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[¶1.] By the last third of the eighteenth century, booksellers were no longer addressing a relatively few, elite readers but a wide, mixed audience including merchants, professionals, children, and urban servants, as well as traditional audiences. Whereas early-eighteenth-century audiences had been conjured as part of the literati, these readers, like midcentury audiences, were advised in literary taste by professional editors and reviewers who often published collections themselves, like Ralph Griffiths of the Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal. The discourse these advisers employ, however, changes. Rather than appealing to readers' common aesthetic sense to persuade them to concur in expert judgments, indeed to justify those judgments, these reviewers evoke moral categories to exhort readers to read self-consciously, for personal improvement. These editors are moral guides, and their students are those who wish to learn how to read properly.
[¶2.] Literary collections offered readers in the late eighteenth century a cultural literacy constructed of a complex web of several different skills and kinds of information, both traditional and new, or newly shaped. Continuing to practice niche marketing, editors and booksellers simultaneously defined specific audiences and uses for literature and issued books designed to cross these divisions. Notably, John Newbery and others designed books for children that took over some of the socializing functions, including moral education, of the school and home.1 In addition, editors continued to shape literary collections to feed midcentury nationalism by offering readers literary history as knowledge of their own culture.2 Like seventeenth-century courtesy books, anthologies, dictionaries, anecdote collections, and some poetic anthologies instruct readers in conversational facility, listing popular topics and hinting at successful techniques of delivery. Literary handbooks extract passages from native poetry in order to instruct readers in composition and recognition, as books of "beauties" excerpt critically revered texts that model morally suasive effects or sentiments. Several anthologies include historical as well as poetical passages in order to educate youth in political concepts. Whether designed for school or private instruction, they provide moral and social guides for culturally ambitious readers.
[¶3.] Despite some religious variations, these books define English culture in Protestant style as moral discipline: the training of the mind and heart to bow to the dictates of conscience, God, or society. They teach not so much what to read as how to read: for meaning, not beauty. Correspondingly, certain authors and works reappear as representative of moral excellence, including Milton's Paradise Lost in excerpts, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," Addison's Letter from Italy, prayers by Addison and Pope, as well as Pope's "Ode to Music" and passages from The Rape of the Lock, excerpts from Young's Night-Thoughts, Parnell's The Hermit, excerpts from Thomson's Seasons, Collins's oriental tales and odes, moral verse by Mason and Mallet, tales by Whitehead, Tickell, and Gay, and occasional verses by Goldsmith, Prior, and Otway, in addition to excerpts from Shakespeare following the publication of Samuel Johnson's edition in 1765. Despite highlighting authorial names on their title pages, until the century's last decade most of these books do not supply biographical or critical information. Although many of these poems had traditionally served to exemplify generic mastery, in these collections the editors do not distinguish at all among genres: dramatic speeches, lyrics, folktales, and meditative verses juxtapose one another without visual or editorial distinction. Indeed, these books uniformly print their pages with only the thinnest of printer's rules separating the items, so that each passage follows on the former in nearly unbroken succession. Both the material selected and its presentation thus define literary culture as the record of a consistent, accessible moral sensibility: these poems become examples of the trials of self-knowledge. By training themselves to experience a parallel moral response as they read this record, purchasers demonstrate their internal culture.
[¶5.] The new pedagogical anthologies of the late century use printing traditions from the last hundred years to package reading and writing as moral improvement. Many late-century anthologies revive the seventeenth-century tradition of pragmatic publications directed to women. Using a format familiar from cookbooks, they catalog their contents for easy access and shape the rhetoric of conduct literature to pedagogical purposes, advertising moral improvement for women and their children. Already successful were such volumes of household hints as The Ladies Cabinet, categorized "Under three general Heads" with "A Particular Table to each Part." Addressed to ambitious readers, "The Industrious improvers of Nature by Art; especially the virtuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of this Land," this tiny volume is embellished with an ornamental headpiece and red lettering to attract the eye.3 More comprehensive female "companions" trained women in gentility as well as housekeeping. The Accomplish'd Female Instructor: Or, A very useful Companion for Ladies, Gentlewomen, and Others, for example, teaches courtesy in part 1 and cleaning in part 2:
Part I. Treating of Generous Breeding and Behaviour; Choice of Company. Friendship; the Art of Speaking well, Directions in Love, Carriage in Company, Conversation, Affability, Courtesy and Humility; the mystery of Eloquence. Of suitable Recreations, Modesty, Chastity, Religion, Charity, Compassion, Contentment of Mind, Devotion and Prayer.4
[¶7.] Part 2 teaches cooking, dyeing, "physick," and "rare Experiments for Diversion." Its frontispiece shows an elegantly dressed woman reading in her boudoir amid commodities in the cabinets surrounding her and on the table of comfits and sewing things before her, but no other books. Indeed, this companion prefers to teach its audience how to do tricks "which to the Ignorant will seem a kind of conjuration," including only very short, cautionary tales as "literature."
[¶8.] Conduct literature for women uses a similar format. In the same year that Samuel Richardson published Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded, the second edition of The Lady's Companion advertises "DIRECTIONS, how to Obtain all Useful and Fashionable Accomplishments suitable to the SEX," specifically housewifery and cooking, yet the book uses the running title of "The Whole Duty of Woman" and contains chapters on piety and behavior, only coming to "Graveis, Soops, Broths, Pottages" at the end.5 Its daunting list commingles connubial and culinary duties but omits pleasure and literature. In view of texts like these, it is hardly surprising that a form offering light and pleasurable reading for women should flourish at the same time. Yet the topics here named closely follow those which appear in literary collections, although with a different moral freight. Whereas conduct manuals define such concepts as vanity, female friendship, and the role of the wife according to rigid and idealistic rules, literature in collections for women provides verses that celebrate, often ambiguously, female power.
[¶9.] One "companion" explicitly distinguishes reading for pleasure from reading for morality while itself actually mimicking the most popular form of female reading. Addressed "To the Right Virtuous and Honourable the Ladies of GREAT BRITAIN," this Companion for the Ladies-Closets: Or, the Life and Death of the Most Excellent the Lady _
[¶11.] While condemning light reading as equivalent to embellishment, this editor applauds the moral conversation of women. As in Steele's Ladies Library, which contains detailed instructions on reading and writing, verbal skills, including judicious reading, endow the reader with moral attraction and social power. By midcentury booksellers were using this rhetoric to convince women to buy literature for their children: the equation of reading with moral training bridges generations and endows children's anthologies with general appeal.7
[¶12.] Overtly pedagogical literature also helps to shape the presentation of literature for children. In order to elevate their class associations, early-eighteenth-century pragmatic guides to writing urge artistic excellence. Whereas guides to eloquence and some courtesy books establish the verbal formulas that signal "politeness" and thus elite culture, writing manuals establish the visual correlative of these signals by identifying specific scripts with specific topics and audiences. Charles Snell's Ars Illucens Luso, a popular and comprehensive writing book, promises to teach the reader an "Easy, Genteel, and Useful Way of Writing" and supplies examples of letters that match calligraphic style to topic: a clear script is used to combine courtesy and business, whereas a more cursive one is used to address "The Ladies."8 Although such distinctions between workmanlike secretary's hands and more aristocratic scripts were conventional in manuscript, once transferred to print culture these styles reproduce the literary as well as visual distinctions between manuscript and printed productions. The contents of such writing books perpetuate these connotations. Maxims and mottoes illustrate a variety of firm, large lettering styles. Clarity and certainty of thought are thus identified with clarity of presentation. Such virtues are those offered to middle-class readers in printed anthologies.
[¶13.] This conflation of subject and style is not accidental. In the opening panegyric to the "Art of the Pen," Peter Motteux praises the "art" of writing as both an artistic and an intellectual accomplishment, and, furthermore, as a divine gift that preserves society and enfranchises the individual:
[¶15.] The "skill" of writing surmounts geography, time, and individual alienation. It not only benefits society by guaranteeing the survival of social distinctions in "Deeds and Titles," and of communication despite "Distance," but it also endows each person with the perspective to "View . . . nay, rule" the earth itself by encompassing history and manifesting "eternity." This manual avers that the skills of writing and reading will grant the buyer power over all the social arts, and even over life itself.
[¶16.] While women's courtesy literature and pragmatic writing manuals helped to establish the moral tone and cultural power of literacy for middle-class audiences, books that taught children how to read also reiterated the social significance of literature. Among these, the devout poet Isaac Watts's Art of Reading and Writing English proved one of the most popular and enduring, running through ten editions between 1720 and 1770, and featuring in later editions a printed announcement of the 21 March 1758 copyright facing the title page as a guarantee of authenticity.9 This manual indicates the way readers throughout the eighteenth century approached and understood the physical book, and learned to distinguish between kinds of printed information, even as book presentation was changing. Like Josua Poole, Watts recommends mastery of the native language as a precondition to classical training: "Let all the foreign Tongues alone, / Till you can spell and read your own." By explaining this in an epigraph printed in both Latin and English, and thus intelligible to both classically learned readers and those versed only in the vernacular, Watts reproduces the mystery of reading. If the Latin text is accessible to few readers, the English reaches more. The cultural aim of those many who can read neither is to become the few who can read both.
[¶17.] Watts identifies each aspect of a book by its function. This function is always closely connected to the experience of reading. Many of his explanations reveal that eighteenth-century readers would be well aware of the methods of production and presentation of the book that they held in their hands. In chapter 18, "Observations concerning the Size, Pages, Titles, &c. in printed Books," for example, he explains the varieties of book format and the features of page layout, including margins, running titles, and signatures designed for the bookseller, but he also identifies catchwords as intended "to show that the pages are printed in true Order, and follow one another aright" (48). Such a definition suggests that readers could check the booksellers' procedures to ensure that they were reading the text as it should be read. Similarly, Watt defines the title page not as the printer's or bookseller's advertisement but as part of a block of prefatory information that positions the reader to receive the book: "The Reader is briefly informed, in the Title Page, what is the general Design of this little Book; and who are the Persons that may hope to profit by it. The Dedication sufficiently acquaints him with the Occasion of this Composure: And . . . it shall be the Business of the Preface to offer a few Things which relate to the Methods of teaching to read and write English, and to declare a little more particularly what may be expected from this Attempt" (ix). By correlating prefatory material with information on what the book holds, how it was written, to whom it is addressed, and what profit it promises, Watts places the reader at the center of the literary enterprise. This is a reader who knows precisely what and why he or she is reading.
[¶18.] The central purpose of this manual, however, is to teach children how to read. Once again, this is a process that entails an education in social, moral, and aesthetic values--an education in culture itself. Watts recommends alternating rote learning with exercises in rule learning, arguing that this will provide "some Variety" to render the process "more pleasant" (xiii). Concerned also to educate readers in all of literary culture, he suggests, "After all, it would not be amiss if a Leaf or two were employed in shewing the Child how to read written Letters, by a Plate of writing in the secretary and the Round Hand graven on purpose; as well as some short specimen, repeated in the Roman, the Italian, the Old English, and the written Letters" (xiii). These directions articulate the cultural concern to train readers in constructing meanings from all the literary material they encounter, no matter how different it appears, both manuscript and printed, private and public, historical and contemporary.
[¶19.] Watts openly collapses moral or cultural and practical categories. After students master vowels, consonants, and syllables, he advocates "Lessons . . . wherein there should be not only such Praxes on the Words of different Syllables . . . but Portions of Scripture . . . that might teach them their Duty and Behaviour towards God and Man, Abroad and at Home" (xi-xii). Following this religious reading, Watts suggests,
[¶21.] Watts not only recommends literature as didactic but specifies an education in genre to give the child a knowledge of his or her own culture that includes practical skills. Such an education, moreover, could also teach adults "to read more usefully . . . as well as to write more intelligibly" (xiv-xv).
[¶22.] This manual advocates reading as both social and individual advancement. Watts further avers that reading aloud not only benefits others but demonstrates the superiority of the speaker. By learning to read properly, people can assimilate the material they read and cultivate their own natures. Proper reading, indeed, should sound natural, even if it must be learned. In his "Directions for Reading," Watts urges masters to read aloud to their students in order to teach them to avoid declamatory affectation in favor of a natural speaking style. "Let the Tone and Sound of your Voice in Reading be the same as it is in Speaking; and do not affect to change that natural and easy Sound wherewith you speak, for a strange, new, aukward Tone, as some do when they begin to read; which would almost persuade our Ears that the Speaker and Reader were two different Persons, if our Eyes did not tell us the Contrary" (chap. 14, pp. 35-36). The right way to read is to recite as if you were speaking extemporaneously. By adjusting the voice to the subject, students can show their possession of that subject. Whereas Watts advises reading orations, exhortations, and sermons passionately, he recommends preserving an even tone when "merely" reciting newspaper stories, essays, or tales, and speeding up for "familiar, easy and pleasant matter" (37-38). These directions teach readers to mimic conversational spontaneity. While acknowledging the differences between modes of versification, Watts endorses an easy, plain style of recitation, illustrating blank verse with Milton's "Description of Hell" from Paradise Lost to be read "just as if it were Prose"--that is, as if it were literally true (53-54). By mastering such techniques and topics, Watts suggests, "we preserve for our own Use, through all our Lives, What our Memory would have lost in a few Days, and lay up a rich Treasure of Knowledge for those that shall come after us" (121). Literacy confers "a sort of Immortality in this World" and, by saving us from "brutal Stupidity . . . unworthy of a reasonable Nature," civilizes the members of society (123).
[¶23.] The ideal of reading as cultural training for youth proved fertile ground for booksellers who had an eye to the new market for children's literature. Before many of his pedagogical volumes like Poetry made Familiar and Easy (1776) were published, John Newbery issued in 1762 an updated version of Edward Bysshe's Art of English Poetry (1702), edited by Oliver Goldsmith and "compiled only for Youth": The Art of Poetry on a New Plan.10 This book packages literature as cultural education. "Illustrated with a great Variety of EXAMPLES from the best English Poets," as well as "Translations from the Ancients," it includes "Reflections and critical Remarks" designed "to form in our Youth an elegant Taste" (title page). In refuting the conventional charge that collections sap the sales of individual works, Newbery argues that his book will promote native culture:
[¶25.] According to this rhetoric, such compendia as Newbery provides initiatereaders into both literature and habits of study. Indeed, they disseminate high culture while cultivating the readers' high nature.
[¶26.] Goldsmith, as the editor of this volume, presents literature as the evocative use of language to articulate and provoke response. Like Watts, he emphasizes the reader's role, but, in accordance with the new conditions ofliterary production, he also sanctifies the poet. In tracing the origins of poetry to music, Goldsmith identifies the prime motive as awe of God, expressed in a new language:
[¶28.] While these technical beauties assist the moral aim of poetry, poets themselves serve as essential and unique sources of this morality. They possess "that enthusiasm, that fertility of invention, those sallies of imagination, lofty ideas, noble sentiments, bold and figurative expressions, harmony of numbers, and indeed that natural love of the grand, sublime, and marvellous, which are the essential characteristics of a good poet" (iii). Divinely inspired, poets invent as well as explore nature and raise language above its daily confines. Moreover,
[¶30.] Guided by the poet's sense of order, which reflects that of God, the reader of this volume can also mirror in his or her mind the harmony of the poetic or divine vision. Together, this vatic language and compositional design models the use of culture for personal improvement.
[¶31.] By participating imaginatively in this poetic process of invention, readers themselves become makers of meaning. Throughout these volumes, Goldsmith reiterates his tenet that clarity and natural, intelligible language constitute true art. Criticizing the overuse of epithets and technical ornaments, he defines "the Beauty of Thought in Poetry" as the perfect fit between words and "the things they represent" (19). This definition invites readers to judge the verse by their own language. Newbery also urges readers to respond individually to the works he reprints by explaining that "In some Parts of the Work, and especially towards the latter End, Sentiments and Reflections will be found which may appear, perhaps, singular; but it is presumed, they will not on that account be thought impertinent. They are generally concerning Things with which Learning has little to do, but where Nature herself is to be consulted, and here no Preeminence is to be claimed in Consequence of a superior Education; since every man can best feel how he is affected" (viii). These sections include essays on poetry, prose, Shakespeare, and reading that instruct buyers to admire the beauties of verse, not to disparage its flaws, and in their minds as in their conversation to imitate "the Polite" in order to "become a Fine Gentleman" (382). This instruction in literature and reading dovetails into cultural instruction in attitudes of genteel and refined responsiveness.
[¶32.] The claim that literary anthologies improved the social skills of their readers proved very popular in the late eighteenth century. Although it appears in collections from the start of the century, it now provides an important justification for the solitary practice of reading. For example, borrowing his title from Ridgeway's anecdote compendium, J. Fletcher, the publisher of Thomas Warton's 1764 Oxford Sausage, glosses the rhetorical identification of the miscellany with a feast in The Poetical Tell-Tale; or Muses in Merry Story by advising readers to take draughts of the book, rather than of wine, to cure "Hyp," to allay "Anger," to soothe "Revenge," and to ameliorate "Low-spiritedness."11 In the preface, the editor touts his collection as a means of socializing ill-humor, and even of mending private breaches:
[¶34.] Featuring familiar octosyllabic fables culled from other collections, including Parnell's Hermit and Pope's Miller of Trompington, this collection exploits fashionable literary taste as social, even moral, improvement. The recommendation to read before speaking situates print culture as an interlocutor in a conversation held between the passionate, unrestrained, impulsive part of mankind and his or her cultivated, restrained, rational nature. By talking with or in literature, whether silently or aloud, the reader absorbs cultural values and disciplines his or her impulses. Literature is thus characterized as the equivalent of a social mediator, bridging private and public values.
[¶35.] In the later eighteenth century as parlor drama grew popular, other cribs provided excerpts of literature to teach elocution as well as social sentiments. The British Spouter, for example, excerpts monologues from Restoration and eighteenth-century drama "to Make Young Persons acquainted with the Art of Speaking, and to impress upon their Minds Sentiments of Morality."12 As does Isaac Watts, this editor identifies proper declamation with sympathetic education: "In speaking a Prologue with a becoming Propriety, by laying an Emphasis upon the most striking similes, requires the utmost efforts of human genius. Youth are led, as it were, insensibly into the love of poetry" (preface, i-ii). By mimicking fine feeling, students learn to feel finely. Including prologues, epilogues, and passages by Dryden, Goldsmith, Garth, and Garrick, among others, this collection is "designed as an easy introduction to polite learning" (ii). The recitation of the words of cultural models is perceived as a route to becoming cultured. These students read and recite in order to absorb fine values, and to shape themselves into images of what they read.
[¶36.] These conversational, literary, and compositional manuals blend moral and technical instruction. By their attention to the receptive posture of the reader, they characterize reading as the avenue to cultural improvement. This reading, moreover encompasses literature and anecdote, and includes memorization, recitation, performance, and internal receptivity and transformation. It is the reader's role, privilege, and responsibility to adopt the right attitude in order to achieve and to manifest self-improvement.
[¶37.] During the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s, literary collections become increasingly uniform. Not only do their contents overlap, but they preface, arrange, and print them in very similar ways. For example, whereas midcentury anthologies proclaim the skills or mood of the "Muse," later collections tend to promote the book's uses, particularly as a quasi-social "companion" or substitute for society. This is culture you can carry with you. Bridging these poles and exploiting the nationalistic mood of the midcentury, the bookseller John Almon issued a series of volumes to serve as "hospitals" or "asylums" for "fugitive" productions. Like Edmund Curll, he was combating the current trend of mainstreaming or centralizing literary culture, but his rhetoric itself announces the marginality of his endeavors. Despite or perhaps because of the interest in rustic, ancient, and folk verse, many anthologies reprinted tried and true anthologized poems that at least represented the past even as new collections of fashionable, sentimental poetry vied for their readership.
[¶38.] This shift in the locus of literary value parallels changes in the ways and purposes of reading. Novelty and topical contemporaneity no longer stand as the first values of literature; indeed, most anthologies arrange their selections in a roughly chronological sequence to advertise the volume's comprehensiveness. Timeless morality embodied in judicious "natural" language has become the test of art. Indeed, despite their chronological sequencing, by largely ignoring generic distinctions in their organization and presentation in favor of thematic or authorial connections, these collections erase the historical dimension of literature. All texts appear equally accessible and equally amenable to the interpretative reading of the buyer. It is this buyer's task to appreciate the culture he or she has purchased, whether through absorbing critical opinions or by spontaneous sympathy.
[¶39.] The texts that came to represent English literature in the eighteenth century both before and after the sentimental fad of the 1770s and 1780s, however, were not advertised as "classic" until the century's end.13 Indeed, as A Select Collection of Modern Poems. By the most Eminent Hands demonstrates, they were still billed as contemporary and updated to accord with new tastes.14 Published in Glasgow in 1744, this anthology names on its title page Milton, Prior, Hughes, Addison, Dryden, Congreve, Gay, Pope, Parnell, and Lord Lansdowne--a characteristic collection of writers of high literary culture--but even while reprinting old favorites, it anticipates the new taste for melancholy. Recontextualizing Milton, Dryden, Congreve, and Gay as protosentimental writers, it includes a very high number of poems that would become canonical.15 In the late eighteenth century particularly, Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Addison's Letter from Italy, Hughes's Ode to the Creator of the World, Dryden's Alexander's Feast, Gay's "Thought on Eternity," Pope's Ode for Music and Ode on Solitude, and Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, Hymn to Contentment, and The Hermit all reappear with great frequency. In this book, however, unlike most, the editor resisted printing Dryden's and Pope's odes on music together for contrast and instead arranged the selections to reflect a literary history of sensibility. Miltonic songs, including the elegy Lycidas, and early-eighteenth-century translations of biblical prayers precede further songs of praise, celebrating natural beauty, music, and religious power. Thus grouped together, all the selections express a proto-Romantic piety. When the collection was reissued in a second edition in 1750, the editor supplemented his selections with two more Miltonic songs, with Pope's Universal Prayer and Tickell's Colin and Lucy--two very popular pieces--and with seven other poems, all advocating self-knowledge.16 The third edition of 1759, however, differs significantly from the previous two. Here the editor rearranges the contents to form clusters of thematic comparison that supersede authorial categories: now Dryden's, Congreve's, and Pope's odes on music are printed together, as are the religious translations of Prior, Hughes, and Gay.17 Moreover, the new title page advertises the contents as "Moral and Philosophical," and this highlights their social use. In addition, feeding off and promoting the new Scottish cultural nationalism, as well as the regard for Shakespeare, this edition features, among others, three poems by Blacklock, a "Soliloquy. In imitation of Hamlet" by Hamilton, and two excerpts--again both very common--from Thomson's Seasons. By these supplements, this anthology recontextualizes examples of Milton's, Dryden's, and Pope's poetry as "modern."
[¶40.] The tendency to reprint some favorites reinvented as contemporary and deplore others as old-fashioned reflects the tightening or narrowing of literary standards as professional critics began to dominate literary taste. After examining The Poetical Tell-Tale of 1763, the Monthly Review sneered that "There is nothing new either in the design or choice. We have had a number of such collections,--the Muse in good HUMOUR.--the Muses Vagaries, Etc. Etc." (29 [July-December 1763]: 154). Featuring Parnell's Hermit, Pope's Miller of Trompington, tales by Gay and Prior, and a stylistic parody of Prior imitating Sir Isaac Hawkins Browne's fashionable burlesque "A Pipe of Tobacco," called "On Tobacco," this collection reflects outdated taste in its recycling of humorous verse by renowned authors and literary parodies admired by undergraduates. Similarly, the successful two-volume Muse in Good Humour, published by Francis and James Noble and copied by Mary Cooper, contains Swift's Baucis and Philemon and Cassinus and Peter, Pope's Vertumnus and Pomona, Hildebrand Jacob's Curious Maid, tales by Gay, Prior, Congreve, and Dryden, and, once again, Pope's Miller of Trompington.18 Cooper even advertised "The Imperfect Enjoyment," probably by Etherege, but did not print it; many editions, indeed, were made up.19 Like The Poetical Tell-Tale, this collection of bawdy verse presents its items in random order for fitful reading, modeling a use for literature increasingly deplored by the literary establishment.
[¶41.] Finding new material that would sustain this distinction between high, moral art and low literature, however, remained as difficult as it had always been. In contrast to The Poetical Tell-Tale, Miscellaneous Pieces of Poetry. Selected from various Eminent Authors, edited by Dr. Charles Stewart and John Bonar, adds "A Few Originals" to a collection that deliberately avoids "pieces of real merit, hackneyed through every collection."20 Vaunting the new Scottish taste, the editors argue "that perpetual uniformity is as apt to disgust, as perpetual variety to perplex" (vii). The reviewers disagreed. In the Monthly Review, favored by Dr. Johnson and sympathetic to the values of "The Club," the editors' conventional rhetoric is turned against them as they are condemned for mixing high and low literary talents:
[¶43.] Such criticism of editors whose "taste is not over-nice" reflects the increasing critical regard for consistency in literary culture (405). The Monthly Review desires only similar kinds of writers and of writing to appear together--and preferably elite, professional authors rather than commercial hacks writing for the indiscriminate horde.21 Likewise, the alternative Critical Review somewhat ironically commends the editors for their "charity" in rescuing orphaned literature but remarks that
[¶45.] Through the condescending innuendo that the editors lack the "proper discernment" to function as "directors" of "taste," this reviewer reiterates the primacy of London-based criticism. Nonetheless, after conceding the difficulty of finding "detached poems of merit, sufficient to constitute a moderate volume," and deploring the "mix" of "the bran of mediocrity with the superfine flour of composition," he quotes the preface at length and applauds the conventional items in the volume, especially works by Langhorne and Gray (176). Even while resorting to the conventional metaphor of the miscellany, these critics eschew this "mixed dish" for a "superfine" feast suited to a delicate palate.
[¶46.] As the passage above from the Critical Review demonstrates, the new status of literature as a middle-class commodity demanded a new metaphor. Once again, it was a publishing bookseller, John Almon, who coined or popularized the new rhetoric: literature was an orphan in need of refuge, asylum, or hospital. This metaphor expressed the new relationship between the buying public and the productions of print culture. Through the sentimental image of abandonment, the works of little-known, amateur, or occasional authors became the social or national responsibility of right-minded, patriotic readers, acting as guardians of the country's heritage. In this formulation, the author figures as negligent, irresponsible, or despairing whilethe midwife bookseller, mediating between unworthy parents and an ignorant but eager public, rescues national culture. Reading literature becomes a social duty. In fulfilling this duty, consumers are represented as exercising their power to preserve and shape their own culture. This rhetorical relationship becomes reciprocal with the increasing power of authors and critics and with the social alienation of the post-French Revolution years. By the end of the century, literature rescues readers as much as readers salvage literary culture.
[¶47.] Readers, however, still wanted to dip and skip. Although periodicals already printed "fugitive" works, John Almon (1737-1805) was the most successful publisher of anthologies of such pieces. Like Dunton, "bred a bookseller," he saw the form as a means of exploiting both manuscript and print culture.22 In his autobiography, he remarks that early in his career he intended to publish a collection of "the Poems of the Sackville family," which would "exhibit a fine series of ancient, middle, and modern poetry" (132). Instead of producing this elite history, however, Almon produced two main series, modeled on "Samuel Silence's" Foundling Hospital for Wit (1743), and dedicated to housing all kinds of light verse, in 1768 and periodically through to the late 1780s: The New Foundling Hospital for Wit.23 First featuring verse by Lord Chesterfield, Lord Lyttleton, Wilkes, Churchill, Garrick, and Akenside, among others, it expanded into a comprehensive container of fashionable names, yet a container open to all: Almon advertises that "The assistance of the Ingenius is humbly requested. They may be assured that their favours will be very greatfully received." Indeed, the names are more memorable than the verse: Lord Bath, Soame Jenyns, Dr. King, Dr. Armstrong, Charles Anstey, Thornton, and Colman appear in part 5, issued in 1772 in 12o for 2s. 6d. Just as this anthology gave readers quick and cheap access to literary fashion, his Asylum for Fugitive Pieces (1785; 1786, 1793, 1795, and 1798) promised to collect for them valuable pieces hitherto unknown. Almon advertises his
[¶49.] With their short verses, these collections offer readers an anthology of current informal writing that counteracts the dominance of long, moral verse in rival anthologies. As Almon explains, moreover, they could either constitute a library or serve as single volumes--whichever the particular reader preferred. Such flexibility probably contributed to their success: six editions of The New Foundling and eight of An Asylum were printed, while the complete ten-volume collection was published four times between 1785 and 1799.25 As John Sutherland notes, Dodsley's Collection addressed cultured readers; Almon's collection, however, appealed to readers anxious for "timely" culture.26 At the same time, in its plain presentation, flexibility, and editorial silence, it erases the specific contexts its verse evokes. Even this topical poetry, represented through current printing conventions, ignores history.
[¶50.] Almon's collections earned the same critical distrust of literary encroachment or faddism as did other popular anthologies. The Monthly Review quibbles that Almon's title "was borrowed from that of a similar collection" made twenty years earlier by Dodsley (38 [January-June 1768]: 404). Even while elevating Almon's anthology to the rank of a judicious collection by this erroneous genealogy, the reviewer complains that although some of its satirical wit is worth preserving, "Many . . . being of a temporary and political nature, will, in a few years, be unintelligible" (404-5). Nonetheless, a later critic concedes that "A few choice bits may be picked out of this basket of scraps" of the fourth volume, while the reviewer for 1785 documents its growth from "a shilling pamphlet" to a library of modern wits holding a large "general mass of valuable materials" (41 [January-June 1771]: 344; 72 [January-June 1785]: 152-53). The review for An Asylum of Fugitive Pieces, which cost 4s. in octavo, reiterates the distrust of an indiscriminating editor: "As caterer for the Public, [Almon] should not be too easily pleased with everything that the market affords" (73 [July-December 1785]: 390).
[¶51.] The mixed reaction of reviewers articulates the contemporary struggle to control public taste. It also reflects distrust of booksellers' methods of compilation that resulted in the sale of unmediated or wrongly mediated literature. As Deborah D. Rogers recounts, as a political hack, Almon was as notorious as Curll for recycling old material into tracts: she quotes a satire in which "Almon, who is referred to at one point as `Little Vamp,' is made to brag: `There is not a bookseller in London that knows better how to touch up an eighteen-penny pamphlet. I've always a collection of allegations, assertions, and ipsedixits, ready-made and well assorted, that will serve for any argument.'"27 With parallel skepticism, the reviewer in The Universal Catalogue remarks, "we are perswaded many [of the pieces in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit] are attributed to those who never wrote them."28 In their Johnsonian role as professional overseers of literary culture, these reviewers oppose authorized to opportunistic collections, for their very existence as literary experts depends on the reader's desire to learn from their guides to culture how to read.
[¶53.] Literature that appealed particularly to youth--poetic tales of early life, or fables--by the late eighteenth century also represented the simple taste applauded by Johnson's "Club" and by other literary reviewers. By including such material, anthologies therefore could be marketed to both adults and children. These overlaps in what audiences differentiated by age read both reflect and create similarities in how and why they did read. Just as editors of anthologies construct ideal, homogenized readers who bridge divisions in class, so they construct through their presentation, rhetoric, and contents a manner of approaching literary culture that levels all readers. Rather than raising young readers to the sophistication of experienced ones who can exercise critical judgments on taste, these techniques position all readers as students of their own culture.
[¶54.] Late-eighteenth-century anthologies conjure readers as attentive and receptive individuals whose critical faculty entails understanding the literature, not rating it. They present moral and sentimental poetry and prose excerpted, retitled, recontextualized, and printed in almost unbroken sequences resembling mixed-genre poems like Thomson's Seasons. As exemplary collections of improving verse, they do not encourage readers to discuss or compare selections. Rather, their prefaces, excerpting, and occasional footnotes manifest the confident guidance of expert editors who assure the buyer that they can choose for him or her. These editors represent themselves as conveying as much information and reproducing as much text, and the right part of it, as the reader needs to use the material well. As is demonstrated particularly by "beauties," the commonplace books of the late eighteenth century primarily but by no means exclusively intended for young people, this use included furnishing the mind with moral precepts, cultural history, and material for social intercourse: these readers read beauties to train their individual aesthetic sensibility. Whether these miscellanies or collections were designed for schools, like the series edited by Ralph Griffiths or by Oliver Goldsmith, or intended for ambitious adults, like The Muse's Banquet, they characterize reading literature as a process of moral self-discovery, experienced alone.
[¶55.] This way of reading stems from contemporary theories of education derived from Shaftesbury and Locke, and buttressed, especially in the late century, by the sentimental theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Fergusson. In general, these philosophers maintained that children should learn not by rote or punishment but by empirical experience and rational reflection, and that they should develop their imaginative and intellectual faculties and their individual natures. Although they disagreed on the value of verse, Locke distrustful of imagery where Fergusson endorsed poetry as natural expression, these men propagated a belief in the merits of reading literature to gain social knowledge. Since reading shaped sensibility, however, it was particularly important to read the right literature. The effects of these ideas in shaping children's anthologies can be seen in The Polite Moralist; or A little, pretty Pocket Companion for pretty little Masters and Misses. Issued by the children's printer Stanley Crowder in 1758, this book juxtaposes short sections of prose accounts of classical tales, occasional verses, and simple maxims derived from the literature of the early eighteenth century, without generic distinction or any directions for reading. As the first two selections show, all art is represented as conveying the same message, specifically that education develops the virtues of nature. After the proverb "Art improves Nature; or Manners make the Man" glossing an illustration with this epigraph attached, "Art and assiduous Care must join, / To make the Works of Nature shine," the editor paraphrases Addison:
[¶57.] After this declaration of the aesthetic benefits of what is later termed a "liberal education" in "Virtue and Good-Manners," the editor attacks the cultural corruptions of the present age: "And never, surely, was a virtuous Education more requisite than in the present Age; since the British Taste is become so universally depraved, that idle, unmeaning Song-Books, ludicrous Pictures, and pernicious Romances, are . . . the favourite Amusements of such Children, whose Parents make a figure in the Beau-Monde" (6-7). This discourse distinguishes popular culture from elite education. Indeed, The Polite Moralist includes extracts from Butler's works, Scripture, and Telemachus, Pope's unattributed couplet from the Essay on Man--"Know well Thyself; presume not
[¶58.] The cultural politics of literary collections are exemplified by the series for children burgeoning in the 1750s. Highly successful, running to six editions in just under thirty years, The Moral Miscellany: or, a Collection of Select Pieces, In Prose and Verse, for the Instruction and Entertainment of Youth aids the formation of a canon of eighteenth-century authors, reflecting and prompting the audience's desire for particular sorts of reading matter, and helping to establish the critical discourse on literature.30 Issued by Ralph Griffiths, the Presbyterian editor of the Monthly Review, patron of Oliver Goldsmith and longtime friend of the bookseller Tom Davies, this compendium adapted for schools the taste of one of the most vocal members of the cultural elite.31 It promoted both particular poems and critical attitudes to education and reading which partly structured the school anthologies that followed it.
[¶59.] The Moral Miscellany arranges literature as a moral lesson on self-discipline: it aims at the minds even more than the hearts of youth. Griffiths maintains that periodical prose provides the best means and matter for instruction; of its ninety-six items in 375 pages, only fifteen are poems. While he hopes "to give [youths] some notion of the beauty, strength, and elegance of our own language, which, tho' an important branch of education, is, in general, too much neglected," his intentions are primarily moral--"to form the minds of youth to knowledge and virtue." Poetry expresses refinement and beauty, but prose articulates morality "to form the minds of youth to just and proper sentiments on the most interesting subjects" through "Stories, Visions, and Allegories [that] impress the imaginations, and fix the giddy roving minds of youth more than any other species of composition." Griffiths's contents are excerpted from the Spectator, the Guardian, the Rambler, the Adventurer, Beaumont's Moralities, the Connoisseur, the Tatler, and the World. Although a few examine literature, the overwhelming majority advocate self-monitoring and self-improvement with essays on pride, repentance, revenge, industry, sincerity, cleanliness, and especially the benefits of learning. Selections for girls reprove giggling, gaming, and sexual vulnerability with sentimental tales of lost virtue and rational discussions of how to chose a husband. Many selections reprimand social affectation, advocating contentment and honesty over glittering ambition. Similarly, the familiar poems that Griffiths selects recapitulate moral themes and are arranged traditionally in clusters. These clusters, however, complement rather than contrast with one another in treatment and theme. Three fables by Gay portray the virtues of resignation and study: The Shepherd and the Philosopher, The Countryman and Jupiter, and The Pack-Horse and the Carrier, which advises a young nobleman to welcome criticism, to study, and to avoid pride. Whitehead's The Youth and the Philosopher follows, reinforcing the theme of social duty: here Plato criticizes the popular Charioteer for wasting his talents on a "coachman's fate" instead of governing the nation. Next, Gray's Elegy glosses Whitehead's lesson by contrasting popular and unsung heroes. Three pastoral verses follow that celebrate the union of art and nature, including Thomson's Story of Palemon and Lavinia, and "Virgil's Tomb" from Dodsley's fourth volume. The rest advocate virtue and piety, among them an excerpt from Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination, extracts from Pope's Essay on Man, and Pope's Universal Prayer. Printed in sequence without editorial commentary, these literary works appear to be undifferentiated articulations of a moral vision. Even while the editor applauds style, his design highlights content.
[¶60.] Although this anthology ran through several editions, it suffered only minor revisions and these only of its poetry. The second edition of 1765, published by T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, and advertised "For the Use of Schools," deletes one poem and includes an "Elegy" and "Pastoral Ballad" by Shenstone.32 The latter particularly reiterates the tenets of contentment in your station, rejection of empty fame, and private happiness; preceded by this context, indeed, the extracts from Pope's Essay on Man appear celebrations of sentimental feeling. The third edition of 1768, published by T. Cadell, merely omits a passage from Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination; the fourth edition, published in Dublin in 1774, leaves out Whiting's Song for Ranelagh; the fifth edition, like the fourth, omits "For the Use of Schools" from its title page and adds W. Vernon's "Parish Clerk" praising "Neglected Worth" (st. 1, line 5); and the sixth edition, put out by A. Strahan and T. Cadell in 1787, is identical to the fifth.33 These changes suggest that whereas poetry changed with fashion, it did so to a very minor extent, and the moral tenor of the prose selections remained appropriate for a remarkably long time. Griffiths intended his anthology not only for schools but for "such persons as cannot afford to purchase those works from which the collection is made." These low-income readers, either children or adult, were receiving an idea of literary morality that taught them to read for moral profit, not for aesthetic pleasure.
[¶61.] As an example of the packaging of literature to train readers in moralvalues, Griffiths's collection prompted a spate of similar works that digested information for children, feeding into the sudden growth of children's books in the 1760s and 1770s. Four years after it was published, but before he took it over, T. Becket, whose name appeared with that of Griffiths on the title page of the Review from 1764, issued The Poetical Miscellany.34 Becket's book, "For the Use of Schools," deliberately attempts to consolidate a native canon that will displace the Greek and Roman classics. His title and attributions name only authors, not works. In his preface, Becket asserts that "every sensible and judicious parent will be better pleased to hear his son repeat fifty Lines of Milton, Pope, Young, or Thomson than five hundred of Ovid or Virgil." Furthermore, he explains that he seeks to educate youths from several classes: "Nothing surely, can be more absurd or ridiculous, than the common Practice of making such young Gentlemen as are not designed for any of the learned Professions, drudge for seven or eight Years in order to acquire a smattering in two dead Languages." Instead, Becket proposes that students learn "the Force and Beauty of our Language" and the "noble Sentiments upon some of the noblest and most important Subjects" embodied in the verse of "some of our best English Poets." Becket supplements Griffiths's anthology by providing reading for linguistic and aesthetic education. This nonetheless has a moral function, for "when the Language of the Poet is easy and familiar to [Young Persons], they readily enter into his Sentiments." According to this logic, natural language naturalizes the message it expresses and, by sympathy, shapes the natural feelings of the reader.
[¶62.] These sentiments are pious and didactic. This is exemplified by the excerpts from Thomson's Seasons and hymns urging religious enlightenment that conclude the volume:
[¶64.] Similarly, Dr. Watts's True Riches locates Eden, the World, and all mystery in the self. By replacing classical poetry that stresses public, civic virtue with religious verse, Becket interweaves the native tradition with piety and articulates the sensibility of a new era.
[¶65.] The way these poems are presented, moreover, reinforces or even creates their ideological uniformity. Although many long works are cut up, only single rules separate sections, while poems by different authors often share the same page. Such a printing style, along with the context of the poems in the anthology, blurs the differences between the ideologies--ideas and styles--of texts. For example, Philips's Splendid Shilling, lamenting the speaker's poverty, which bars him from "pleasure," follows Watts's hymn to internal contentment, and Parnell's Hymn to Contentment lauding "Lovely, lasting peace of Mind!" in turn follows Philips's poem on the same page. Whereas the poems by Watts and Parnell belong to the same genre and share ideology, Philips's burlesque of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso expresses a very different perspective. While paying tribute to Milton's poetic idiom, Philips uses a form of mock-heroic inversion to ridicule both the literary debasement of Grub Street hacks and the current disregard for noble poetry and poets. It revels in literary referentiality, playing with epithets and similes for readers whose pleasure lies primarily in intertextual irony. Thus presented, however, Philips's burlesque no longer satirizes Milton for overly cerebral affectation, or poets for grandiosity; rather, it mocks plebeians who value physical over spiritual delights. Fifty pages of excerpts from Paradise Lost preceding Watts's hymn reinforce the supremacy of Miltonic over mock-heroic values. Neither humor nor literary playfulness forms its distinguishing characteristics. In this volume where classical texts are anathema, Philips's poem is contextualized as a reproach to the unfeeling world and an illustration of the dangers of discontent.
[¶66.] The Poetical Miscellany reveals the contemporary preference for melancholy or contemplative verse that supports unironic and linear reading. Its longest features are ninety-one pages from Young's Night Thoughts, fifty pages from Milton's Paradise Lost--including the battles of the angels, the expulsion of man from Paradise, Satan's speech on the burning lake, Pandemonium, Adam's complaint about solitude, and Eve's account of herself--and forty-six pages from Thomson's Seasons, supplemented by further verse at the end of the volume. Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination fills another twenty pages, and his "Ode to the Right Honourable Francis Earl of Huntington, 1747" further on in the volume fills nine more. In contrast, while Pope is allotted twenty-nine pages of verse culled mainly from the Essay on Man, Horatian Imitations, and Moral Epistles, Dryden is allowed only two poems, "Alexander's Feast" and "The Character of a Good Parson, imitated from Chaucer." Becket does reproduce several pieces already common: Philips's Splendid Shilling, Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" and "Hymn to Adversity" (although not the Elegy), several of Gay's fables, including "The Miser and Plutus" and "The Hare and Many Friends," as well as "A Contemplation on Night" and "A Thought on Eternity," Parnell's "Hymn to Contentment" and "A Night-Piece on Death," plus a few pages of verse by Dr. Watts.35 Although his name does not appear on the title page, Dyer is represented by six poems. The contents do not proceed chronologically but rather, more or less, in the usual order of an assembled miscellany or a printed collection: beginning with the longest or most significant pieces, and tapering off with shorter, lighter fare. The principles of stylistic contrast and topical unity are also retained. Dryden's "Alexander's Feast" precedes Pope's version, the "Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia's Day." Three hymns by Addison open the miscellany, juxtaposed to Pope's excerpts from the Essay on Man; further on in the volume, Addison's "To Sir Godfrey Kneller, on his picture of King George I" precedes Pope's lament for Addison from Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the "Character of Atticus." Reaffirming its pious theme, the collection ends with short prayers by Young and Thomson that echo the opening hymns.
[¶67.] Becket's endeavor won some applause that testifies to the genre's popularity as simultaneously a social and a literary endeavor. The Monthly Review quotes his preface at length, commending the "extracts" for "their poetical merit, and the moral and useful tendency of their composition."36 By conflating the aesthetic and moral qualities of these native works, this review seeks to unify reading for pleasure with reading for profit. Similarly approving "this kind of compilation of select passages from the most approved poets, as it impresses on the tender mind a variety of beauties without loading the memory," the Critical Review objected only to the "long and obscure extracts from the Night Thoughts; a poem indeed of great merit, but the least of all the others adapted to the capacity of school-boys; which, if they at all acquire a taste for it, is too apt to seduce them into a passion for a turgid pomp of expression" (14 [1763]: 319). By reproving Young's Night Thoughts as a model for adolescent expression, this reviewer articulates the social function of these collections: to shape the speech and behavior of youth.
[¶68.] Subsequent editions of The Poetical Miscellany document the modifications in poetic fashion and pedagogical theory of the following decades. Perhaps due to the remarks in the Critical Review, Becket "improved" the second edition by editing Young's contribution. By the third edition, indeed, of the original ninety-one pages of Young, eighty-one disappear, while the rest are shortened into passages under rubrics like "The gross Absurdities and Horrors of Annihilation," which both channel the youthful readers' interpretations and edit their imaginative immersion in Young's text. The third and fourth (1789) editions advertise The Moral Miscellany and An Historical Miscellany, each for three shillings, thus providing a mini-"library" of improving reading for the young.
[¶69.] Published at a juncture when the question of the native "canon" was receiving a great deal of critical attention, the third edition, printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell in 1778, reflects a burgeoning critical consensus in the identification of native worthies and their best works. It traces the shift from a religious pedagogy to an aesthetic and moral didacticism flavored by a proto-Romantic regard for imagination and solitary contemplation. While it deletes the hymns by Dr. Watts, whom Johnson would nonetheless include in his Lives of the English Poets published over the following three years, it adds seven speeches by Shakespeare, whom Johnson had lauded in his 1765 edition, some passages from Joseph Warton's Enthusiast; or a Lover of Nature, and Warton's "Ode to Fancy," a critical panegyric listing both the topics and the poets, notably Spenser and Shakespeare, that ought to be praised. In 1774-1781, Thomas Warton had written a three-volume History of English Poetry that esteemed both classicism and the more "primitive" verse of early English poets. The Poetical Miscellany echoes these values by leaving the selections by Milton untouched, except to replace the angelic battles with a section from Pope's translation of the Iliad, perhaps as a more direct and recent rendition of classical themes. Many of the changes show a greater regard for the juvenile audience in their choices of topics, their treatments, and their language. The Shakespearean selections emphasize imagination, vision, and individuality, including three passages from Hamlet; the selections by Parnell are expanded to include The Hermit, "A Fairy Tale in the ancient English Stile," and "Health, an Eclogue." In addition, the editors include three fables about youths by Wilkie, Goldsmith's "The Village Preacher" and "A Ballad," Tickell's Colin and Lucy, and Mrs. Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition," introducing a cluster of elegies suitable also for slightly older readers, among them "The parting of Hector and Andromache," from Pope's Iliad, William Mason's "Elegy to a young Nobleman leaving the University," and Gray's "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat." Dyer's "Grongar Hill" also appears for the first time, as does Hawkins Browne's "A Pipe of Tobacco," burlesquing Cibber, Philips, Thomson, Young, Pope, and Swift. This is one of the only stylistic parodies in the volume and may serve as a kind of literary test for readers.37 These changes, demonstrating how anthologies responded to current critical dogma, indicate that many such collections fused aesthetic and didactic aims.
[¶70.] Despite this interest in using poetry for moral education, periodicals and novels were attracting audiences untrained in reading verse. Recognizing that readers needed this training in order to read comfortably, booksellers issued anthologies that mingled poetry and prose, often ostensibly directed at children or titled to reassure modest buyers. Dr. Johnson recognized this when he remarked that "a man will often look" at such books as Kearsley's Beauties of Watts "and be tempted to go on, when he would have been frightened at books of a larger size and of a more erudite appearance."38 By including prose, publishers were following the miscellany tradition of including fresh, topical, easy-to-read material--wit, jests, songs, jokes, and anecdotes--even while including more challenging verse. For example, the 1757 The Muse in a Moral Humour: being a collection of tales, fables, pastorals, by several hands, followed the next year by a second volume, earned praise as a compilation of moralized literature. Applauding the editor as "a friend to virtue and morality, as well as a man of taste," the Critical Review commended the contents as "pieces . . . such as tempt us to read, and at the same time contribute to polish the mind," particularly noting Pope's Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard and Parnell's Hermit and Rise of Woman.39 These volumes equate poetry and prose on the basis of their moral content.
[¶71.] While later collections repeat Becket's formula of fusing aesthetic and moral refinement, they emphasize the moral uses even of aesthetics. Oliver Goldsmith's successful Poems for Young Ladies includes "Devotional, Moral and Entertaining" pieces.40 As he explains in the preface, this book sells cultural literacy even to the purse-pinched:
[¶73.] Although the Monthly Review applauded Goldsmith's argument that poetry strengthens innocence, the Critical Review grumbled that "This publication might with equal propriety have been stiled, Poems for Old Ladies, for middle-aged ladies, and for young persons of both sexes," further hinting that Goldsmith reprinted merely "well-known" works (Monthly Review 36 [January-June 1767]: 240; Critical Review 22 [1766]: 469). He includes, indeed, many pieces from The Poetical Miscellany but admits classical imitation with translations of Homer by Pope, of Virgil by Dryden, and of Ovid by Addison and Dryden. The Poetical Preceptor, published by Stanley Crowder in 1777 and reissued in 1780 and 1785, repeats this formula, promising education primarily through morality and purity, and secondarily through beauty, with a similar selection of poetry.41 So too does the long Select Lessons in Prose and Verse, an imitation of Griffiths's Moral Miscellany, issued in 1774.42 Although these books contain poems that advocate piety, purity, resignation, and social duty, they still feature a secondary but consistent advocacy of aesthetic pleasure, represented as skillful poetic style. This pleasure, however, is moral and class-coded. The Poetical Monitor, for example, designed for a female charity-school, includes epitaphs, fables, and a wide selection of religious items by Addison, Armstrong, Hannah Moore, Dr. Cotton, Mrs. Barbauld, and others. These choices reflect the editor's assertion that since these poor children have little chance to improve themselves, they need not learn to understand classical allusions.43 Indeed, the preface explains that "This will be a constant furniture for the minds of Children, that they may have something to think upon when alone, and sing over to themselves. Thus they will not be forced to seek relief for an emptiness of mind out of the loose and dangerous sonnets of the age" (ii). Here, pious literature provides a mode of self-discipline suitable to a specific audience, whereas classical or neoclassical literature remains the cultural resource of elite readers. Literature educates students for their rank in life.
[¶74.] Oliver Goldsmith moralized the new aesthetic and exemplified the new role of critic as teacher particularly through Beauties of English Poesy, first issued in two volumes by William Griffin in 1767, and often reprinted.44 Perennially poor, Goldsmith was compelled to oblige his booksellers by producing these anthologies for "mass" consumption. Himself an advocate of folk poetry, simplicity, and linguistic purity, he carried the approved taste of Johnson's "Literary Club" to popular audiences through his periodical essays, poetry, and novel The Vicar of Wakefield, as well as in editions of poetic beauties and slim miscellanies of sentimental prose excerpting his work. In 1772, for example, The beauties of English prose offered "a select collection of moral, critical, and entertaining passages, disposed in the manner of essays" in four volumes that featured extracts from several sentimental novels as well as Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield.45 Through these multifarious, inexpensive collections, Goldsmith became a contemporary"classic" writer who bridged learned and popular literary cultures, for by the end of the century, nourished by the fashion for rustic poetry, English verse had become the standard of "classical" taste.46
[¶75.] Goldsmith's two-volume, six-shilling Beauties of English Poesy (1767) asserts the authority of critics not only to determine literary merit but to teach readers how to read.47 As he explains in the preface, Goldsmith takes on the task of choosing the best literature and explaining it to inexperienced readers, whatever their age:
[¶77.] Portraying himself as a disinterested instructor, Goldsmith identifies his audience as composed of both new readers and readers with already formed tastes capable of correction. In order to achieve this, he prefaces his selections with directions on which passages to admire for originality of style or subject, for poetic devices or language, and which to deplore for artificiality or low topics. While rehearsing the conventional rhetoric of the individuality of taste, Goldsmith submits the desires of all of his readers and even of himself to the general purpose of improving taste. This taste is defined as stylistic and moral.
[¶78.] In educating readers, late-eighteenth-century anthologies combined the functions of many of the earlier forms of literary handbook. Indeed, printers and booksellers created hybrid forms that allowed readers to educate themselves in different ways: to refine their conversation, or writing, to broaden their knowledge of contemporary and historical literature, or to improve the shining hour with sentimental experience. As the century wore on, however, anthologies increasingly represent cultural education as the history of British poetry. This meant that whereas midcentury compendia had to justify including older or unfamiliar material, most late-century collections were forms predicated on their historical sweep. This history, furthermore, applauded by critical authorities and refined from a century of literary collections, was advertised as pertinent to--indeed exemplary for--contemporary values.
[¶79.] By this principle, literary history could be often rearranged in new books. Reviewing the two-volume Beauties of Poetry Display'd (London: Hinton, 1757), an ambitious anthology of "beautiful Passages, Similes, and Descriptions" from Shakespeare, Waller, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Swift, Pope, Gay, Garth, Prior, Rowe, Thomson, Young, and others, the Monthly Review remarks that "This Collection is formed upon the plan of Bysshe's Art of Poetry; but as many of the quotations in Bys[s]he were taken from some Poets of the last age, or farther back, and whose works are now less generally read our present Compiler has rejected them, in general, and, in their stead, has substituted Akinside, Grey, Smart, West, Blacklock etc." (16 [January-June 1757]: 581). Like this volume, over thirty years later The English Parnassus; being a new Selection of Didactic, Descriptive, Pathetic, Plaintive, and Pastoral Poetry, extracted from the works of the latest and most celebrated Poets (London: G. Kearsley, 1789) is "distinguished from most other collections of the kind, by the admission of many very modern names--even of living authors." The reviewer explains, "The former publishers of poetical miscellanies (a sort of books now prodigiously multiplied) contented themselves with extracting only from the works of our most celebrated poets; but here, the honours of selection are lavished, not only on a YOUNG, a THOMSON, a POPE, Etc. but on such writers as _
[¶80.] Late-eighteenth-century collections use the authority of professional authors and critics to teach readers how to read and understand literature as a guide to culture, be this internal morality, social duty, or national history. These anthologies promote reading for improvement, not for pleasure, and thus reading for moral effect or content rather than for style. In conjuring a consensus on how and why to read, editors thus negotiate the question of what to read, for recontextualized by other poems or editorial notes, traditional favorites become newly interpretable. For readers, the process of attentive immersion in long, uninterrupted poems is presented as a way to imitate the vision of fine verse and to induce the sensibility or self-monitoring required to read critically. Just as the newly anthologized literature endorses the private experience of emotion and meaning, so the physical presentation encourages steady application. The social context of literature and reading gives way to a new, middle-class ideal of reading as a self-conscious activity for individual, solitary refinement.
1 For an analysis of Newbery's commercialization of literature, see Plumb, "Commercialization and Society," 272-73, 286-315.
2 See Colley, Britons.
3 London: T.M., 1655. This contains: I. Preserving, Conserving, Candying, &c. 2. Physick and Chirurgery. 3. Cookery and Housewifery, "Whereunto is added, Sundry Experiments and choice Extractions of Waters, Oyls, &c. Collected and practised; By the Late Right Honourable and Learned Chymist, the Lord RUTHUEN. The second Edit. with Additions." Clark Library.
4 London: James Knapton, 1704. Newberry Library.
5 Second ed. (London, T. Read, 1740).
6 London: J. Downing, 1712. Preface signed "A.B." Newberry Library.
7 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 72, 75.
8 (London: 1712), 3. Newberry Library. Snell, an accountant and schoolmaster, ran a school for young boys on penmanship.
9 The 10th ed. (London: J. Buckland, etc., 1770). Newberry Library.
10 2 vols. (London: J. Newbery, 1762), iii.
11 By Prior, Pope, Gay, Swift, Parnell, Wesley, Fontaine, and Other Celebrated Poets, both French and English (London: J. Fletcher, 1764), preface.
12 (London: J. Roson, etc. 1773), title page. British Library.
13 See Bonnell, "John Bell's Poets of Great Britain," 128-52.
14 Glasgow: R. Urie and Company: For J. Gilmour, 1744. British Library.
15 See Bonnell, "Bookselling and Canon-Making."
16 British Library. One of these is Matthew Green's "The Spleen."
17 A Select Collection of Modern Poems, Moral and Philosophical. By the Most Eminent Hands, 3d ed. (Glasgow: Robert Urie, 1759). British Library.
18 Six editions appeared between 1744 and 1751.
19 The Muse in Good Humour, vol. 2 (London: M. Cooper, 1745). Newberry Library.
20 (Edinburgh: W. Gray, 1765), vi. British Library.
21 This embodies the tensions between competing ideals of authorship. See Ferdinand, "Benjamin Collins," 116-17; also Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson.
22 Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, 16.
23 Subtitled Intended for the Reception and Preservation of such Brats of Wit and Humour, as Parents Chuse to Drop them. "Silence's" volume uses the metaphor that Almon adopts, but exhibits a harsher, presentimental attitude. London: G. Lion, 1743. British Library. This was reissued in a second edition by "Timothy Silence" in 1743 and republished in 1744, 1746
24 An Asylum for Fugitive Pieces in Prose and Verse, Not in Any Other Collection: with Several Pieces Never Before Published (London: J. Debrett, 1785). British Library.
25 Rogers, Bookseller as Rogue, 49.
26 Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 54; Rogers, Bookseller as Rogue, 50-52.
27 Rogers, Bookseller as Rogue, 9. The quotation comes from an anonymous article prefixed to A Letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of Temple (1763; reprint, London: S. Bladon, 1766), 15 n. 42.
28 (London: printed for the Proprietors, sold by J. Bell, 1772), 3, 5. Vol. 1 (1772), art. 998. British Library.
29 (London: Stanley Crowder, 1758), 4. British Library.
30 London: R. Griffiths, 1758. British Library.
31 For an account of the literary heritage that informs Griffiths's endeavor, see Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity.
32 London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1765. British Library.
33 The 3d ed., British Library 12270.bb.20; 4th ed., Dublin: J. Williams, 1774. British Library 1607/4961; 5th ed. British Library 012273.ff.7; 6th ed. British Library 8405.ccc.21.
34 London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1762. British Library; Beinecke Library.
35 Consisting of Select Pieces From the works of the following Poets . . . (London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. DeHondt, 1762). British Library.
36 The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal. By Several Hands (London: Printed for R. Griffiths, 1750-1790) 27 (July-December 1762): 390.
37 This text remained popular throughout the late eighteenth century; Mary Crawford quotes it in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and Chapman, editor of the Oxford edition of Austen's novels, speculates that Austen may have encountered it in Dodsley's Collection of Poems, which she certainly read, or Goldsmith's Beauties of English Poetry (The Novels of Jane Austen, vol. 3, Mansfield Park, 545 n. 161).
38 Hill, Johnson's Miscellanies, 2, 2; quoted in Brown, Critical Opinions of Samuel Johnson, 16.
39 The Critical Review: or, Annals of Literature. By a Society of Gentlemen (London: Printed for A. Hamilton) 3 (1757): 477.
40 London: J. Payne, 1767. British Library. Reprinted in 1770, 1785, and 1792.
41 London: Stanley Crowder, 1777. British Library; Huntington Library.
42 Designed for the Improvement of Youth. Two editions were issued the same year, the second with additions: 2d ed. (Bristol: S. Farley, 1774).
43 (London: T. N. Longman, 1796), ii.
44 Pirated in Dublin, printed for James Williams, 1771.
45 London, printed for Hawes Clarke and Collins, S. Crowder, B. Law, and G. Robinson, 1772.
46 In 1797, Thomas Gill even co-opted the term by printing A Selection, in prose and verse, of classical beauties, from approved English writers (Leeds).
47 Selected by Oliver Goldsmith, 2 vols. (London: William Griffin, 1767).
48 In a similar anthology enlarged for its fifth edition and produced in Dublin in 1779, The Muse's Banquet, many of the same poems are again advertised as a "select Collection of PIECES in the different species of POETICAL COMPOSITION. By the most celebrated authors." Many of Pope's familiar verses, including the Essay on Man, Elegy to an Unfortunate Young Lady, Eloisa to Abelard, Ode on Solitude, and Universal Prayer, Gray's Elegy and Hymn to Adversity, Arbuthnot's Know Yourself, Mrs. Madan's Abelard to Eloisa, Collins's Ode to Evening, Miss Carter's Night-Piece, Whitehead's The Youth and the Philosopher, Blair's The Grave, Parnell's Hermit and Night Piece on Death, Philips's Splendid Shilling, and pieces by Young, Warton, Congreve, Scott, Shenstone, Goldsmith, and others testify to the predominance of moral melancholy works. Dublin: Robert Burton, 1779. British Library.
Though too many of Your fair Sex, so accumstom [sic] themselves to reading of light, frothy Novels, Romances and Plays; that their Appetites are pall'd, and even dead to things more solid and serious; yet I make no Question, but, by the Grace of God, there are still not a few, who have such a lively Sense of true Religion and Virtue, as to relish well any thing that tends thereunto. 'Tis to such as You, Ladies, only, that I dedicate these following Sheets; to You . . . whose inward Beauties are most excellent, much rather to be affected and admir'd, than your clothing.
Hail mystick ART! which Men like Angels taught,
To speak to Eyes, and paint unbody'd Thought!
Tho' Deaf, and Dumb; blest Skill, reliev'd by THEE,
We make one Sence perform the Task of Three.
We see, we hear, we touch the Head and Heart,
And take, or give, what each but yields in part.
With the hard Laws of Distance we dispence,
And without Sounds, apart, commune in sense;
View, tho' confin'd; nay, rule this Earthly Ball,
And travel o'er the wide expanded ALL.
Dead Letters, thus with Living Notions fraught,
Prove to the Soul the Telescopes of Thought;
To Mortal Life a deathless Witness give;
And bid all Deed and Titles last, and live.
In scanty Life, ETERNITY we taste;
View the first Ages, and inform the Last.
Arts, Hist'ry, Laws, we purchase with a Look;
And keep, like FATE, all Nature in a BOOK.
(Lines 74-91)
short sentences, to discourage the Vices to which Children are most addicted: Then a catalogue of common English Proverbs: After this, some of the more difficult Parts of the Scripture . . . as may . . . entertain the Child with some agreeable Notices of Sacred History. Next to this might be added some well chosen, short and useful stories, that may entice the young Learner to the Pleasure of Reading; something of the History of Mankind, a short Account of England, or the common Affairs of our Nation; and the World will forgive me, if I should say, let a few Pieces of Poesy be added; and let the Verse be of Various Kinds, to acquaint the Learner with all Sorts of Subjects and Manners of Writing, that he may well know how to read them when they are put into his Hand. (xii)
The Examples here collected from different Books will give no Offence, it is hoped, either to the Authors or Proprietors; for, whatever may be the Fate of these Volumes, they can neither depreciate the merit of those Books, nor anticipate their Sale; but will, we apprehend, have a contrary Effect. . . . Whatever Value these Reflections and Observations may have, the Examples introduced will always have their merit, and will, we hope, lead the young student to a careful perusal of the Volumes from whence they are extracted. (Advertisement, vii-viii)
Tropes and figures were called in to express its sentiments, and the diction was dignified and embellished with metaphors, beautiful descriptions, lively images, similies, and whatever else could help to express, with force and grandeur, its passion and surprise: disdaining common thoughts and trivial expressions, it explores all Nature and aspires at all that is sublime and beautiful, in order to approach perfection and beatitude. (ii)
A true poet is distinguished by a fruitfulness of invention, a lively imagination tempered by a solid judgement, a nobleness of sentiments and ideas, and a bold, lofty, and figurative manner of expression. He thoroughly understands the nature of his subject; and, let his poem be never so short, he forms a design or plan, by which every verse is directed to a certain end, and each has a just dependence on the other; for it is this produces the beauty of order and harmony, and gives satisfaction to a rational mind. (1)
If a Man in Company shou'd be taken with a Fit of Passion, read one of these Lessons before you give him an Answer, and let him read another before he makes a Reply, and your Disputes will be ended without a Lawyer. This Effect it has had even between Man and Wife, and kept many turbulent Tempers in Tune.
To please every palate, is generally the aim of every collector of miscellaneous pieces; and, accordingly, in this poetical collection, we have the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Here, Messrs. Akenside, Grey, West, Ogilvie, Langhorne, Mason, and Lord Lyttleton, with some others of no mean fame, figure in with Duik, Savage, Moses Brown, Sam Boyce, and a variety of Magazine-poets. (33 [July-December 1765]: 404)
The purpose of this, as of all other charitable institutions, is, however, apt to be defeated by prejudices and partialities; sometimes by an excess of good nature, and sometimes by want of proper discernment in the directors, who generally admit improper objects into these hospitals of taste. Nevertheless, it is better that fifty bantlings of Dulness should live, than that one production of Genius should perish. (20 [1765]: 176)
idea of a Collection of those Fugitive Pieces of Merit which occasionally appear in print, or are handed about in manuscript, [which are newly titled so] that it may not seem compulsatory on the purchasers of the former work to proceed. It is intended to publish a volume of this work occasionally, and to print it in the same size as the New Foundling Hospital for Wit, in order that such Gentlemen as chuse to have both, may bind them uniformly, wherever they please.24
Children's Anthologies
A Human Soul (says the late inimitable Mr. Addison) without Education, is like Marble in a Quarry, which shews none of its inherent Beauties, till the Skill of the Polisher fetches out the Colours, makes the Surface shine, and discovers every ornamental Cloud, every little spot or vein that runs through the Body of it. Education, however, draws out to View every latent Virtue, which, without such Helps, would never be able to make any Appearance.29
FATHER of light and life! Thou GOOD SUPREME!
O teach me what is good! Teach me THYSELF!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice
From every low pursuit! and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure;
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
(P. 336)
Poetry is an art, which no young lady can, or ought to be wholly ignorant of. The pleasure which it gives, and indeed the necessity of knowing enough of it to mix in modern conversation, will evince the usefulness of my design; which is to supply the highest and the most innocent entertainment at the smallest expence; as the poems in this collection, if sold singly, would amount to ten times the price of what I am able to afford [at] the present. (vi)
Compilations of this kind are chiefly designed for such as either want leisure, skill, or fortune, to choose for themselves; for persons whose professions turn them to different pursuits, or who, not yet arrived at sufficient maturity, require a guide to direct their application. To our youth, particularly, a publication of this sort may be useful; since, if compiled with any share of judgement, it may at once unite precept and example, shew them what is beautiful, and inform them why it is so: I therefore offer this, to the best of my judgement, as the best collection that has yet appeared, though as tastes are various, numbers will be of a very different opinion. Many perhaps may wish to see in it the poems of their favourite Authors, others may wish that I had selected from works less generally read, and others still may wish, that I had selected from their own. But my design was to give a useful, unaffected compilation; one that might tend to advance the reader's taste, and not impress him with exalted ideas of mine.
Notes