Miscellany Publication

This chapter addresses Pope’s hitherto neglected use of miscellany publication. With the exceptions of An Essay on Criticism, The Temple of Fame, and Windsor-Forest, all Pope’s early printed poems first appeared in miscellanies or periodicals. Three miscellanies are of particular importance: the sixth and final volume of Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies (1709), Bernard Lintot’s Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (1712), and Poems on Several Occasions (1717), also published by Lintot. A section is devoted to each of those miscellanies. Pope made his public print debut in the first one, was the guiding spirit behind the second, and the editor of the third. In his roles as contributor and editor, Pope encouraged friends to contribute to the collections too, dragging them from the world of clandestine scribal publication into that of print. The chapter scrutinizes the content surrounding Pope’s poems in these miscellanies and teases out the sophisticated political resonances of those texts. By 1717 Pope had transformed the miscellany from a mere vessel for minor occasional verse into a focal point for dissident wits who otherwise wrote principally for scribal publication.

Manuscript Circulation

This chapter challenges enduring assumptions about Pope’s early uses of scribal publication. Drawing on a wealth of famous and hitherto overlooked or unknown manuscript sources, it reconstructs the early circulation of Pope’s poems. The chapter explores the methods by which Pope’s fair copy holographs circulated among select readers and, in the second section, examine important differences between the manuscript and printed texts of his poems. The third section traces the distribution of his early poems in contemporary manuscript miscellanies. Pope’s earliest manuscript readers, it argues, viewed him as the latest addition to a grand tradition of seventeenth-century royalist poetry. The last section of the chapter investigates what remains of Pope’s juvenile epic, Alcander, Prince of Rhodes. Tracing the textual history of the Alcander manuscript from its origins in 1701 to its destruction in 1717, it argues that the poem’s non-appearance in print was probably due to political factors rather than literary ones.

‘Here you may trace a pigmy hand, / And there a Giant strength’

Albums kept by Sara Coleridge, Edith May Southey, and Dora Wordsworth between the early 1820s and late 1840s show that that although the Wordsworth circle daughters’ access to their famous fathers’ literary networks resulted in books exceptionally rich in album verse by well-known contemporary poets, their poet-fathers’ practical assistance and symbolic influence exacerbated the anxiety of reception for amateur contributors, and complicated each woman’s role as agent and subject of her own book. In the Wordsworth circle albums, scribal publication is perilously close to conventional publication, and contributors negotiate between fulfilling the woman owner’s wishes and articulating awareness of the revered older poets’ scepticism or downright hostility to feminized album culture. The poet-father’s presence turns albums into contested textual spaces where generational, gender, and power dynamics are played out in poetry.

The Destabilizing Materiality of the Autograph for Blake, Coleridge, and Tighe

This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who integrate print and manuscript technologies to produce a new materiality in autographic texts that capture their idiolectic voices. They deploy scribal practices in print media to inscribe individuality, autographing the print copies of their works to transform them from uniform products into objects embodying vital processes. Illuminated printing enables Blake to make each copy of his texts a unique graphic object, most expansively in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Coleridge’s habitual revision of his printed texts destabilizes each version to re-engage the immediacy of poetic vision through a vocalized experience, most dramatically in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Tighe initially rejects print publication for the affective palpability of scribal publication but then inscribes privately printed copies of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love to specific members of her coterie, a process her coterie continues after Tighe dies. All three explore the implications of being bound in bookish or human form in their poems even as they use the materiality of their autographic texts to reconfigure a print publication system that might otherwise lock them or their texts into fixed identities or commodities.

The Dutch Translation and Circulation of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in Manuscript and Print (1670-1694)

Benedictus de Spinoza became one of the few censored authors in the liberal publishing climate of the Dutch Republic. Twenty-three years passed before the first Dutch translation of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) appeared in print, despite two interrupted attempts to bring out a vernacular version before 1693. This article compares the three oldest Dutch translations of Spinoza’s notorious treatise by combining digital sentence alignment with philological analysis. It describes the relationship between the variants, two printed versions and a manuscript, revealing a pattern of fragmentary similarity. This partial textual reuse can be explained using Harold Love’s notion of ‘scribal publication’: readers circulated handwritten copies as a strategy to avoid the censorship of Spinozism. As a result, medium and language not only conditioned the dissemination of Spinoza’s treatise in Dutch, but also affected its text in the versions published—either in manuscript or print—between 1670 and 1694.

Manuscript in the House of Print

In his classic account of seventeenth-century scribal publication, Harold Love points briefly to three authors—Swift, Richardson, Sterne—whose careers indicate the ongoing vitality of manuscript culture in later generations. Taking a cue from Love, this chapter explores Richardson’s self-consciousness as a novelist about manuscript production and transmission, his real-world cultivation of epistolary sociability, and the ways in which his published output was shaped by practices arising from scribal tradition. For all his centrality in the history of print, Richardson was also at the centre of a thriving culture of manuscript exchange that bypassed or transcended print and also informed its products at every stage from creation to reception. There emerges a story of enduring interaction between coexisting media systems, not simple supersession of one by another, with creative consequences as much for the novel as for the lyric, epistolary, and other forms most often associated with manuscript exchange.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women’s Life-Writing

Chapter Four examines women’s life-writing and the formation of an “erotic imagination” within life-writing as a genre. It begins by examining the Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers (1793), one of the most influential works of Methodist life-writing, and reads it as against her earlier manuscript versions of the work. This reading reveals some of the ways and reasons Methodist women navigated different publication platforms and life-writing genres (private diary, semi-public scribal publication, print publication) in order to reach different audiences. Specifically, it examines Rogers’ status as a Methodist “mystic” who, in her diaries and manuscript works, represents a deeply erotic female mysticism that is edited out of her print publications. The chapter then turns to Rogers’ contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, to consider how both women use the life-writing genre to re-write the terms and conditions of female desire while textually re-orienting this desire away from the male gaze.

1660–1700 Faint Meaning: Dryden and Restoration Censorship

This chapter uses Dryden’s poetry as a case study through which to explore the practical dynamics and literary consequences of censorship across the Restoration period (1660–1700). Though normally seen as a securely established Stuart loyalist—the right place to start, though too crude a category for a poet of his agility, complexity, and irony—Dryden had to navigate political conditions of great instability throughout his career, and was in opposition at key points. Genres considered include elegy, panegyric, mock panegyric, topical application tragedy, fable, and classical translation; texts considered include Heroic Stanzas, Astraea Redux, Mac Flecknoe, The Duke of Guise, The Hind and the Panther, and Dryden’s translation of Juvenal with his discourse on satire. Contexts include the operation of Restoration censorship under Roger L’Estrange, clandestine printing and scribal publication, the significance of the 1679–85 licensing lapse, and the emergence of Jacobite satire from 1689.

Marvell and Manuscript Culture

This chapter explores the significances of the medium of manuscript for Marvell. It uncovers links between his self-formation and conduct as a scribal poet, and a set of questions and dilemmas long recognized as definitive in his work, those surrounding integrity and retreat. In Marvell’s imaginary, the wish to ‘circumscribe’ oneself in a private or transcendent world was always, in some measure, a scribal ideal or fantasy. To assess Marvell’s relations with ‘manuscript culture’, then, is not merely to document his involvements with particular scribal communities, or the varying extent of the scribal publication of his verse at different points in his career, but to plot those aspects of his practice against his lifelong preoccupation with privacy as an object of desire.