The ‘Trade of Authorship’ In Eighteenth – Century Britain

W.B.Carnochan

I

Some time ago an advertisement appeared for a book called The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (figure 1). At first glance, perhaps nothing in it appears out of the ordinary. Ask someone to look at it, quickly, and then to say what is unusual about it, and your ‘subject’ will usually notice the image of the Maya figurine first, for it seems to dominate the verbal text, not only by its placement within the frame but also by its commanding presence and gesture. The title, The Blood of Kings, darkens as it crosses the body of this figure, drawing attention to the mysterious object in his left hand. What is unusual, at first sight, about the imagery of the advertisement is the prevalence of the visual over the verbal, of the primitive original over the derivative commentary.

What is more unusual is that no author’s name appears, although four names do appear: those of a reviewer, a famous anthropologist, a photographer and a publisher. Allen Wardwell’s gnomic metaphors of light and darkness, set in white against a dark ground, have epigrammatic force. The name of Claude Lévi-Strauss, ultimate figure of ‘authority’, appears in a position that hints at a type of authorship: star billing places the actor above the vehicle, the author above the title. In small print, between a copyright mark and a date, is the name of the photographer, Justin Kerr. Finally there is George Braziller, whose identity hovers between the personal and the corporate, and who is in position to compete with Lévi-Strauss for authorship were it not for the statistical data that intervene between the title and his name.

The total effect is one of ghostly presences, on the one hand, and multiple authorship, on the other – a multiple authorship that obscures the names and existence of the actual authors of what is in fact an exhibition catalogue, albeit an unusual one.¹ This helps to explain the situation, exhibition catalogues not being the product of authorship in the same sense as novels or poems. The Maya kings, long gone, are present and dominant in an image that co-exists with the authority of copyright, hence with a kind of proprietary authorship. The book itself, inevitably absent, is represented as a collection of data: ‘Cloth, 320 pages, 122 colour plates, 200 line drawings, 50 black & white illustrations, 10”×10”.’ By a convention that would be obscure to an alien observer we call into being the physical object that the data represent. Somewhere else, there is a book.

The sense of ghostly presences corresponds to the absence of any explicit attribution of authorship and the associated sense of multiple authors. The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art seems to rise out of a collective, even a ritual experience. Allen Wardwell, Lévi-Strauss, Justin Kerr, George Braziller, all contribute to the making of the absent book, while some ‘real’ author or authors seem to exert a spectral influence. It is by him or her or them that ‘the brilliance of Maya Culture is seen in a dark new light’. The dark new light of their passive seeing is also that of divinity hidden behind its own aura yet capable of seeing to the heart of things, emblematic of mastery and of a synthesis to which the data of the text are subordinate if not incidental.

II

In a conversational sally that has found its way into editions of the Pensées, Pascal anticipates Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault by three centuries: ‘Authors who say “My book”, “My commentary”, “My history”, etc. resemble those bourgeois with a house of their own who are always saying “chez moi”, – ‘qui ont pignon sur rue, et toujours un “chez-moi” à la bouche’ – ‘when they should say “Our book”, “Our commentary”, “Our history”, etc. since there is in them usually more of other people’s wares than their own.’² This is plain truth, of course, and it underlies the current concern with the interdependence of literary (and other) texts. It also underlies Joyce’s attempt in Finnegans Wake to create a new language and, as well, the paradox of Finnegans Wake that, because it is made from the ruins of an old language, it reads like a vast, collective effort of the tribe. Finnegans Wake seems to anticipate the conditions of the new world that Foucault presents as an anticipatory vision in ‘What is an Author?’: ‘I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author-function will disappear.’ In this new world, all discourses will ‘develop in the anonymity of a murmur’. Questions about authorial intention, about the relationship between author and narrator, about authenticity and originality, will fall away like the state in a Marxist Utopia, to be replaced by different questions, such as: ‘What are the modes of existence of this discourse?’ and ‘Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself?’ Behind these questions, says Foucault, ‘we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” ‘³

Foucault’s idiom is not everyone’s. But his vision of the future stands comparison, at first sight a surprising one, with another forward-looking manifesto: ‘A new Model for the Study of the Book’, by Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, included in this volume. Foucault predicts that others will ask of a ‘discourse’, where it has been used and how it can circulate; Adams and Barker remark that the distribution of a book or text from one person to another is ‘a densely woven network about which we still know comparatively little’. Where Foucault asks who can appropriate a discourse for himself, which is to ask, among other things, who can buy a book and for what reasons. Adams and Barker speak of ‘the power conveyed by the book itself, an incalculable, inarticulate, but none the less potent factor in the mixture of motives that makes people want book’. Foucault could not have said it better. The history of the book, in the new life that Adams and Barker imagine for it, resembles the forms of life imagined by Foucault in a world that has lost, as one of its distinctive signs, the ‘author-function’. To be sure, Adams and Barker regard authorial intention as part of the history of the book, but it is far from being central.⁴ In the history of the book, authorship is one function among others. Our difficulty in admitting that fact may be one reason why we have been so slow to develop a history of the book that is not subordinate to other fields and other interests. The coming of a new history of the book, as envisaged by Adams and Barker, might coincide with a declining power of authorship.

III

The ascendant power of authorship over the last few centuries mirrors the self-possessive habits of modernity. We hardly understand the psychology of anonymous publication except as a stratagem of self-protection, and in such cases our custom is that of pseudonymous rather than anonymous performance. We can hardly bear to bring a book into the world without authorial attribution, even if it involves pseudonymous concealment. This inability has made it hard to understand fully the motives for anonymous publication that underlie, for example, A Tale of a Tub, or even to understand exactly the response of Swift’s contemporaries to anonymous publication. On first appearance, the Tale generated eager speculation about the author’s identity; but what did Swift believe he was doing – authorially speaking – when he published the Tale, one among his many anonymous publications and dazzling in the very fact of its anonymity, as in so much else? Was it only a matter of self-protection?

No doubt anonymity protected Swift in obvious ways: he had his career to think about, and even if he had entirely and disingenuously believed that this satire on the abuses of religion and learning was in no way subversive, it would have been prudent for any young clergyman with large aspirations to be cautious. But self-protection is just part of the story. Beyond it lies a satire both on authorial possessiveness and on the reader’s need to identify the author. And beyond that specific intention lies a larger claim, itself subject to satirical treatment, to participation in an original act of creation – the same claim as seems to lie behind, or within, the apparent anonymity of The Blood of Kings. From the start of the Tale, a sense of unseen forces created by the learned mysteries of the title page provides a commentary on the habits of the Grub Street writer trying relentlessly to lay claim to ‘his’ book, ‘his’ commentary, ‘his’ history, ‘his’ tale. Swift stands in the same relationship to the ‘author’ of the Tale as does Pascal to those authors whose bourgeois pride and presumption lead them to false claims of ownership.

In early editions of the Tale, a jocular list of ‘Treatises writ by the same Author’ appears facing the title page. This list, with such entries as ‘A Character of the present Set of Wits in this Island’ and ‘A Panegyrical Essay upon the Number three’, establishes the Tale as a piece not just of modern writing but of modern authorship, a ragbag of digressions and vulgarisms, all accompanied by large claims of originality. These claims are then mocked in the text by the author’s everlasting harping on his own authorship. The word ‘author’ is a leitmotif. In the Dedication to Somers, the tale-teller immediately turns the floodlight on himself, announcing that, although ‘the Author has written a large Dedication’ to Prince Posterity, the Prince is unlikely to be his patron and therefore he will turn to Somers instead. Near the end of the Tale we learn that the disappointment of being a bad conversationalist gave the tale-teller the idea of ‘setting up for an Author’ in the first place. In between, in the ‘Digression on Madness’ (among many other instances), the tale-teller identifies himself, with mad pride, as being the author of momentous truths, hence a kind of divine original: ‘even, I my self, the Author of these momentous Truths, am a Person, whose Imaginations are hard-mouth’d, and exceedingly disposed to run away with his Reason’.⁵ Possessed with the idea of possessing, the author of the Tale displays the dark side of the cult of originality.

Yet Swift took pride in his own originality and was deeply offended by claims that the Tale of a Tub was not all his. In the ‘Apology’ of 1710, he counters William Wotton’s charges of plagiarism. These charges, says Swift, acting as his own apologist, touch ‘the Author in a very tender Point, who insists upon it, that through the whole Book he has not borrowed one single Hint from any Writer in the World; and he thought, of all Criticisms, that would never have been one. He conceived it was never disputed to be an Original, whatever Faults it might have.’ ⁶ The gross hyperbole that the author has not borrowed a single hint from anyone else calls attention to itself and is self-implicating; here, as so often with Swift, he recognizes what he shares with victims of his satire, which derives much of its strength from such self-recognitions. This does not alter the fact that his sense of his own originality is extremely strong. In an ‘Advertisement’ to the second volume of Faulkner’s 1735 edition of Swift’s Works, the publisher records ‘what we have heard from several Persons of great Judgment; that the Author never was known either in Verse or Prose to borrow any Thought, Simile, Epithet, or particular Manner of Style; but whatever he writ, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is an Original in itself.’⁷ Swift unquestionably approved the judgement – and unquestionably realized its implications.

The title-page of the Tale (figure 2) comments on the pretensions of modern, authorial ownership. The sense of cosmic forces bringing the text into being is both parodic of the author’s huge claims to originality and exemplary of the collective nature of all authorship: the Tale has been mysteriously and anonymously written for the benefit of mankind, it has long been desired by the world, the Battle of the Books has been added to it, all in a series of unassignable transactions in some collective enterprise. In this context, the babble of Gnostic heretics transcribed by Irenaeus has something of the true Joycean flavour. While these babblings may have been mere sound in their original, here they hint at meanings and hence the need for deciphering: the history of collective utterance has a meaning, however ludicrously obscure.

The excerpt from Lucretius on the title-page makes the satiric point most directly, that originality is relative. Emblems of this sort provide protective authority by establishing the author’s place in a line of intellectual transmission. The Lucretian verses, from the invocation to the fourth book of De Rerum Natura, celebrate the poet’s originality. In translation: ‘I delight in plucking new flowers, seeking a noble garland for my head in fields whose flowers the Muses never placed on human brows before.’ Whatever may be true of De Rerum Natura, the Tale’s claim to originality in the presence of this motto becomes self-cancelling: even if everything else in the Tale were miraculously original, the claim itself is not. Whatever Swift’s conscious intentions when he added his ‘Apology’ to the 1710 edition, its assertion of his own originality is not only hyperbolic but unavoidably ironic, Lucretius having pre-empted the claim.

IV

While preparing this paper, I tried the patience of the Clark Library’s staff – or I would have done so, if they had not been so resolutely helpful. I called up what seemed like volume after volume to look at title-pages, prefaces, advertisements and afterwords: the places and moments in books where authors or publishers leave visible traces of themselves. A study that did the job in truly thorough fashion, however, would try the patience of the hardiest librarian, for what in fact I looked at were only a few familiar texts: Faulkner’s 1735 edition of Swift, Pamela, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, and one or two more. What one would need to look at, to understand the multiplicity of situations that define eighteenth-century authorship, is not much less than everything: novels, poetry, tracts, histories, pamphlets, indeed all that was published during an age when conditions of authorship were enormously fluid. Eighteenth-century title-pages, prefaces and the like have the allure of obscurely encoded systems.

Here I will look at authorial traces displayed in a few texts and then, in a closing section, reflect on the ‘trade of authorship’⁸ as practised in a time when the modern author, as we know him or her, came into being. In the eighteenth century, Pascal’s advice to authors was definitively rejected and the way cleared to say ‘my book’ with hardly a reflection on the assumptions behind such assertions of proprietary right. This story can be told in other terms – for example, those afforded by the history of copyright, which begins, formally speaking, with a statute of 1709 and makes part of the larger histories of intellectual property, of print technology and of professionalism.⁹ These are allied stories, the one variously anticipating or reinforcing the other. The curious evidence of title-pages, prefaces and advertisements, provides a more intimate laboratory, however, than that of corresponding laws or large social movements.

The texts I have chosen are: Faulkner’s 1735 edition of Swift; Richardson’s three novels; Joseph Andrews and The Adventures of David Simple; Johnson’s Dictionary; and Hume’s posthumous ‘My Own Life’. This list conspicuously leaves out poetry and, with the exception of David Simple, works by women. In the case of poetry, other than satiric poetry, the situation is less intricate, largely because poetry was a more respectable business than fiction and anonymous publication therefore less the norm. In the case of fictions by women, the situation is if anything more complicated and can be summed up in the familiar aphorism, ‘anonymous was a woman’. What I am looking at, then, is the emergence of an authorial, male class. In the listing that follows, the arrangement is roughly chronological; the movement, roughly in the direction of growing authorial possessiveness.

1.        In The Works of J.S., D.D., D.S.P.D., printed ‘by and for’ George Faulkner in 1735, Swift’s usual strategy of anonymity collides with the demands of a collected edition designed to record and to memorialize a career, a form that assigns particular value to the author whose life binds the individual texts together. Decisive acts of authorship, collected editions gather and identify what is the author’s own and save what might otherwise have been lost. When a living author publishes a collected edition, it amounts to saying ‘this is mine’ or ‘this is what I want to call mine’. But Faulkner’s edition, attributed to J.S., D.D., D.S.P.D., maintains a fiction of pseudo-anonymity. In its editorial apparatus Swift sometimes appears as ‘the supposed Author’ or as ‘this Author, whoever he be’; or we are told, of ‘On Poetry A Rapsody’ – a particularly inflammatory piece – that ‘the Author [is] not known.’¹⁰ Swift’s career was a fantasia on the theme of anonymity; the collected works bring the fantasy to completion by specifically inviting the reader to constitute the author from all manner of signs and equivocations. The equivocations merely reinforce the attribution of authorship to J.S., D.D., D.S.P.D., because J.S. was so well known to be the prince of equivocation. The real though closeted author of the Tale has edged out into the light of day.

2.        Part I of Pamela came into the world with Richardson’s name nowhere in view. The title-pages of the two volumes announced that they were printed for Richardson’s friend, Charles Rivington, and sold by another of Richardson’s friends, John Osborn. Copyright was in the names of Richardson, Rivington, and Osborn. In a preface by the ‘editor’, Richardson distinguished between editors and authors: ‘an Editor may reasonably be supposed to judge with an Impartiality which is rarely to be met with in an Author towards his own works.’¹¹ The fiction of editorship, though a convenient avenue to self-praise, means more to Richardson than that, just as anonymity means more to Swift than a way of self-protection. As printer, publisher and editorial reviser of others’ works, Richardson came to the writing of Pamela with a history of literary activity behind him that had shown him how elusive were the gradations between editorial and authorial functions. If the concept of authorship was then far less hardened than it would become, so was the concept of editorship more capacious and less cautious than it has become (as Richard Bentley’s high-handed emendations of Milton make clear). Richardson’s editorship of Pamela, far from being merely a disguise, asserts the power of an anonymous will as strong as that of any author’s. In the second edition of Pamela, Richardson admitted into the prefatory material an ecstatic letter from Aaron Hill which, though addressed to the editor of Pamela, nonetheless praises the ‘wonderful AUTHOR’, in bold capitals, ‘of Pamela’.¹² And in the second part of the novel, Richardson emerged partly from the shadows: the volumes were described as printed for him and sold by Rivington (and Richardson held sole copyright). Still he never explicitly gave up his role as editor. Clarissa was described as printed for Richardson and published by the editor of Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison, as printed for Richardson and published by the editor of Pamela and Clarissa. It is not far-fetched to say that if the history of the novel had taken different turns than it did, we might by now think of it as natural to claim the editorship, rather than the authorship, of literary fictions.

3.        One reason the history of the novel took the turns it did, rather than the turns it did not, was Fielding’s example. In 1741 he published Shamela, using the pseudonym of Conny Keyber. Joseph Andrews followed the next year, without Fielding’s name on the title page but described as ‘written in the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote’ – thus signalling primacy of authorship. Who would not have known that Cervantes was the author of Don Quixote? In 1743 came the three-volume Miscellanies ‘by Henry Fielding’, who thereby identified himself forth-rightly as the author of the fiercely satirical Jonathan Wild, included in the third volume. Tom Jones (1749) and Amelia (1751) were both ‘by Henry Fielding, Esquire’. Just as Fielding valued the authorial persona in his fiction, so he valued the role of authorship in his life.

When his sister Sarah published The Adventures of David Simple (1744), described on the title-page as written ‘by a lady’, some thought Fielding to be the author. Offended by this, he furnished a preface to the second edition, in which he not only denied authorship but made the whole matter into a case of conscience. He would not have troubled to reply, he says, ‘had not the Imputation directly accused me of Falshood, in breaking a Promise, which I have solemnly made in Print, of never publishing, even a Pamphlet, without setting my Name to it: A Promise I have always hitherto faithfully kept; and for the Sake of Men’s Characters, I wish all other Writers were by Law obliged to use the same Method….’ Then he renounces his promise: ‘’till they are, I shall no longer impose any such Restraint on myself’.¹³ This is all quite odd, since Sarah Fielding had after all published anonymously and it was this anonymity that led to the mistaken attributions. Is it that Fielding’s rules need not apply to women? Perhaps, yet he may also be dissembling: he claims to be offended because he believes, for reasons of moral responsibility, in setting his name to what he writes, yet is he not also upset to have been taken for the author of his sister’s fiction, this novel ‘by a lady’ and, no doubt, a work of less power than he himself was capable of? Is this not a case of possessive (and male) authorial pride concealing itself as high-mindedness?

4.       The title-page of Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) reads as follows:

A
Dictionary
of the
English Language
in which
The Words are Deduced from their Originals
and
Illustrated in their Different Significations
by
Examples from the best Writers
to which are prefixed
A History of the Language,
and
An English Grammar
By Samuel Johnson, A.M.

      Seeing this for the first time, a modern reader might suppose that the attribution of authorship refers only to the history of the English language and to the grammar. We no longer think of dictionaries as authorial products. But Johnson and his age did. Among the ‘unhappy mortals’ who ‘toil at the lower employments of life’, Johnson says, ‘is the writer of dictionaries…. Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recommendation has been yet granted to very few.’¹⁴ It is not only because early dictionaries depended so much on individual efforts that lexicographers had the status of authors but also because the distinction had not yet been made between writing a dictionary and compiling it. The distinction might have been made; Johnson’s third definition of ‘author’ is ‘The first writer of any thing; distinct from the translator or compiler’. But Johnson’s understanding of what a dictionary is emphasizes the actual writing of definitions. The famous, witty ones, like ‘lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge’, announce Johnson’s sense of what is distinctive in his enterprise. Even so, the claim to authorship carries a sense of some presumption to modern eyes. In our sense of things, to be the ‘author’ of a dictionary would be to create language itself, and with the advantage of linguistic history behind us we sense in Johnson a tug between assertions of humility and of power; between the belief that making dictionaries is one of the lower employments of life and the imposing aura of authorship. Pascal could have said, ‘Certain authors … say “My book”, “My commentary”, “My history”, “My dictionary”, etc.’ It is an irony that Johnson’s dictionary initiated the custom of providing examples from other authors and thus emphasized the collective nature of linguistic meanings. When we call the dictionary Johnson’s, we attribute to him more than we may realize.

5.  When David Hume was ill in spring, 1776, and only a few months from death, he wrote a short autobiographical account that he called ‘My Own Life’; in a codicil to his will he expressed the wish that it appear in a posthumous edition of his works. In the event, his publisher William Strahan brought out ‘My Own Life’ in a separate edition, together with a letter from Adam Smith to Strahan that described Hume’s last illness and death (1777). Facing the half-title was a listing, under works ‘Published by the Same Author’, of three editions of Hume’s History and three editions of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, all ‘published by T. Cadell in the Strand’. The half-title announces The Life of David Hume, Esq, and a price, 1s. 6d. There follows a portrait of Hume and then a title-page announcing The Life of David Hume, Esq.: Written by Himself. These reiterated signs of posthumous authorship, represented in both biographical and autobiographical modes, proclaim the author-function with a curious insistence.

The concern that dominates ‘My Own Life’, as it dominated Hume’s thoughts during his last illness, was his posthumous reputation. Near the end he remarks that ‘I see many symptoms of my literary reputation’s breaking out with additional lustre’ and calls the ‘love of literary fame’ his ruling passion.¹⁵ Had he been able to know that ‘My Own Life’ would be published independently of his works, he would have had reason to be pleased, for separate publication confirmed the triumph of his reputation. However intimately responsible for generating a work, the modern author lives apart from it. The author’s life, in so far as the ascendancy of authorship has become an article of modern faith, pre-empts or is independent of the work and assumes a value larger than that of what has been written: a situation that the ‘new criticism’ strove to alter, though with modest and temporary success. The author achieves a reputation by virtue of being an author. When Strahan decided to publish ‘My Own Life’ separately, he took a step that we can recognize as parallel in implication to Rousseau’s Confessions or Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Separate publication of Hume’s ‘Life’ – especially with its emphatic title of ‘My Own Life’ – implies the apotheosis of his own authorship. It therefore seems unsurprising to find Hume, in the text of ‘My Own Life’, reiterating claims of possession: ‘I composed my Treatise of Human Nature’; ‘my Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals’; ‘my Political Discourses, the only work of mine that was successful on the first publication’; ‘my Natural History of Religion’: ‘my History’; ‘my writings’.¹⁶ Hume speaks the quintessential language of proprietary authorship.

V

Chapter II of Biographia Literaria is headed ‘An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors’. This tongue-in-cheekiness matches the mood of some of what follows in an essay that begins with a semi-solemn exhortation, ‘never pursue literature as a trade’ – that is, don’t write to make a living – and ends with a jokey aside that concedes a large part of what it began by challenging: “woefully will that man find himself mistaken who imagines that the profession of literature, or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its members with fewer or less insidious temptations, than the church, the law, or the different branches of commerce.’¹⁷ Coleridge’s scrambling of the distinction between trades and professions both asserts and denies a nostalgia for a professionalism uncontaminated by economic motives. The long stability of the distinction between trades and professions had coincided with a stability of class relationships, and when Coleridge advises aspiring authors not to pursue literature as a trade, he manages to imply that to be an author is to be truly disinterested and not one of the grub-street mob. Yet he realizes how badly this image misses the reality.

Coleridge’s ironic perception of the situation of authorship still colours our self-understanding and sense of vocation. When we say, as scholars who happen to be authors, that so-and-so’s study of such-and-such is only journalism – the term ‘journalism’ having been imported from the French in the early nineteenth century to help professionalize so far as possible the trade of authorship – we are still insisting, with a sense of advantage, on the distinction between trades and professions. Yet we insist (not unreasonably) on the rewardability of our authorial labours, occasionally to the point of creating or threatening to create academic trade unions. These conditions of the academy can be generalized. In moments of self-reflection, any modern author could assent to the ironic self-understanding of Coleridge’s formulation, ‘the profession of literature, or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship’.

At the same time, two hundred years have blunted the edge of realization: our recognitions are further from the surface of consciousness than they were when the emerging character of authorship was of immediate concern. Johnson’s famous apothegm, that no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, is the gruff assertion of one who began his literary life in trade he is denying the distinction between professionals whose economic interest are supposed to be secondary and tradesmen who write to make a living. If history had taken Johnson’s apothegm more seriously, we would have seen more readily the ambivalence of Coleridge’s injunction, never pursue literature as a trade.

The conditions of modern authorship, as established in the eighteenth century, can only be exemplified here, not summarized. To that end, I will close with the case of William Whitehead, Poet Laureate for almost thirty years and a writer whose reflections on writing and on the laureateship, in their conventionality, shed light on the history of authorship and on the institution of the laureateship, itself a considerable footnote in that history.

I choose Whitehead in part because Coleridge’s pious advice to ‘youthful literati’ is lifted from one of Whitehead’s poems. ‘Exerting the prerogative of his laureatship’, says Coleridge, Whitehead ‘addressed to youthful poets a poetic CHARGE, which is perhaps the best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works.’¹⁸ Coleridge refers to A Charge to the Poets (1762), in which he found these lines:

    If nature prompts you, or if friends persuade,
Why, write; but ne’er pursue it as a trade.
And seldom publish: manuscripts disarm
The censor’ frown, and boast an added charm,
Enhance their worth by seeming to retire,
For what but few can prate of, all admire.
    Who trade in verse, alas! as rarely find
The public grateful, as the Muses kind.¹⁹

Whitehead has in mind the risk of being criticized that writers who publish cannot help but run. But his advice evokes those old and better days when writers became famous not by publishing but by circulating manuscripts from hand to hand: ‘what but few can prate of, all admire’. The rejection of literature as a trade mirrors a desire to recreate a literary elite, graceful and mutually supportive, and not, like the modern rabble, vulgar and inept. Whitehead describes the mob of modern critics: ‘One epithet supplies their constant chime, / Damn’d bad, damn’d good, damn’d low, and damn’d sublime.’²⁰ It is every writer’s complaint, but the moral of the poem underscores the modern kinship between the mob of critics and the mob of authors.

And who was this Whitehead, the laureate poet who closed his Charge to the Poets with the stoic and consolatory proposition ‘that verse and virtue are their own reward?’²¹ In brief, he was the son of a baker who somehow managed to send him to Winchester College, where the boy spent his adolescence in the company of students far above him in social rank. His friendships, it was said, ‘were usually contracted either with noblemen, or gentlemen of large fortune’.²² After Winchester, he applied to New College, Oxford, where Winchester students typically enrolled; but he was not admitted and instead became a sizar at Clare Hall, Cambridge, with a tiny scholarship of four shillings a week, reserved for orphan sons of Cambridge tradesmen (Whitehead’s father having died soon after he entered Winchester). At university, as at school, Whitehead courted his betters. He became tutor to the son of the Earl of Jersey and, having established some reputation as a poet and playwright, spent two years leading a grand tour of the continent, returning to England shortly after Cibber’s death left the laureateship vacant in 1757.

The laureateship was not offered to Whitehead first but to Gray, who refused it and, in a letter to William Mason, made some famous remarks that capture forever the oddity of the office, in both its pretensions and its reality:

Tho’ I very well know the bland emollient saponaceous qualities both of Sack & Silver, yet if any great Man would say to me, ‘I make you Rat-catcher to his Majesty with a salary of £300 a-year & two Butts of the best Malaga; and tho’ it has been usual to catch a mouse or two (for form’s sake) in public once a year, yet to You, S^r, we shall not stand upon these things.’ I can not say, I should jump at it. nay, if they would drop the very name of the Office, and call me Sinecure to the K^g’s majesty, I should still feel a little awkward, & think every body, I saw, smelt a Rat about me…..²³

In short, Gray could afford, temperamentally and financially, to act out the fantasy of the disinterested professional and turn the offer down. Whitehead could not.

But even though the position could not have come more conveniently into his hands, Whitehead eventually chafed under its requirements. At his death he left an unpublished poem called ‘A Pathetic Apology for all Laureats, Past, Present and to Come’. Though it is a poor thing, it provides a commentary on his earlier innocent exhortation not to pursue literature as a trade. The laureate’s role, which in fact Whitehead performed with almost touching diligence,²⁴ requires the poet to versify on royal command:

His Muse, obliged by sack and pension,
Without a subject, or invention –
Must certain words in order set,
As innocent as a Gazette;
Must some half-meaning half disguise,
And utter neither truth nor lies.²⁵

These sentiments, so self-conscious in their awareness of the costs that accompany the laureate’s stipend, can stand as a final, oblique comment on the trade of authorship since the eighteenth century. Poets and writers like to imagine themselves as pure creatures. In this fantasy, the laurel proves that verse and virtue are truly their own reward. Money does not matter. Fame is incidental. But of course the real situation is different, as Coleridge, Johnson, Whitehead and we ourselves all know. The possessive habits of modern authorship, so insistently asserting ownership, are reciprocal with the unavoidable, equally modern habit of writing from a deep, ambiguous sense of need.

NOTES

  1  Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art, Fort Worth, 1986. In a foreword, Emily J. Sano states that the director of the Kimbell Museum advised the authors that ‘I would like to see the publication developed as a book rather than an exhibition catalogue’ and that it should contain ‘eight long chapters’ (p. xi) – as it does. More than ever, The Blood of Kings appears the product of multiple authorship; it also bears the imprint, in different printings, of different publishers – the Kimbell Museum and George Braziller. Still, one wonders whether the ommission of Schele’s and Miller’s names from the advertisement was intended or not.

  2  ‘M. Pascal disait de “ces auteurs qui, parlant de leurs ouvrages, disent: ‘Mon livre, mon commentaire, mon histoire, etc.’ ”, qu’ “ils sentent leurs bourgeois qui ont pignon sur rue, et toujours un chez-moi à la bouche, Ils feraient mieux, ajoutait cet excellent homme, de dire: ‘notre livre, notre commentaire, notre histoire, etc.,’ vu que d’ ordinaire il y a plus en cela du bien d’autrui que du leur.” ’ Les Pensées de Pascal, ed. Francis Kaplan, Paris, 1982, p. 589.

  3  ‘What is an Author’, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari, Ithaca, N.Y., 1979, p. 160. Cf. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath, New York, 1977, pp. 142-8. Barthes does not cite Pascal but, appropriately, seems to do so: ‘The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (p. 146).

  4  ‘A new Model for the Study of the Book’, supra.

  5  London, 1704, pp. a3^r; 220; 182.

  6  London, 1710, [p. xiii].

  7  The Works of J.S., D.D., D.S.P.D., Dublin, 1735, II, aI^r-aI^v.

  8  See below, n18.

  9  The literature on these topics is large and growing larger, and works such as Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge, 1979, have become well known. At the same time, a synoptic history detailing the consequences for literary culture of what C. B. MacPherson called ‘possessive individualism’ (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford, 1962) remains to be written. For a recent informed study of copyright and authorship, see Mark Rose, ‘The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship’, Representations, no. 23, Summer 1988, pp. 57-85.

10  The Works of J.S., D.D., D.S.P.D., II, AI^r; AI^v; 433.

11  London, 1741, I, p. vi.

12  London, 1741, I, p. xvii.

13  Fielding had made the promise that he here renounces in his preface to the Miscellanies: ‘I will never hereafter publish any Book or Pamphlet whatever, to which I will not put my Name’ (Miscellanies by Henry Fielding Esq., London, 1743, I, p. xxvii). On this promise and its renunciation, see R. C. Jarvis, ‘The Death of Walpole: Henry Fielding and a Forgotten Cause Célèbre’, MLR, 41, 1946, pp. 113–30, especially 120–1. Jarvis argues that the renunciation of the promise was owing to the difficult – even ‘desperate’ – financial situation Fielding found himself in at the time.

14  London, 1755, I, a2^r.

15  London, 1777, pp. 31–2, 33.

16  Ibid., p. 6–7, 13–14, 16, 21, 22, 24.

17  Biographia Literaria ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton, 1983, I, pp. 223, 230. This is volume VII of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer, Princeton, 1969-

18  Ibid., p. 223.

19  The Poems of William Whitehead, in The Works of the English Poets, ed. Alexander Chalmers, London, 1810, XVII, p. 232.

20  Ibid., p. 233.

21  Ibid., p. 234.

22  ‘The Life of Whitehead’, ibid., p. 190. Whitehead’s editor and biographer, William Mason, is quoted.

23      Gray to Mason, 19 December 1757. Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, Oxford, 1935, II, pp. 543-4.

24  Between 1758 and 1785, Whithead wrote (if we assume the compilation in The Poems of William Whitehead to be complete) twenty-five birthday odes to the king and twenty-three odes for the new year. Birthday odes are missing only for 1760 and 1764; New Year’s odes are missing only for 1764, 1766, 1769, and 1775.

25  ’A Pathetic Apology for All Laureats, Past, Present and to Come’, The Poems of William Whitehead p. 277.