'The Poet and Publisher at Variance!': Comic Representations of Literary

“The Poet and Publisher at Variance!”: Comic Representations of Literary Professionals in Eighteenth- Century Fiction and Drama by HEATHER ANN LADD A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Heather Ladd 2013 “The Poet and Publisher at Variance!”: Comic Representations of Literary Professionals in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Drama Heather Ann Ladd Doctorate of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2013 Abstract This dissertation investigates the fictionalization of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace, which is consistently presented through the lens of comedy in the imaginative literature of the period. Illuminating the surprising degree of variation among representations of literary professionals in conversation, my analysis of texts like Henry Fielding’s The Author’s Farce and Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker underlines how seemingly programmatic scenes of the author-character’s oppression by the bookseller-character are complicated and subverted by comedy. I posit that readers are encouraged to construct a paradigm of Literary Professionalism against the unprofessionalism—as well as glimpses of professionalism—among the characters involved in the literary literary marketplace. Both the conflict and concord among characters accentuate a set of professional standards graspable to individual readers sensitive to the nuances of comedy and power in these negotiations. A lively and persuasive argument for print is ultimately made through the interactive nature of the comedy in these works. ii Chapter One examines the conditions of eighteenth-century literary marketplace, surveying developments in professional writing and publishing. I also present an overview of the period’s debate about commercial authorship and introduce the literary stereotypes of the author and the bookseller. In the middle chapters of the dissertation I use outcome power, the ability to affect outcomes, to group and separate the fictional dialogues between literary professionals that appear in eighteenth-century fiction and drama. Chapter Two discusses scenes in which oppressive and exploitative bookseller-characters possess outcome power while Chapter Three analyzes works from the period in which a balance of power is achieved, power being shared in relationships in which neither the author-character nor the bookseller-character fully achieves his goals. In Chapter Four, writer-characters school the fictional booksellers, achieving outcome power as they undermine the perceived authority of their publishers and establish intellectual or ethical superiority. The final chapter is a focused reading of The Adventures of an Author, which contains multiple representations of literary professionals in different kinds of narrative encounters. iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Toronto for providing me with the resources and the rich intellectual environment out of which this project emerged. I appreciate the generous internal and external funding I received, including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a University of Toronto Fellowship, and several travel grants. I also benefitted greatly from opportunities for research and writing at the Lewis Walpole Library, the Chawton House Library, and Fordham University. Brian Corman, my doctoral supervisor, deserves my sincere thanks for his unfailing patience, kindness, and steady encouragement. Despite his busy schedule, he found time for countless meetings with me. I could not be where I am today without him. As well, I would like to thank my committee members, Deidre Lynch and Thomas Keymer, for their helpful input at different stages of the project, and Daniel O’Quinn for his incisive external report. My thanks to everyone who contributed to an intellectually-rewarding Final Oral Exam. I feel very fortunate to have been given the chance to teach my own courses in the Department of English; from these instructorships I gained invaluable experience and confidence as an academic. As working for ACCUTE was one of my most positive experiences at the University of Toronto, I would like to extend my thanks to Heather Murray and Craig Patterson from whom I learned so much. I offer my kind regards to Carol Percy, John Baird, Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Chantel Lavoie, Darryl Domingo, Betty A. Schellenberg, David Ritter, Paul Keen, and the other iv inspiring and inspired scholars whom I have had the pleasure of meeting at the University of Toronto and CSECS. I would also like to acknowledge Nick Mount for his teaching mentorship, Paul Stevens for preparing me for the academic job market, and Elizabeth D. Harvey for her wonderful GEA yoga class. I am extremely grateful to my family and my friends for their unwavering belief in me. For her thoughtful, engaged commentary on earlier versions of the project, I wish to thank Lindsay Reid. I would also like to thank Leslie Stobbart for her careful reading of the final draft of the dissertation. A special thank you to my parents, Gerald and Janet Ladd, to whom I dedicate this dissertation, and my brothers, Matthew and David Ladd. I would also like to thank Catherine Montgomery, my Toronto family, for her support. I am especially grateful to my partner, Andrew Robb, whom I feel so privileged to know and love. I share the success of completing this degree with you. v Table of Contents 1. An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Literary Professionals 1 2. Oppressed Authors, Oppressive Booksellers 53 3. A Balance of Powers 110 4. Authors Schooling Booksellers 167 5. Literary Multiplicity in The Adventures of An Author 216 Epilogue 267 List of Works Consulted 275 vi 1 Chapter 1 An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Literary Professionals Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed, Who was long a bookseller’s hack; He led such a damnable life in this world, I don’t think he’ll wish to come back. -Oliver Goldsmith, “Epitaph on Edward Purdon” (1767) The eighteenth-century literary marketplace negotiated by Oliver Goldsmith—poet, playwright, novelist, historian, and man-of-all-literary-work—presented challenges that felled authors less adaptable and resilient than himself, including the Irish hack writer Edward Purdon, the subject of the darkly comic epigraph which prefaces this first chapter.1 “Poor” Purdon, as he is concisely sketched by his friend and mentor, was essentially an indentured slave to a bookseller, a business arrangement that merely secured Ned survival, a “damnable life” from which he was “freed.” The relationship between this author and bookseller, as beheld by Goldsmith, seems to evidence a power imbalance conclusively tipped in favour of the bookseller, the forces of commerce marshaled against the author. This particular literary agent has made his dependent’s life such that the hack would prefer death to a miserable earthly existence.2 The worn-out Purdon is a symbol of exploited, powerless authors, a tool for Goldsmith’s authorial polemics, which centre on “the problem…that the republic of letters is also a realm of commerce” (Harkin 327). The dynamic between Ned and his employer fits easily into the 1 I use the term “literary marketplace” as George Justice does, to denote “both the physical locations for printing, selling, and reading printed matter and, in the sense that the phrase is used today, to describe a system of procedures through which human agents understand the transactions and customs regulating the publication of what is known as ‘intellectual property’” (16). 2 The Gentleman’s Magazine reported: “Died on March 27, 1767, Mr. Purdon, suddenly, in Smithfield, famous for his literary abilities” (453). 2 rhetorically useful binary of oppressed author/oppressive bookseller, seen in the non-fiction prose of James Ralph and some visual representations of the book trade. Yet elsewhere in eighteenth-century literature, the application of this binary would be a misleading distillation of complex power relations into a static image. Comedy can put pressure on this binary, however. Goldsmith’s hyperbolic language nearly moves the condensed tragedy of Ned Purdon in the realm of bathos, where comedy and tragedy intersect. Ned’s situation, as Goldsmith reports it, is difficult to read in isolation from the mock-seriousness of explicitly fictional depictions of literary professionals. Like the historical Ned Purdon, Scroggen, the imagined subject of Goldsmith’s “Description of an Author’s Bed-Chamber” (published in the Public Ledger on 2 May 1760) is a down-at-heels scribbler, discovered by the “Muse” in pitiable lodgings (6). Remarks about the poet-character’s solitude and physical discomfort—he is cold and hungry— are joined by the comic observation that Scroggen, liable to be arrested for debt, roguishly dwells “from bailiffs snug” (5). His appearance, which suggests his social isolation, poverty, and obscurity, also renders Scroggen clownish: “A nightcap deck’d his brows instead of bay/ A cap by night—a stocking all the day!” (19-20). A crown of laurels (symbolizing artistic excellence) and a nightcap (representing material want) are mutually exclusive: both cannot be worn simultaneously. Literary lives like Scroggren’s are portrayed equivocally in Goldsmith’s time, blending the lamentable, blamable, and ridiculous as the professional writer “fashions an existence from the pressures and demands of the trade” (Flint 38). Goldsmith’s humorous depiction of the literary marketplace disempowering authors brings me to the three central concerns of this dissertation: comedy, power—in modernity, “the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable” (Foucault, History 93)—and representation, which Stuart Hall identifies as “one of the central practices which produces culture” (1). 3 In recent years, literary critics have seized on Samuel Johnson’s conception of his own time as an “Age of Authors,” a period in which authors took up more space in British society than ever before.

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