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[¶1.] Throughout the period from the Restoration to the Regency, the literary anthology reflects contemporary aesthetic values and shapes the reception of specific works and genres. As a haven for fugitive verse, it rescues expressions drowned out by the dominant culture; as an expression of that culture, it also perpetuates conventional definitions of beauty and meaning. Most significantly, it provides a space in which current literature and criticism are publicized, thus helping to shape a canon while keeping that canon flexible. By organizing multiple, similar works in a fashion that invites readers to contrast, compare, and evaluate them, it establishes the process of ranking as integral to the reading of literature. Whereas Restoration anthologies sell classical literature to new audiences by promoting aesthetic comparisons valuing freshness and colloquial stylistics, early-eighteenth-century collections sell neoclassical craftsmanship to audiences defined as informed consumers. Later in the century, as professionals edit collections, readers are adjured to train themselves to read critically, and to internalize aesthetic standards as moral principles. Anthologies thus both grant and deny power to the reading public to shape their own culture.1
[¶2.] These early anthologies and miscellanies sell cultural literacy. Indeed, they help to establish the concept of contemporary "taste" itself by presenting in one book works from many current authors, by distributing new texts quickly and inexpensively, joined with treatises or poems about writing and reading that guide audiences in interpretation, and by presenting political and social issues and elite translations or jokes in accessible forms. Typically, early anthologies invited readers to participate directly in literary culture by contributing their own pieces to the collection, although later-eighteenth-century anthologies confine these invitations to elite groups while periodicals take over the invitation to general readers. Specializing in fresh, topical publications, literary anthologies thus exploit the opportunities of print by representing social power to the reader as the mastery of current literary culture. This process also allows any readers who could master their native language to participate, if only in imagination, in forging literary values. In their formation, form, and consumption, they constitute a genre that defines the relationship of individual readers to their society.
[¶3.] As collections represent a bridge, however frail, interconnecting publishers, editors, authors, and readers, they consolidate a consensus of literary values; at the same time, they enfranchise individual readers to pursue their own taste regardless of the consensus. This discourse and the literature published in anthologies define the proper way to read: for refinement of language and feeling. Accordingly, although there are exceptions, most collections muffle or leach out any overtly political message or context in the literature they reprint. Literature becomes a triumph of aesthetic skill, a feast of stylistic beauty, not a vehicle with a message to social action. Rather than conveying political lessons, literature is represented as the enfranchisement of individuals to judge morality and meaning. As the genre changes from a carnival of competing voices to a home for examples of the best of England's talent, literature and the pleasures it offers are represented increasingly as private and internal.
[¶4.] Literary miscellanies and anthologies are created by and fulfill the particular cultural conditions of the historical period from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. They originate as vessels of a concept of reading as the participation by individuals in a common culture of literary exchange, including writing, reading, and conversation, and they facilitate this definition of literary culture as communal, consensual, and inclusive. As the historical audience expands, however, and as literary creation becomes professionalized and commodified, critical theories advocate responsive, private reading, and the social dynamics of reading change. So does the anthology. By the eighteenth century, the anthology works less to convey the open interchange of members of the reading community than to teach readers their role in literary culture. As neoclassical theory ousts specifically political verse, they increasingly define particular ways of reading, and thus readers. These neoclassical collections vaunt elegance over topicality. Their cluster or radial organization furthermore emphasizes the stylistic relationships between pieces, rather than their causality or sequence. Such an organization encourages readers to compare treatments and techniques, while essays or poems on critical values provide guidelines for this activity. By the end of the eighteenth century, the anthology has transformed into multiseries, authoritative anthologies that position readers as individual customers of this culture. These reconstructions change the reader's subjectivity.2 In the anthologies of the later eighteenth century, readers are no longer constructed as engaged participants in commonly constructed culture; they become, instead, recipients of impression, reading to exercise moral judgment.
[¶5.] Literary collections became a powerful vehicle for defining both what and how to read in the eighteenth century. These books chronicle the gradual, cooperative construction, by both producers and consumers, of the reader as a solitary individual who reads not for social pleasure but for private self-improvement. Penned by printers, booksellers, or, later, editors, the prefaces of anthologies typically recount their method of production, explicate the volume's aim, advertise the contents, and apologize for defects. By confessing their scrambling procedures, inviting contributions from readers, and using the metaphor of the "miscellany" or mixed feast, the prefaces from the period 1660-1685 figure the reader as a participant in a celebration of cultural plenty, whose "taste" defines him or her as simultaneously individual and a member of the community. In the first third of the eighteenth century, editors supplement this rhetoric by touting the discrimination they demonstrate and so invoking a discriminating reader. These prefaces, now usually written by authors belonging to a literary coterie, vaunt the professionalism of their production and the quality--rather than the variety--of their selections. They thus conjure readers as cultural recipients of expertly vetted literature who read for the private pleasure of imaginative membership in the coterie. In the second half of the eighteenth century, anthologies adopt a pedagogical discourse that charges the audience to read for moral improvement and commends it for seeking cultural literacy; their prefaces construct readers as those who desire to cultivate their individual "taste" in order to belong to a moral elite. These prefaces chronicle the evolving construction of the reader as the audience expanded and changed, and as the book trade moved from the sole domination of printers, through the control of cooperative congers of booksellers, to a new partnership with professional authors. From collaborative participants in literary culture, readers are reconstructed as passive recipients of commodified literature. By solicitations to read both "intensively" and "extensively," these readers are portrayed as informed consumers whose imaginative engagement in reading serves as an entrée to culture.
[¶6.] During the Restoration, collections began to focus on the experience of reading alone, and to address the reader as a private individual. Although drolleries, song collections, and collections of verse penned in public by groups of friends still litter the market, gradually anthologies attempt to encapsulate fashionable culture itself, to reproduce in print the spirit of the best wits at the time. The court anthologies edited by Aphra Behn and Dryden for Tonson demonstrate the way the form began to serve high literature to middle-class readers by celebrating pleasure and consumption--sex, drinking, eating. Unlike the collections of the Commonwealth, however, these volumes, if themselves cooperative, supply delights that could be solitarily enjoyed. Since different readers and different contexts change the way these texts are read, literary collections provide literature to be enjoyed alone as well as jokes to be recited aloud. Along with poems that vaunt linguistic play, others emphasizing private or domestic pleasures of love andobservation also encouraged solitary reading. By the late eighteenth century, anthologies reduce the number of songs in favor of long, descriptive, and contemplative poetry demanding steady, concentrated reading far from the distractions of family or friends. This literature asks the reader for an imaginative commitment and offers not social but moral guidance. These anthologies sell reading as a course for private improvement.
[¶7.] This function is remarked by Jane Austen, an author who criticized not only contemporary novels but also literary collections and series. In Northanger Abbey, Austen defines the literary miscellany and mocks it on several grounds. In the famous passage defending novels, she contrasts the "injured" "literary corporation" of novelists with "the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator and a chapter from Sterne."3 Here, Austen describes the typical formula for a collection of the sort published from the 1750s and increasingly popular throughout the century as the copyright laws changed. A prominent example is George Nicholson's Literary Miscellany; or Elegant Selections of the Most Admired Fugitive Pieces, and Extracts from Works of the Greatest Merit; with Originals, in Prose and Verse, sold about thrice annually in London from 1793 through 1802, and then reissued as a bound series in 1812 and 1825.4 Aimed at poorer, less literate audiences than those who bought complete collections of poetry or novels, these volumes supply segments of once-fashionable texts written by authors from the previous hundred years whose works were newly released by the copyright decision of 1774 for republication.5 Particularly popular were sentimental vignettes from Addison and Steele's Spectator, including "Father Nicholas" and "Theodosius and Constantia"; Milton's L'Allegro; Pope's Epistle to a Lady, Eloisa to Abelard, and sections from The Rape of the Lock; occasional verses and love lyrics by Prior, Buckingham, Dryden, and others; and chapters from sentimental novels by Sterne, Goldsmith, and Henry Brooke.
[¶8.] To Austen, these compendia model the corruption of literary politics. Like the simplified histories she mocks in this passage and mimicked in her juvenile History of England . . . by a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian, these books supply a Reader's Digest of fragmented texts presented as literary models merely because they profit booksellers who possess the copyrights.6 Austen considered that such stale selections recycled culture instead of revitalizing it. She implies, moreover, that by praising collections instead of novels, literary "Reviewers" applaud the vicarious talent of editing in place of the creative powers of writing (37).
[¶9.] Austen also criticizes the taste these collections purvey even while she mocks the literature--gothic novels--set in opposition to this taste. In castigating the "improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation" and "coarse" language of the Spectator, Austen's narrator explodes the invoked distinction between "high" and popular culture (38). These books purportedly provide impeccable taste, yet they reveal precisely the same qualities that make Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho fascinating yet morally suspect: fanciful plots, fantastic situations, and powerful feelings. Republished vignettes from the Spectator even present lurid scenes of men suffering guilt not dissimilar to Radcliffe's characterology in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Austen notes, furthermore, that whereas The Mysteries of Udolpho was penned by a member of the "injured body" of female novelists that included Fanny Burney, the miscellany, like the "history of England," vaunts only male products. These literary prejudices form central topics in Northanger Abbey, whose heroine, Catherine Morland, reproved for her sloppy language with threats of "Johnson and Blair," shrinks from history because "the men [are] all so good for nothing; and [there are] hardly any women at all" (108). Both the coarse John Thorpe and the witty Henry Tilney, moreover, do read women's novels, even those by Mrs. Radcliffe. Austen thus pinpoints several flaws in the culture purveyed by the "literary corporation" of the anthology.
[¶10.] Emma also addresses the values and taste sold in the literary collection. The most important example mentioned in this text is the highly popular series Elegant Extracts, edited by the Christian philosopher and proponent of liberal education Vicesimus Knox (1752-1821). Knox's Elegant Extracts from the Most Eminent British Poets adheres to the formula Austen satirizes in Northanger Abbey but runs to six tiny volumes embellished with dramatic engravings.7 The first, of "Devotional and Moral" poetry, includes selections from the work of Pope, Prior, Blair, and Addison, as well Austen's favorites, Thomson and Cowper. Elegant Extracts from the Most Eminent ProseWriters, following the same format, contains "Preceptive" passages in volume 2, including Blair's "Origin of Language," and Harris's "Advice to a Beginner in the Art of Criticism" recommending moderation to the "beginner in this elegant pursuit."8 The final volume supplies "Detached Sentences" culled from poetry and prose. The first two address social virtue: "To be ever active in laudable pursuits is the distinguishing characteristic of a man of merit," and "There is an heroic innocence, as well as an heroic courage" (6:156). Later, Pope's maxim appears: "To err, is human; to forgive, divine" (158). Throughout the series, no distinction appears between historical and literary excerpts, or between "factual" and fictional dialogues, nor do prefaces supply a context for the information. Elegant Extracts justifies Catherine Morland's confusion of "invention" and history (108).
[¶11.] Even while Austen depicts collections as cultural cribs in Northanger Abbey and Emma, she uses Vicesimus Knox's Elegant Epistles to supply names for her characters in Persuasion.9 Knox issued other editions of his work clearly designed for children. Both The Poetical Epitome and the single-volume Elegant Extracts: Or, useful and entertaining Passages in Prose, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons being similar in Design to Elegant Extracts in Poetry appeared in large sizes, the latter containing only two sections, "Moral and Religious" and "Classical and Historical."10 The elaborate frontispiece depicts a youth chasing a bee from its hive amid flowering shrubs, a pictorial allusion to the root meaning of "anthology" as a garland of literary flowers, and to the classical ideal of education as the gathering of information from many different sources as bees gather pollen to make honey. Knox's subsequent Elegant Preceptor; Or, An Introduction to the Knowledge of the World, Selected from the Works of the most Eminent Writers, stresses the morality of reading with two epigraphs:
Literature is a kind of intellectual light.--Dr. Johnson
He who blends instruction with delight
Profit with pleasure, carries all the votes.--Roscommon.11
[¶13.] Knox organizes the contents by use, as an educational manual does, including a selection by Blair on the "Beneficial Effects of a Taste for the Belles Lettres" followed by "reading" as best way to form taste.
[¶14.] In Emma as in Northanger Abbey, reading forms an important theme. When Emma asks Harriet whether Mr. Robert Martin is "a man of information beyond the line of his own business," she replies that he reads the Agricultural Reports, and other books "to himself," but "sometimes of an evening, before we went to cards, he would read something aloud out of the Elegant Extracts--very entertaining. And I know he has read the Vicar of Wakefield. He never read the Romance of the Forest, nor the Children of the Abbey. He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them."12 By implying that when Emma reads Mr. Martin as "illiterate and coarse" she reads wrongly, Austen grants Elegant Extracts cultural legitimacy (34). Mr. Martin reads these texts to his family before they indulge in "cards," so that some social and moral instruction precedes pleasure. As in Northanger Abbey, Austen rhetorically opposes this collection to Ann Radcliffe's novels, which here represent lightweight literature. Emma educates Harriet badly if she supplies her with Radcliffe instead of Knox. By mentioning this popular contemporary text, Austen no doubt pleased her youthful audience, for she herself gave her niece Marianne a copy of Knox's anthology.13 Again, however, the texts excerpted in this series do not include the women's novels Harriet enjoys; the "Eminent" authors exclude women.
[¶15.] While the narrator reproves Emma for her snobbish devaluation of Elegant Extracts, however, she also points out the similarity between her values and those represented by Knox. The narrator mocks Mr. Woodhouse for his juvenile taste as he mutters a riddle from another collection, The New Foundling Hospital for Wit.14 Like "Kitty, a fair but frozen maid," Mr. Woodhouse is fixed in one phase of his life. As her educator, he demonstrates both Emma's hypocrisy and her poor education. Emma's snobbism blinds her to the fact that Knox's Elegant Extracts advertises the very use for literature as mental and social improvement that she theoretically endorses but fails to practice. Mary Bennet exhibits the same kind of hypocrisy when she "makes extracts" from "great books" as an exercise of vanity.15 Emma molds her mind on novels, not on the texts that Knox excerpts, yet by promising "elegance" and providing canonized works in digestible pieces, Knox's volumes propagate the very ideal of cultural literacy and "manner" at which Emma herself aims when she compiles her lists of "steady reading," organized "sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule" (37)--perhaps chronologically, thematically, or generically, all methods Knox uses. Emma wants the very literary breadth that Elegant Extracts provides. In seeking the sign "gentleman so plainly written" on the faces of her companions, and in demanding "elegance of feature," Emma also exhibits the appetite for easy, perceptible elegance that Knox provides (33, original italics; 35). In fact, like Harriet, Emma seems better acquainted with Radcliffe's fictions than with "elegant" literature.
[¶16.] In Emma, private readings are indulgent and dangerous. Not only does Emma hurt others and endanger herself by assuming the role of novelist to plot marriages, but the word games she and Frank play on "perfection" and "Mr. Dixon" demonstrate the hazards of unsocialized reading. In contrast, Mr. Martin, by reading the Elegant Extracts aloud, exhibits social responsibility in a fashion parallel to the way Mr. Knightley directs Emma. As an example of a contented, self-made man, moreover, Mr. Martin portrays the ideal that Pierre Bourdieu has observed of peaceful peasants reading in groups, an image which, after the French Revolution, symbolized harmonious class relations.16 Patricia Howell Michaelson has further pointed out that principles of elocution, derived partly from Knox's works and from Blair, influenced Austen's style and subject, and that reading aloud formed part of the family ethos and education.17
[¶17.] All of Austen's novels contain letters. The theme of letter writing and the appearance of letters in Emma, however, serves to gloss not only Austen's attack on superficial judgment and perception in the novel, but also another of Knox's productions: Elegant Epistles. Shortly before Harriet mentions the Elegant Extracts, the narrator of Emma records that all Highbury have admired Frank's "handsome letter" to his new stepmother: "`I suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill had written to Mrs. Weston? I understand it was a very handsome letter, indeed. Mr. Woodhouse told me of it. Mr. Woodhouse saw the letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life'" (18). By repeating the formulaic praise of "handsome," Austen hints that this letter itself reflects an impersonal formula. While expressing socially approved emotion, however, it reveals nothing about the writer's real feelings. The "handsome" letter looks and sounds as such a letter should, but it does not therefore reflect the character of the writer. It is all show. This charge of "handsome," like Catherine Morland's use of the term "fine," puns on the confusion of moral and aesthetic categories. This confusion is exemplified not merely by careless society but also by collections like Knox's, with their elaborate frontispieces, various typescripts, and detailed engravings. Knox's Elegant Epistles, from the most Eminent Writers were, indeed, as popular as his Elegant Extracts. According to the National Union Catalogue, editions of Elegant Epistles appeared from the undated first edition (probably about 1789-1790) to eleven editions by 1822.18 Knox also wrote Personal Nobility: Or, Letters to a Young Nobleman, on the Conduct of his Studies, and the Dignity and the Peerage, dedicated to Charles James Fox, and featuring a long preface on English liberty and dangers of pride based on birth alone that may have influenced Austen when she wrote Darcy's letters in Pride and Prejudice. Unlike Elegant Extracts, these Epistles possess contextual prefaces.19
[¶18.] By the time Austen was writing novels, however, the literary anthology had transmuted to a form miscellaneous no more: literary series. Tiny, multiple volumes issued by Cooke, Knox, Harrison, and Bell, embellished with engravings and portraits and bound in highly colored and gilded identical covers or wrappers, supplied literature as a consistent cultural narrative for children and their parents in sizes and shapes easily carried in pocket or reticule. Designed for private consumption, not for the public display of a gentleman's library, these series promise the buyer that she or he can possess culture in private. This culture, however, is now highly moralized. Often, the literary selections are prefaced with biographical sketches of the author, and the poetry is interpreted by the editor according to moral categories: in George Nicholson's 1812 series, for example, the poems of Smart and Cowper are mournfully mediated by explanations of insanity and religious mania that replace stylistic with psychological emphasis. The moral education promised by these series is also offered by the Victorian gift book, another form of miscellany. These compendia of moral verse, usually addressed to women, openly present literature simultaneously as cultural enfranchisement and moral training. These books were very expensively packaged, with elaborate title pages and engravings, sometimes commissioned especially for particular girls and bound in covers that portray scenes from the texts within. These expensive possessions introduce the young girl to public culture figured as individual moral lessons.
[¶19.] Literary anthologies package imaginative literature, especially poetry, as a commodity. Whereas the early anthology boasts of its inclusive variety, later collections advertise their contents' consistent "quality," a moral as well as stylistic term. Correspondingly, where early editors, who were usually booksellers, defined themselves as public servants, later professional critics define themselves as guardians or guides of culture for the public. Both, however, advertise the wealth of native literature and their own ability to judge it. This posture redefines the reader's attitude toward literary culture. As imaginative participants in writing and publishing, by the mid-eighteenth century readers manifest their discrimination by their sympathetic reception of art and by their internalization of critical values. They admire literary "style" as the mastery of native culture: "elegance," refinement, and control become the watchwords of both reading and behavior. This marks a new kind of reader, a reader increasingly dissociated from direct literary interplay, but engaged in the solitary and imaginative re-creation of culture through critical reading. This is the modern reader.
[¶20.] The history of literary collections reveals that "taste" is a cultural construction, created by particular circumstances of production and reception, that valorizes choice. It is the result of the cooperation of writers, printers, booksellers, and readers in a commodity culture. As the increasing volume and accessibility of printed literature facilitated the spread of reading for pleasure to new audiences throughout the eighteenth century, so the changes in regulations and practices in writing, collecting, editing, publishing, and selling literature helped to create a new way of regarding literature itself. Literary producers--authors, printers, booksellers, and, later, critics--in the Restoration and the eighteenth century promoted printed literature as a class commodity as vulnerable to fashion and novelty as dress. As a leisure item, literature reflected the choice of its buyers. Consumers, or readers, required principles by which to guide these literary choices, and to ensure that those choices were profitable, be this a social, intellectual, or fiscal concern. Novelty, contemporaneity, and social utility were general principles, but they could be used to sell anything. Indeed, if particular choices change--Pope ousting Dryden and vice versa, Shakespeare rising over Milton--the basic importance of choosing only deepens. Choice is the principle that defines "taste," and difference--or différance--ensures choice. This definition characterizes readers as critical, educated, and cultured; it is this ability to choose, to discriminate, among literary works, authors, or styles that exhibits the reader's cultural literacy.
[¶21.] Cultural literacy is a concept that has received much attention recently. Proponents of "traditional" canons have located in certain texts the fundamental principles of Western civilization, arguing that reading these sources is essential to learning Western cultural values. Opponents who advocate "diversity" propose that all culture is "our" culture, and that contemporary, marginal, and exotic texts are essential to the education of citizens of the world. This conflict between the true and the new, the decent and the recent, the consistent and the resistant, the exclusive and the inclusive has marked the literary anthology from its inception in the Restoration. These books show, however, that cultural literacy does not comprise the knowledge of literature per se, either of its history or of particular texts. Rather, as constructed by the literary anthology through its rhetoric, its practices of compilation and dissemination, and its cultural role, cultural literacy constitutes the internalization of critical values. It is not a question of what to read, but of how and why and what you "do" with what you have read. By the end of the eighteenth century, for the English, and by extension to a certain degree for Americans also, reading literature critically demonstrated the cultivation of one's internal character in accordance with the values of culture--reading by employing categories of evaluation to understand and respond to the material in order to improve oneself, and using what one has read to understand the world, rather than to escape from it. Cultural literacy is the manifestation of choice in what one reads. Literary anthologies prompt readers to make this choice.
[¶22.] Literary collections continue in diverse forms today as pedagogical compilations of essays, poetry, and extracts of prose directed to students, fashionable publications, and scholarly collections. In these forms, several traits from the early miscellany persist. Still it is the poetry which celebrates physical pleasure that dominates anthologies of poetry; and still the controlling notion, until very recently, is often to put politics in the background, and to flatter the reader's ability to piece together cultural meanings on his or her own in the manner of New Criticism. The Restoration carnival of competing voices perhaps inspires the efforts of anthologizers seeking to present a globally diverse selection, such as Paul Lauter, whose Heath Anthology aims to give all participants in culture a voice. Certainly, the contrary impulses of the anthology to consolidate a canon and to debunk it, to interpret literary meanings for an audience and to refuse this role, still remain in the literary collections currently on the market.
[¶23.] Anthologies are perhaps more popular today, in a world exploding with printed and electronic information, than at any time since the Restoration. While these offer guides to choice, however, they often finesse the primary lure of the early collection: reading for pleasure. Perhaps television has replaced this aspect of the miscellany, with its visual stimulation, framed variety, fractured brevity, rhetorical promotion of differences between formulaic programs, and endlessly accommodating morality. The Internet certainly promises to customize culture for home use. Perhaps since literary value has shifted from poetry to prose, the aesthetic values of postmodern stylistics have found other venues. Regardless, literary collections, both formal and informal, both bound by publishers and compiled at copying shops by professors, continue to recontextualize literature to provide critical training for a wide and mutable readership. Indeed, with the advent of computer-generated anthologies, the form promises once again to pull language out of legal frameworks and decentralize literary culture. Perhaps, by their subversive deferral of a central authority, these anthologies can again provide feasts even for the critical modern reader.
1 Gilmore argues that literacy increased the belief in personal freedom in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, esp. 131-37. See also Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
2 For an analogous examination, see Sicherman's account of nineteenth-century American reading, "Sense and Sensibility."
3 Austen, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 37.
4 Printed by G. Nicholson and Co., Manchester; sold by T. Knott, London, 1793-1803. Among poems and prose by Samuel Johnson, Soame Jenyns, Langhorne, Thomas Parnell, and Lord Lyttleton are Matthew Prior's "Henry and Emma," Pope's Pastorals and Eloisa to Abelard, and Henry Mackenzie's sentimental vignettes, the "Story of Old Edwards" and the "Story of La Roche."
5 See Altick, Paintings from Books, 38.
6 Benedict, "Literary Miscellanies."
7 Elegant Extracts from the Most Eminent British Poets, 6 vols. (London: John Sharpe, n.d.). Adorned by an engraving of a youth fleeing a graveyard, the first part of the first volume contains works by Young, Milton, Boyse, Pope, Cowper, Ogilvie, Addison, Sir. J. Davies, Soame Jenyns, Davenport, Habbington, Gay, Porteus, Dr. Harrington, Lansdowne, Parnell, Watts, Blair, Cotton, Lowth, Pitt, Watts, Rowe, and Dr. Glynn. The second part, illustrated by a picture of a young man praying on his knees before his bed, adds works by Thomson, Dryden, Addison, Burns, Merrick, Cotton, Mallet Grahame, Pope, Cowper, Young, Prior, Miss Williams, Merrick, Mrs. Barbauld, Pitt, Johnson, Arbuthnot, and Parnell. Vol. 2 offers "Didactic (including Fables), Descriptive, Narrative, and Pastoral" poetry; vol. 3 supplies "Odes"; vol. 4 "Dramatic" pieces; vol. 5 "British Poets; Ballads, Songs and Sonnets; and Satirical and Humorous Pieces"; and the final volume supplies "Larger Poems," including The Rape of the Lock.
8 Elegant Extracts from the Most Eminent Prose Writers, 6 vols. (London: John Sharpe, n.d.), 2:232. The first volume contains "Religious" selections; vols. 3 to 6 include "Orations and Harangues; Parliamentary Speeches," including speeches from Shakespeare's history plays; dialogues, including one between Autoclus and the Clown in As You Like It; "Narrative; Humorous and Satirical" passages; and, in the final volume, "Miscellaneous; Detached Sentences, Thoughts, Maxims and Proverbs."
9 See Benedict, "A Source for the Names in Persuasion."
10 The Poetical Epitome; Or, Elegant Extracts Abridged (London: C. Dilly, 1792). Elegant Extracts . . . for the Improvement of Youth is advertised as the "8th and Last Edition" (London: J. Johnson, 1801).
11 The 2d ed. (London: B. Crosby, 1806).
12 Austen, Emma, 20.
13 Miller, "Jane Austen," 36; also noted in Michaelson, "Reading Pride and Prejudice," 67 n. 5.
14 Chapman traces "Kitty, a fair but frozen maid" to the fourth part of this collection in Emma, 489.
15 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 7.
16 Bourdieu, Distinction, 7.
17 Michaelson, "Reading Pride and Prejudice."
18 Elegant Epistles, 4 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1803). The first run, Elegant Epistles, from the most Eminent Writers, 6 vols. (London: John Sharpe, n.d. [1789?]), contains letters from many of Austen's favorites, including Cowper and Johnson, on topics spanning all subjects: death, grief, literature, people, social theories, domestic humor, and so forth. Several address children or discuss education.
19 The 2d ed. (London: Charles Dilly, 1793).