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[¶1.] Anthologies, miscellanies, and collections of poems and stories have formed a central part of literary culture for two hundred years. They are read in schools and universities, and both editors and authors profit from them since, by widely disseminating a vetted selection of texts, they popularize editorial judgment as well as authorial invention. In helping to form and reform canons, confirm literary reputations, and establish taste and cultural literacy for generations of readers, such books offer much information about the way people wrote and read literature and about the role of literature in culture, yet they have received virtually no critical attention until recently.1 This study sets out to remedy part of this neglect by examining the development of literary collections during the period when they became a printed genre directed to a diverse readership, from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. By analyzing the way these collections shape and are shaped by the cultural contexts in which they were produced and by explicating the kind of reading they invite, this book argues that literary anthologies mediate between individual readers and literary culture. This mediation redefines readers' subjectivity by representing literature as art and reading as a critical activity. Anthologies sell texts of choice and the choice of texts.
[¶2.] Eighteenth-century literary miscellanies are early forms of literary anthologies. Anthologies are conventionally defined as volumes containing a historical survey of English literature, and they are thought of as being compiled by editors from canonical material. Miscellanies, in contrast, are understood to be bundled together from contemporary, fashionable material by booksellers. Although anthologies purportedly differ from miscellanies in scope, the forms are not fundamentally different. In his study of Jacob Tonson, Harry M. Geduld distinguishes early miscellanies from anthologies by stipulating that miscellanies include "more or less heterogeneous . . . writings by three or more contemporary authors," but the historical instability of the categories of heterogeneity and contemporaneity and the frequency of paraphrases and classical translations blur this distinction.2 The category of history, moreover, is merely one of many fashionable rubrics under which literary material was collected, albeit it remained one of the most popular and enduring after the middle of the eighteenth century; the claim of historical sweep does not alone distinguish the "anthology" as a distinct genre from the "miscellany." Rather, anthologies and miscellanies constitute the same genre because they share means of material production, processes of compilation, audiences, and forms that define their cultural functions. They are compiled by individual booksellers and readers who collect printed pamphlets and assemble them into makeshift volumes; they are also compiled by booksellers and editors who collect manuscript and printed works and issue these in single volumes as printed anthologies. Both "miscellanies" and "anthologies" describe a form, shaped by readers and mediated by booksellers and editors, that works to define contemporary cultural literacy and the attitude of the reader of printed literature.
[¶3.] The format of these books prompts the formation of a canon: a demonstration of refined choice. This may seem paradoxical since collections defer hierarchical rankings because they have no apparent system of distinguishing good from better texts. Their traditional organization, however, implies a hierarchy. Miscellanies and anthologies organize literature into categories for comparison. Imitating the bundles of multiple examples of genre that booksellers gathered together on the basis of their similarities, anthologies embody the principle of clustering together different but similar items. They thus presuppose that all their contents are alike enough to be compared, yet unalike enough to spur readerly evaluation. By beginning with a text that defines the genre and then arranging entries to emphasize contrast, these books stimulate readers to compare, judge, and thus rank the separate items. This ranking fosters the cultural desire for a canon: a consensual hierarchy of contrast and comparison, an order that extends beyond individual taste, a systematic classification of excellence established by professionals. Anthologies categorize literature by kind and by quality.
[¶4.] These books embody the dialectical relationship between private readers and a professionalizing literary culture, a relationship largely determined by historical conditions. Because miscellanies embody the literary choices of individual readers and booksellers, they transmit particular tastes to general culture and thus document the influence and impact that individual readers have on forming literary values. At the same time, however, printed anthologies transmit cultural ideas to individual readers and booksellers, helping to determine the way literature was read--especially through including texts that describe and discuss reading. During the period from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the relationship between individual readers and what was becoming professional literary culture changed considerably, and these changes transformed the way people read and understood reading. As Roger Chartier has argued, cultural transmission is a complex phenomenon in which texts move up, down, and sideways through different pockets of culture and different uses.3 Nonetheless, the shifts in the methods of production, packaging, prefatory rhetoric, layout, contents, and forms of the anthology during this period record a significant shift in the relationship of the individual reader to literature.
[¶5.] After the civil war (1642-1649), literary culture centered on the Restoration court and theater, but a new, gradually professionalizing and powerful kind of publishing bookseller sprang up to take this culture to new readers. These booksellers produced anthologies that mediated between the traditional manuscript culture of the court and the new public by providing a mixture of classical and contemporary material. As a genre predicated on disseminating literature to mixed audiences--audiences, moreover, that had recently been rent by civil and religious differences--these anthologies provided a space, if only symbolically, for the productions of all members of society. In this space, different literary languages and genres that represented or embodied different readers and traditions were juxtaposed. Even readers ignorant of Latin and Greek were invited to compare translations to define themselves as culturally literate. As Shaftesbury ironically notes in his essay "Of the nature, rise, and establishment of Miscellanies," authors of miscellanies needed only "a little Invention, and . . . Common-place-Book Learning" since "A Coherence, a Design, a Meaning, is against their purpose" and oppressive to "the airy Reader."4 By promoting the literary values of novelty and topicality, by prefatory rhetoric invoking variety, by a page layout that differentiated each item of the contents but eschewed conventional literary decorum, and by including public and privately circulated poems, these books invited readers to participate actively in the construction of literary interpretation. Indeed, by soliciting contributions and information from their audiences, they constructed their readers as participants in literary culture itself.
[¶6.] As the book trade grew increasingly professional and powerful, the form of the anthology and its corresponding ideal reader changed. During the first half of the eighteenth century, printers typically commissioned professional authors to compile anthologies representing the latest fashionable style. As weapons in cultural competition and as cultural commodities, these collections proclaimed their new principle to be quality, rather than variety. Their elegantly regular page layouts and profusion of pieces about reading and praising literature invited readers to exhibit their discrimination by learning the language of criticism, admiring the control of form, and reading for the stylistic expertise of the poetry. Although readers were still invited to submit pieces to anthologies, these invitations served rather as advertisements than as opportunities. In the second half of the eighteenth century as authors gained copyrighting power, publishers of anthologies abandoned contemporaneity and novelty as their central criteria; these had become the attributes of the novel. Instead, they advertised anthologies as collections of the works of individual authors who exemplified timeless morality. By the mid-eighteenth century, indeed, critics and booksellers represented current taste to a wide audience who thirsted to acquire a knowledge represented by reading English literature--contemporary works in contrast to Greek and Latin classics.5 In the absence of formal differentiation between their entries and the length and similarity of their contents, these anthologies presented native literature as the coherent reading experience of a consistent ideology. The anthology now represented a seamless fabric of social and national values for private readers.
[¶7.] These changes in the anthology create and reflect changes in the role of the reader: from that of a collaborative participant in forging literary culture to that of a recipient of commodified literature who reads poetry to train his or her moral response.6 Restoration readers are conjured as members of a cultural circle within which carnivalesque reversals become possible. They are rhetorically invited to interpret literature as part of a cultural conversation in which they are participating. Readers of the early-eighteenth-century anthology, however, are conjured as informed consumers, discriminating buyers who display their cultural power by selective--albeit extensive--purchasing. Anthologies solicit them to interpret literature according to its aesthetic expertise and emotional force, and their posture as critical but responsive judges, in turn, represents their cultural power. By the end of the century, readers are characterized as engaged in an enterprise of cultural and moral self-improvement that entails the interpretation of literature by its moral content. Despite the replacement of classical translations by British verse, these readers are no longer direct contributors to anthologies but rather recipients of a professionally mediated and systematized literary culture who identify the social value of self-discipline with literary merit.
[¶8.] In this process of defining the reader's role, anthologies help to mold both the reader's subjectivity--his or her imaginative interaction with the text--and the literary values that lead to a canon. These, indeed, are reciprocally related. As anthologies reprint material in different settings and according to different principles, they strip it of its historical and political contexts. Texts become dehistoricized, depoliticized, and hence "timeless," immortal, or, in other words, eternally contemporary. Eighteenth-century anthologies publicize and proliferate critical values and thus facilitate the constant reformation of a cultural consensus on literary merit. While such a result favors booksellers wishing to squeeze profits from old copyrights, it also helps to construct a way of reading literature that places a heavy burden on individual readers to reconstruct meanings from their own contexts. Of course, readers change the way they read throughout their lives, moving, as one sociologist argues, through the roles of player, hero, thinker, interpreter, and, finally, pragmatist who combines elements of each of the other roles as circumstances warrant.7 As compilations of multiple works, moreover, anthologies particularly invite not only repeated use for different ends but a wide range of different uses by different kinds of readers--children, poets, rural families, schoolmasters, middle-class women, and others. Even while they continue to accommodate these different uses and readers, however, by the end of the eighteenth century, anthologies typically present their texts in a fashion especially hospitable to a particular kind of reading. Chosen and prepared by authorities, these texts appear as immaculate vessels of cultural value, not works in context or transition: it is the reader's task to demonstrate his or her discrimination, his or her internal culture, by "taking in" the text, a process that proves the correspondence between his or her values and those embodied in the culture. If in one sense the readers of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthologies are passive, in another, depending on the extent and nature of the editorial mediation, they must expend enormous energy in converting decontextualized material into meaningful experience, in choosing for themselves what has been chosen for them. This enforced process of imaginative engagement simultaneously defines reader and literature as culturally elite.
[¶9.] Literary collections often contextualize their contents by means of prefaces written by the editor, be this the printer, the bookseller, or an author. Although there are many different kinds of literary collections, which are put together in a variety of ways, the generic term that early booksellers preferred for most, if not all, of them, is miscellany. In his Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson traces the term miscellane to the Latin for "a dish of mixed corn," a definition that echoes the derivation of satire from the Latin satura, "a dish filled with various kinds of fruits" or a "medley."8 So popular was this term that Tonson literalized it in his frontispiece to the fourth volume of Dryden's Miscellanies in 1694 (see fig. 1).
[¶10.] Fig. 1 [on page 8 of the print edition] Frontispiece of Dryden's Annual Miscellany: for the Year 1694, M. Burghers sculp., 19 cm., fourth part of the six-volume Miscellany Poems (London: Jacob Tonson, 1694). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This engraving depicts the year as a Muse crowned with the laurel wreath of poetry and holding a cornucopia inscribed "The Annual Miscellany" of fruits symbolizing the various and plentiful contents of the volume. The putti playing musical instruments identify these poems as classical, lyrical, and amorous.
[¶11.] In his Essay Upon Satyr, reprinted in Charles Gildon's Miscellany Poems Upon Several Occasions, M. Dacier links the two terms etymologically.9 The jumbled quality of this dish conveys the unordered, perhaps disorderly, quality of the literary anthology itself and introduces several of the key tropes that booksellers and printers used to tout their collections. Like the satura, literary collections offer the reader fresh fruits: nonce publications, and current, topical, even ephemeral poetry and prose, written in the latest popular style. As the technology for producing literature and disseminating it quickly develops in the early eighteenth century, novelty becomes the mark of fashion.10 Anthologies exploit this fashion by providing current culture and providing it fast.
[¶12.] Printers and booksellers almost always represent the early literary miscellany or anthology as a feast, a collation of fruits gathered in one banquet to suit a variety of tastes. While claims of heterogeneity and contemporaneity often signify only that the material has never before--or not recently, or not legally--been published, the metaphor of a feast reveals the cultural logic of the collection. While harking back to the word's etymology, it reinscribes the paradoxical independence yet community of miscellaneous readers. Similarly, the less common Greek term anthology, meaning a collection of flowers, marks simultaneously the distinction and the unity of the contents, the flowers garlanded within the volume.11 Thus Restoration and eighteenth-century booksellers emphasize that the various feast of the miscellany or anthology is designed to invite the reader not only to select those particular fruits that appeal to his or her palate, but to join the banquet. The feasting image celebrates the cultural commonality of reading, the participation in a community, even while lauding the active integrity of individual readers. By exploiting the problematic dynamic of reading--which, as Colin Campbell explains, is at once a private and a communicative act--this discourse preserves a flexibility that can accommodate rapid changes in audience and literary fashion.12 Through such imagery and discourse, anthologies contribute to the development in the eighteenth century of a new social role for literary analysis: they provide one of the vehicles by which literary criticism becomes an arena of cultural self-examination.13 Equally important, they represent literary culture as commodities to be consumed.
[¶13.] By endorsing the differences among individual readers' tastes, the metaphor of a feast validates as the criterion for judgment not so much informed opinion as the instinctive response of each particular reader. This criterion anticipates literary sentimentalism, becoming a tenet central to criticism by the time of Samuel Johnson.14 In encouraging readers to examine each entry independently, it also turns the process of reading the volume into an exercise in stylistic comparison, while the volume itself becomes a celebration of choice and plenty. The authors whose works the anthology prints are also shown to have different tastes. Restoration anthologies, for example, juxtapose translations of the same Latin verse by different authors that highlight their independence of style and language, and later anthologies until the midcentury employ similar organizational techniques. By contextualizing or recontextualizing poems and prose vignettes and thus creating fresh relationships among words, languages, and genres, Restoration anthologies allow competing, even oppositional, voices or discourses to be heard within the same printed arena, echoing the heteroglossia that Mikhail Bakhtin has examined in the novel.15 These books set language in a context that refashions it in a manner similar to that seen by Mikita Hoy in modern popular culture, by setting up new resonances between categories that, until the cultural shifts of literature's professionalization in the early eighteenth century, resist or explode the fixity of "canonism."16 By validating individual responses to culture while permitting conflicting voices equal space in the book, collections invite all readers to participate in the feast. Any reader who has or wants taste--and who does not fit into one of those categories?--by purchasing the book enters the feast and belongs to the community: desire is the only qualification for the consumption of this literary culture. Literary miscellanies and anthologies become an avenue to criticism for an audience that might earlier have been discouraged by the demanding and serious attention that poetry can require.17
[¶14.] Through the metaphors of plenitude, diversity, and feasting, collections celebrate the wealth of the culture from which they draw and encourage readers to consume it. In its elevation of appetite to cultural capital, the metaphor of consumption is significant. Literary miscellanies and anthologies, indeed, promote the commodification of literature itself in the period when consumer culture is now thought to have begun.18 They stimulate the production and consumption of poetry by encouraging people to join the enterprise of printed literature, not only by buying books, but by writing or collecting and submitting verse themselves. Through the common eighteenth-century device of subscriptions, poets and hacks even induce readers to participate in their rankings of contemporary poets and poems. Early collections also propel the fashion for topical verse by supplying it quickly and relatively inexpensively. As the eighteenth century draws toward the nineteenth, however, and periodicals, novels, and series take over the functions of the miscellany, the metaphor of feasting gives way to that of fleeing in books labeled traveling companions, asylums, or hospitals for fugitive verse. This rhetorical shift not only promotes the uniqueness of private tastes but also signals the decline of the early form of the miscellany, for it expresses the dissolution of the peculiar dialectic between community and individuality that defines the early genre. With the change of metaphor comes a change in the form and function of the anthology itself.
[¶15.] In their prefaces, titles, and advertisements, the printers, booksellers, and editors of literary collections also boast of the variety of their "corn." Such discourse serves several purposes. Clearly, heterogeneous contents may attract multiple audiences--high and low, refined and simple, conventional and quirky--and thus sell more copies. At the same time, editors acknowledge that this variety also refers to quality by confessing that they depend on their customers for copy. Although their claims of variety are sometimes only rhetorical, they serve to excuse or, sometimes, to veil the unpolished texts included in the collection by proclaiming the novelty of the contents, still wet from the author's pen or crisp from his closet collection. In addition, they advertise the egalitarianism of the booksellers' principles of inclusion, which are purportedly determined by the reading public, and even, later, of the British tradition of a free press. By admitting that the collection is uneven, booksellers erase or conceal their own editorship, presenting the book as a virtually unmediated text of texts, freshly open to the reader's eye: it is the reader's feast. Typically, the bookseller Samuel Briscoe further maintains that "tho' the Reader may not understand every particular passage, yet there are other things in them that will make him sufficient Amends."19 By declaring that the collection is diverse, and that if all the contents cannot please all the readers, assuredly everyone will find something he or she likes, booksellers appeal to the proud heterogeneity of the English people who are flattered into indulging their independent judgment within a consensual context.20
[¶16.] The emphasis on variety, moreover, inscribes différance in the Derridian sense: a dislocation of meaning that traces value in the dynamic comparison, contrast, and differentiation between similar or opposing forms and messages. In the early anthology, différance rationalizes replication and finesses poor quality: it serves as a directive to readers to peruse for pleasure rather than for definitive meaning, particularly in the collections of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. This fluidity of meaning encompasses many meanings, hence many readers. The rhetorical boast of diversity, furthermore, opens the way both for discussion and for hierarchy. Such language promotes anthologies as literary carnivals that accommodate disparate literary quality or qualities and that even overturn conventional literary hierarchies; it also underscores their social dimension as products of the readers' particular historical moment.21 Readers thus remain individual while concurring in the latest fashion. Such prefatory discourse empowers them to trust their own opinions of the literature while it simultaneously draws them together as a public joined in the cultural activity of literary judgment.
[¶17.] Eventually, however, when response ousts sociability as the moral arena of literature, this discourse changes. Later-eighteenth-century prefaces in contrast to those of the earlier period typically represent collections not as opportunistic publications but as works of social art. Addressed to critical readers, they advertise the quality of their contents and their editor; they explain these contents as examples of the finest culture, selected and censored according to refined principles at once aesthetic and moral. Some use footnotes or, late in the eighteenth century, contextual explanations or biographical sketches. This editorial work redefines the contents as a more or less coherent body of work selected on consistent principles that illustrate social values. In both early miscellanies and the anthologies of the late century, editors urge that their selections will "reform" English culture. While early editors confine this reform to the improvement of poetic and linguistic values, later editors like Oliver Goldsmith indicate that moral advancement is their goal. This discourse not only advertises novelty but also represents literary culture as the locus of progressive thought, the site of social change: literary values become social values. Such rhetoric also fosters the development of authoritative anthologies that help to establish a critical climate hospitable to the formation of a historical canon of English authors and works.
[¶18.] The physical appearance of the anthology also indicates the way in which compilers expected it to be read. As Roger Chartier has observed, "texts are not deposited in books, whether hand-written or printed, as if in a mere recipient. Readers only encounter texts within an object whose forms and layout guide and compel the production of meaning."22 From the Restoration, most anthologies fit snugly in diminutive octavo or duodecimo sizes rather than in folio or quarto, suggesting that instead of lining the shelves of a gentleman's library with them, readers might have carried these books on journeys, casually left them accessible, or handed them to others. In the early eighteenth century when page decoration was still fashionable, a row of printer's ornaments may head the first, most important selection of an anthology, while few or none may appear in the rest of the volume, but often each item is separated from the previous one by a printer's line, or "rule." Separate items invite short, disconnected reading experiences. Usually, it is only those edited by fashionable authors that bear frontispieces, and these, like those in Tonson's and Fenton's collections, generally depict scenes of feasting, revelry, and classical inspiration. Such illustrations portray the contents and the genre of the anthology as a general introduction to cultural pleasure. Once Thomas Bewick creates the technique of "wood engraving" in 1778, by means of which illustrations could be cheaply and finely reproduced in great quantities, every anthology features detailed frontispieces, headpieces, and tailpieces. By illustrating emotional scenes from the literature in the anthology, these decorations prompt sentimental responses to the reading.
[¶19.] One of the central changes in the anthology concerns the use of names to identify authors. During the early period, most poems in collections are anonymous, while some poems are attributed by authorial initials, meaningful only to readers already familiar with the author's work or the circumstances of the collection's production. There are several reasons for this anonymity. Most obviously, before the revision of copyright practices, booksellers did not sell works by author as much as by topic or form, so advertising by name was not the best policy. Booksellers who bound together miscellanies from extra stock would not bother to reprint looted literature merely to identify an author made newly anonymous by the deletion of a title page; they probably believed that some selections were famous enough to be easily recognized anyway, and if others were not, names would scarcely help to sell them. Some booksellers and many amateur editors also lacked the author's permission to print their names, while some contributors intended their submissions to remain anonymous (see fig. 2).
[¶20.] [Fig. 2 appears on page 15 of the print edition.]
[¶21.] Avoiding naming an author also facilitated piracy and dodged detection. By the midcentury, however, as authors paradoxically won more power in the literary marketplace and yet, because of their increasing numbers and access to print, lost general recognition by the audience, anthologies proliferated and began to function as guides through a cluttered literary culture. In these literary collections, booksellers boast of their authors on their title pages. These changes mark the beginning of a cultural desire for an English canon.
[¶22.] The period from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century creates a distinct shape for the literary anthology. The Renaissance and early seventeenth century lacked two of the essential elements that parent the anthology: the multifarious volume of printed literature facilitated by cheap printing and the growing, literate audience. Only in a culture with enough prestigious publications to make choice a real issue will a form that promises judicious selections flourish. Only readers with the opportunity and means to read for amusement or to raise their status in society by mastering "literate culture" will purchase the luxury of print.23 Despite similarities to earlier commonplace books and anthologies, only in the Restoration does the literary anthology form a printed genre in the sense of addressing a particular desire in the audience by means of a specific form enabled by historical conditions, and even then it remains so unstable and expansive that it easily co-opts or mutates into other forms, like the periodical, the school anthology, and the series. Earlier anthologies, like Tottel's Miscellany (1557) and Renaissance sonnet collections, do not attempt to mediate their fine literature for a wider readership. Most important, the processes by which the literary anthology was created and organized distinguish it as a particular form. Compiled largely from preprinted materials and designed primarily but not exclusively for a new, nontraditional audience of gentry and "middle classes" interested in reading for cultural advancement and pleasure rather than for pragmatic ends, eighteenth-century anthologies adapt themselves to new tastes and fashions with a flexibility denied to virtually any previous genre. This flexibility determines the cultural function of the anthology as mediator between readers and printed literature. After the end of the eighteenth century, the literary anthology intensifies its pedagogical role to produce versions for children, while still packaging high culture for private consumption; periodicals and novels supply the topical literature and assume the mediation between readers and literary culture once served by the eighteenth-century form.
[¶23.] The methods of making, advertising, and classifying anthologies help in part to explain how particular authors and works became canonical in the history of English literature. The difficult questions of how and why particular poems were canonized and the process of canonization have attracted a great deal of recent attention, but this attention has focused almost exclusively on two aspects of the process: the skillful negotiations of printers, booksellers, and authors in controlling the market and authorial reputations, and the political and social support of particular authors and styles, leading to the prominence of literature exhibiting particular kinds of ideology.24 Clearly, publishing booksellers like Tonson, Lintot, and Dodsley who built exclusive relationships with best-selling authors and owned their copyrights could promote, print, and advertise their authors widely, regardless of whether these authors were patronized by the Crown, like Dryden, or maneuvered their own reputations, like Pope; the authors they sponsored were thus doubly likely to be canonized. Although authors often published poems first in heterogeneous anthologies and then, if they were successful, transferred them to their singly authored works, as Pope did with The Rape of the Lock, sometimes printers or pirates reversed the process. As Howard D. Weinbrot has observed, the "canon" in the eighteenth century remained, nonetheless, flexible and diverse.25 Indeed, in some ways it is premature to talk of a "canon" during this period since the distinction between central and peripheral authors and kinds of literature constantly shifted. Not only were prose forms--the periodical essay, the novel, and books of biographical anecdotes--encroaching on the cultural prestige and centrality of poetry, but sentimental, proto-Romantic principles were diluting neoclassical literary criteria while sentimental, Scottish, "ancient," and folk or rustic verse in freer forms was transforming classical genres like satire, panegyric, and georgic. As a genre that quickly supplied the latest fashionable literature, moreover, the early anthology resists efforts to historicize or date its contents into established "canons." The examination of anthologies of the Restoration and eighteenth century also demonstrates that more authors and works were hugely popular than have survived the selections of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New historical and feminist criticism has also examined the exclusion of literature that had once been popular, finding social causes for the formation and rearrangement of the canon to delete women, regional, working-class, and other authors.26
[¶24.] Anthologies contribute in several ways to the dialectical movement of canon construction and deconstruction that marks the eighteenth century. They disseminate particular texts by making copies of fashionable works reasonably affordable and by recycling unsold copies with additions sewn into them. At the same time, by grouping unknown publications under the rubric of a famous name, either accurately or not, and by providing expansive and flexible envelopes for pirated pieces, they continually test the limits of an author's popularity and authority. Anthologies also facilitate the formation of an English canon by continually stealing from each other, and thus recontextualizing literary works and introducing them to fresh audiences in fresh ways. By reappearing in contexts other than their original pamphlets, these works often appear in enough contexts to lose their historical specificity of meaning and to become popularly understood as "universal"--a central criterion in eighteenth-century literary theory. Anthologies thus form a vital link in the transformation of particular poems from the novelties of the day to staple features in the English canon. New contexts renew the contents.
[¶25.] As vehicles for the commodification of literature, anthologies perpetuate the consumerism of the eighteenth century. Books, however, had earlier become a part of consumer culture. Traditionally, indeed, booksellers like John Almon sold a variety of the commodities pertaining to literate culture in their shops. In his autobiography, Almon notes that he commenced as a bookseller by opening a shop "for books and stationary," and in his catalogs he advertises literature in the same roster with other fashionable writing accoutrements.27 As James Raven has documented in Judging New Wealth, literature increasingly is represented in culture as a commodity that embodies the buyer's social power. When the periodical with its advantage of steady, regular publication assumes the literary character of the anthology in the midcentury, however, the anthology blends its discourse of novelty into claims of lasting value and increasingly attends to the physical nature of the book as a status object for middle-class consumers. By expanding into series identically sized, organized, and bound like the volumes of a gentleman's library in a country house, these later anthologies present literature as a symbol of gentility.
[¶26.] By encouraging disconnected dipping and skipping, Restoration and early-eighteenth-century literary collections invite a particular kind of reading appropriate to an age in which literature was becoming commodified. Many critics have argued that the form promotes casual, even careless, habits of reading by substituting the literary equivalent of "sound bytes" for thorough, imaginative engagement in the experience of reading, and by perhaps even endorsing the perception of quick contrasts, Locke's "wit," over the more profound analyses that judgment offers.28 For example, in 1893, George R. Humphrey mourns:
I have known few instances of students being made out of readers of miscellanies. This class of literature begets loose, desultory habits of reading, and the idea that the study of a given subject is the height of monotony. . . . Can a book published, as a commercial speculation only, at one penny, and containing sixty-two articles and stories, added to one hundred and thirty-five various paragraphs, be all true?29
[¶28.] Certainly anthologies popularize a way of reading, as well as a kind of literature, that differs from that of the Renaissance. While examining Pope's annotations of the reissued Restoration anthology A New Collection of Poems relating to State Affairs (1705), W. J. Cameron points to inkblot evidence and marginalia to suggest that Pope read the collection "cursorily," perhaps returning later for a more thorough reading.30 Although this is surely a common pattern, anthologies particularly invite both of these uses: reading for quick effect, and reading for critical judgment. The German historian of reading Rolf Engelsing has identified the former as a shift in the eighteenth century from an "intensive" model of reading, in which readers thoroughly study a few texts, to an "extensive" model, in which they more rapidly con a wider variety of material.31 Anthologies of the eighteenth century bridge these two models. They promote "extensive" reading by promising many pieces, not great ones; nonce, not timeless, texts; the latest, not the best. Moreover, they show few marginalia that might testify to a reader's intensive examination. At the same time, the brevity and mnemonic literary devices of much miscellaneous literature and the organization of anthologies suggest that readers might have memorized some of the contents and certainly absorbed their critical values. Readers are enabled to use anthologies in either way because these volumes include texts that readers use in both ways. At the same time, the prefaces, packaging, and contents direct readers in how to appreciate literature defined as art.
[¶30.] Early collections were produced in several ways. Early miscellanies were batches of printed material that booksellers tied together to be sold at trade sales or public auctions as lots.32 These groupings indicate the way printed collections also were compiled and arranged. Begun in 1676 by the bookseller William Cooper, auctions were a profitable method of selling books that classified them by subject and format.33 Their catalogs group two or three separately printed pamphlets for a single price, while listing larger parcels as "Bundles of Stitcht Books and Pamphlets." Under this rubric, pamphlets of the same format (folio, quarto, octavo, or duodecimo) are bracketed together if they share an author, topic, theme, or genre. As in printed anthologies, Latin books usually remain separate from English bundles, which are far more prevalent since the authors of the topical and ephemeral publications printed in pamphlets used the vernacular in order to have their works widely read.34 Such bundles comprise collections of doctrinal treatises, speeches, political tracts, ordinances, "weekly news" or periodicals, and sermons. Some genres are very common. Cooper asked only 3s. 7d. for "Twelve volumes of several Sermons bound together" by different authors--scarcely a price to fuel the hopes of Henry Fielding's Abraham Adams, solemnly expecting a hundred pounds for his "nine Volumes of Manuscript Sermons."35
[¶31.] By facilitating the categorization of literature into genres including what would be called ephemera, the catalogs of these auctions reveal the organizational principles behind booksellers' groupings and indicate the way readers were expected to purchase, read, and think about this literature. In these catalogs, three closely interrelated principles organize the bundles: genre, topic, and, least important, a crude chronology. Where possible, Cooper prefers to organize his bundles by genre--for example, parceling together a "Collection" of fifty broadsides of death poetry in English and Latin, containing "Obsequies, Elegies, Epitaphs, &c."36 Genre could be loosely construed, as indicated by the combination of A Joyful Message of the Kingdom of Righteousness with English Proverbs, a coupling that reveals the interconnection between form (biblical paragraph) and subject.37 This pattern mirrors that of the printed collections Cooper also advertises, like the fivepenny Help to discourse; or a miscellany of merriment by W.B. and E.P. (1620), Cambridge Jests (1674), or the sevenpenny Oxford Jests (1675). Both these books and Cooper's bundles suggest that readers collected and compared multiple examples of similar material to contemplate or master the rules and variations of one genre, and that they skipped between unconnected items rather than either shifting between different sorts of literature or engaging in long stints of reading. Short genres invite such stylistic exercises, whereas single-narrative prose or poetic works induce a different sort of reading. Edward Bysshe, indeed, suggests that the collection of extracts in his Art of English Poetry "may divert and amuse you better" because the parts have no "connexion . . . to keep the Mind intent, and constrain you to any length of Reading."38 Later anthologies continue to invite this sort of casual reading. In Restoration and eighteenth-century collections, notably Dryden's six-volume Miscellanies for Jacob Tonson (1784-1709), editors include multiple examples of similar genres, even several translations of the same Latin poem. Despite their claim of heterogeneity, Restoration and eighteenth-century miscellanies and anthologies echo the generic or stylistic specialization of early miscellaneous bundles.
[¶32.] Under the pressures of sorting pamphlets for the sale, differences in genre sometimes collapse beneath the similarity of subject. Should there be an insufficient number of items of a given genre for a bundle, Cooper gathers material of a similar topic together, often presenting opposite sides of a contemporary issue, as in the coupling of Jo Standishes Treatise against the Protestation of Rob. Barnes (1540) with A Confutation of Jo. Standishes Treatise against D.R. Barnes.39 Although topical collections clearly resemble generic ones, some bundles are quite diverse:
Twelve merry Jests of the Lying Widow Edyth, very old. A merry Play between the Pardoner and the Frere, very old. Manner of Consecrating Bishops, Priests, Etc. Lond. 1559. A Pillar of gratitude to the King and Parliament for restoring Episcopy, 1661. John Ogilbyes relation of the King's Entertainment through London 1661. Bishop Ushers Mystery of the Incarnation of God, London 1645, with seven more of Episcopy Etc. (371, no. 18)
[¶34.] This folio packet contains material of a vaguely episcopal nature, ranging from joke to catechism. Booksellers continue this practice as they assemble topical material for nonce miscellanies, pamphlets issued for a particular, present occasion, by slipping in dated or reprinted pieces to swell their collections. In gathering all the available material on an issue, regardless of its contradictions, booksellers eschew open partisanship. Likewise, in their posture as servants to the public, they often disavow political or moral--but not literary--bias. Even Edward Bysshe, whose "handbook for poets" scarcely contains polemical material, avers, "I have upon every Subject given both Pro and Con whenever I met with them . . . and if both are not always found, let none imagine that I wilfully suppress'd either; or that what is here uncontradicted must be unanswerable" (x).40 This does not always mean that collections are nonpartisan, of course. In his introductory essay to the collection of pamphlets he edited with William Oldys in the Harleian Miscellany, "Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and Fugitive Pieces," Samuel Johnson argues that the miscellany demonstrates the English tradition of a free press, yet the collection is strongly anti-Catholic. For booksellers, this neutral stance is profitable: it accommodates differently minded readers, allowing a greater audience to participate imaginatively in the anthology. In a similar fashion, as Tessa Watt argues, seventeenth-century "pieties" preserved a middle-of-the-road morality that could be stretched to include Puritans or Anglicans.41 By including contradictory material, booksellers advertise themselves as all things to all readers while simultaneously touting the plenty and hospitality of a print culture that welcomes divergent views.42
[¶35.] Finally, Cooper uses contemporaneity or age to unify diverse materials, although this is always his last organizational principle. To Restoration booksellers, literary material, generally, is either old or new, but Cooper does admit a gray area between these poles. Accordingly, in the catalogs for 1676-1779, Cooper often lists the material in his bundles chronologically, perhaps to appeal to collectors like Samuel Pepys, so that more recent publications are often grouped together even while the catalogs of the following decade generally highlight popular titles at the expense of chronology.43 Especially in bundles exclusively of recent or contemporaneous English verse, this loose chronological organization also supplements subject to identify the kind of contents each bundle holds and hence works as one of the criteria that define genre. Thus Cooper's Bundle of Poems, consisting of translations of Virgil and Ovid, with poems by Pasquin, Surrey, and others, constitutes a miscellany of imitations and translations ranging in date from 1570 to 1642, while another more contemporary bundle consists of elegies, epigrams, satires, and translations by Jonson, Harrington, John Taylor, and others from 1618 to 1660 (395, nos. 48, 49). Item 216 comprises "Several Poems of Ben. Johnson [sic], Coryat, Sir John Suckling, &c. to the Number of 34, with Bishop Andrews Poem on the praise of a
[¶36.] These organizational practices persist until the end of the century. As late as 1792, the bookseller J. Deighton advertises several miscellanies of his own compilation as Poems, Etc. Some he anchors with a poem made famous by critical acclaim and reproduction: Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1751) heads one quarto miscellany of Latin and English verses; Dyer's The Fleece (1757) opens another of exclusively native poems, including two by Churchill, for 4s. half-bound. Others, expanding to fifteen items, mingle translations or thematically similar works with topical poems and tracts.44 To form a sheaf of largely loco-descriptive verse, including georgics and pastorals, Deighton grafts Denham's Cooper's Hill (pirated 1642) onto a collection of poems by John Philips including Blenheim (1705), Sir Richard Blackmore's "The Kit-Cats" (1708), and John Beaumont's long "Bosworth Field" (1629), as well as others "by eminent men," for 2s. 6d. Selecting mainly satire for another miscellany, he assembles an unattributed compendium of Jabez Hughes's translation of Claudius's Rape of Proserpine (1714, reissued 1716 and 1723), John Dennis's "The Battle of Ramilia [sic]" (1706), John Philips's The Pretender's Flight, or a Mock Coronation (1716), John Freke's The History of the Insipids (1709, attributed to Rochester), Rochester's "Upon Nothing," and others for 2s. (188, nos. 7207, 7208). These miscellanies are chronologically organized but thematically grouped.
[¶37.] From pamphlets, private miscellanies might be produced. Purchasers of "Bundles of Stitcht Pamphlets" or other books who desired to protect or to display their literary purchases could commission binders or booksellers to bind their private selections of plays, poems, or tracts together, thus creating personal literary anthologies or miscellanies that made ephemeral literature seem permanent (see the customer ordering binding in fig. 3).
[¶38.] Fig. 3 [on page 24 of the print edition] "Irish Binding for the Caricature Magazine." Woodward del. Hand-colored etching, 21.8 x 32.7 cm., 15 April 1808. Courtesy of the Print Collection, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Illustration for Thomas Tegg's five-volume Caricature Magazine (1807-1821). The bookseller Thomas Tegg (1776-1845) published miscellanies, magazines, and, after the 1774 copyright decision, a series of fashionable novels in miniature, all identically bound and finely illustrated. This print satirizes both the profiteering bookseller seeking to bind the ephemeral Caricature Magazine in the popular, aromatic, and fine Russia calf, and his Irish customer who confuses the country with the product, preferring local Dublin binding to keep the jokes fresh.
[¶39.] Such miscellanies follow no particular organizational principle: Fredson Bowers notes the complexity resulting from the "frequent lack of any set order in the sections, casual binding or special binding for customers who already owned certain parts, and later arrangement or sophistication."45 These private collections of popular reading document individual participation in the fashionable culture of particular historical moments. Early bound collections presuppose a wealthy reader with a library, whose participation in culture might also have taken more directly political forms in government. Once bookselling and publishing become high-volume, more impersonal businesses later in the century, however, customers, especially those of modest means and unsure or inexperienced at literary selection, bought booksellers' miscellanies, and these form the clearest link between auctioneers' bundles of books and printed anthologies.
[¶40.] Booksellers fairly often compiled their own volumes from unbound sheets of pamphlets in their shops.46 As members of "congers," associations of booksellers who shared copyrights, or of less formal partnerships, shop-owning printers and booksellers may also have traded books--not merely copyrights--so that they could offer their customers a greater number of titles.47 By attaching an unsold or pirated pamphlet to a current one and adding a new title page, booksellers recontextualized their stock. When title pages appear on these volumes, as "the publisher's advertisement of the book," they indicate the way books were marketed, although not necessarily the way they were originally conceived or assembled, since title pages and prefatory material were printed last to accommodate changes.48 Especially in the case of "built-books" made up of miscellaneous writings, they serve to emphasize the most widely selling, popular contents, in contrast to indexes, which list all the texts in the volume.49 When they did not order title pages and prefaces printed as part of the new book, indeed, booksellers often commissioned printers to make separate title pages to be inserted or "tipped" (glued) into the front of their assembled miscellanies.50 These articulate the booksellers' informed idea of how to unify the contents and to present them in the current literary market. In his examination of the marketing of printed books, Graham Pollard has remarked that "in the usual course of trade a book will never be printed until someone thinks that it can be sold."51 The same is true of miscellanies: they were unlikely to have been compiled unless the bookseller had reason to believe they would sell in the new format. Some perhaps were even designed for collectors in the same way that "early numbers of eighteenth-century periodicals [were] reprinted so that subscribers [could] complete their sets."52 Probably some booksellers intended to deceive naive buyers by packaging certain compilations as single-author collections; other volumes, however, serve as representative anthologies of a particular style, genre, or topical treatment at a time when the valorization of authorial originality still lay in the future.53
[¶41.] The processes by which miscellanies and anthologies were assembled demonstrate the interdependence of audiences, booksellers, and printers during the Restoration and eighteenth century. During the seventeenth century, as distribution of books to the provinces became essential for profit, publishing changed.54 Instead of being the province of printers alone, it became the cooperative endeavor of two professionals: the printer, traditionally referred to as the publisher, who owned the shop in which the text was set in type and produced, and the bookseller, a new kind of entrepreneur who owned the copyrights and specialized in distributing the book. Sometimes, in addition, an editor--critic, author, or entrepreneur--would find, arrange, and present the contents. While some early books bear the printer's name in the phrase "Printed by," many carry only the bookseller's imprint in the phrase "Printed for," although some imprints bear both names. As this practice shows, printers increasingly lost prestige during the eighteenth century, becoming craftsmen or even laborers rather than independent businessmen; nonetheless, many who grew successful became booksellers in their own right, serving as both printers and copyright-owners. In addition, authors or editors serving as producers of books are sometimes termed "publishers" in imprints. These classes of work were closely tied with one another so that the men and women performing these jobs were as much working together to create a market as competing against one other to dominate it. Consequently, anthologies reflect the consensus of many "publishers" rather than the decisions of individual readers with access to a publishing mechanism, no matter how powerful the reader might be.
[¶42.] Although a number of printed anthologies, like other eighteenth-century books, were the result of subscriptions, many booksellers solicited their customers for material in printed pleas in prefaces and advertisements.55 For example, in his preface to the two-volume Familiar Letters (1705), mainly written by Rochester to Henry Savile, Samuel Briscoe notes that, "Upon the Noise of this Collection, several Gentlemen have been so kind, as to send me in Materials to compose a Second," which has led the enterprising Briscoe to accumulate some items for a third to be printed shortly if "those Gentlemen that have any curious Letters by them . . . are willing to oblige the Publick" by sending them to him.56 Anthology editors like Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Sir Richard Steele, James Ralph, and Alexander Pope asked their friends for contributions. According to the traditional discourse of bookselling, indeed, it was readers who provided the rationale for collections by demanding and supplying a particular sort of reading matter. The prefaces of anthologies characterize this as material that requires only fleeting attention, about which the reader can quickly pass judgment. Indeed, even before novelty bows to the nationalistic nostalgia of the late eighteenth century, the anthology as a printed genre geared to an anonymous audience favors particular kinds of literature, which are repeatedly anthologized for practical reasons. These are short poems that allow room for more, separate pieces; love lyrics, attractive to readers young and old; and verse that either conveys mood, be this light or solemn, paints vivid pictures, or plays with language--pleasures accessible to more readers than cerebrally philosophical, purely topical, or polemically political poems. Prefaces tout these as the readers' choices. This evidence shows Restoration and early-eighteenth-century readers directly entering print culture by helping to determine which books, letters, or poems were published, and therefore which authors, genres, styles, and subjects would become canonical. Even as the increasing importance of the editor in the eighteenth century corresponds to the declining power of readers directly to influence literary culture themselves by proposing specific texts to be printed, readers as buyers retain their power to prefer or reject selections into the nineteenth century, even while these choices are shaped by cultural circumstances.57
[¶43.] To whom were these printers and booksellers aiming their collections? Such a question raises the vexed issue of who could read at all during the Restoration and eighteenth century. In reviewing current research on the literacy of the early modern period, J. Paul Hunter points out that literacy for both sexes leaped forward in the early seventeenth century but stagnated in the eighteenth.58 Hunter, furthermore, argues that although women wrote less often than men, they might read or be read to quite as often. David Cressy similarly notes that although little is known about literacy from 1720 to 1760, evidence proves a significant jump in the number of people who could at least sign their names from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries; he also cautions, however, that, apart from local pockets of literacy, the only participants in the literate culture of the seventeenth century were the "cultivated elite," urban men and women of the haute bourgeoisie who led a fashion in reading as in other consumer habits.59 The publication statistics drawn from the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (hereafter ESTC) support these conclusions: Alvin Kernan observes a dip in the number of publications issued in the middle years of the eighteenth century, suggesting again that the reading public remained stable or even waned during this period.60 As Richard D. Altick and Jon P. Klancher have shown, literacy and the demand for books burgeoned again toward the end of the eighteenth century.61 Henry Curwen notes nonetheless that although the first circulating library was founded by Wright of the Strand about 1730, by 1770 only four existed in London.62 Thus the audience for literary collections changes throughout the period under study, becoming greater and more diverse (except during the middle of the century), more largely female, and more middle-class. These changes shape changes in the anthology. Whereas the early literary miscellany or anthology offers through a small, centralized band of literary producers an accessible, printed resort to a growing audience, midcentury collections diversify to stimulate a stagnant readership with prose and amateur collections, while the late-century anthology offers a historical survey of literary culture for a wide, varied audience.
[¶44.] Within these broad categories, however, there remain specific kinds of readers. The practice of sewing together surplus or topical pamphlets assumes a clientele who wish to buy several pieces and who probably do not own any, or at least many, of the texts in the collection. Different material also posits different readers: collectors who desire older poetry, wealthy gentry completing libraries, and fashionable consumers of an increasingly commodified culture. While some customers may have hired booksellers to purvey whatever the bookseller thought important, others may have hired them to collect what the customer found important, although these categories must have overlapped substantially since from 1714 to 1774 on average only fifty new works were patented annually.63 These customers might include country readers, commissioning a bookseller to send them all the literature on a recent scandal, and urban buyers whose libraries and tastes the bookseller knew, as well as general readers. Some miscellanies might result from the cooperative discussion between a customer or several customers and the bookseller.64 Many, although not all, collections were also relatively affordable, given the high price of books. Since it was cheaper to purchase one anthology than editions of all the works it contained, even if skillful booksellers charged more for them than for single-authored volumes, in fact as well as reputation miscellanies and anthologies were generally cut-rate books. Their prefaces, furthermore, suggest that their readership was widely inclusive. Because they came to these texts from other collections of poetry, jest books, and courtesy literature, this audience included both women and men, both the young and the mature, both the experienced and the neophyte. Anthologies turned them all into critical readers.
[¶45.] This book analyzes the way Restoration and eighteenth-century literary anthologies present literature to produce meaning in different cultural climates and the way they define readers to consume it.65 By tracing its formal changes, I argue that the literary anthology bridges diverse social groups by showing them how to read fashionably. It does so by recontextualizing literature to neutralize political messages, elevate style as morality, and, by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, package literature as a consistent, moral narrative available to the solitary reader. In the process, the reader is redefined as a critical judge of quality.
[¶46.] Although literature is written, compiled, produced, and read by individuals whose decisions affect the popularity and influence of particular authors and works, this book argues that taste--including their taste--is the result of market forces, and that the history of the anthology, the very genre that publishes literary consensus, definitively proves this. This argument echoes that of Horkheimer and Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu in maintaining that literary history reflects economics, politics, and material culture.66 While editors and booksellers are also themselves readers and thus agents in forging literary taste, I here analyze the ways in which these individuals enact or embody cultural forces--including advances in technology, new marketing strategies, and changes in audiences, literary politics, and consumption habits--rather than exploring their personalities. Similarly, I do not examine the individual histories of authors but instead the way they were sold to the public. Indeed, I am specifically concerned with refuting the traditional emphasis on the individual genius of writers as the sole determinant of their stature in the canon. In its place, I argue that the history of the anthology demonstrates the growing control of the self-definition of readers by a rhetoric tuned to mass production in an increasingly anonymous market. While these changes reflect the emergence of the bourgeois ideal of self-discipline married to class ambition that Peter Stallybrass and Allon White diagnose in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, the creation of a mass literary market selling literature cheaply to untraditional audiences also demonstrates the democratization of literary culture.
[¶47.] Anthologies represent high literature for a mass audience. In the process, they depoliticize it.67 Much--perhaps all--literature contains what might be called propaganda: this can support patrons and patronage, advocate religious resignation, charity, or pilgrimage, endorse or condemn patriotism, or criticize the state, among other attitudes. A political agenda, indeed, drives such genres as panegyric, georgic, elegy, and particularly satire. The latter is especially prevalent in the eighteenth century, when cheap printing made the publication of the political strife between Whigs and Tories profitable. Readers, however, historically are not always invited or induced to recognize or receive this level of meaning. In the period I examine, literary theory increasingly encourages them to disregard political text or subtext in favor of style; anthologies specifically facilitate this process by decontextualizing and recontextualizing selected works. In the process, they define what it means to read literature and what it is to be a reader. Particularly in my treatment of commonplace books in chapter 1 and pedagogical series in the conclusion, I explore this aspect of literacy by examining the ways in which readers' subjectivity is fashioned by a print culture devoted to showing the reader him or herself, an approach to cultural history indebted to the innovative work of Stephen Greenblatt.68 As this history of the anthology from the Restoration to the Regency shows, the influence of individuals on culture and vice versa is dialectical. This dialectic appears in the heteroglossia of diverse voices that sound in the single text of the anthology.69
[¶48.] An enterprise of this kind entails several assumptions. Perhaps the most glaring is the question of cause and effect: do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste? My answer is that they always and inevitably do both. It is in order to improve their profits that the printer and bookseller bind together poems or passages which have already proven their popularity, but, conversely, the packaging and juxtaposition of these works ineradicably affects the reader's understanding of them. It changes the expectations and tastes of the audience; it influences the youthful authors who peruse these miscellaneous works in preparation for writing their own. The reproduction of printed works in a different context invariably modifies the meanings of those works. In the case of anthologies where booksellers or editors affix prefaces providing up-to-date rationales for their selections, the recontextualization creates self-conscious readers.
[¶49.] A second problem involves the distinction between "high" and "popular" works. In this book, I use the term popular to denote a work that was read by a broad section of literate people, in contrast to a "high" work which deliberately appealed to the traditional audience for literature: leisured, edu
[¶50.] Much scholarship recently has examined these different aspects of literary culture. I am indebted to Arthur Ellicott Case's early Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521-1750 for help in locating overlaps and debts, but this splendid descriptive bibliography does not approach questions of cultural analysis. Work by scholars of the book trade, such as Terry Belanger, Michael Treadwell, David McKitterick, D. F. McKenzie, and David Foxon, however, has revealed the importance of the mechanics of production on both specific texts and literary culture.70 While I am indebted to the burgeoning field of book history, I depart in this book from the methodology of individual case studies for an overview that locates the significance of booksellers' practices in their products. Indeed, I implicitly take issue with current book trade scholarship for ignoring the contents of the books produced by firms or individuals, and for neglecting the role of the consumer in fashioning the market. In contrast, indeed, to most book studies, parts 4 and 5 of Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, explore the book as a commercial product, although they still underrate the significance of what a book actually contains. Adopting a different approach, scholars of cultural history and of mentalité including Rolf Engelsing, Roger Chartier, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Robert DeMaria have been scrutinizing the historical changes in the way people read literature, an approach epitomized by Robert Darnton's analysis of sentimental response in "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity."71 As these studies show, books inhabit two spheres of meaning. They are material objects, consumer goods, that circulate in the world of commerce and symbolically represent cultural value.72 But they also have "use value," helping to disseminate ideas, influence people, and mold culture itself. This book seeks to link these two spheres of literary culture by examining the way anthologies serve simultaneously as vessels and as vehicles, as objects imbued with meaning and as mediators disseminating meanings. Although it is one thing to buy or borrow a book and another to read it, literary anthologies are designed to bridge this gap: they have low status as a literary form, but their indexes, page layouts, organization, and contents ensure easy but guided reading. The investigation of these books must, therefore, entail an analysis of the way contemporary audiences read them. James Raven in Judging New Wealth similarly attempts to marry book history with cultural studies by documenting the commercialization of books and their role in promoting consumer culture, but Raven eschews "reception theory," preferring to summarize the narratives of his novels rather than to analyze the writing or reading of them.73 My study, however, by linking texts to their physical and social contexts, examines how these books embody cultural meanings. The contexts of anthologies necessitate a study not only of the bibliography of particular texts, but of the way editions reshape the meanings of their contents.74
[¶51.] This book concentrates on what economists call the "demand" or consumer side of the literary culture of anthologies, the way they were received and read, largely leaving the "supply" side--the story of the relationships among particular printers, congers, booksellers, and authors--to be told by other scholars. In doing so, it follows the practice of Neil McKendrick, whose revolutionary treatment of commercialization in eighteenth-century England helped to relocate the origins of consumer culture.75 Nonetheless, the relationship between the production and the consumption of literary collections is highly dialectical: first, because readers help to produce miscellanies as well as consuming them, since booksellers and printers compile miscellanies from material requested by readers or remaindered; and, second, because the cultural interplay between the producers and consumers of anthologies is so steady and so rich. By examining the discourse, packaging, and contents of literary anthologies, and by explicating the way the anthology's context organizes the reception of these contents, this analysis explores this interplay and reveals the role of the genre in eighteenth-century literary culture. This approach resembles that of Alvin Kernan, who in his groundbreaking Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson sees the eighteenth century's literary criticism, creation of a canon, and shift in aesthetic taste as the result of the capacity of the printing press to multiply the production of books, so that "the need of print for copy . . . created writers." As a result of this new means of production, which erased the need for patronage and, at the same time, promoted new critical criteria valuing readers' responses and independent judgment, Kernan argues, the cultural role of the author changed from that of a courtly dilettante to that of a self-conscious, middle-class, and independent businessman.76 While literary anthologies bear out many of Kernan's conclusions, they also testify to the key role of readers and critics in determining what literature was read and written. Kernan underrates the extent to which readers themselves shaped the books they read, or inherited a tradition of critical evaluation. In contrast, Mary Thomas Crane examines these issues in Framing Authority, but her admirable study of Renaissance collections does not go beyond the early seventeenth century.
[¶52.] A further word is needed to clarify my organization and linguistic usages. Although the chapters follow a chronological path that is important to the argument, sections within each chapter define subgenres of the anthology that often transcend neat, chronological divisions. Both university anthologies and children's anthologies, for example, flourish throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, although I locate one in the late Restoration and the other in the late eighteenth century. It is the nature of miscellanies and anthologies to look backward and forward even while they advertise themselves as utterly contemporary, for the current is the junction of past and future. Literary taste itself, moreover, mutates gradually, with many a throwback on its way to a new ideal. My principle has been to discuss definable forms of the anthology at the period when they first appear as significant publications in order to examine their relationship with contemporary print culture. The term print culture signifies the culture of print, including traditions of how texts appear in print as well as what texts are printed, whereas printed culture refers to the literature and other texts that are printed. Although booksellers and printers typically refer to their productions as "miscellanies" and that term is significant for the genre, I have used the terms collection, anthology, and compendium where necessary in order to clarify the distinction between volumes of preprinted material sewn together--miscellanies--and collections printed in a single run. I have also noted where necessary in the footnotes the current location of the volume being examined and shelf marks in cases of ambiguity. In each chapter, I have selected anthologies by central figures in the history of English criticism whose success gave them wide -audiences and influence over their publishers, and ones that were popular, as evidenced by frequent editions, long runs, or a high number of republished contents.
[¶53.] This book contains five chapters. The first traces the influences of popular versions of the anthology that flourished before the Restoration in establishing the genre as a vehicle for cultural education. Here I argue that anthologies, commonplace books, courtesy literature, and English reference and writing manuals from the late Renaissance to the eighteenth century serve as models for the anthology not only by their presentational techniques but also by promoting native literature as the means for social mastery and by encouraging participation in literary culture. At the same time, they chart the transition from an earlier world of manuscript production to one in which the reader's subjectivity is defined by printed literature. The second chapter, centering on Restoration court anthologies, university collections, and poetic handbooks, examines the selling of classical and English literature as contemporary, topical, and novel in a climate that sought to reconcile diverse readers by celebrating aesthetic variety. This print culture grants readers the authority to judge literature for themselves. In chapter 3, I trace the new values of elegance, exclusivity, topicality, and balance that define readers as discriminating consumers of fine art, using works by Steele, Pope, and Curll. The fourth chapter chronicles the result of the professionalization of criticism in the midcentury collections designed by powerful critics and booksellers that centralize literary values and rank authors: here, readers are conjured as concurring with the critical consensus. In the final chapter, I examine collections that bridge youthful and adult audiences by defining reading as critical training and moral improvement. In the conclusion, by looking at Jane Austen's views of collections, I suggest that early-nineteenth-century anthologies present the experience of reading literature as the possession of public values. This book demonstrates that early anthologies mediate between readers and print culture by defining reading as the private self-conscious enactment of elite criticism.
1 The anthology of essays in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, edited by Griffiths and Pearsall, explores medieval miscellanies; Ezell has looked at some eighteenth-century literary collections in Writing Women's Literary History; Raven has examined early novels including some collections in Judging New Wealth; see also for the treatment of related serialized publications and topics in the nineteenth century, Altick, The Presence of the Past and the ceaselessly valuable English Common Reader. The argument opposing collections for corrupting culture appears in A Pamphlet against Anthologies by Riding and Graves.
2 Geduld, Prince of Publishers, 87-88.
3 Chartier, "Comment on Mr. Grimsted's Paper," 227-28.
4 Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3:4, 6-7.
5 Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, 10.
6 In A Pamphlet against Anthologies, Riding and Graves deplore this phenomenon, arguing that anthologies forestall critical choice and homogenize literature.
7 Appleyard, Becoming a Reader, 14-15, passim.
8 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (1635). Johnson corrects the mistaken root of satyr in his Dictionary of the English Language.
9 London: Peter Buck, 1692.
10 In Before Novels, Hunter documents the ambitious, urban tastes of an eighteenth-century audience eager for mobility, commerce, and change (76-79); for his analysis of the passion for novelty, see chapter 5. Hunter also notes the emphasis on contemporaneity in the 1690s (171-72).
11 Samuel Johnson defines anthology as, primarily, "A collection of flowers," and lastly as "A collection of poems" in his Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "A collection of flowers of verse, esp. epigrams, by various authors" (1:60). The English titular translations of the term often use garland to stress the editor's role in weaving the separate blossoms into a whole.
12 Campbell, "Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption," 40-57.
13 See Eagleton, The Function of Criticism.
14 Weinbrot maintains that the notion that "Response is all" flourished with Johnson and Percival Stockdale in the middle of the eighteenth century, marking a gradual Romanticization of taste, but even in the previous century this criterion was important; see "Samuel Johnson, Percival Stockdale, and Brick-Bats from Grubstreet," 121, 125, passim. Campbell associates this sensibility with the response to pleasurable consumption in "Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption" (48-49).
15 See particularly Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination.
16 Hoy, "Bakhtin and Popular Culture," 771, 781.
17 Hunter, Before Novels, 86-89.
18 In "Coming Up for Air," Agnew outlines historians' current relocation of consumer culture in the early modern period (22).
19 Briscoe, preface to Familiar Letters (1705), 1:i.
20 In "Enlightenment Canon Wars," Weinbrot argues that the later-eighteenth-century English "canon" reflected the diversity that characterizes the English literary tradition: 70-100. Dryden celebrates the mixed modes of English drama in Of Dramatick Poesie (1688), while Defoe's True-Born Englishman (1701) satirically attacks hypocritical English prejudice against foreigners.
21 See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, and Castle, Masquerade and Civilization.
22 Chartier, Frenchness in the History of the Book, 13. McKenzie repeatedly makes this point also; see, for example, "The Book as an Expressive Form," in his Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 1-21.
23 Olsen notes the overlap between rationalizing reading for pleasure and for moral profit in Literature as Recreation; see also Quintero's Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art, which examines the way Pope was read by explicating the formulaic rhetorical strategies that mediate between newly ambitious readers and the poet.
24 See Bonnell, "John Bell's Poets of Great Britain" and "Bookselling and Canon-Making"; Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson; Zwicker, Dryden's Political Poetry and Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry; Corman, "What Is the Canon of English Drama, 1660-1737?"; Deutsch, "The `Truest Copies' and the `Mean Original.'
25 Weinbrot, "Enlightenment Canon Wars," 79.
26 Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History; Kaplan and Rose, The Canon and the Common Reader; von Hallberg, Canons.
27 Almon, Memoirs, 16.
28 Sitter describes Locke's ideal of wit in a fashion analogous to Shaftesbury's definition of the miscellany, as a quick, various "assemblage of ideas" for immediate entertainment; see Arguments of Augustan Wit, 49-88, esp. 52.
29 Humphrey, "The Reading of the Working Classes," 693.
30 Cameron, "Pope's Annotations," 291-94.
31 DeMaria, "Samuel Johnson and the Reading Revolution," 86-89, 101.
32 For an account of the sale of books by auction in England, see Hobson's foreword to Munby and Coral, British Book Sales Catalogues 1676-1800, xviii.
33 Curwen, A History of Booksellers, 386.
34 Some collections
35 William Cooper, Sale Catalogues, 1:376-84, nos. 46-157; 394, no. 28. Since several entries have two prices in the margins in the same script, I have assumed that the second is the revised sale price. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, bk. 1, chap. 16, p. 73. Of course, Adams is hawking manuscript, not printed, sermons, so that even if a publisher or bookseller agreed to finance their printing, they would shrink to less than nine volumes.
36 1:221, no. 338; 217, no. 83; 221, no. 346; 370, no. 16.
37 Auction Catalogues of Books, "Rev. Dr. Lazarus Seaman's Library" 120, no. 55.
38 Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry, iii.
39 "Rev. Dr. Lazarus Seaman's Library" 115, no. 44.
40 In "Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook," Culler maintains that Bysshe is writing solely a poet's handbook, but Bysshe's preface indicates that he invited general readers to peruse his commonplace book to enjoy fine style. In his rival Complete Art of Poetry, Gildon, himself editor of several important miscellanies, substitutes "Design" for Bysshe's emphasis on "Colouring" but does not directly attack the idea that poetry is the skillful use of language, rather than a moral action or resource.
41 Watt, Cheap Print, 10.
42 See Barrell and Guest, "On the Use of Contradiction," 121-43; for a more general discussion of the ways in which contradictory signals may be overlooked or seen as ideologically coherent, see Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
43 Auction Catalogues of Books, "Rev. Dr. Lazarus Seaman's Library" 115, nos. 44, 55; "D. Thomas Kidner's Library" (6 February 1676) 30, no. 21; "Gisberti Voetii" (25 November 1678) 251-66, nos. 46, 75 (British Library).
44 Deighton, Catalogue (British Library), 46, nos. 1530, 1531; 48, nos. 1534, 1538.
45 Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, 44.
46 Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography; my thanks to Terry Belanger.
47 Bernard Lintot's 1714-717 Catalogue of Books, Sermons, and Pamphlets includes titles by authors whose works he did not own, at least until financial problems curtailed the publication; see Foxon's introduction, iii.
48 Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, 125; my thanks to Terry Belanger.
49 Pollard, Last Words on the History of the Title-Page, 28-33. Like miscellanies, title pages blossom with the broadening of the literary market, but Pollard does not mention the rival function of indexes.
50 Maslen, An Early London Printing House, 153-64.
51 Pollard, quoted in Edwards and Meale, "The Marketing of Printed Books," 95.
52 Foxon, introduction to Catalogue, v.
53 Rose, Authors and Owners.
54 Feather, A History of British Publishing, 38-42, 60-63.
55 Alston, Robinson, and Wadham, Eighteenth-Century Subscription Lists, introduction.
56 Briscoe, preface to Familiar Letters, 1:i-ii.
57 Crane, Framing Authority, 185.
58
59 Cressy, "Literacy in Context," 305, 314-15, 317.
60 Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, 60-61. I am deeply indebted to this book.
61 Altick, The English Common Reader; Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences. See also Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, 60, 164-65.
62 Curwen, A History of Booksellers, 423. Ian Watt dates the first circulating library at 1742 and suggests a rapid spread of such institutions in The Rise of the Novel, 42, 55. Other scholars date circulating libraries as early as the Restoration.
63 Plant, The English Book Trade, 92.
64 For the intimate relations between booksellers and their clients, see Benedict, "
65 For an exploration of the importance of different, particular historical audiences, see Rose, "Rereading the English Common Reader," 47-70.
66 Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry," 120-67; Bourdieu, Distinction.
67 For a lucid discussion of the ways in which literary practice and interpretation involve politics, see Rabinowitz, Before Reading, 1-12.
68 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
69 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination.
70 McKitterick, "Bibliography, Bibliophily, and the Organization of Knowledge," 29-61; McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.
71 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 215-56; Chartier, Cultural History, The Culture of Print, and The Order of Books; DeMaria, "Samuel Johnson and the Reading Revolution," 86-102.
72 See Bourdieu, Distinction.
73 Raven, Judging New Wealth, 5-6.
74 See McGann, The Textual Condition and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism on the definition of a text as a body of meanings in process.
75 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society; see also Brewer and Porter's introduction to Consumption and the World of Goods, 1-15. As Agnew points out in "Coming Up for Air," McKendrick views Wedgewood as a "midwife" of the consumer culture he brought about (24).
76 Kernan, Printing Technology, Letters, and Samuel Johnson, 74, 226-36, passim.
Notes