107.] Lintot was not alone in using Pope to define taste. The piratical Curll also exploited Pope's name in many collections, among them his five-piece, one-shilling compilation A Miscellany on Taste. By Mr. Pope, &c., mocking Pope's use of the genre and his pretensions, while simultaneously capitalizing on his name.74 As another comparative exercise, this pamphlet reprints Pope's Epistle to Burlington on false taste, published the previous year, with Congreve's "fine Epistle on Retirement and Taste. Address'd to Lord Cobham," adding as variations on the form and theme a letter and poem by Theobald, and a fourteen-line poem on vanity, "The Looking-Glass." The clever frontispiece, possibly by Hogarth, caricatures Pope by depicting his stunted figure bedaubing a grandiose, mechanically constructed monument to "TASTE" and at the same time "Bespattering" his own patron (see fig. 7).75
[¶108.] Fig. 7 [on pages 145-46 of the print edition] Frontispiece and facing title page of A Miscellany on Taste, 15 cm. (London: G. Lawton, etc., 1732). Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Putatively by William Hogarth (1697-1764), this frontispiece depicts Pope bedaubing the monument of taste and splattering his patron Burlington, emerging from a coach that the key warns us is falsely advertised as ducal. A painter E, "a standing Proof," surmounts the pediment inscribed "Raphael" and "Michelangelo," hinting that Hogarth is the summit of taste whose painting is grossly imitated by the incompetent and malicious Pope. This satire emphasizes the falsity of Popean values while ironically advertising its own falsity: these texts are pirated.
[¶109.] As the epigraph lifted from Gay's eighth "Fable" announces, this compendium dramatizes literary war for the audience: "No Author ever spar'd a Brother, / Wits are Game Cocks to one another." The Scriblerian editing, probably by Concanen or Curll, debates whose poetry is best but leaves the essential categories untouched. After a querulous note on the prepositional phrase "Of Taste" in the title, the second footnote glosses Pope's initial proposition that "'Tis strange, the Miser should his Cares imploy / To gain those Riches he can ne'er enjoy" by invoking in contradiction the classical authority, Horace:76
[¶111.] -- Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo
[¶113.] Even while condemning Pope, the editor reiterates his reverence for the model Pope imitates and appeals to the reader to judge its use. Again, in the "Appendix" following Pope's piece, the editor reasserts the critical applause of contemporary society:
[¶115.] But, what is most surprizing, Mr. Pope has not once named, nor so much as hinted at, his Patron's polite Taste so well known to all Mankind. (25)
[¶116.] By contextualizing and comparing Pope's work with that of other contemporary and recent authors, this editor perpetuates the representation of literary value as controlled by an exclusive group of poets. At the same time, public evaluations of particular verses are reaffirmed, and applause for neoclassical traditions reasserted. This collection asks readers to evaluate Pope's taste by comparison.
[¶117.] Throughout the century, many other collections featured Pope's verse in contexts that elicit different kinds of critical appraisal. Typical of a highbrow collection is the finely produced New Miscellany of Original Poems, Translations and Imitations, By the most Eminent Hands, probably edited by Anthony Hammond.78 Proclaimed on the title page with Prior, Hughes, Harcourt, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mrs. Manley, Pope provides short epigrams and verses that jostle love lyrics by Sewell, Moore, Suckling, Shirley, and Charles Hopkins, among others, along with "familiar" letters by Rochester, character sketches, and parliamentary debates in prose. In this potpourri of works pilfered from other compendia, Pope first publishes his "Verses to the Lady Mary Wortley Montague," which reasserts his literary mastery in social terms.79 This context implies the continuity of literary standards from the late Renaissance to the present.
[¶118.] Pope also flourished in volumes of wit and prurience closer to the popular productions of the seventeenth century that retain a primarily entertaining or- didactic purpose. Issued in both 1755 and 1756, The Lovers Cabinet: A Collection of Poems contains ten selections including the tenth edition of Samuel Croxall's lewd production The Fair Circassian: A Dramatic Performance.80 Following this, "Occasional Poems. By the same Author" contains translations from Virgil, Ovid's Fastorum, songs to "Sylvia," a titillating rhapsody "On Florinda, Seen while she was bathing," Pope's Heloise to Abelard [sic], and then Mrs. Centlivre's reply, Abelard to Heloise. A Poem In Answer to that wrote by Mr. Pope, followed by the brief poem "A Dissuasive from Marriage. To Chloe," and the separately paginated "New Edition" of The Oeconomy of Love. A Poetical Essay, a twenty-page polemic against sodomy (London, 1756). This context packages Pope's work as part of a tradition of erotic verse.
[¶119.] Pope could also be used as a social skill. He contributes epigrams and short verses to The Muses Choice, containing extracts from "the Works of the most celebrated Authors, such as Congreve, Pope, Swift, Gay, Prior, Etc." as well as "Originals."81 First printed in 1754, and reissued again as late as 1770, the preface of this 1s. 6d. volume offers the collection as middle-class balm to those harassed by the "Troubles, Vexations and Perplexities" of the human condition, a remedy superior to "Bodily Exercizes" like hunting or "Sedentary Amusements" like gambling. It also helps the purchaser set the tone of his or her social environment:
[¶121.] This book uses high literature as common culture for people selective about their amusements. At the same time, readers are invited to evaluate what they read, especially in the first section containing linguistic jokes--for example:
[¶123.] Again in 1764, in The Poetical Tell-Tale; or, Muses in Merry Story, Pope appears beside Prior, Gay, Swift, Parnell, Wesley, and Fontaine in a volume with epigraphs by Addison, "These / Can never fail to please," and King David, "Life's like Tale that is told."82 Like other "merries," this literary "Pill to purge melancholy," as the preface explains, asserts that merry miscellanies cure antisocial passions, among them "Lowspiritedness." Pope could thus be used for both moral and social improvement.
[¶124.] If the collection facilitated the creation of a Pope for all seasons, Pope's manipulation of the form, in turn, helped to forge a literary culture that bridged male and female, classically trained and untrained readers. The early-eighteenth-century anthology served to bring elite literature to the general reader. This, at least, was always the editorial claim, if not always successfully the practice. David Lewis's preface to Miscellaneous Poems, By Several Hands (1726), for example, specifies a gender-mixed audience. As a form of university miscellany published by subscription, this volume includes Latin translations compiled by "a Sett of Gentlemen of both Universities," which should appeal to both women and men:
[¶126.] Latin verse, once accessible only to male readers, proves the excellence of the collection by anchoring it in the classical tradition. Translations open this culture for female or untrained audiences. The penultimate piece of volume 2 models this compromise between traditional culture and new readers. It is a "lady"'s English version of a Latin poem from volume 1 that identifies women with degraded culture by equating them with parrots. It concludes:
[¶128.] Like the teacher who reveals herself as a parrot, this writer exposes even female authors as empty voices echoing male language. In mocking women as cultural counterfeits, this lady's translation represents them as participants in the very culture that derides them. This poem simultaneously reasserts and confutes the privilege that excludes writers like this one from belonging to the literary elite.
[¶129.] Pope's ascendancy marks a shift in the critical discourse employed by editors of collections from idiosyncratic tastes to a universal good "Taste," exemplified by neoclassical verse. In particular, the names of Pope and Pope's friends represented high fashion. Several compilations of the 1720s and 1730s demonstrate this consensus. For example, Thomas Mosse's Miscellaneous Collection of Poems, Songs and Epigrams. By Several Hands, although a national production designed to broaden the literary grip of England to include Irish verse, contains pieces by the same authors as other contemporary compendia. Published in Dublin by A. Rhames in 1721, and compiled by subscription, it vets local verse as examples of high aesthetic standards that reflect English literary fashion.84 The epigraph from Pope's Essay on Man, "See some fit Passion every Age supply / Hope travels through nor quits us when we die," announces the neoclassical principle of universal human nature (ep. 3). Correspondingly, the 175 poems in two volumes always bound together yet issued and printed separately provide "an Entertainment which . . . will please the most delicate Taste," since the poems have "pass'd the Examination of very good Judges"--this despite the conventional epigram from Martial vaunting variety, "Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura / Quae legis hic; aliter non fit, Avite, liber," meaning "There are good things, some ordinary things, and rather more bad things that you read here; a book is not made otherwise, Avitus."85 Like Lewis, Mosse solicited pieces from his literary friends, and he inserted several poems with topical references to Trinity College, Dublin; his subscription lists 308 names, among them several renowned Irish literary families, including Congreve, Bland, and a "John Parnel," possibly the poet's brother.86 Although he avers that "Many of the Pieces are entirely Original" and few of the rest have been collected together, he features poems by the well-known authors Addison, Garth, Tickell, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Welsted, Gay, and Pope, including both the "Description of the Game at Ombre," excerpted from The Rape of the Lock, and the often-reprinted "Epistle to Miss Blount."87 Again, the contents, like Lewis's, provide a sample of the most popular genres of the time: Horatian translations, prologues, imitations of Chaucer and Spenser, epigrams, descriptive verse epistles, songs, and occasional verses, printed with an unusual number of ornaments to highlight the fine artistry of the whole volume (see fig. 8).
[¶130.] Fig. 8 [on page 151 of the print edition] Pages 22-23 from Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, 240 pp., always bound with A Miscellaneous Collections of Poems, Songs and Epigrams. By several hands, Publish'd by T[homas] M[osse], Gent[leman], vol. 2, 264 pp., 19 cm. (Dublin: A. Rhames, 1720/1). Photograph by author from the book in Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. These printer's ornaments separate each item from the next and depict the literary contents as fine art.
[¶131.] Such collections define high culture as neoclassical poetry, vetted by authorities to make it accessible to general readers.
[¶132.] As collections by Steele, Pope, Curll, and others show, by the mid-eighteenth century anthologies packaged fine literature mediated by increasingly professional editors, often authors themselves. Through discussions of literary politics, these editors championed the values of topicality, novelty, balance, and exclusivity, identified as a fine style that required reading literature as art. By collecting similar contemporary works and including poems about how to read, they helped to define the audience as a self-consciously discriminating body of aesthetic judges. "Niche marketing" to particular groups of readers--women, holidaying gentry, leisured urban readers--simultaneously reflected and helped to create a diverse readership who yet sought to acquire general literacy in current poetic values. As their increasingly elegant and simplified layout signaled elite aesthetic values, so their selection of occasional verses adapting classical genres signaled refinement. By including poetic and prefatory material on how to admire and rank beauty, furthermore, they offered readers an easy way to master aesthetic standards and guided them on how to read and to be seen reading. At the same time, they encouraged readers to imagine themselves as participants in elite consumption. Purchasers of these fashionable collections or imitations of them could distinguish themselves by their taste from conjured "other" audiences. By their contents, their marketing of fashion, and their packaging, these anthologies begin to locate culture in the consumption of literary fashion, and to embody and confer on their readers cultural exclusivity.
1 Treadwell, "London Trade Publishers," 99-134.
2 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 73 and passim.
3 Hill points out the diversity of the audience's tastes in Two Augustan Booksellers, 6-7.
4 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 74.
5 Simpson, Proof-Reading, 43-44; Foxon, "Greg's `Rationale' and the Editing of Pope," 119-24, cited in Tanselle, Textual Criticism since Greg, 91.
6 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 193, 206-7.
7 For a parallel discussion of the commodification of culture, and of the self-definition of consumers, see Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry," 120-67.
8 For example, Parnell's "An Essay on the Different Stiles of Poetry" (1713), a version of Horace's Ars Poetica, followed Pope's Essay on Criticism in 1711, although, according to Rawson, it might have been conceived earlier. Moreover, it was reprinted in 1715, with John Philips's Cyder (sometimes found separately), although Pope excluded it from his edition of Parnell's Poems on Several Occasions (1722), and reprinted again in Matthew Concanen's Miscellaneous Poems, Original and Translated in 1724. See The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, 432-34.
9 In Framing Authority, Crane points out the corresponding increase in the editor's power over the reader (168-69).
10 In Before Novels, Hunter reviews the contradictory evidence on the question of female literacy in the eighteenth century, suggesting persuasively that although women wrote less than men because they were less involved in commercial and other exchanges requiring writing, they are generally depicted as literate, depending on their class (69-73).
11 Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth, 42-47.
12 London: James Ridgway, 1796. Such moral preceptors as Goldsmith's Poems for young ladies in three parts. Devotional, moral and entertaining, first issued in 1767, with a new edition in 1770, as well as subsequent ones including Scottish editions (Perth: R. Morison, 1785; Edinburgh: N. R. Cheyne, Leith, 1792), used poetry as pedagogy, adapting it to audiences often differentiated by gender. See also Thomas Sadler's The Muses cabinet; or, delights for the ladies in 1771. In 1785, John Seally produced Belles-lettres for the ladies: or, a new and easy introduction to polite literature (London: W. Goldsmith and P. Elmsley, 1785); George Wright, editor of another fashionable compendium entitled Pleasing melancholy; or, a walk among the tombs (1793), produced The lady's miscellany; or Pleasing essays, poems, stories, and examples in 1793 (London: Chapman and Co.; reissued in Boston), and 1799 saw published The ladies annual register; or, a sketch of polite literature, for the year 1798, advertised in prospectus the previous year (London: J. Hurst; and Carpenter and Co., 1798).
13 Whereas The Gentleman's Miscellany (1722) cost 10s. for two volumes, the highly fashionable Ladies Miscellany (1718) cost half that price, but still far more than the equally slim, low-grade productions Curll habitually issued for between 6d. and 1s. 6d.
14 An ESTC search indicates that from 1718 to 1732, and again from 1770 to about 1800, volumes of literature specifically directed to women boomed.
15 At least two editions of D'Assigny's collection were printed that year. London: printed for A. More, and sold by E. Nutt, A. Dodd, and the pamphlet shops in London and Westminster, 1730. The ladies miscellany (London: W. Hinton, 1731).
16 Shevelow analyzes the way early print manufactured a role for women in literary culture, with particular attention to periodicals and literacy patterns suggesting the increased participation of women, in Women and Print Culture, 29-31.
17 Bond, The Tatler, 7.
18 Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, 266.
19 McKenzie notes the rivalry between different kinds of booksellers as books grew increasingly profitable in The London Book Trade, 26, 29-30.
20 Bronson, Printing as an Index of Taste, 7, 11, 16; Tanselle, Textual Criticism since Greg, 91.
21 Spectator, no. 37 (Thursday, 12 April 1711), 1:152-57.
22 Published by Mr. Steele, 3 vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714). I have examined copies in the Clark, Beinecke, Watkinson, and Huntington Libraries.
23 Hunter identifies it as a "guide book" in Before Novels (275).
24 The Ladies Library (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714), 1:ii-iii. Huntington 303432.
25 Mr. Steele Detected (London: John Morphew, 1714), 5-6.
26 P. vi; Ded., iii. The categories for vol. 1 comprise an Introduction; Employment; Wit and Delicacy; Recreations; Dress; Chastity; Modesty; Meekness; Charity; Envy; Detraction; Censure and Reproof; Ignorance; and Pride.
27 London: J. and T. Dormer, 1736.
28 Probably by Thomas Gent[leman], this preface recapitulates the gender definitions found in Pope's Rape of the Lock and other popular texts for collections.
29 London: Jacob Tonson, 1714. This book was reprinted after its initial publication with a corrected title page and reissued in another edition in 1727. I have looked at three copies, one in the Clark and two in the Huntington. The two copies in the Huntington are the same except for the contents pages: in 147843, these comprise A7 and A8; in 147842, they are A6, A7, and A8. The frontispiece in 147843 is A1 of the first gathering, whereas it is tipped into the earlier copy, indicating that the frontispiece was a significant part of the presentation.
30 The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, 482.
31 See Sedgwick, Between Men, 67-82. For analyses of coffeehouse culture, see Kaufman, Libraries and Their Users, 115-27; also Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability.
32 Parnell contributed four poems to the volume; see The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, 482.
33 Eusden first appeared in another miscellany, Original Poems and Translations by Mr. Hill, Mr. Eusden, W. Broome, Etc. (London, 1714).
34 Dublin: J. Thompson, 1729; the collation, A-C4, indicates that this collection was designed as a complete volume. Huntington 352817. For Gay's complicated relationship with Steele and with "down-market" publications, see Nokes, John Gay, esp. 69-71, 401-44.
35 He had published two pieces in Lintot's 1712 Miscellaneous Poems and Translations; four had appeared in Steele's 1714 volumes, another in Pope's 1717 Poems on Several Occasions, and seventeen in Pope's 1720 Poems on Several Occasions. See John Gay: Poetry and Prose, ed. Dearing and Beckwith. For a close treatment of Gay's later use of popular markets, see Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club.
36 Williams, Points in Eighteenth-Century Verse, 86. The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell notes a partial edition published in 1726 without Parnell's poems in it (482).
37 London: H. Curll, 1727, reissued with different contents in 1732. Clark Library.
38 McLaverty, "Pope and Giles Jacob's Lives of the Poets," 25-26.
39 In Two Volumes. Never before Published. Viz I. Familiar Letters written to Henry Cromwell Esq; by Mr. Pope. II. Occasional Poems by Mr. Pope, Mr. Cromwell, Dean Swift, &c. III. Letters from Mr. Dryden, to a Lady, in the Year 1699, vol. 1 (London, 1727). Price 5s. Lintot spelled his name with an added t in his early career.
40 After Pattison's premature death, Curll issued The Poetical Works of Mr. William Pattison and a collection of Pattison's work entitled Cupid's Metamorphosis; or, Love in All Shapes. Pattison's poems reappear in later anthologies including Pratt's Cabinet of Poetry in 1808.
41 Signed by William Pattison, Sidney Coll. Camb. 1715, addressed "To Mr. E. Curll, Bookseller."
42 This was reprinted in 1727 with Pope's "Court poems" added.
43 I analyze some of this material to make a related argument in "Consumptive Communities."
44 A New Miscellany: Being a Collection of Pieces of Poetry, from Bath, Tunbridge, Oxford, Epsom, and other Places, in the Year 1725 (London, T. Warner). Huntington Library.
45 See Levine, The Battle of the Books; also Nokes, who discusses similarities among the Scriblerians, including Pope and Gay, in Raillery and Rage.
46 See Foxon and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 34-37; for an analysis of Pope's corresponding control of his persona see Deutsch, "The `Truest Copies' and the `Mean Original.'"
47 Ault, A New Light on Pope, 27-48.
48 Quoted in ibid., 29. This advertisement also mentions "Four Songs written in 1683."
49 Rawl. letter 90, fol. 46v., i.e., Bodleian MS. Rawlinson letters, 90 (The Pope-Cromwell correspondence).
50 London: Bernard Lintott, 1712. The epigraph from Horace reads, "Multa Poetarum veniet manus, auxilio quae / Sit mihi," meaning "The hand of many poets will come to my aid." Copies examined are those in the Clark Library and the Mills Memorial Library.
51 Ault, Pope's Own Miscellany, lii.
52 For a detailed analysis of Pope's role as editor of this book, see Foxon and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade.
53 All are for Lintot's books, including religion, history, and "Dr. King's Miscellanies in 1 vol. 6s."; Fenton's Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems adv. for 5s.; The "Earl of Rochester's and Roscommon's Poems, 2nd. Ed." 5s.; "Lady Chudleigh's Poems. 2nd. ed." 3s.; and "Mrs. D'urfey's Poems and Tales." 3s. 6d. The vast majority of advertised works range from 3s. to 6s. with pamphlets about 3d.
54 See Ault, Pope's Own Miscellany.
55 In March 1728, the "last" volume of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies reached print; and in October 1732, the third volume of the series appeared; see Rogers, Grub Street.
56 See Bogel, Literature and Insubstantiality.
57 Printing under the imprint J[ohn] Morphew appears throughout the eighteenth century; among the 1,497 records listed in the ESTC are ten collections of poems and three "libraries," as well as two editions of Anne Finch's poems.
58 The lines are slightly changed and rearranged in other editions; see The Poems of Alexander Pope (Twickenham edition), 279-80.
59 See Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, and Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
60 For an analysis of Pope's invitation to women "to participate . . . in their male-dominated culture" and his use of footnotes to mediate between his audiences, see Thomas, "Pope's Iliad and the Contemporary Context," esp. 1-4. See also Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers, and Cynthia Wall, "Editing Desire."
61 Readers characteristically signed this internal title page, as well as that to the entire volume, as a testament of ownership, indicating that they registered the poem as an item separate from the rest.
62 See Bloom, Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock.
63 Poems on Several Occasions by His Grace the Duke of Buckingham, Mr. Wycherly, Lady Winchelsea, Sir Samuel Garth, N. Rowe, Esq., Mrs. Singer, Bevil Higgons, Esq., And other Eminent Hands (London: Bernard Lintot, 1717). See Ault, Pope's Own Miscellany, xxi, xxiv.
64 Ault, Pope's Own Miscellany, lxv.
65 See Carlin, "The Swift-Pope `Miscellanies,'" 53-55, passim. I am indebted to this comprehensive study.
66 Quoted in ibid., 7: from Pope to Swift, 17 February 1727; Pope, Correspondence, 2:426.
67 Carlin, "The Swift-Pope `Miscellanies,'" 9 (R. H. Griffith, Alexander Pope: A Bibliography [London: The Holland Press, 1968], 1:143); Pope, "The Author to the Reader," in Collected Works (London: B. Lintot, 1736), 2:51; quoted in Carlin, 52.
68 Carlin, "The Swift-Pope `Miscellanies,'" 7; 17 February 1727.
69 Pope, The Correspondence, 2:248; quoted in Carlin, "The Swift-Pope `Miscellanies,'" 10.
70 Carlin notes, "In their correspondence from this period, Pope and Swift describe their incessant search for materials to fill The Last Volume. [Aubrey] Williams, in his The Text of Gulliver's Travels [Cambridge U.P. 1952, pp. 72-76], points out that with Cadenus and Vanessa and a considerable portion of the miscellaneous poems already printed, Pope must have known that the volumes would be fairly large. I wonder why both Pope and Swift labored to fill the volume if it was fairly obvious, even at this early date, that it would be as large, if not larger, than the other two. . . . One explanation is that Swift hoped to make this volume `definitive' for his poetic works to date" ("The Swift-Pope `Miscellanies,'" 12-13).
71 Carlin, "The Swift-Pope `Miscellanies,'" 21.
72 Reprinted in Dennis and Concanen, A Compleat Collection, 1-2.
73 After the titular poem comes Pope's Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (now known as Elegy), followed by Fenton's Florelio, "Mrs. Singer's" Upon the Death of her Husband, Gay's elegy by a damsel to lost love called "A Ballad," and, penultimately, Richy and Sandy, A Pastoral On the Death of Mr. Joseph Addison by Allan Ramsay, with a translation from Ramsay's Scottish dialect into English on the opposite page, entitled An Explanation of Richy and Sandy by Mr. Burchet (62-63) (2d ed. [London: Bernard Lintot, 1720]). Clark Library.
74 Although this is "Printed and sold by G. Lawton . . . T. Osborne . . . and J. Hughes . . . 1732," Ralph Straus suspects Curll because of the "detailed and sarcastic notes . . . a Key, and Congreve's Epistle to Lord Cobham; also much that appears in The Female Dunciad" (The Unspeakable Curll, 294). I have examined the copies at the Clark Library, University of Virginia Library, and Mills Memorial Library.
75 Paulson, The Art of Hogarth.
76 "Of Taste ] Some of our little Second-Hand Smatterers in Criticism, will be apt to imagine our Author ought to have wrote On Taste, rather than Of Taste, as if Of and On had two different Significations. But Mr. Pope has declar'd himself in favour of, and thereby clapt a Gag into the Mouths of all Gainsayers. His hoc volo, hic jubeo is sufficient to make any Expression pass for Standard, and stet pro Ratione Voluntas." The first Latin expression here means "Here I want, here I order," possibly a mistake for "Haec volo, haec jubeo," i.e., "these I want, these I order"; the second means "Let will stand in the place of reason."
77 Horace, Satires 1.1, lines 66-67: "The people hiss at me but I applaud myself at home, as I look at my money in the chest."
78 The copy at Sterling Memorial Library is inscribed in hand, "By Anthony Hammond, Esq. M.P. known as the `silver tongued', 1668-1738"; see Williams, Points in Eighteenth-Century Verse, 87. Williams points out that two epigrams attributed to Prior are here printed as by Simon Harcourt (88).
79 See Wall, "Editing Desire," 221-37.
80 Dublin: Printed for L. Flin, 1756. Sterling Library.
81 The 3d ed. (London: J. Warcus, 1759). Sterling Library.
82 London: J. Fletcher, 1764. Price 1s. 6d. Sterling Library.
83 Publish'd by D. Lewis (London, J. Watts, 1726). Clark Library.
84 I have examined copies in the Clark Library, Mills Memorial Library, and Sterling Library, whose edition has misprinted the list of contents of the second volume.
85 The ESTC calls the compiler Morse, the CBEL calls him Mosse, but in neither of these sources nor the NUC are there any other publications listed under either name for this period, aside from those of a writer of religious polemic who published in York at the same time, and of a Regency poet.
86 See The Collected Poems of Thomas Parnell, 24, 594.
87 This miscellany also includes Hildebrand Jacob's "The Curious Maid: A Tale," which appeared the same year as a broadside in London; see Benedict, "The `Curious Attitude,'" 86-88.
as I have taken the Ladies under my particular care, I shall make it my Business to find out in the best Authors ancient and modern such Passages as may be for their use, and endeavour to accommodate them as well as I can to their Taste. . . . Most Books being calculated for Male Readers, and generally written with an Eye to Men of Learning, makes a Work of this Nature the more necessary. (392-93)
Being by nature more inclined to such Enquiries as by general Custom my Sex is debarr'd from, I could not resist a strong Propensity to Reading; and having flattered my self that what I read dwelt with Improvement upon my Mind, I could not but conclude that a due regard being had to different Circumstances of Life, it is a great Injustice to shut Books of Knowledge from the Eyes of Women.
Our Philips, though 'twere to oblige the Fair,
Dares not destroy, where Horace bids him spare,
His decent Scene, like that of Greece appears;
No Deaths our Eyes offend, no Fights our Ears.
(230, lines 7-10)
Was not this Piece so elegantly fine,
You had not listen'd to a dull design.
Gay, pompous Nonsense had less fatal been
You could not weep, where Nature was not seen.
(258, lines 57-60)
To Dryden's Muse I early Homage pay'd,
And Manhood fix'd the Choice my Youth had made . . .
But since Cleora the sweet Bard disdains,
Harsh is his Verse, and rugged are his strains . . .
Nor let my Rival triumph, tho' I yield;
Her Charms, and not his Reas'nings, won the Field.
Pleas'd with Cleora's Censures, I submit
So fair a Face is sure a Judge of Wit.
Rough are the Lines, that rough to her appear;
Her Eyes confess the Justness of her Ear.
(218-19, lines 1-2, 5-6, 9-14)
. . . spurious Poems daily vex us,
And cannot please, but must perplex us;
While TONSON builds on DRYDEN's Name,
And flourishes in Wealth and Fame,
By swelling Volumes three to six,
And other miscellaneous Tricks,
By stuffing them with Rhymes on Trust,
(Well, Things by standing will get Dust.)Then, pr'ythee CURLL, e'er 'tis too late,
(For Mortals must submit to Fate)
Collect, correct, and eke produce
The scatter'd Labours of thy Muse,
I'm sure they'll make a pretty Volume,
And every Body will extol 'em;
For Fame you'll have a double Venture,
As Author first, then next, as Printer:
So shall you prove by that you've writ,
What TONSON passes for a Wit.But this observe, Sir, let your Letter
Be good as Lintot's, if not better:
As for the Title on the Shelf,
I'll leave that Matter to your self.
The Binding, ay, the Binding tho'--
You know fine Trappings make a Beau--
For if that shine thro' Crystal-Case,
'Twill wound the Ladies as they pass:
And then the Joy, 'tis so uncommon,
Of being handled by a Woman!
Commended almost out of Measure,
The Pride of giving Ladies Pleasure!
Thus happier than APOLLO, you,
Shall gain the NYMPH and Laural too.
(145-46)41
The Bits of Poetry which make up the following Miscellany, were most of them writ at BATH and TUNBRIDGE, at that soft season of the Year, which invites the Gay and the Wealthy to leave the busy Town, and pass their idle Time at those places of Pleasure; many of them by Persons of Rank and Distinction, whom I am not allowed to Name. . . . I shall only add, that when they came out in single Copies, they had the good Fortune to please several Persons of the best Taste, who, I observ'd, were fond of keeping Manuscript Copies of several of them, which, indeed, was the Reason we took the Pains to collect them into this little Volume, thinking they would prove no disagreeable Entertainment to such Gentlemen and Ladies as have any Relish for the Works of the Muses.
"Praise with Profit": Pope and Publishers
But for the Wits of either Charles's days,
The Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease;
Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more
(Like twinkling Stars the Miscellanies o'er),
One Simile, that solitary shines
In the dry Desert of a thousand lines,
Or lengthen'd Thought, that gleams thro' many a page,
Has sanctified whole Poems for an age.
(First Epistle of Second Book of Horace, lines 107-14)
So, Bernard must a Miscellany be
Compounded of all kinds of Poetry;
The Muses O'lio which all Tastes may fit,
And treat each Reader with his darling Wit.
(Lines 7-10)
Would thou for Miscellanies raise thy Fame;
And bravely rival Jacob's mighty Name,
Let all the Muses in the Piece conspire,
The Lyrick Bard must strike th'harmonious Lyre;
Heroick Strains must here and there be found,
And Nervous Sense be sung in Lofty Sound;
Let Elegy in moving Numbers flow,
And fill some Pages with melodious Woe;
Let not your am'rous Songs too num'rous prove.
Not glut thy Reader with abundant Love;
Satyr must interfere, whose pointed Rage
May last the Madness of a vicious Age;
Satyr, the Muse that never fails to hit,
For if there's Scandal, to be sure there's Wit.
(Lines 11-24)
Tire not our Patience with Pindarick Lays,
Those swell the Piece, but very rarely please:
Let short-breath'd Epigram its Force confine,
And strike at Follies in a single Line.
Translations should throughout the Work be sown
And Homer's Godlike Muse be made our own;
Horace in useful Numbers should be Sung,
And Virgil's Thoughts adorn the British Tongue.
(Lines 25-32)
Let every Classic in the Volume shine,
And each contribute to thy great Design:
Through various Subjects let the Reader range,
And raise his Fancy with a grateful Change;
Variety's the Source of Joy below,
From whence still fresh revolving Pleasures flow.
In Books and Love, the Mind one End pursues,
And only Change th'expiring Flame renews.
(Lines 37-44)
From these successful Bards collect thy Strains,
And Praise with Profit shall reward thy Pains:
Then, while Calves-leather Binding bears the Sway,
Add Sheep-skin to its sleeker gloss gives way;
While neat old Elzevir is reckon'd better
Than Pirate Hill's brown Sheets, and scurvy Letter;
While Print Admirers careful Aldus chuse
Before John Morphew, or the weekly News,
So long shall live thy Praise in Books of Fame,
And Tonson yield to Lintott's lofty Name.
(Lines 87-96)
Some Colinaeus praise, some Bleau
Others account them but so, so;
Some Stephens to the rest prefer,
And some esteem old Elzevir:
Others with Aldus would besot us;
I, for my part, admire Lintottus.
(Lines 1-6)Those printed unknown Tongues, 'tis said,
Which some can't construe, most can't read;
What Lintott offers to your Hand,
Even R_____ may understand:
They Print their Names in Letters small,
But LINTOTT stands in Capital;
Author and he with equal Grace
Appear, and stare you in the Face.
(Lines 7-14)
Oft in an Aldus or a Plantin,
A Page is blotted, or a Leaf wanting;
Of LINTOTT's Books this can't be said,
All fair, and not so much as read.
Their Books are useful but to few,
A Scholar, or a Wit or two:
LINTOTT's for general Use are fit,
For some Folks read, but all Folks Sh--t.
(Pp. 174-75, lines 15-22)
Now crown'd with Myrtle, on th' Elysian coast,
Amidst those Lovers, joys his gentle Ghost,
Pleas'd while with Smiles his happy Lines you view,
And finds a fairer Ramboüllet in you.
The brightest Eyes of France inspir'd his Muse,
The brightest Eyes of Britain now peruse,
And dead as living, 'tis our Author's Pride,
Still to charm those who charm the World beside.
(P. 142, lines 73-80)
No longer let your Glass supply
Too just an Emblem of your Breast;
Where oft to my deluded Eye
Love's Image has appear'd imprest;
But play'd so lightly on your Mind,
It left no lasting Print behind.
(P. 178, st. 5)
Mean was the Piece, unelegantly wrought,
The Colours faint, irregular the Draught!
But your commanding Touch, your nicer Art,
Rais'd ev'ry Stroke, and brightened ev'ry Part.
(P. 222, lines 7-10)
Yet by the Muse these fancy'd forms were wrought,
And both are creatures of the Poet's thought.
In you, who animate these lines, we view
The wonder greater, the description true.
(P. 62, lines 7-10)
Our Miscellany is now quite printed. I am prodigiously pleas'd with this joint-volume, in which methinks we look like friends, side by side, serious and merry by turns, conversing interchangeably, and walking down hand in hand to posterity; not in the stiff forms of learned Authors, flattering each other, and setting the rest of mankind at nought: but in a free, unimportant, natural, easy manner; diverting others just as we diverted ourselves.66
The third volumes consists of Verses, but I would chuse to print none but such as have some peculiarity, and may be distinguish'd for our[s], from other writers. There's no end of making Books, Solomon said, and above all of making Miscellanies, which all men can make. For unless there be a character in every piece, like the mark of the Elect, I should not care to be one of the Twelve-thousand signed.68
It was not till lately that I met with two Volumes of Miscellanies (as they are call'd) in Prose and Verse. . . . When I looked them over, and found that much the greatest part of them had been already printed in Volume, Octavo, and that all the rest were either very common in single Pamphlets, or in old Collections, and compared all this with the Greatness of the Price those Books bore, I began to fancy that it was some Bookseller's Fraud upon the Publick, and indeed was not a little suspicious of my old Friend in the Strand. But when I cast my Eye over the Preface, I was strangely surprized to find it sign'd with the great Names of J. Swift and A. Pope. The latter of these Gentlemen, I had heard had been often concerned in such kind of Jobbs, and hired out his Name to stand Centinel before the Inventions of Booksellers; but the former, I had always observed, was very cautious of prefixing his name even to such of his own Works as were published by himself.72
But from Tonson's Miscellanies to Pope's, from Sir William Temple to his Chaplain Swift, is a melancholy Prospect of the Precipitation which Posterity is threaten'd with, both in Wit and Language. 'Tis too well known that the Generality of Readers had rather be amus'd than instructed; and therefore sober and ingenious Writers have invented pleasant Fables to join Instruction with Amusement: But for Authors to tell frivolous Tales, purely for telling-sake, to collect Trifles by Volumes, to deal by their Readers as fond Mothers do by their Children and give them Toys and Gewgaws, instead of Lessons useful for Life, is wicked, if done with the Design to corrupt their Understandings; and if done with no Design, idle and impertinent. (Compleat Collection, 26)
'Tis Strange &c. ] This is a vast deal too strange to be true; and the Misfortune is, every common Observer knows it to be quite otherwise. The Miser's enjoyment consists in hoarding up his Wealth, and feasting his Eyes with the Sight thereof. Our old Friend Horace has assured us of this, almost Two Thousand Years ago; for he introduces a Man of this Character, saying,
Thus have I given my Readers a few plain Remarks upon Mr. Pope's last doughty Performance: I shall now add Mr. Congreve's Epistle to the Lord Viscount Cobham, (On a Subject not much different) whereby the World will easily perceive that this Work falls as far short of Mr. Congreve's, as his Ode on Music did of Mr. Dryden's; His Pastoral's of Mr. Philips's; His Windsor Forest of Sir John Denham Cooper's Hill; His first Book of Homer, of that done by Mr. Tickell, or his Dunciad of the Dispensary [by Garth].
How often have we seen a Piece of facetious Wit, or a Jest well timed, put a Man in a good Humour, and made him a sociable Companion for a whole Night. . . . When a Company has been put out of Humour, or perhaps set in the Hip, by some melancholy or disagreeable Subject . . . some merry Fellow tells a pleasant Story, full of jocular Incidents, or sings a humorous Song; immediately every Countenance brightens with Life and Merriment. . . . So that we see here the Useful mix'd with the Agreeable, which is an Entertainment an honest Mind is best pleased with. (4)
On a certain Poet.
Thy Verses are eternal, O my Friend,
For he who reads them, reads them to no End.
(17)
As for the Latin Copies, it must be own'd it is not very usual to have so great a Number of them in our Miscellanies: but 'tis hoped the Learned will be pleas'd to find them no fewer; and that the English Readers will at least excuse them, since they may, perhaps, have given Occasion to some of the best Things which shall here be met with in our own Language; for all of them, which are not themselves Versions of former English, are translated, excepting the three little Pieces at the End: and I should ask Pardon of the Fair-Sex, that those are not; but they are of a particular Scholastic Kind, not altogether so proper for their Perusal.83
An equal Height of Genius, we confess,
Both in the Pupil shines, and Tutoress!
The Art of Prate is to Perfection brought,
A Woman teaching, and a Parrot taught.
(317-18)
Notes