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[¶1.] By the mid-eighteenth century, poetry was seriously challenged as the most influential form of high literature. Novels, periodical journals and magazines, and collections of prose anecdotes, extracts, and vignettes were attracting multiple readers, as well as popular, "hack," and "elite" authors, or authors who portrayed themselves as such.1 In changing the patterns of readership, these forms also influenced contemporary ways of reading. This can be seen both in the packaging of anthologies and in the discourse in and about them. Rather than advertising their variety or contemporaneity, most poetic miscellanies now alter their presentation and contents to diminish the differences among their entries, and to represent the works of diverse authors as similar in topic and technique. This induces a consistent reading for moral narrative which resembles that invited by novels. At the same time, critics like Samuel Johnson and George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, and booksellers like Robert Dodsley and John Newbery edited multivolume series of fashionable verse that systematized literature by categories ranged as thematically coherent. By packaging literature in specific forms for children, women, men, and gentlefolk, these professionals invited a reading that made English literature the moral expression of a national culture. Finally, changes in the application of copyright law gradually worked to free literary material written in the eighteenth century for general publication, even before the significant trial of 1774. As the changes in the status of authors indicate, the reverence for genre was giving way to a reverence for names, and the burgeoning of literature directed at children and untraditional audiences was working to consolidate a canon. With these changes, knowledge of native literature became an important criterion for social mobility, as well as the source and test of individual morality and patriotism. All these developments shaped the collection into a vehicle for consolidating and purveying a concrete body of literature to a wide audience. The mastery of literature was represented as cultural literacy.
[¶2.] With the results of the Becket v. Donaldson trial in 1774, provincial booksellers finally overcame the monopolistic London firms and broke open the market. They forced through Parliament a decision that released the worksof native poets and novelists for free republication. Now, works from the present century, as well as from the past, could be published in forms that presented a British tradition to rival that of classical antiquity. Indeed, miscellanies and collections of English, Irish, and Scottish verse sprang up to display different local and regional traditions as booksellers competed to define a national canon of poetry and novels.2 Editions of native "classics" appeared in multivolume series, as did periodical miscellanies of earlier literature and historical anthologies. As the debate over the trial demonstrates, indeed, more than merely profit was at stake: the arguments also address the nature and role of literature and bookselling themselves.
[¶3.] The copyright decision of 1774 addressed the cultural function of literature. Was this to be determined by the trade, with its regulations on printing, production, and distribution, or by the public whose demand would stimulate supply? The established London booksellers naturally argued for the traditional control of books by the trade licensed to control them, booksellers, and further protested against broadening the number of licensed printers. They defended the notion of "perpetual copyright" on the grounds that it protected the quality of literary culture, a culture not only intellectual and social, but also material. One speaker observed that unmonitored printing would degrade books by permitting them to appear roughly printed on coarse paper; conservative politicians like Edmund Burke complained that unlicensed printing would flood the market with works as cheap in moral vision or aesthetic refinement as in price. Such speakers desired to preserve the idea, championed from the beginning of the century, of literature as an elite and moral commodity, and of reading as a critical activity.
[¶4.] Against this position stood the advocates of commercialization. Even these men recognized that allowing booksellers without perpetual copyright interests in a stock to print and publish it at will might result in shabby productions, but they also believed that a free market system would correct this flaw and was better, at any rate, than the present monopoly. One speaker asserts this point by noting the difference between books published in Scotland (and, by extension, Ireland and even the provinces) and books published in England. He argued: "It was shameful to allow a monopoly in books; they might as well allow a monopoly of anything else; that monopolies always enhance the price of goods; that being fearful of being undersold by the booksellers of Edinburgh was idle, for no person would purchase an Edinburgh book when he could get an English one, for the Scotch editions were generally incorrect, and not fit for a gentleman's library" (Hansard, col. 1087). By claiming that two classes of literary consumers exist--gentlemen seeking well-produced and authoritative editions to collect as well as to read, and poorer purchasers who simply want to read for pleasure--this speaker pinpoints the underlying point of contention in the debates: the transformation of literature into a common commodity.
[¶5.] Speakers from both sides deplored this commercialization. They believed that it infected not only the appearance of books but also literary standards. One of those who advocated the abolition of perpetual copyright himself argues that a freer market would allow a more reasonable and respectable definition of literary value: "Attorney General Thurlow was against the booksellers; he said, they were a set of impudent monopolizing men, that they had combined together . . . against any person who should endeavour to get a livelihood as well as themselves; that . . . they had purchased copies [i.e., copyright shares] from Homer down to Hawkesworth's Voyages, which, he said, was very low indeed, that Hawkesworth's book, which was a mere composition of trash, sold for three guineas by their monopolizing" (Hansard, col. 1086). By comparing possibly the most venerated author of classical literature with a very recently deceased hack, Thurlow uses traditional literary evaluations to condemn current booksellers for jockeying prices, corrupting values, and pandering to the lowest tastes of the audience. He blames booksellers, not readers, for polluting culture. This paradox illustrates the contemporary conviction that the general public could and would determine reasonable literary value by consensus. Thurlow defines this value as classical, not contemporary, and epic, not narrative.
[¶6.] The juxtaposition of Homer and Hawkesworth encapsulates the struggle between conventional and contemporary literary values. For most of the century to this point, Homer was the model of untutored genius who interwove personal and public themes and tales to portray an ideal picture of the individual in public life. Contemporary critics considered that his characters acted and spoke with decorum and probability, while his plots conveyed a morality both lofty and logical. Not only did his works exemplify traditional standards of style and sentiment, but the Iliad and Odyssey as classical texts had been released from copyright restriction for most of the century. At the same time, translations (often still under copyright) of these works, most notably by Alexander Pope, ranked among the most respected productions by modern authors. Homer thus seemed a fine example of the benefits of a publishing practice that balanced free access to elite ancient literature with the monitoring of modern works.
[¶7.] John Hawkesworth (1715-1773), in contrast, exemplified the midcentury type of literary dilettante whose sensationalistic "trash" excited curiosity and fantasy, and who depended on a "mass" public for survival.3 A schoolmaster as well as editor of the Rambler (1752-1754), he had won notoriety with his highly successful Oriental tale Almoran and Hamet (1761), in which the hero metamorphoses at will to consort with matchless heroes and scurrilous villains in supernatural settings. In his Account of the Voyages . . . in the Southern Hemisphere (1773), to which Thurlow refers, he uses annotated editions of travelogues, including the journals of Cook and Carteret, to portray the Edenic reveling of the Pacific islanders in a fashion widely condemned as indecent. Thus, by urging the passage of the 1774 copyright decision, Attorney General Thurlow sought, in the process of making current literature affordable, to reinforce the evaluative distinctions between high and popular literature, and to restore respect for classical culture. In fact, however, the decision further eroded distinctions already outdated. Excerpts from the Rambler and from Hawkesworth's narratives were to litter the sentimental miscellanies and collections that proliferated after the decision, and, facilitated by the new freedom to mingle revered poets with contemporary scribblers in impressive editions, sensationalistic narratives quickly dominated contemporary culture.
[¶8.] The 1774 copyright decision, new audiences, and new forms hence changed the nature of the literary collection. They encouraged the juxtaposition of poetry and prose, of elite and popular authors, and of past and present literature in a vehicle that eschewed formal distinctions. While previous anthologies had attempted this, "high" audiences were reluctant to buy volumes whose contents violated conventional categories too radically. Now, not only could booksellers manufacture their own versions of the native literary tradition, but they could also blur distinctions of class or literary quality by packaging literature in identically presented, multiple volumes produced as a series. In order to sell these series to a wide audience, they carefully presented them as affordable editions of classics, of the very best literature, in short, of literary quality. This quality resided in style and subject, method and message. In contrast to the early literary collections, these series promised their readers exactly what Attorney General Thurlow and Edmund Burke, in their different ways, desired literature to provide: social morality.
[¶9.] Although the trial itself occurred in 1774, earlier attempts at similar rulings expressed its cultural and commercial impulses and began to shape the literary market in the middle of the century. In the 1740s and 1750s, miscellanies and collections of periodical essays and political pamphlets presented readers with a tradition of popular print as political history.4 These documents were packaged as safeguards of English manners and values; they preserved the tradition of free expression, itself part of the ideological "structure" of the assembled miscellany, which they represented as distinguishing England from the Continent. Literary miscellanies and collections thus portray literature as national history as well as art. Compendia of prose excerpts from recent novels also appear. While serving as cribs of fashionable reading, these also testify to the importance of prose in the collection during this period. In addition, however, publishers began to issue finely produced series of contemporary, indeed original, poetry, which had not been previously printed, and which they had gathered, even solicited, themselves. These worked to centralize literary standards, and to make the names of certain poets famous both as touchstones of modern taste and as examples of the native tradition. These collections sketch the shape not only of a contemporary, flexible canon but of the process by which canons can be formed.
[¶11.] Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), an innovative and ambitious publisher in the style of Tonson and Lintot, issued several ambitious series, like the Select Collection of Old Plays (1744), which ran to twelve volumes, but it is his Collection of Poems that most influentially used the anthology to define contemporary taste. This series deliberately organizes contemporary literature as aesthetically consistent. In constructing his collection, Dodsley reenforced the role of the publisher as a member of the literary elite, rather than a mere businessman, by defining "taste" himself.5 As Ralph Straus notes, by editing his books personally, Dodsley directly shaped the literary culture he was selling.6 Indeed, his Collection of Poems stimulated the production of serialized literary collections bridging "high" and popular audiences.7 A compilation in one, uniformly presented series of respected and skillful poems by contemporary and recent authors, it has been considered the "precursor to the Golden Treasury."8 Issued in six volumes from 1748 to 1758, revised and continued by the publisher Pearch in 1775, and imitated by Moses Mendez, this collection embodied the vision of a central aesthetic for contemporary verse with selections by Johnson, Goldsmith, Pope, Gray, Young, Akenside, and Shenstone, among others. Indeed, its production resembles Dryden's Miscellanies in several ways. Like Tonson's editions, it appeared sequentially: the first three volumes were issued on 15 January 1748, the fourth on 18 March 1755, and the final two in March 1758. Like the compilations of the early century, moreover, Dodsley's collection was, in a sense, the product of a circle of literary friends. Not only did the publisher know many of the poets whose works he included, but he even solicited poems from them for the collection, as well as asking their advice. Testimony suggests that, like Tonson, Dodsley had trouble finding contributions to finish his series despite anchoring it with famous names, since the series was conceived as an authoritative collection of contemporary verse even before the material for it had been gathered. Unlike Dryden's Miscellanies, Dodsley's Collection, issued fifty years later, appeared in simultaneous multivolume bursts--conceived earlier coherently as an authoritative collection, and helped by the expectations already formed for it through the influence of its authors. For decades afterward, nonetheless, like its predecessor, it appeared repackaged as a complete series for new audiences.9
[¶12.] Dodsley's Collection represents the midcentury passion for melancholic, proto-Romantic verse. In so doing, it may seem to violate the traditional tone of the collection, which emphasized physical pleasure, classical imitations, and songs. Nonetheless, despite addressing a highly refined audience and despite its conventional didacticism, as Raymond D. Havens has observed, Dodsley's collection retains the miscellany's traditional promise of supplying light, pleasing, stylistically attractive verse.10 When soliciting a contribution from Shenstone, for example, Dodsley asked for "anything which You shall think proper to appear in" the fourth volume, and suggested as an example his "Pastoral Ballad."11 Poems from earlier or contemporary collections, pirated or permitted, also appear here, like Lady Mary WortleyMontagu's Town Eclogues, Dyer's Gronger Hill, and Isaac Hawkins Browne's Pipe of Tobacco. These volumes feature works by Fielding, Hawkesworth, Gray, Garrick, Collins, both Wartons, Mason, and Akenside, among others, all widely republished in later collections. Many of the poems include long, descriptive passages, popular at the time, that flow into each other and require of the reader an imaginative concentration different from the engagement elicited by the paradoxes and riddles of an earlier age. The fine original engravings of allegorical figures that embellish the volumes further enforce the fashionable aesthetics of the production.12 Reproduced in all subsequent editions of the collection, they evoke neoclassical simplicity set in gloomy, haunting natural scenes, thus bridging conventional and current aesthetic standards. In his "Advertisement," furthermore, Dodsley concedes in traditional rhetoric that everything cannot please everyone, but avers that "nothing is set before him, but what has been approved by those of the most acknowledged taste." Although unlike previous collections, this one groups poems by their authors in the text, authors are still not acknowledged in the index at the end, where the traditional emphasis on a "user-friendly" organization by topic or theme dominates.
[¶13.] A Collection of Poems sets up to be the touchstone of literary taste for contemporary readers. Dodsley's postscript and other comments self-consciously advocate cultural preservation as the motive for this collection: "From the loose and fugitive pieces, some printed, others in manuscript, which for forty or fifty years past have been thrown into the world, and carelessly left to perish; I have here, according to the most judicious opinions I could obtain in distinguishing their merits, endeavour'd to select and preserve the best . . . [so that I have] furnished to the public an elegant and polite Amusement."13 Unlike previous compendia, this collection does not claim solely to suit contemporary tastes with the latest in literary fashion; it also offers "elegance," mediated by literary authority, and presented as "the best" in native literary history. Here, the authority to judge is represented as belonging again outside the publisher--presumably the audience remained ignorant of his interventionist editing--but no longer in the audience, nor in a single poet or editor. Rather, Dodsley advertises his collection as the fruit of the opinions of experts.
The intent of the following Volumes is to preserve to the Public those poetical performances, which seemed to merit a longer remembrance than what would probably be secured to them by the MANNER wherein they were originally published. This design was first suggested to the Editor, as it was afterwards conducted, by the opinions of some Gentlemen, whose names it would do him the highest honour to mention. He desires in this place also to make his acknowledgments to the Authors of several pieces inserted in these Volumes, which were never before in print; and which, he is persuaded, would be thought to add credit to the most judicious collection of this kind in our language. He has nothing farther to promise, but that the Reader must not expect to be pleased with every particular poem which is here presented to him. It is impossible to furnish out an entertainment of this nature, where every part shall be relished by every guest: it will be sufficient if nothing is set before him but what has been approved by those of the most acknowledged taste. (1:1-2)
[¶15.] Despite the conventional disclaimer, Dodsley reminds the reader in the sixth volume's postscript of the authority of the "friends" on whose taste he has relied: he does expect all poems to please all readers because all embody the same aesthetic.14 This Collection hence resurrects an identity between social and aesthetic values, a fact resented by later editors who deplored his favoritism and disputed his chauvinistic taste.15 While collections by other editors eschew what they considered Dodsley's snobbism, they nevertheless echo the central values of his anthology. The literature they contain is either celebrated for the qualities of simplicity, lucidity, and elegance lauded by the "Literary Club" ruled by Samuel Johnson, or, at any rate, positioned in relationship to the works canonized by Dodsley's series. Similarly, editors frame their selections by both historical and aesthetic contexts so that they are seen to offer the reader both cultural literacy, the history of their own culture, and aesthetic pleasure, an elite response. Dodsley's Collection of Poems demonstrates the publisher's control of literary values and the increasing centralization of literary taste.
[¶16.] Although Dodsley addressed his series to ambitious readers of both sexes, other booksellers and critics were conscious of the particular audience of women. Moreover, women were also, whether acknowledged or not, literary producers. In contrast to--or as a development of--the defensive control of women as readers exhibited in early-eighteenth-century collections of poetry, some mid- and late-century compendia seek to fit women as authors into a newly defined (male) literary tradition. Notably, George Colman and Bonnell Thornton's two-volume Poems by Eminent Ladies, first published in 1755, reissued in 1773, and reprinted and revised in 1780, shows particular care in its presentation, indicating the critics' intention to introduce the volume into high cultural context and their caution in negotiating the problem of cultural authority.16 These critics present women as authors of professional stature who bridge old and new tastes.
[¶17.] Colman and Thornton were coeditors of the periodical the Connoisseur (1754-1756) and set themselves up as fashionable literary experts.17 Prominent on the London literary scene, Colman was even elected to Dr. Johnson's "Club" in 1768. As its name suggests, the Connoisseur monitored social and literary taste in a highly satirical, even misogynistic, vein, yet it often addressed a female audience. During the very year that Eminent Ladies was published, indeed, the persona of the Connoisseur teased the future novelist Frances Moore Brooke for launching her rival periodical the Old Maid under the pseudonym Mary Singleton in 1755. Describing a dream vision of marriage, he characterizes Singleton and, by extension, Brooke, as a frenzied virgin, in order to mock women's attempts to publish with prurient innuendos, writing that "An old woman, fantastically drest, then burst into the Temple, and run raving up to the altar, crying out that her name was Mary Singleton, and she would have an husband" (no. 95 [Thursday, 20 November 1755], 576). When no one takes her, "Furious with rage and despair," she tries to cram the wedding cake down the throat of the first man who comes along, who happens to be the author; this abruptly awakens him with a nauseous taste in his mouth.18 Nor is this the only misogynistic text in the periodical. In no. 61 (Thursday, 27 March 1755), the Connoisseur explains women's piety as the consequence of feeble intellect, "since the passions of females are stronger in youth, and their minds weaker in age, than those of the other sex" (1:362). Again in his essay on the "Female Thermometer" in no. 85 (Thursday, 11 September 1754), he discusses the way to tell a lady's passions, and to manipulate her character. While systematizing nature, the Connoisseur argues that "the whole scale of female characters might be reduced" to the "Abandoned, Impudence, Gallantry, Loose Behaviour, Innocent Freedoms, Indiscretions, Inviolable Modesty."19 Such satire invites the women who read the Connoisseur to consider themselves superior to their sex.
[¶18.] As literary guides for this audience, Colman and Thornton advocate conventional, current poetic standards of elegance and natural smoothness. They suggest that readers may find these virtues in the traditional English poets as long as they read them for such effects, rather than for mechanical "beauties." Mocking the alternative inorganic values represented by Edward Bysshe's Art of Poetry, the Connoisseur proposes a series of "Lilliputian volumes, entitled Pretty Books for Children" for poetasters: "It will be a treatise on the art of poetry adapted to the meanest capacities," published by subscription, and containing directions on composition, a "table of Alliteration," and epithets "To be illustrated with examples from the modern poets" (no. 83 [Thursday, 28 August 1755], 2:502-3). In contrast to this reduction of culture, Colman and Thornton advertise the "solid compliment" of their own Poems by Eminent Ladies. These "two little volumes . . . lately published" and handed anonymously to the Connoisseur "by a lady" elevate rather than trivialize the poetic tradition (no. 69 [Thursday, 22 May 1755], 2:409). Like Sir Richard Steele, these editors advertise their literary judgment as, if not gender-blind, at least pure, by avowing that their book represents authentic female literary production. Such claims demonstrate the unity of male and female tastes.
[¶19.] The language that these critics use to recommend the female literature in their volumes reveals the cultural logic of the enterprise. They justify expanding the literary tradition to include women by tracing the similarities between the works of these women and of famous men, and the imaginative debts that male poets owe women. In their advertisement, they equate women's skill with men's: "it is with the highest satisfaction [that] I can assure my female readers in particular, that I have found a great number of very elegant pieces among the writings of these ladies, which cannot be surpassed by the most celebrated of our male-writers"(409). By assuring his "female readers" that they can lay claim to a literary heritage equal and similar to that of men, the Connoisseur confirms the universality of his critical values. The ensuing vision reaffirms these values. Dreaming that he is witnessing a debate in Apollo's court on Parnassus as to "Whether the ladies, who had distinguished themselves in poetry, should be allowed to hold the same rank, and have the same honours paid them, with the men," he evaluates the balance between talent or "nature" and education or "skill" exhibited by each of his female authors. In this vision, Colman and Thornton represent poetic control as the mastery of Pegasus, the winged horse favored by the Muses. While this image suggests that poetry is a learned skill, it also implies a natural strength or talent particularly suited to men. Nonetheless, Colman and Thornton praise women for both courage and control. In this allegory, "experience," skill, and a relationship with revered if not canonical authors constitutes poetical expertise. The long, detailed ranking constructs a coherent set of values by which to evaluate male and female authors, and thus creates a coherent literary tradition.
[¶20.] Similarly, in the preface of Poems by Eminent Ladies, Colman and Thornton reassert the gender-free universality of their criteria. Indeed, the Monthly Review dismisses the collection as comprising "very common" texts, indicating the conventionality of their choices (12 [January-June 1755]: 512). Maintaining that the volume is "not inferior to any miscellany compiled from the works of men," they argue that "There is no good reason to be assigned why the poetical attempts of females should not be well received, unless it can be demonstrated that fancy and judgement are wholly confined to one half of our species; a notion, to which the readers of these volumes will not readily assent" (i). This rhetoric evokes a reader too sensible and discriminating to embrace this prejudice; nonetheless, the editors remark that "the reader will here meet with a great many pieces on a great variety of subjects excellent in their way" (i-ii). Colman and Thornton suggest that while these poems do not challenge the conventional superiority of male verse, they do complement this tradition "in their way."20 By praising the "fancy and judgement" of all English poets, these critics vaunt a uniform native literary culture that blends natural talent and skill. This is the culture that the normalized but refined reader is invited to admire.
[¶21.] In the preface to Poems by Eminent Ladies, Colman and Thornton construct this universal reader by endorsing yet quibbling with previous literary editors. They defend the "equal warmth" of women's genius, women's role as honorable examples to their country, and the variety and quality of female works. This argument for women as "one half of our species," equally capable of participating in cultural production, both criticizes and celebrates the established literary tradition since it partly rests on the approval of accepted cultural leaders: we learn that these authors were applauded in their own time, as well as in this, by such authorities as Cowley, Dryden, Roscommon, Creech, Pope, and Swift. On the other hand, by noting that the practice of publication by subscription meant that these authors, like their male counterparts, padded their opus with trifling works, writing some poems exhibiting a rude wit unpolished by education that degrade the authors' finest pieces, the editors criticize the amateur opportunism of earlier booksellers. Critics are needed to sort this literature.
[¶22.] In its editorial discourse and organization, Poems by Eminent Ladies also documents the increasing power of the author and of original genius as a literary criterion. As in their periodical essay on women's poetry, Colman and Thornton applaud the native talent of women disadvantaged by poor education. The volumes arrange their contents by the authors, who are listed alphabetically, so that the works appear to express a coherent authorial vision. This vision, moreover, conveys an ahistorical, "universal" aesthetic, presumably shared by the reader. After listing the eighteen women whose works the edition includes, the title page supplies an epigraph by Abraham Cowley that pinpoints the ideological spirit of the publication:
We allow'd you Beauty, and we did submit
To all the Tyrannies of it.
Ah, cruel Sex! will you depose us too in Wit?
[¶24.] As the leader of poetic taste and rectitude for over a generation, Cowley serves here to represent the views of general society. With other male authors, whose critical standards defined taste for earlier generations, he gives the collection, as Margaret Ezell remarks, "a measure of instant literary respectability" (91). Although Cowley's confession of surrender seems to articulate the ambition of this volume to supplant male poetic culture with female talent, in fact it supplements the former with the latter. This enterprise is designed to open the tradition to encompass more material, whose universal values assure that it can be sold to more readers.
[¶25.] As monitors of culture, the editors reinforce literary tradition. Colman and Thornton sprinkle already familiar works from early-century collections in all the sections. The final two under Lady Winchelsea's section are "To Lady Winchelsea, occasioned by some verses in the Rape of the Lock. By Mr. Pope" and "Answer to the foregoing Verses," the same pair as appeared in Lintot's 1712 Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (2:314-16). The forty-nine selections by Aphra Behn include items from Lycidas, or A Voyage to the Isle of Love and from Poems upon Several Occasions, including a high proportion of the most popular pieces, like "The Prospect and Bower of Bliss," "The Complaint," "The Golden Age," Love Armed, and The Invitation, familiar from Charles Gildon's 1692 Miscellany Poems. Unusually, the editors identify the sources of their selections, indicating that the audience might be quite familiar with Behn's own collections. The predominance of moral poetry in the volume nevertheless edits Behn's messages of sensual delight. "Sylvio's Complaint. A Song," for example, appears in this context less a "Scotch" tune than a moral warning against wishing "to be a king," surrounded as it is with other moral fables in verse.
[¶26.] Colman and Thornton, however, do add newly popular poets. One of the slimmest sections of their collection features two items by a poet just in vogue and a member of the Blue Stocking Circle, Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806). Another favorite of Johnson's, "Eliza" Carter published her first volume of poetry in 1738, contributed two numbers to the Rambler, and in 1758 published a highly acclaimed translation of Epictetus that had been seven years in the making, issued by Samuel Richardson. Indeed, a subscription was being circulated to produce this translation in 1755, the year of this collection, and Carter was already known as an exemplary scholar. Coleman and Thornton's biographical sketch avows her remarkable "knowledge in the antient and modern languages, as well as the several branches of philosophy," along with "her refined taste, and excellent talent in poetry," praise that serves to stamp the two poems as a blend of traditional and contemporary verse (1:172).
[¶27.] Both poems celebrate the private pleasures of reading through celebrations of solitude. The first, "Ode to Wisdom," was already famous in another context: Richardson had used it to show off his heroine's taste in Clarissa and had drawn Carter's criticism for printing it without her permission.21 Readers of this collection would very likely recognize it from that highly popular novel, which had been applauded even by Dr. Johnson; indeed, the poem accords well with the tendency of this volume as well as of the novel by praising mental beauty and attributing wisdom to God.22 Furthermore, it is not printed in stanza form, nor punctuated with capitals or exclamation points, as it is in the 1762 edition of her Poems on Several Occasions. In the second poem, "To a Gentleman, On his intending to cut down a Grove to enlarge his Prospect," a "weeping Hamadryad" reminds the progressive landowner that the true heritage of classical authors is individual contemplation. The elegantly regular punctuation of this collection tends to subordinate the oral, social character of the verse to the meditative tendency of the whole volume.
[¶28.] Robert Dodsley and Colman and Thornton use the anthology to centralize literary tradition in the hands of publishers. They select and edit material to enforce its similarity, and their volumes are printed and decorated to emphasize their simplicity, elegance, and uniformity. Whereas Dodsley used the by now traditional procedure of booksellers by compiling his Collection of Poems as an ongoing project that advertised the distinctive quality of his "stable" of writers, and thus his own literary judgment, Colman and Thornton, already proven critics, completed their history of female writing as a single, authoritative venture. Nonetheless, both productions balance poetry that criticizes contemporary society for injustice and insensitivity with meditative panegyrics to private spirituality. These books present poetry as a consolidated body of moral perceptions expressed through a uniform aesthetic.
[¶30.] The British literary tradition and its reader were invented by the chronological anthology of the later eighteenth century. According to this tradition, the best British literature shares a distinct character of stylistic propriety manifested particularly by the use of metaphor; at the same time, each example and each historical period differs. To recognize and appreciate this simultaneous identity and difference, audiences must read closely, respond sensitively, and possess an aesthetic education. Whether these historical anthologies defined an English literary tradition that demonstrated Whiggish national improvement or Tory national degeneracy, they uniformly presented the history of English literature as a patriotic and moral commodity, and the cultivated reader of this tradition as the one who can perceive this identity while admiring these differences.
[¶31.] Historical anthologies transform lyrics into public literature. As compilations of native poetry presented chronologically and mediated by scholars, they replace collections of classical literature in translation with a tradition that conveys similar prestige for vernacular verse. This tradition characteristically includes drama and regional works, ballads, and rustic--or rusticized--poetry celebrating simple emotions and domestic situations. Generally, these anthologies confute earlier collections that trace English aesthetics to classical Greece and Rome, and hence emphasize themes of public virtue, obedience, loyalty, and hedonism. Instead, shaped by contemporary praise for simple "folk" purity, historical anthologies valorize the "popular" tradition, defined as a thread from Chaucer to Spenser, which typically leaps over the Metaphysical poets to the songs of the Restoration and ends with ballads, popularized by the Scottish Enlightenment literati in the later eighteenth century. Such poetry praises bawdy sociability and personal feeling, especially loss, intimacy, and romantic and domestic love, that encourage audience identification and discourage irony.23 By scholarly editing, historical anthologies imbue the tradition of lowbrow "merries," "pills to purge melancholy," and wit collections that had flourished since the Commonwealth with elite critical endorsement.24 The format of these collections negotiates the contradiction that arises from selling vernacular literature as a high culture requiring interpretation and scholarly apparatus. By adapting the conventional format of seventeenth-century poetic handbooks, historical anthologies both endorse an impressionistic reading that enfranchises uneducated audiences, and attempt to teach these audiences the aesthetic virtues of ancient verse. Scholarly mediation, indeed, provided both the rationale and the authority to establish the importance of unfamiliar material while redefining "high" culture as native literature, hospitable to women and to middle-class values. The arrangement of verse in historical anthologies, furthermore, suggests that England offers models for its own instruction, be this moral, political, or aesthetic. Anthologies are thus patriotic announcements of a native cultural tradition in which the British language symbolizes style, value, even civilization itself.
[¶32.] Perhaps the first thorough historical anthology was Elizabeth Cooper's scrupulously scholarly collection of largely lyric poems from Edward the Confessor's time to the present, issued twice in 1737 and 1741, but this accessible collection lacked extensive notes. The three-volume The British Muse, or, A Collection of Thoughts Moral, Natural, and Sublime, of our English Poets: Who flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by "Thomas Hayward, Gent.," exemplifies the historical compendium that combines literary and antiquarian purposes.25 An amateur scholar, Thomas Haywood (d. 1779) published a collection of epitaphs running to thirty-four volumes, with a seven-volume index, and The British Muse also contains obscure excerpts from texts now lost. Haywood's friend the antiquarian critic William Oldys wrote the preface that set the standard for scholarly excellence. In this essay "containing an Historical and Critical Review of . . . all the COLLECTIONS of this Kind hitherto published," he provides one of the earliest surveys of the genre of the anthology. Indicting previous anthologies for carelessness, overly edited selections, and the omission of authors' names, he endorses a rigorously scholarly ideal of literary history. He condemns Josua Poole's The English Parnassus, or, An Help to English Poesy, for example, as an "elaborate piece of poetical patchwork . . . fit only to teach . . . the pompous insignificance and empty swell of pedantry and bombast" (xiii). He adds that Bysshe's Art of English Poetry (London, 1702), in turn, despite its fine commonplace collection, mistakenly stresses mechanical rules of versification and rhyming, preferring to teach "art" rather than values. According to Oldys, anthologies ought to improve social and moral behavior rather than supply professional guides for poetasters. On these grounds, he also condemns Charles Gildon's two-volume Complete Art of Poetry (1718), even while acknowledging that Gildon rejects the objection that Shakespeare was "obsolete." Oldys envisions the anthology as a cultural and moral guide for general readers.
[¶33.] Accordingly, Oldys is the first to define the anthologizer as a high-cultural figure with a solemn duty. Like Sir Philip Sidney's poet, and foreshadowing Shelley's Romantic critic as a moral legislator, this anthologizer serves as a sort of historian of morality, practicing a cultural function that requires thestrictest scientific objectivity. Indeed, Oldys's language anticipates Matthew Arnold's definition of criticism as the combination of curiosity and disinterestedness, and Virginia Woolf's ideal of a genderless author:
Hence we have long wanted a compiler, or reader-general for mankind, to digest whatever was most exquisite (the flowers) in our poets, into the most commodious method for use and application; a person, void of all prejudice, who would take no author's character upon trust, but would deliberately review such of our poets as had seemed to expire in fame, rather though length of time, and the variation of our language, than want of merit; one, who had not only intelligence to know what compositions of value our country had produced, but leisure, patience and attention to go through a vast diversity of reading; with judgment to discern beauties amidst the obscurity of antiquated modes of speech, and the great superfluity of matter that surrounds them. . . . In fine, sagacity to discover the gross and innumerable errors of the press; fidelity, not to obtrude the officious alterations of an editor, under the pretence of restoring the sense of an author; and capacity, to dispose a great variety of select readings under their proper heads: All which attributes, as they rarely meet in the same person, seem to account for our not having had one collection of this kind of any great merit and utility. (xviii-xix)
[¶35.] This shamanic role foreshadows Victorian conceptions of literary criticism, breaking with the eighteenth-century tradition that endows booksellers and profit-seeking authors with the task of compiling a collection of literature for a popular audience. While he acknowledges that changes in language distract the reader, Oldys, like Samuel Johnson, maintains both that great literature is perceptible to the good reader, regardless of his era, and that great literature conveys eternal truths applicable to every age. This ahistorical notion of truth implicitly equates the native literature of England with that of classical Greece and Rome, and admits the reader without classical training into knowledge of the refined truths of universal high culture.
[¶36.] The British Muse employs a format that permits impressionistic reading while emphasizing a chronological narrative of cultural growth. It thus promotes the identity of English authors even while declaring that they improve in time. Oldys's preface explains that the anthology was designed to proffer native literature to an audience interested in the traditions of their own language, rather than in the neoclassical traditions that had been stimulated by translations of Latin and Greek verse. Indeed, the preface declares that the compiler "has admitted no professed translations, that this collection . . . might be entirely English" (xxiii). As defined by this anthology, the most prominent native tradition is drama, exemplified by Shakespeare: Oldys boasts that the volume contains "between four and five hundred plays, both tragedies and comedies" (xxiii).26 A close second is Spenser's Faerie Queene, and excerpts from the lyrical works of Donne and Herrick are also prominent. Oldys praises both Shakespeare and Spenser as models of the "flowers" or beauties of the English language. By this discourse, he identifies the quantifiable and separable units of style, the traditional ornaments of rhetoric, especially metaphor, as the essence of English poetic excellence. Books of such beauties, also appearing in the midcentury, promote this ideal of English literature; Oldys similarly instructs readers to recognize and admire such isolated passages. In order properly to appreciate his or her own culture, the reader of this anthology thus need not read for dramatic or narrative meaning, but rather for isolated effects. While Oldys includes dramatic prose, he tailors his excerpts to conform to the other patterns of verse lines in order to please the eye (xxiii). Such presentational techniques reinforce the similarity or consistency between poetry and prose, and among works by different authors.
[¶37.] By arranging the entries under alphabetical titles, Haywood invites the reader to compare the several treatments of the same theme, rather than trace historical development. This format suppresses the dramatic structure of the original text to emphasize stylistic conceits and sentiments. The chapter on "Love"--by far the longest entry at thirty pages, followed by a further page on "Self-love"--defines love as paradoxical, suitable for representation by linguistic conceits. After two quatrains from Spenser's Faerie Queen stressing the difficulty of conquering love and Anthony's ten-line declaration to Octavia that "love I will, / Though all the world say no" from Brandon's Anthony, a simile from Lyly's Gallathea warns of love's ruthlessness. This tonal and topical consistency constructs an ahistorical image of love as an unvarying, powerful, personal force inspiring verses that differ only in stylistics, not in ideology. The chronological order of the entries may imply a narrative progression of ideas in history, but the absence of dates or contextualization suppresses this narrative and emphasizes style once again. This is a literary history commodified into packets for dip-and-skip reading.27
[¶38.] At the same time, this anthology reiterates Gildon's patriotic purpose, "to shew the gradual IMPROVEMENTS of our Poetry and Language" (title page). Indeed, Oldys also avers that he intends to "shew the progressive alterations and improvement of our style and language" (xxiii).28 Moreover, here poetry proclaims peace and proves civil harmony: he explains his aesthetic choices by historical event, arguing that periods of civil calm and national prosperity favor the Muses. This stylistic "improvement," however, coexists with the immutable moral sensibility displayed by English poets. As Oldys explains in the preface, Haywood's collection provides models of universal and eternal ideas, since men are always the same:
I would not derogate in the least from the praise of the more modern or cotemporary [sic] poets . . . but to exclude the merits of the dead, whom themselves have always admired, is so far from being a compliment to them, that it must be an unpardonable partiality in their sense; especially whilst they know, that the old vices and follies of mankind are perpetually reviving, and that the preservation of as much of the knowledge of things as possible, is so necessary to correct the ignorance and follies, and improve the knowledge and manners, of mankind; the great ends of all useful learning, and especially that diviner species of it, poetry. (v-vi)<xt>Oldys recommends the perusal of early native literature both as a way to understand contemporary style, and as an education in moral knowledge. The central "merit and utility" of the anthology remains the moral instruction of the individual through reading in private:Wherever you open it, you are in the heart of your subject: Every head includes many lessons, and is a system of knowledge in a few lines. It is a guide in the actions, passions, fortunes, misfortunes, and all the vicissitudes of life. The merely speculative may here find experience; the flattered, truth; the diffident, resolution; the presumptuous, modesty; the oppressor, mercy; the proud, humility; and the powerful, justice. Youth and age may improve equally by consulting it: The one it directs, the other it admonishes: Whilst it amends the heart, it informs the head, and is, at the same time, the rule of virtue, and the standards of poetical eloquence; especially to those who can discern delicacy of wit, dignity of sentiment, and sublimity of thought, through antiquated modes of speech, and the language of an age ago. (xxiv)[¶41.] By mastering stylistic anachronism and variety, the reader may refine his or her sentiments, thoughts, and expressions, and improve morally as he or she improves culturally. The booksellers' advertisements at the end further indicate that this improvement has social dimensions; they comprise a travelogue, a court narrative, a defense of the theater, a romance, a guide for the "Gentleman-Farrier" with receipts from the nobility, and three political histories. English literature represents universal experience. It, not classical literature, is the chronicle of mankind. Indeed, Oldys asserts that in place of earlier anthologies' "fiction and fancy" this one "has rather preferred what concerns the improvement of real life, in the most considerable characters, descriptions, conditions, manners and events of it" (xx). This represents a move away from romantic or hedonistic verse to moral and material topics like "Abbeys" and "Absence," which allow the reader to dip, skip, and refer to categories with the utilitarian ease of "beauties." Anthologies such as this one are thus designed to educate the reader in aesthetics and morality, in historical particularity and universal truth, and in the idiosyncrasies yet consistency of the English character.
[¶42.] It was not, however, until the second half of the century that critical authorities generally touted "rustic" verse as aesthetically fine, stirring fashionable critics to compile their own anthologies. In addition, the copyright decision of 1774, which facilitated the reprinting of native verse, roused popular interest in the English tradition at a time when audiences were accustomed to the direction of literary experts in mediating their reading choices. These circumstances set the stage for several collections that helped to shape the literary tradition inherited by the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most successful and certainly the most famous editor of "ancient" poetry was Thomas Percy (1729-1811), a poet as well as an antiquarian. Percy's three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) exemplifies the fashionable taste for primitive verse. Percy derived the material for this collection of ballads, romances, sonnets, and songs from the Percy Folio, a mid-seventeenth-century miscellany that contained verse from antiquity to the time of Charles I, adding material by Wither, Dryden, Lovelace, Shenstone, and Glover, and supplementing the collection with new verse in the subsequent editions of 1767, 1775, and 1794. The most vociferous critic of Percy's Reliques did not attack him for valorizing productions of mean literary status, however, but on the contrary for attempting to elevate this status by erroneous historical assumptions and poor editing. It was his authority as a mediator that critics attacked rather than his choice of texts.
[¶43.] Notable among his enemies was Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), an aficionado of fugitive, popular verse who attempted to systematize all English culture by compiling a historical collection of English literary works. After attacking Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1782) for polluting primitive verse with classicized pieces, Ritson published his own Select Collection of English Songs (1783) in which he criticized Percy for editing texts in his Reliques to make them seem intriguingly antiquated. Ritson, as his argument with Percy shows, rejected elitist distinctions in literature and favored ballads as much as classical genres; at the end of his life, indeed, he enthusiastically supported the revolutionary government of France, even during the Terror, although he seems to have been growing deranged.29 While admiring rustic verse, however, he ascribed fugitive poems to educated poets, rather than to mere songsters. Such ascription raises the lowly form of native verse to a level close to, if not the same as, "classical" literature and emphasizes the aesthetic refinement of the versification. Twelve years later, he published another ballad collection, this one illustrated by Thomas Bewick, entitled Robin Hood: a collection of all the ancient poems, songs and ballads now extant relative to that outlaw (1795). Among other miscellanies and anthologies of songs, verse for specialized antiquarian interests, and children's tales, he published an answer to Oldys that replaces dramatic with lyrical literature, especially ballads, to construct a new interpretation of the native literary tradition: The English Anthology (1793-1794).
[¶44.] Joseph Ritson's three-volume English Anthology heralds the moral and mournful anthologies of Victorian prose and verse.30 Its chronological organization and stylish presentation package literature as a scholarly recourse for the thoughtful general reader. Moreover, it favors meditative over dramatic literature. Begun at the same time as The Caledonian Muse, a chronological anthology of Scottish verse, it reflects Ritson's conviction that local traditions shaped poetry into distinctively different literary forms. It also complements his English Songs as the matching half of English poetic tradition, supplying the formal verse to balance the oral lyrics.31 Each volume of the anthology comprises works from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, so each volume represents a revision of or addition to the last, but volumes 2 and 3 are arranged in "Parts" that use different organizing principles. While part 1 of volume 2 does concentrate on poetry of the mid-eighteenth century, part 2 features poetry by women cribbed from Poems by Eminent Ladies (1773). Adorned with head- and tailpieces by Stothard depicting urns, wreaths, and country scenes, it offers the native literary tradition as an aesthetic adventure in simple, accessible forms that largely concentrate on isolated, personal experiences. The beauty of its presentation did not escape the attention of the reviewers at the British Critic, who note:
Setting . . . the objections [to organization] apart, the English Anthology is entitled to much commendation from the correct taste with which the selection is made, for the careful accuracy with which the whole is printed, for the extreme elegance and beauty which distinguish it as a specimen of typography. It is, indeed, an ornament to the English press, and very few who are lovers either of Poetry or Printing will consent to be without it.32[¶46.] Promising no alteration of language or orthography, the anthology combines a historical and an aesthetic appeal by portraying literary history as a collection of aesthetic flowers of undoubted but accessible antiquity. Ritson developed his own peculiar system of spelling and criticized Percy for taking liberties with the texts he published in Reliques. By this avowal, Ritson thus avers his scholarly integrity and reassures his audience of his adherence to a common language. He does, however, delete the emphatic use of capitals and italics, explaining that these are used without a rational principle. This collection of literature is designed and printed as a display item of high culture that replaces the visual clues earlier audiences relished with painterly vignettes: it is both an object and a vehicle of refinement.
[¶47.] Historical anthologies refashion native, popular literature into fine art for new audiences. While defining this art as a tradition of consistently excellent stylistic mastery, they also promote the quantity, variety, and individuality of English authors. Similarly, since these collections embody the ideological bias and the expertise of learned editors, they are objects of refined culture, yet they are packaged as commodities for general, but sensitive, readers. By their format, presentation, and scholarly mediation, they stress the uniformity yet variety of British literature. Such anthologies thus invite their readers to recognize simultaneously the coherence and the uniqueness of their own language and literary tradition. These readers read for refinement and, in recognizing their tradition, become part of the culture they absorb.
[¶48.] Such readers, already familiar with prose literature, bring to their reading the expectation of a moral narrative. While the collections of Dodsley and of Colman and Thornton confine themselves to poetry, they reflect the taste for consistency and contemplative, discursive literature exemplified by prose fiction. Similarly, historical anthologies, although largely dramatic, package their contents as independent "beauties" that exhibit meaning as well as skill.33 By emphasizing the cultural associations and stylistic and topical resemblances among the authors they feature, these books encourage a reading that interprets the material not only as the work of individual genius but simultaneously as sections of a single, long, coherent opus.34 This homogenizing process both mirrors and stimulates contemporary publishing and creative ventures that blur the generic distinctions between poetry and prose. In the process of commodifying all literature into "beauties," these books paradoxically present it as a moral as well as stylistic, commentary. Such a presentation again works to make English literature equally accessible to trained and untrained readers by positioning it as social education.
[¶49.] Culled from various sources, prose appeared in many miscellaneous forms. These include collections of letters, excerpts from periodical journals, vignettes from novels, anecdotes or biographical sketches of famous people, and, from the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, "libraries"or series of novels. Such collections take over several of the functions earlier monopolized by the literary miscellany and the anthology. As accessible repositories of gossip and news that define the important issues and characters in English history and literature, they supply a cultural education to busy, young, or undereducated readers. As compendia of prose genres, furthermore, they offer readers models of ways to write. As reprinted digests of central passages from critically applauded literature, they also guide these readers through contemporary and recent culture, prompting and training them in particular reactions. These books thus direct audiences in how to read according to the new fashion, as refined and cultivated members of society. This fashion invites readers to ignore the linguistic and formal differences between poetry and prose, so that images, descriptions, stylistic ornaments, and sentiments from either genre possess equal force. By sympathizing with sentimental characters, or with the perspective of the narrator or persona describing them, readers can perceive the ideological coherence among texts, locate universal truths in them, and apply these to their personal lives.35
[¶50.] One of the most influential and famous of the midcentury prose collections was "The Harleian Miscellany: Or, a Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Entertaining Tracts" (1744-1746). Gathered and edited by William Oldys from the earl of Oxford's collection of manuscripts and pamphlets, this impressive collection appeared originally in four quarto volumes, calf-bound; it was steadily reprinted throughout the century in different forms, and its contents plundered to furnish material for other collections. The introduction asserts that these materials preserve the English tradition of a free press and constitute a form of accessible, libertarian, popular history: the history of people's opinions and writings, not the accounts of battles and kings that make up conventional history. This influential essay appears in several unexpected places. It even crops up as the first item in the second volume of the bookseller Thomas Davis's unauthorized three-volume compilation of Johnson's work, issued in 1774 as Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces. As it articulates, The Harleian Miscellany linked history and literature: it established for a generation already attracted to nostalgia the idea that patriotism was manifested by a literate tradition, a tradition of writing regardless of genre. This miscellany gave a new ideological justification to the compendia of reissued periodicals that had always been popular.
[¶51.] This ideology helped booksellers to negotiate, once again, the problem of seeming to profiteer from culture. Periodical collections particularly address this issue. In the two-volume miscellany The Beauties of the Magazines, and Other Periodicals (1772), the "Advertisement" even associates the press with the flowering of British culture:
Whoever is in the least acquainted with the press must know, that Magazines and other periodical works have become, of late years, more than ever objects of pecuniary advantage. Of course the book-sellers have often, at a high price, engaged authors of general reputation to assist in forming and establishing such works. To select and preserve what has fallen from their pens in a lucky hour is the purpose of these volumes. How far the collector has succeeded must be left to the determination of the reader, who, whatever he may think of the execution, will no doubt readily subscribe to the usefulness of the design.36[¶53.] The contents include three pages of anecdotes, supplying cribs of significant figures, including Goldsmith and the "King of Prussia." Even the essay entitled "Complaints of the Degeneracy of the Times ill grounded and trifling" dismisses such complaints as private failings in "types" of men, and a justification of the present age. The second volume emphasizes manners and contemporary fashionable taste, so that the book works to define print as the characteristic strength of the British nation.37 As collections of collections, periodical miscellanies promote print as social exchange and booksellers as its guardians.
[¶54.] Periodical anthologies are not the only prose collections to advertise printed literature. Collections of minor works in poetry and prose remained an avenue to popularize novelists, many of whom also contributed to periodicals. Most notable among these is Henry Fielding (1707-1754). During his life, Fielding worked in virtually every genre--plays, satire, poetry, novels, periodicals. Indeed, if the generation following him was to receive his work in the moralized form of beauties as well as in novels, his contemporaries knew him as well by his occasional productions as by his long works, for he not only published in journals but also issued a three-volume compendium entitled Miscellanies the year after Joseph Andrews (1742). The first two of these volumes feature occasional verse; the last contains the satirical novel Jonathan Wild.38 The presentation of Fielding's prose miscellanies indicates that Fielding and Andrew Millar, his publisher, considered the enterprise part of his serious work, despite its inclusion of juvenilia.39 Finely printed and bound in quarto, these volumes convey permanence and prestige. Despite this, Fielding avers in the preface of his first volume that his Miscellanies include work of uneven quality and "various Matter; treating of Subjects which bear not the least Relation to each other." Only the first volume contains the occasional pieces, translations, and lyrics associated with the miscellanies of Lintot and Tonson. Volume 2, however, contains only two pieces: a "vision," a form related to the oriental tales made popular in the periodicals of Addison and Steele but also a classical genre and thus a form of imitation; and a farce, which contains the lively dialogue and satirically pertinent references of the prologues and epilogues featured in literary collections. Volume 3 contains a mock-biography of Jonathan Wild with a "marvelous" tale satirizing travelogues, later deleted. The topic of the notorious criminal--fashionable from Gay's Beggar's Opera, which had stimulated a flurry of songs included in miscellanies--and the political satire of Walpole lend the piece the transitional and allusive quality of a "fugitive" work, despite its length and complexity.
[¶55.] It is the novel as a genre, however, that most evidently takes over many of the cultural functions of the literary anthology. Since novels aimed at the same mixed audience of readers as did anthologies, they employed similar methods.40 As a writer with ambitions to gain an audience spanning both the literary elite and the popular crowd, Fielding especially demonstrates the lure of the miscellany organization. Despite his avowedly neoclassical principles, his novels oscillate between various tones in a fashion closer to the deliberately carnivalesque printed miscellany than to the consistent model of the epic. When, indeed, he abandons the stylistic variety of his earlier prose fiction in his final novel, Amelia (1751), turning to a more rigid and consistent method of interwoven, sentimental narratives, the result is less successful than his other works. His novels exhibit contemporaneity, variety, cultural instruction, and--of course--novelty, all features of the anthology. In both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones (1749), Fielding makes references to contemporary people and books, as well as places, to give his work topical appeal.41 He also interlards his narrative with a variety of different genres: pastoral songs, passages of burlesque description, play dialogues, moral fables like "The Unfortunate Jilt," and miniature histories like the tales of Wilson and the Man of the Hill. While breaking the monotony of the long narratives with stylistic and generic variety, these juxtapositions also blur the reader's generic expectations. By equating colloquial and classical depictions of people and society, this technique explicates high literature for mixed audiences. For example, in Tom Jones when Deborah Wilkins emerges from Allworthy's house to the village, the narrator employs an epic simile comparing her to a kite "hovering over . . . every innocent bird" and follows this with an explanation of its significance that translates or decodes the classical idiom for the reader (bk. 1, chap. 6, pp. 62-63). Other passages of mock-epic analogy similarly model ways in which readers can apply classical literature to life, and vice versa. By juxtaposing ornamental, epic diction and conversational prose, albeit for mock-heroic effect, Fielding provides the experience of aesthetic contrast and multiplicity of stylistic treatments in the fashion of the literary anthology.
[¶56.] Fielding was clearly aware of the similarity between the novel and the literary collection. In Tom Jones, he introduces himself to the reader with the traditional metaphor of the poetic miscellany:
An Author ought to consider himself, not as a Gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary Treat, but rather as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their Money. In the former Case, it is well known, that the Entertainer provides what Fare he pleases. . . . Now the contrary of this happens to the Master of an Ordinary. Men who pay for what they eat, will insist on gratifying their Palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if every Thing is not agreeable to their Taste, will challenge a Right to censure, to abuse, and to d--n their Dinner without Controul.42[¶58.] Fielding's attitude as caterer to the public is closer to that of the publisher than to the traditional role of author, even in the aftermath of the Grub Street attack on the prestige of authorship. To provide varied fare to please "all persons," no matter how idiosyncratic their tastes, who have put up "their Money," Fielding announces his contents with chapter titles that advertise variety, just as literary collections include "tables" of contents (a pun not lost on Fielding) to attract finicky readers. Even as Fielding reiterates this discourse, however, he flatters the "sensible reader" who, "though most luxurious in his taste," will not demand more variety than "HUMAN NATURE" offers. Indeed, Fielding proposes that his novel supplies both variety and uniformity in its capacity to combine many different kinds of description or narrative: "nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in Human Nature, tho' here collected under one general name, is such a prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject." While conjuring a reader who peruses literature for moral reasons, Fielding also defines "variety" by subject rather than by genre. All literature, all variety, and food for all tastes is "collected" in this anthology of prose. Fielding's readers are distinguished as part of a uniform moral culture--one taste--rather than as disparate and diverse individuals.
[¶59.] Fielding's novels also define the reader and his or her method of reading both books and life as cultivated, yet commonsensical. Joseph Andrewsprefaces its narrative with a theoretical justification of the genre on classical grounds.43 By associating prose with the "comic epic poem," Fielding elevates readers of the novel to participants in high literary culture who derive the same quality of aesthetic and moral experience from prose as from classical literature. Tom Jones also contains discussions of aesthetic values, authorial procedures, and the role of literature that echo the treatises and poems on writing, translation, and reading so prominent in poetic collections. In Tom Jones, Fielding even mentions his "commonplace" source of anecdotes, laughing at the arbitrary rigidity such categorizations entail (bk. 6, chap. 9, p. 281).44 In the opening chapter of the first book, Fielding's narrator quotes Pope's couplet from the Essay on Criticism to illustrate his contention that "the excellence of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the manner of dressing it up": "True wit is nature to advantage drest, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well exprest" (1.1.52). While evoking the poetic authority of Pope to elevate his own claims of authorial power, Fielding here highlights the role of aesthetic or stylistic control in the presentation of reality. According to this comparison, prose exhibits the same literary skill as poetry, and readers thus attain the same kind of pleasure and profit from it. Such language directs readers to view this prose as an articulation of the same culture as Pope's poetry.
[¶60.] Prose collections also provided a form for instant republication of popular works. One novel that exemplifies the symbiosis between fashion and publication is the sentimental cult success, Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771). Like Fielding, Mackenzie desired to win both audiences: elite readers who viewed sentiment with as much skepticism as approval, and less critical readers who enjoyed the emotional fix of free feeling. His episodic method allowed him to negotiate these contrary ideologies while it also propelled the novel into furious republication.45 Although The Man of Feeling itself exhibits the flaws of this double ambition in its unstable irony and unfocused narrative, it provided a rich series of incidents that were republished in a variety of miscellanies and collections. The chapter depicting Harley's pity at the madness of a distraught lover, entitled "He visits Bedlam--The distresses of a daughter," and "The Misanthropist" episode satirizing Hume were particularly popular, as was "The Man of Feeling in love" and "The Man of Feeling jealous," which includes "Lavinia," a pastoral song. These incidents appear reprinted in The Beauties of Mackenzie, in cheap sheafs of sentimental incidents lifted from his novels and matched with sentimental poems, and in anthologies of sentimental novels, like Leigh Hunt's Classic Tales (1806).46 Indeed, this form of publication may have stimulated the fad for severed scenes of sentiment from other works like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and thus influenced the form of the novel during this period. These collections provided accessible fashion to readers ignorant of classical culture but adept at sympathetic response (see fig. 9).
[¶61.] Fig. 9 [on page 180 of the print edition] Frontispiece and title page of Sterne's Witticisms, or Yorick's Convivial Jester, Jeffrey Hamet O'Neal (1763-1772), dr. John Lodge (op. 1782-1796) sculp., 118 pp., 18 cm. (London: A. Milne, 1782). Courtesy of the Newberry Library. The frontispiece portrays Yorick from Sterne's Tristram Shandy reading jokes aloud from the very book the reader is holding, to the admiration of the gentry assembled in the garden, one of whom declares, "That's a good one." The adoring dog, the urn, the flask of wine, the natural setting, and the smiles of the audience indicate the sentimental context, while the subscription "Yorick in Clover" suggests that buyers can enjoy similar social success if they purchase this book. The columns of authors' names on the title page advertise the scope and quality of the jests.
[¶62.] The popularity of novels and periodicals stimulated compilations that presented prose as equally essential for moral education as poetry. By emphasizing their exemplary and didactic qualities--a strategy that had been well employed by Defoe in his prefaces to Moll Flanders and Roxana, by Richardson, and by Fielding--late-eighteenth-century booksellers, echoing the popular sentimental philosophy of the time, insisted that the sympathetic and engaged reading of narrative "histories" taught readers to follow virtue. Both the material in prose literature and the way it was read were thus represented as vital to cultural education. Whereas Select Novels, a two-volume collection of previously printed romantic tales issued in 1720, like Croxall's six-volume Select Collection of Novels (1722), is advertised as merely "entertaining" and inexpensive, The Narrative Companion and Entertaining Moralist (1789) bills its contents as instructive: its subtitle reads, Being a selection of Histories, Novels, Tales, Fables, Essays, Dreams, Etc. Etc. From the writings of Johnson, Goldsmith, Hawkesworth, Smollett, Colman, Shenstone, Sterne, Aikin, More, Franklin, and Others. Intended to Strengthen and Improve the Mind as well as Give Energy and Fortitude to Moral Conduct.47 This book characterizes prose literature as an avenue to cultural literacy:
The merits of the writers whose works have furnished the following selections are so well known and universally acknowledged, as to preclude the necessity of any other remark on the present occasion, than that as they wrote to the understanding as well as to the heart, so the TALES, NOVELS Etc. here extracted from them are not only agreeably written, but inculcate the universal system of BENEVOLENCE and VIRTUE. . . . [B]y blending the airy sallies of the Imagination with the sober dictates of Wisdom, the Compiler hopes he will be found to have produced a not unpleasing medley; the professed design of which is to give that strength and fortitude to the moral conduct of the rising generation, which are so essential to national and individual happiness.48[¶64.] This pedagogical rhetoric claims social merit for sentimental literature; itprovides universal morality parallel to that exhibited in poetry. Although the collection contains Sterne's story of "LeFevre," and "Maria," and Goldsmith's "Fortitude," most of the contents in fact derive from the Adventurer, the Gentleman's Magazine, the Connoisseur, Beaumont's Moralities, the Annual Register, and the World. In contrast, An Historical Miscellany, part of a spate of pedagogical anthologies in the 1760s and 1770s, advertisesprose reading in historical works as "beneficial instruction."49 Nonetheless, this anthology also presents knowledge as rhetorical mastery. Conceived as a complement to the mixed-genre Moral Miscellany and the later Poetical Miscellany, it mainly contains historical speeches--literary models of civic virtue in action--that are designed "to instill into young minds, just and liberal sentiments; to form, and to improve their taste and sensibility; and to inspire them with a generous emulation to excel" (advertisement). Its rival, The Historical Mirror, or Biographical Miscellany, also "For the Instruction and Entertainment of Youth," similarly contains "striking SENTIMENTS" as well as tales.50 This anthology also teaches readers social behavior and aesthetic values. By the end of the century, prose merited extraction and combination with poetry as a vehicle of morality, refinement, and culture.
[¶65.] The popularity and increasing prestige of prose literature served editors and booksellers well. Since eighteenth-century novels required long periods of time to finish, and since volumes of collected periodical runs were bulky and diffuse, extracts that selected only the best or most useful parts for quick perusal appealed to many readers. This audience included children, who could master prose more easily than poetry, and adults eager for the latest moral literature but short of time to spend finding it themselves. By excerpting short passages from long works, moreover, booksellers provided an alternative way of achieving cultural literacy.
[¶66.] As the power of publishers and booksellers increased, the mid-eighteenth century saw the proliferation of systematized volumes of historical as well as contemporary literature. Collections of poetry and of prose organized to highlight aesthetic skill presented English literature as a body of work with an identifiable aesthetic that appealed to general readers who recognized refinement. In their presentation, prefaces, and production methods, these volumes induced readers to peruse a literature systematically edited by experts, and to find within différance similarity. These readers were invited to identify their country's culture with themselves. No longer did mastery of English language and literature require a comparative study of genre and style; rather, it entailed understanding the continuity of elegance, simplicity, sincerity, and regularity in the style of all the best poets, and identifying their consistent advocacy of moral purity. Arranged systematically, literature was national culture.
Notes
1 Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines.
2 See Feather, "The English Book Trade and the Law," 57-65; also "The Publishers and the Pirates" and The Provincial Book Trade. Also see Bonnell, "Bookselling and Canon-Making."
3 Hawkesworth was a friend of Joseph Warton and Dr. Johnson, and produced editions of Swift's poems and letters (1754-1755, 1761), so he was an intimate of the contemporary literary elite. For an analysis of the shift from the "gentleman author" to the professional, see Ferdinand, "Benjamin Collins," 116.
4 Downie argues in "Periodicals and Politics" that midcentury periodicals required governmental subsidies to survive, and that even the Spectator had ideological dimensions allied to the status quo (45-61, esp. 58-59).
5 For an analysis of the changes in the social role of the bookseller, see Benedict, "`Service to the Public.'" This article includes an appendix listing the contents of the publishing bookseller Creech's collection, Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (1791).
6 Straus, Robert Dodsley, 110. See Tierney, The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley.
7 A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands (London: J. Hughes, For R. and J. Dodsley, 1763).
8 Straus, Robert Dodsley, 101.
9 Plenty of imitative "supplements" also appeared, notably The Poetical Calendar, 12 vols. (1763); A Collection of the most esteemed Pieces of Poetry, by Richardson and Urquhart (1766), with a 2d ed. in 1770, edited by Moses Mendez; and A Collection of Poems . . . by Several Hands, 2 vols. for George Pearch in 1768, expanding to 4 vols. in 1770, with new editions in 1775 and 1783. See Forster's Supplements to Dodsley's Collection of Poems for the contents. Jane Austen sold "Dodsley's Poems" for 10s. in 1801 (no. 37, Thursday, 21 May 1801; Jane Austen's Letters, 133).
10 Havens, "Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century." Havens criticizes Dodsley's collection for the shallow didacticism of its contents, but this is characteristic of the form.
11 Straus, Robert Dodsley, 118.
12 Straus notes that Gray wrote to Walpole about the original frontispiece of the Graces and the poor paper; Dodsley replaces the former with an allegorical vignette (ibid., 104) that may have been designed by Daniel Bond and engraved by Charles Grigman; thanks to John Ross and Donald Kerr. It is notable also that Shenstone wished his changes in The Schoolmistress had been incorporated into the first edition.
13 Postscript to vol. 6 (1782) signed R. Dodsley. The 1775 edition has fewer notes, but some of these are preserved in 1782 text, identifying poetic dates and references.
14 "Little more need be added, than to return my thanks to several ingenious friends, who have obligingly contributed to this Entertainment. If the reader should happen to find, what I hope he seldom will, any pieces which he may think unworthy of having been inserted; as it would ill become me to attribute his dislike of them to his own want of Taste, so I am too conscious of my own deficiencies not to allow him to impute the insertion of them to mine" (6:333).
15 See Dodsley's Collection, 3d ed. A Collection of Poems in Two Volumes, By Several Hands (Dublin: P. Wilson, J. Exshaw, J. Esdall, R. James, S. Price, and M. Williamson, 1751). In the advertisement, this editor remarks that "as the English Editor, who collected these Poems, enjoyed the conversation and acquaintance of their Authors, it is probable his good Nature sometimes over-ruled his Judgment, and that he printed some Pieces rather to gratify the Desires of others than his own Taste."
16 London: R. Baldwin, 1755. I have looked at editions in the Sterling Library, Huntington Library, and the British Library. The version of 1773, "A New Edition," is identical to the first except for the claim "Selected, with an Account of the Writers by G. Colman and B. Thornton, Esqrs." Sterling Library.
17 See Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club, 32-61; also Rizzo, "Bonnell Thornton," 339, passim.
18 "The Connoisseur, By Mr. Town, Critic, and Censor-General," 2 vols. (London: R. Baldwin, 1755-1756).
19 1:511-16. See Castle, "The Female Thermometer," for an analysis of the persistence and cultural dimensions of this image.
20 Ezell maintains that Colman and Thornton recognize a different tradition for female poets as indebted to nature, not education, but this reading does not take their prefatory rhetoric into account; see Writing Women's Literary History, 69-74, 91.
21 See Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson. Thanks to Peter Sabor.
22 Myers, The Bluestocking Circle, 172.
23 See Booth, The Experience of Songs, esp. 7, 16, 21. Mason points out the "unique relationship" of the primarily oral and performative genre--which could circulate among the illiterate--to the printed page in "Songs: Mixing Media," esp. 252-53, 268-69.
24 Fowler analyzes the persistence of collections such as Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany in A Literary History of the Popular Ballad; see also chap. 1, n. 98.
25 London: F. Cadogan and J. Nurse, 1738. Sterling Library. This was republished in 1740 as The Quintessence of English Poetry: Or, a Collection of all the Beautiful Passages in our Poems and Plays: From the Celebrated Spencer . . . (London: O. Payne): the new title identifies Spenser as the original source of "modern" English literary culture (Sterling Library).
26 As Taylor observes in Reinventing Shakespeare, Tonson and Dryden together had promoted Shakespeare's reputation in the Restoration and first decades of the eighteenth century (52-53).
27 For a detailed analysis of books of "beauties," see Benedict, "The `Beauties' of Literature."
28 Printed literature inevitably reflected or embodied current political debates during this time, especially debates about the character of the nation. See Spector, Political Controversy, and Colley, Britons.
29 Davis, Thomas Percy, 279-80.
30 "Volume the First" appeared in 1793; the subsequent two volumes appeared the following year (London: C. Clarke for T. and J. Egerton). Copies examined are from the Newberry Library and Sterling Memorial Library.
31 Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 1:112.
32 British Critic 4 (September 1794): 229-31; quoted in Bronson, Joseph Ritson, 1:186.
33 In A Colonial Southern Bookshelf, Davis notes that New World settlers read a great deal of drama (94-100).
34 Barrell and Guest, "On the Use of Contradiction."
35 Darnton describes a similar way of reading in "Readers Respond to Rousseau," in The Great Cat Massacre, 215-56.
36 The Beauties of the Magazines, and Other Periodicals. Selected for a Series of Years: consisting of Essays, Moral Tales, Characters, and the Fugitive Pieces, in Prose; By the most eminent Hands; viz. Colman, Goldsmith, Murphy, Smollet, Thornton, &c., 2 vols. (London: Richardson and Urquhart, 1772).
37 The volumes contain many excerpts from Gray's Inn Journal, October 1752-October 1754; 2 vols. by [Arthur] Murphy, and by [Thomas?] Gordon.
38 Fielding, Miscellanies, 3 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1743): this went into a second edition that year. See also the Wesleyan editions of the first two volumes.
39 Millar published a revised Jonathan Wild in 1754; see Varey, Henry Fielding, 135-36.
40 Hunter analyzes in detail the relationships among ephemera, topical publications, and the novel in Before Novels, while Mayo's earlier work, The English Novel in the Magazines, takes the story into the end of the century by analyzing the reproduction of incidents from novels in periodicals.
41 Watt, The Rise of the Novel.
42 Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. 1, chap. 1, p. 31. Battestin glosses the following specification of dishes as a satire on public extravagance.
43 See Bond, "Representing Reality."
44 See chap. 1, n. 23.
45 Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability.
46 See Benedict, "Literary Miscellanies."
47 The Narrative Companion and Entertaining Moralist (London: Joseph Wenman, 1789), vii-viii. British Library.
48 Select Novels, 2 vols. (London: M. Wellington, and sold by A. Bettesworth, 1720), advertisement. Newberry Library.
49 London: T. Cadell, 1771. Advertisement. British Library.
50 London: J. Bew, 1775. British Library.