University of Virginia Library

Scribal Texts and Literary Communities: The Rochester Circle Osborn b. 105
by
Harold Love

Yale University Library MS Osborn b. 105 is the best known of the large body of manuscript miscellanies of verse from the Restoration period. Even in its present mutilated state, with a total of forty-five leaves excised by some prudish past owner, it has been accepted by both David M. Vieth and Keith Walker as the most important single witness to the text of Rochester. Yet it is also fair to say that, since the manuscript was first brought to the attention of scholars in 1963 through Vieth's monumental study in Attribution in Restoration Poetry, there has been no substantial increment to our understanding of it.[1] The problem is not so much one of lack of evidence as of uncertainty about what questions scholars should be asking. In the feeling that a quarter of a century is too long to have been waiting for a significant advance on Vieth's findings, I would like to present some new hypotheses concerning the origins and production of the manuscript.

First of all, it is necessary to consider what is already known or has been plausibly guessed about Osborn b. 105. It is a collection that before mutilation probably consisted of between seventy and eighty poems in the first or original hand, along with eight added later by a second hand. What immediately follows is concerned only with the poems in the first hand. The most important datum is that the contents of its surviving pages and their order are largely identical with those of the corresponding sections of the 1680 Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable, the E. of R--- (henceforth 1680H), with the exception of eleven poems unique to the manuscript and one unique to the edition.[2] Vieth (pp. 80-83) demonstrates by means of line counts that the correspondence probably continued through the various gaps caused by excision, apart from two instances where the manuscript again had room for additional material. Although the precise relationship of these two texts has yet to be established, and Vieth suspected some measure of conflation from an outside source, it was undoubtedly close.[3] Vieth (p. 74) believed that the lost manuscript (henceforth MS1680H) which served as copy for 1680H was the work of the same scribe and resembled Osborn b. 105 in containing a number of ascriptions to authors, arguing that these were omitted by the printer in order to pass off the edition as being entirely the work of Rochester. This too is simply a hypothesis, and one that should not be accepted uncritically, but is plausible in the light of our present knowledge. The alternative would be that the attributions were added from personal knowledge

by the scribe of Osborn b. 105 or in some manuscript intermediate between it and the nearest common ancestor. Most of the poems also exist in other contemporary manuscript anthologies and sometimes also as single sheets of the kind that were passed from hand to hand at court, sent through the post with newsletters or made available to the frequenters of coffee-houses.[4] Vieth's suggestion, based on the estimated date of the last-composed item, that the manuscript's contents were first assembled in the spring of 1680 will hardly be argued with (p. 65). It is written in a clear but unfussy professional hand which is also found in Princeton MS Taylor 1 (see below) composed of political satires of the time. As mentioned, the surviving sections of the manuscript lack only one poem present in the edition, and that the very last, "On Rome's Pardons." Vieth wonders if this may have been added by the printer in order to fill up space on the last sheet (pp. 79, 355-356).

The consistently good quality of the text of the 1680 compilation (here used to cover both the manuscript and the edition) is confirmed by the practice of recent editors of Rochester who all show a strong preference in their choice of copy texts for one or the other, usually favoring the manuscript.[5] The poems themselves range in date of composition from the mid-166os to late 1679, and some at least had been circulating in manuscript as separate entities for many years prior to the compilation of the collection.[6] These considerations suggest a collection assembled step by step over a considerable period by someone who was consistently able to lay his hands on good texts of poems soon after their appearance, and who therefore presumably moved in the same literary circles as the writers. A useful contrast can be made with the topical verse sporadically included in the commonplace book of the courtier Sir William Haward (Bodleian MS Don b. 8) which includes a number of items which also appear in the 1680 compilation. Haward's contacts were also good and he often obtained copies at very close to the apparent date of composition, but neither was his collection as comprehensive nor his information about authorship nearly as assured as that of the 1680 compiler. His texts, moreover, vary greatly in their quality.

The presence of eleven poems in the surviving leaves of the manuscript which are not found in the edition (with more probably lost from the excised sections) raises the question whether we are dealing with a collection that expanded in the course of recopying (with the edition representing the earlier state) or whether MS1680H had the same contents as Osborn b. 105. Vieth argues for the second alternative, maintaining that MS1680H probably contained all the poems contained in Osborn b. 105 but that some had to be left out of the edition for reasons of space. His assumptions about the nature of MS1680H become evident in the course of speculations about the nature of the nearest common ancestor (called by him "the archetype") from which they derived the readings they share against other sources:

Most of this is plausible, but none of it is conclusive. Surviving families of Restoration miscellanies are not so numerous that we can generalize from them without risk. Moreover, if we widen our horizons by looking at scribal publication as a phenomenon of the earlier as well as the later Stuart period, and as embracing such diverse activities as the distribution of musical part books and reports of parliamentary proceedings, it can be argued that the dominant model is that of the "rolling" archetype from which old material is continually removed and new material added in the course of production.[7]

Aware of this objection, Vieth invokes the evidence of "linked groups" of poems, which appear in the same order in other manuscript sources, arguing that in four cases it is Osborn b. 105 which preserves the "normal" group while the edition has it in reordered or (in one case) truncated form (pp. 76-79). In these cases it is hard not to agree that the "archetype," however conceived of, will have preserved the attested order; yet it would still be possible that the changes originated during the copying of MS1680H rather than when it was being marked up for printing. Vieth's response to this possibility is to argue that it is the change of medium which is more likely to have provoked the alteration:

Here the argument, although logical, is not as strong as it seems. In the first place, the point made in the last sentence only holds if one restricts oneself to the eleven poems that can actually be shown to be missing from the edition (and whose order in Vieth's reconstructed contents table to Osborn b. 105 of 72 items is 3, 47, 53, 55, 58, 61, 62, 67, and 69-71) and ignores his demonstration (pp. 93-100) that additional material totaling more than seven pages had also been present in the fourth and fifth gaps, corresponding to items 17-22 and 34-63. Moreover, even if true, it would not meet the objection that, in a "rolling" collection, new material which was not linked in an obviously thematic way with items already present would also tend to cluster towards the end. A more general objection is that a printer setting from a bound manuscript, as Vieth believes to have been the case, would have no reason to alter the order of items, this being much more likely to happen when a text is being copied from an exemplar in the form of separate leaves or booklets. Viewed in this light the case for a rolling archetype against a static one is stronger than Vieth gives it credit for being, though not strong enough for us to assume without further corroboration that 1680H represents an earlier state of the compilation and Osborn b. 105 a later, enlarged one. Vieth's uncharacteristic failure to think through this question seems to arise from his attention having been directed towards problems of determining attributions and establishing a text for Rochester, in which the issue is not of very great moment. However, it becomes of crucial importance (as will be seen later) as soon as one wishes to analyse the contents of the compilation for evidence of its genesis.

A further argument for accretion is that a process of this kind can be observed at work in the manuscript itself in the form of the group of poems added at the end by the second hand. These are of similar date and may well have been added by an assistant to the original copyist, but are all absent from 1680H and seem unlikely to have been present in MS1680H.

Another issue is whether Osborn b. 105 is to be considered a "factory manuscript," produced for sale, or a private commission from a litterateur to a scrivener or secretary. Vieth's speculation that it "formerly existed in several more copies in the same handwriting" endorses the first of these possibilities and leads him to the further suggestion that the manuscript was one of a set of complementary compilations, another of which is represented by Princeton MS Taylor 1, whose contents are entirely composed of political satires. Noting that the only songs contained in Osborn b. 105 are those by Rochester, Vieth (p. 90) further proposes that there might have been a third volume composed only of songs. Although there is no evidence of a connection it should be noted that exactly such a collection has become incorporated into Edinburgh University Library MS DC. 1. 3 (pp. 108-112), a compendium of six independently circulated miscellanies. However, to accept the likelihood that the manuscript was produced for sale (an assumption strengthened by evidence to be presented later) is not to imply that those responsible for copying it were also the original compilers of the collection.

One last piece of textual evidence that only became available in 1986 is that the text of Rochester's "Seneca's Troas" in Osborn b. 105 is identical in its substantive readings with one printed by Charles Blount in his edition in 1680 of The Two First Books of Philostratus.[8] Blount's source for this was presumably the manuscript of the poem he mentions in a letter to Rochester of 7 February 1679 in terms which have led some writers to assume that it was a gift from Rochester, though in my view with insufficient justification. The simplest and in textual terms the most economical explanation for this close agreement would be that the compiler of the manuscript took his text from Blount's volume; but other explanations are possible and might be worth reviewing should any further evidence emerge concerning the matter.[9]

This discussion does not attempt to deal with the intricate question of

the relationship of the "archetype" to other surviving collections containing a high proportion of the same poems, such as Stockholm Riks-Bibliotheket MS Vu 69 (Vieth's "Gyldenstolpe MS"), Leeds Brotherton MS Lt. 54, Nottingham University Library MS Portland PwV. 40, Victoria and Albert Museum MS Dyce 43, Vienna Nationalbibliothek MS 14090, and Harvard MS Eng. 636F. The most likely possibilities are (1) that the poems common to these manuscripts and the "archetype" are derived from an ancestor of the archetype, or (2) that they and the "archetype" were independently garnered selections of material that was in scribal circulation as single poems and groups of poems. It does not seem to be the case that the texts of either group are descended from those of the other.[10] The matter is one to which I hope to return on another occasion.

II

Having considered what can be deduced concerning the physical manuscript and its textual relationship with the edition, I would now like to turn to the social context of compilation, a matter about which Vieth has assembled a wealth of data without actually proceeding to interpretation. In doing so I propose to use two approaches which have not so far been applied to the material. The first is comparison with analogous situations from a history of scribal publication of verse and prose miscellanies which reaches back to the reign of James I. The second, and more radical, is the analysis of the collection as a communal construct, reflecting three apparent layers of compilation. My aim in doing so is not to contravert Vieth's conclusions, which as a rule are carefully reasoned and presented with a scrupulous explanation of their limitations, but to suggest that a case can be made for possibilities that were rejected by him because they did not seem germane to the particular aims of his enquiry. Underlying both Vieth's and my own approaches to the collection is the desire to find a significant shape for the materials which would permit a further process of reasoning from the known to the unknown. In Vieth's case the shape educed was a linear one based on the sequence of items in the manuscript:

In this what is no more than a demonstrable tendency (that poems in a certain section of the manuscript seem to be mostly by Rochester) has been extended into a general principle for declaring some works authentic and others suppositious. The principle is then used to establish three working assumptions concerning the reliability of attributions which although printed by Vieth in italic type, as if they possessed the certainty of theorems, are in fact no more than plausible guesses (pp. 74, 86, 88). Making no pretence to conclusiveness, I would like to explore the possibilities of another shape which is not in this instance linear, but which involves trying to look at the collection as a series of strata, each laid in place by a separate community of readers.

The analysis of miscellanies as communal creations is a familiar enough technique to scholars of mediaeval poetry and becomes even more relevant with the advent of the seventeenth century when manuscript publication became a matter of choice rather than necessity and was normally undertaken with the explicit aim of restricting texts to a small group of the like minded. The composition and issuing of these texts might itself become a way of reinforcing the corporate ideology of such groups. Representative examples of such a process are to be found in the circulation of philosophical and religious verse within the Donne circle during the first three decades of the century, in the circulation of political tracts among the gentry of Kent during the decades prior to the civil war, in Henry King's production of collections of his own and others' poems at Christ Church Oxford, and in the production of miscellanies of the work of the court poets of Charles I.[11] In each of these instances, the aim of circulation was not to broadcast verse out to an indiscriminate public (though this sometimes happened over a period of years) so much as to use the exchange of writings in manuscript as a way of maintaining the coherence of a community which might well be a political or religious as well as a literary entity. In the cases of Donne and King, we see collections exchanged among groups of friends sharing religious and philosophic interests, but also concerned to advance each others' careers and to ease the path to patronage.[12] In that of the Kentish squires the exchange of manuscripts was helping to sustain a regional political structure whose members due to their scholarly interests and proximity to the capital were especially sensitive to ideological questions.[13] This "bonding" role of scribal transmission might require that the material so circulated should be of a kind to deter outsiders who might happen to encounter it. A student of Restoration poetry, if asked why such a collection as Osborn b. 105 should initially have been reserved for scribal transmission, would probably say because it was against the law to print obscene literature. But this in turn raises the question why obscene literature gets written in the first place—or did in the seventeenth century.

An answer to the latter question would be that the poetry of Rochester and his friends, published, as far as they were able to ensure, entirely in manuscript, was an ideological consciousness-raising exercise among a dissident political interest group at the court of Charles II. As regards the nature of this group, one must begin with the observation that although Rochester is the best represented poet and the obvious star of the collection (much as Carew had been in the miscellanies from the court of Charles I), Osborn b.

105 is in fact a composite anthology drawing on work from a number of writers, several of whom were friends of Rochester, others clients, and some enemies. The friends were members of a court faction among a number of other factions, composed of the Duke of Buckingham, the Earls of Rochester and Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley, Henry Savile, Fleetwood Shepherd, William Wycherley, George Etherege and a few hangers-on. Among the professional writers the one most consistently in receipt of their patronage was Thomas Shadwell, who by 1680 had dedicated Timon to Buckingham, The Miser to Dorset (the first of three such dedications) and A True Widow to Sedley, who was also reputed to assist him with the polishing of his plays. Buckingham, Dorset, Wycherley, Shadwell and Etherege are all represented in the compilation. Sedley's name occurs at a number of points in it and he may also be present as the author of either of two works of disputed authorship—"In the fields of Lincoln's Inn" and "Timon." All those named are included by Rochester in the roll-call of his literary friends at the end of "An Allusion to Horace" which can be seen as a kind of manifesto on behalf of the group: The faction admired Dryden up to a point but were strongly opposed to his politics. Besides he represented the new principled professionalism of the man of letters which challenged their aristocratic cult of amateurism and improvisation.[15] "An Allusion to Horace" and Buckingham's The Rehearsal give us their view of him. Although Rochester was the star writer, the political leader of the group was Buckingham, and their ideologue, Buckingham's long-term adviser, Andrew Marvell. They were thus Whig placemen in a Tory court, sceptical in religion but anti-Catholic in politics, French in culture but by now pro-Dutch in foreign policy, boon companions of the king yet resentful of the power of those unconstitutional ministers of state, his mistresses. They had been important to the king as a counterpoise to the partisans of his brother, James, Duke of York, but by 1680 they had lost his confidence through their links with Shaftesbury's campaign to exclude James from the succession. These matters are uncontroversial (except perhaps the role of Marvell) and the evidence for them has been available for many years in a series of studies by John Harold Wilson.[16] Poetry, along with sceptical philosophy and practical debauchery, was the bonding agent of a group whose ultimate rationale was political—the Erastian, anti-clerical wing of Shaftesbury's exclusionist alliance—and which through the influence of Buckingham, Dorset and Sedley was to play a significant part in bringing about the great political change of 1688. However, they differed from Shaftesbury in preferring William of Orange to Monmouth as heir in the place of James. This group is the first and most important of the literary communities who contributed material to Osborn b. 105.

To understand the next stage of the argument it will be helpful to turn to another model from the earlier Stuart period, that of the circulation of miscellanies of poems by Henry King and his friends produced under King's direction at Christ Church, Oxford during the 1630s. In an important unpublished dissertation by Mary Hobbs, the creation and dissemination of these collections is followed in exemplary detail.[17] To begin with they were intended for Christ Church readers and King's immediate circle of friends and performed, for that community, the bonding function already described in connection with Donne and the Kentish squires. It was not long, however, before they were also being copied in other Oxford colleges and then in London, where the Inns-of-Court, always an important centre for scribal publication, proved exceptionally receptive.[18] As this happened the contents of the collections were modified to accommodate the expectations of their new readerships. Hobbs's discussion, by relating changes in the contents of miscellanies to evidence of hands, scribes, owners and personal links between individuals who were connected in all these capacities with the manuscripts, shows how collections similar to MS1680H and Osborn b. 105 would vary not only through time but as a result of movement from community to community. In the case of the 1680 collections we possess neither the rich body of scribal recensions nor the knowledge of provenances that provide the basis for Hobbs's work; but guided by her conclusions we can suggest further levels of communal affiliation within the collection.

A second community that contributed items was also based at court. During the second half of the 1670s the proto-Whig Buckingham faction was challenged by another which was strongly Yorkist in its sympathies, headed by the Earl of Mulgrave and with Dryden as its professional luminary. Sir Carr Scroope seems also to have been associated with it for a while, though the reference to him in Mulgrave and Dryden's "An Essay on Satyr" of 1679 is an unflattering one.[19] Vieth has shown in detail how a substantial body of poems in the 1680 compilation were inspired by this antagonism.[20] An important show of strength of the Mulgrave group was the production in March 1677 of Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens, dedicated to Mulgrave and with a prologue by Scroope and commendatory verses by Dryden. Both versions of the collection contain attacks of particular virulence on Mulgrave and Scroope, while "An Allusion to Horace" contains a stinging reference to Mulgrave as Dryden's "foolish patron." Dryden counter-attacked in the preface to All for Love and assisted Mulgrave with the "Essay on Satyr" in which Buckingham, Dorset, Sedley and Rochester are assailed in the company of Shaftesbury, Halifax and Lord Chancellor Finch. Vieth was the first scholar to sort out the motivations and targets of the satires directed at Mulgrave and Scroope; but even he did not seem to grasp the political dimension of the exchanges or to understand that the allegiances of Absalom and Achitophel, in which Buckingham is demolished as Zimri and Mulgrave lauded as Adriel, were already overt in Osborn b. 105. (Basil Greenslade in his discussion of Rochester's political convictions has fallen into a similar error.[21]) The viewpoint of the Mulgrave faction is represented in the collection

by three items (all by Scroope) which appear in both Osborn b. 105 and 1680H—"In defence of Satyr," "Raile on poor feeble Scribler" and "I cannot change as others doe" along with a further four which appear only among the eleven additional poems in Osborn b. 105. These are a poem by Mulgrave himself, "On the Enjoyment of his Mrs" ("Since now my Silvia, is as kind as faire"), Dryden's "Mac Flecknoe"—an attack by the leading professional of one faction on the leading professional of the other—and two vicious attacks on Buckingham, "A New Ballad to an Old Tune Call'd Sage Leafe" and the "D: of B: Letany."

The presence of these pieces is significant for what it tells us about the intended audience of the two texts. Although the greater part of the compilation derives from the Buckingham faction, members of this faction would not wish to circulate poems by Mulgrave and his friends which were uncomplimentary to themselves. (The reverse would also apply.) This makes it likely that the core collection underlying 1680H and Osborn b. 105 was reedited outside the court by someone who, while obviously having a good source of supply within the Buckingham faction, felt no personal involvement in its squabbles and was quite happy to mingle work by members of both factions. 1680H is less offensive in this regard, since each of the three poems by Scroope, which are its only contribution from the opposition, is neutralised by an "answer." "I cannot change" is cruelly burlesqued as "I swive as well as others do"; "In defence of Satyr" is followed by the crushing "To wrack and torture thy unmeaning Brayne"; and "Raile on poor feeble Scribler" receives its comeuppance from "On Poet Ninny." (In the last of these cases, the reply is not part of the linked group containing the earlier parts of the exchange, and has become attached to another group satirising Mulgrave. However, it is likely that both it and Buckingham's satire on Scroope, "A Familiar Epistle to Mr Julian Secretary of the Muses," which follows it in Osborn b. 105 were meant to belong with the earlier Rochester-Scroope exchange.) This difference between the two collections must be regarded as supporting evidence for the hypothesis advanced earlier that the edition represents a prior state of the collection to Osborn b. 105. On the other hand, the case can not be pushed very far. Mac Flecknoe and "Since now my Silvia" are both long poems, in addition to being by authors other than Rochester, and a publisher of Whiggish inclination might have had his own reasons for suppressing satires on Buckingham. The remaining seven poems unique to Osborn b. 105 pose no such difficulties, being of a kind that might easily have appealed to members of the Buckingham faction.[22]

The third communal affiliation is with one of the Inns of Court. Among the poems common to both the printed and the manuscript versions of the compilation are four which can be linked to Gray's Inn: two of these are by Alexander Radcliffe, who entered the Inn in November 1669, and two by Aphra Behn, whose lover John Hoyle had enjoyed a long connection with the Inn before moving in January 1679 to the Inner Temple.[23] The Behn poems are a light piece of erotic verse "On a Giniper Tree now cut down to make Busks" and an elegy on the painter John Greenhill, a member of the

same dissolute half-world inhabited by Hoyle.[24] Osborn b. 105 adds a third poem, "One day the amorous Lysander." In this case, as Vieth pointed out, Behn is known on the basis of a letter first printed in 1718 to have sent a copy of the poem to Hoyle. (Maureen Duffy has cast doubt on the authenticity of the letter but on grounds which I believe to be questionable.[25]) Hoyle is known to have been a friend of Sedley, who was also a Whig, a freethinker and a libertine. Hoyle's murder by a Tory zealot in May 1692 was to draw from Sedley the bitter "A Ballad to the Tune of Bateman." Could Hoyle, a legal man active in literary and libertine circles, with contacts at court and with easy access to professional scriveners, have been connected with the compiling of Osborn b. 105? It is impossible to tell, but the theory of an Inns-of-Court provenance for the manuscript is attractive not only because it would place it in a line of such compilations reaching back to Donne's days at Lincoln's Inn, but would also explain how discriminations which would have been of vital interest to a partisan court readership would no longer be felt to apply.

Of course if Duffy is right in questioning the authenticity of the 1718 letter, the evidence for Hoyle's involvement is seriously weakened and with it that for a distinct "Gray's Inn" stage in the evolution of the collection. Here the crucial issue is that at a point which can not yet be determined the burgeoning collection ceased to be a private possession and came into the hands of a professional publisher of manuscripts. While a miscellany still in private hands would grow in ways dictated by the communal affiliations of successive copyists, a professional trader in lampoons would acknowledge no such restrictions but aim at presenting a mix of materials from different sources aimed at attracting the widest possible readership. At this point the assumptions underlying Hobbs's method would cease to apply.

III

Our concern so far has been with the literary genesis of the collection: it is now time to consider its production in scribal and printed form, beginning with the edition and then looking more searchingly at the manuscript.

The printing of 1680H is commonly regarded as a surreptitious, hole-in-the-corner affair, undertaken by a printer who had fortuitously come into the possession of a manuscript and was cashing in on its saleability as a work of pornography. To Vieth it is "the printer" who is responsible for the changes he maintains were made to the copy and who therefore must have been undertaking the work on his own account rather than at the direction of a bookseller. This pattern of work is not unknown and might be particularly suspected of a surreptitious operation; but it also required that the printer should finance the work, paying initially for the paper (a very substantial expense) and carrying the manpower costs of printing in the hope of recouping them from sales which he himself would have to negotiate with stationers or hawkers. These costs were likely to be steep as workmen required higher wages to work on illegal publications, which often involved printing in the early hours of the morning. It also required that the printer

should himself run the risk of warehousing the stock and protecting it against seizure. All this might be worth the trouble to a well-organised master printer with good contacts in the retail trade and reasonable reserves of capital, but is a departure from the normal practice of the trade which was for the bookseller to initiate publication and the printer to work to an agreed quotation, which in the case of an illegal publication would be a higher than usual one. Paper under these circumstances would be ordered in by the bookseller in the amount required for the edition. It should also be noted that a bookseller would not necessarily have to go to a back-street or unlicensed printer to get illegal work printed. Documents presented to a House of Lords enquiry in 1675 make it clear that leading stationers drove a thriving trade in unlicensed publications and would blackmail their regular printers into printing them with threats of harassment by the Stationers' Company or of withdrawing orders for legitimate work.[26]

Whatever the situation with the first edition of 1680H, it is obvious that the work became an enormous best-seller. In one of the classic demonstrations of modern bibliographical scholarship, James Thorpe showed that what up till his time had been accepted as seventeen copies of a single edition were in fact representative of ten separate editions with the existence of others inferable from the analysis of variants.[27] (One of these hypothesised editions has since come to light.[28]) It is also likely that some editions have disappeared without trace. Whichever way one looks at the matter, and however long these editions took to appear (they are all dated 1680 but this is no more true than their claim to be printed at Antwerp), the book was one of the great publishing successes of the Restoration period. A question which was not asked by Thorpe but which is germane to the present discussion is how this huge body of copies was distributed to its readers. To this there is only one possible answer. A printing operation on this scale could not have been disposed of by hawkers: the book must have been handled, albeit surreptitiously, as a regular item of trade by a considerable body of booksellers and with the tacit approval of the Stationers' Company. The moment this possibility is raised it becomes even less likely that the initial printing was the happy inspiration of a side-alley printer. It must have been obvious in the autumn of 1680 that a collection of Rochester's poems would be a hot property. Leading booksellers would have known where a manuscript and a printer were to be obtained and how to remove the danger of suppression by offering their colleagues of the Company a slice of the action.

To take this argument any further would be to trespass on important findings by John Hetet on the printing and distribution of prohibited books which still await publication.[29] Hetet's concern was with nonconformist political writings, not with libertine literature, but the detailed picture he gives of the workings of this particular underground and its substantial contribution to the profitability of the book trade casts light at every turn on the methods by which 1680H will have been produced and circulated. The point of concern to the present argument is that, if the book was commissioned by a bookseller in the normal way of trade, any cutting will have been

done by him rather than by the printer, and will have been determined by the time paper was ordered for the edition. We would not be thinking of ad hoc cuts made as the paper supply dwindled.

The writing of the manuscript needs also to be set against a background of trade practice for such undertakings. It has become common for scholars of Restoration poetry to refer loosely to "scriptoria" as the agencies of publication; but this is once again to sever the manufacture of the text from its distribution and the likelihood that it would be the distributor rather than the scribe who financed and initiated production. There can be no doubt for a start that much of the trade in manuscripts was in the hands of booksellers. An important testimony to this is a document by Sir Roger L'Estrange, presented to the House of Lords in 1675, of which a precis is given in a Historical Manuscripts Commission Report, but which is here reproduced in full from the original in the House of Lords Record Office:

An oddity of this report is that much of its phraseology is taken over from a similar document of 1662, and therefore presumably also composed by L'Estrange.[31] Allowance must also be made for the writer's longstanding feud with the Stationers' Company. However, as will be seen in a moment there is corroborative evidence for his account of the state of affairs.

A bookseller did not need to go to the trouble of maintaining a scriptorium: instead he could order job lots of copies from a scrivener.[32] Scriveners were particularly thick on the ground in the areas close to the law courts and the Inns-of-Court. The work pattern of those most closely associated with the courts would see them heavily occupied during the legal terms but with slack periods during the vacations during which they would need to look for other kinds of copying.[33] The concentration of young law students, many with literary tastes and some themselves writers, in the neighbourhood of the

Inns provided a ready market for scribally published collections of verse. If one was to guess at the most likely circumstances for the production of a volume such as Osborn b. 105 it would be a commission from a bookseller in one of the streets close to the Inns—the Strand, Fleet Street, Chancery Lane or High Holborn—to a neighbouring scrivener made during the summer law vacation of 1680. However, scriptoria did exist and we are fortunate in a spy's report of 1675, first published by Andrew Browning, to have a description of one in full blast. John Starkey and Thomas Collins at their respective shops strategically close to the Middle Temple Gate had in the mid 1670s become chief suppliers of parliamentary papers and political "separates" to the Whig party:

The report does not mention poetry as among the products of these scriptoria but is of great interest for its insight into scribal publication as it was organised on a commercial basis by established booksellers. The reference to "a grand Book or Books" suggests that the original function of the large lampoon miscellanies may not have been as objects of sale in their own right but as "samplers" from which a customer could order copies of individual items or an agreed selection of poems. (One sign of such a volume would be an unpredictable alternation of hands, as is the case with Harvard MS Eng. 636F.) To Starkey and Collins as operators of scriptoria must be added the better-known figure of Robert Julian, the retired naval clerk who figures so largely in the satires which were written for him to distribute.[35] The chief difference between Julian's operation and that of Starkey and Collins was the method of distribution. Whereas the booksellers' customers came to their shops to place orders and collect manuscripts, Julian was a mobile vendor of lampoons, waiting personally on his clients in the court and the coffeehouses, and apparently leaving the actual transcribing to the "two clerks" mentioned by Ravenscroft in the prologue to The London Cuckolds.[36] Julian is, however, mentioned several times as a retailer of "books" and had close connections with the Buckingham circle. A letter from him to Dorset is extant, dateable to 1675-77, and in June 1666 he would have made the acquaintance of Rochester who served on the same ship during the Four Days

Battle against the Dutch.[37] It is highly likely that he was responsible for the production and sale of some of the surviving manuscript miscellanies but it cannot be assumed for that reason that he rather than a bookseller or a private collector with access to professional copyists was responsible for commissioning Osborn b. 105 and its lost sibling. The efficiency with which the collection was moved into print, taken together with the possibility that this may have involved concerted activity from the trade, would rather point towards a stationer in one of the streets already mentioned who combined dealing in manuscripts with the publication and sale of printed books. Certainly the printing of the collection can have had nothing to do with Julian to whom it was only of value as long as it was kept from the press.

So far we are still multiplying possibilities without possessing any criterion to judge between them; but as regards the date of writing and the circumstances under which the manuscript was written we are now able to make use of an important clue, so far disregarded. This is the name "Hansen" written on the lower right-hand corner of the title page in a hand which Vieth thought might be that of the second scribe. The name is rare enough in England (as opposed to the usual "Hanson") to suggest that it refers to the diplomat Friedrich Adolphus Hansen, who visited England in September 1680 in the entourage of Charles, the electoral prince Palatine.[38] The presence of two other important Rochester manuscripts in continental libraries indicates that they may have been attractive as souvenirs to visiting dignitaries.[39] In Hansen's case it is possible to suggest additional reasons for his wishing to acquire the collection and why in the end it may have failed to accompany him back to the Palatinate. There is no reason to believe that a German visitor to England at this period would have known any English, but at Whitehall and Newmarket which he visited in the company of the king and the electoral prince he would have been able to communicate with members of the court in French, and at Oxford, where he was awarded a D.C.L. on 9 September, he would have been able to converse with members of the university in Latin. At both places he is likely to have heard of the wicked earl and great poet who had died only two months earlier as an exemplary penitent. At Oxford he might have met clergy who had attended Rochester during the closing weeks of his life. The story may also have come to the ears of the electoral prince, a young man of exemplary learning and, through his descent from Elizabeth of Bohemia, a cousin of Charles II. In either case, and whether for reasons of piety or notoriety, an attempt might plausibly have been made to obtain a collection of Rochester's verse, the enquirer been directed to the source of supply (presumably well known at Whitehall), and a manuscript been written and inscribed with Hansen's name, indicating that it had been personally bespoke by him. (This practice is also encountered in Leeds University Library MS Brotherton Lt 54.)[40]

While there are reasons to believe that the manuscript was written for Hansen, there is also a reason why it may never have been collected. On 11 September, the news reached the electoral prince at Whitehall that his father had died and that he was now Elector. Further plans for the visit were now

abandoned as the party prepared for an immediate return to the Palatinate and on the 18th they set sail from Greenwich. The collection of a manuscript will not have been a matter of great concern at such a period, and the supplier would hardly be interested in sending it overseas when ready money could be obtained in London for such a desirable item. This hypothesis implies that the manuscript was a commercial production, and that, as late as September 1680, 1680H was still unavailable. (Our first definite evidence of its existence is in the following November.[41])

What has been presented is for the most part offered not as a series of conclusions but as possibilities for scholars to work with as they try to make further sense of the evidence. I regard the case for a rolling archetype, as opposed to Vieth's static model, as no more than evenly balanced and have tried not to draw on it to support other proposals. The case for the final editing of the compilation having taken place in the Inns of Court is dependent on a further assumption of its still being a private possession at that stage. If it was not, there is still a strong likelihood of its having been assembled by a trader in the streets adjacent to those venerable institutions. That the bulk of the compilation emanated from manuscripts privately circulated within the Buckingham faction seems to me beyond doubt; but the mingling in of work from the Mulgrave faction in Osborn b. 105 shows that by then it had moved out to a wider community. The argument that the manuscript was written for F. A. Hansen is supported by the coincidence of dates, the fact that two similar collections also left England and the lack of any other candidate. The suggestion that the publication of 1680H may have been a less disreputable operation than has formerly been assumed again points towards the possibility that a bookseller near the Inns of Court may have been responsible for the production first of the manuscript and, as orders began to flood in, of the edition. How many of these guesses are accurate can not be determined on the presently available evidence, but at the very least they point to new questions to be asked of a document which is in many ways the key to our understanding of a whole literary culture.

Notes