One fairly widespread feature of Augustan literature is the idea that
the temple of the Muses was being profaned by sinful and arrogant
booksellers and that the true wit, therefore, should miss no opportunity of
cutting them down to size. Hostility to publishers is not, of course, peculiar
to the eighteenth century, but it does seem uniquely powerful and pervasive
in the literature of the period from Dryden to Goldsmith; their iniquities
seem to meet us everywhere, not only in verse and prose satire, but in
fiction and drama, to say nothing of private letters and parliamentary
debates. It's usually only a matter of incidental jeers, but there is also
something of a special literary tradition in which the bookseller figures as
comic villain; in poetry, of course, there's the Dunciad, with
Lintot and Curll given leading roles and a dozen or so other booksellers in
the cast; there are prose pamphlets like Richard Savage's (and probably in
part Pope's) An Author to be
Let (1729), plays like Fielding's The Author's Farce
(1730) and Samuel Foote's The Author (1757), Archibald
Campbell's Lucianic dialogue The Sale of Authors (1767),
and a host of novels including, most notably, Amelia and
Roderick Random. The period is also characterized by the
amount of personal friction between authors and booksellers: David Hume
brandishing his sword at Jacob Robinson, Dr. Johnson knocking Thomas
Osborne down, Goldsmith trying to do the same to Evans, and Pope,
determined to make the punishment fit the crime, choosing the emetic as his
weapon and applying it to the bowels of that gross feeder at the table of the
Muses, Edmund Curll.
Why do the booksellers loom so large on the literary scene? Was
their bad eminence peculiar to England? What literary consequences did it
have? And to what extent was the hostility which the booksellers
provoked—in Pope, for instance—justified? I must preface my
necessarily cursory and speculative attempt to indicate answers to these
inherently difficult problems with a note of scholarly caution. We must
remember that despite the many additions to our picture of the institutional
structure of the Augustan literary world since the two main monographs on
the subject, Alexandre Beljame's
Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres
en Angleterre au Dix-huitième Siècle (1881), and
A. S.
Collins'
Authorship in the Days of Johnson (1927), the limits
to our knowledge are still numerous and in some respects crippling; nor can
much be done about them until the short-title catalogue finally wings its
way into the eighteenth century, and until we are then supplied with an
Augustan equivalent to Paul Morrison's
Index of Printers, Publishers
and Booksellers (1955).
