University of Virginia Library

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.