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I
The Subscribers and Their Copies
Our earliest notice of the Miscellanies is a squib by Horace Walpole satirizing Fielding's poverty, written in March or April 1742; here it appears that Fielding was already soliciting subscriptions, a year before the book was finally published.[4] No copy of the proposals survives, but their substance is recorded in an advertisement of 5 June 1742, which also implies, as Miller notes, that subscription "must have been underway for some time." How long is anyone's guess, but Miller and Martin Battestin plausibly propose that it began in late 1741.[5] The form of subscribers' names, however, usually dates from after that time, when it can be dated: not only the Earl of Orford, but the Earls of Bath, Harrington and Lichfield acquired their titles in 1742 or 1743; the Countess of Dalkeith, née Lady Caroline Campbell, and Mrs.
For these fourteen subscribers, at least, and probably for others, subscription continued into 1742 and even 1743; as late as 14 February 1743, Fielding was still pleading in the Daily Advertiser with "all such as have dispos'd of any Receipts, and have not yet sent in the Names of the Subscribers" to send them in by the end of the month. None of this seriously challenges the received dating, of course, since only fourteen of Fielding's 427 subscriptions can be dated. Nevertheless, the names of the subscribers in the list are prima facie the names on Fielding's receipts; there is no evidence that he ever went back and updated them. The Earl of Lichfield—if, as I suppose, he is the same earl who subscribed for Sarah Fielding's Familiar Letters between the Characters of David Simple—signed on less than two months before publication; Walpole presumably subscribed after his creation as Earl of Orford, on 6 Feb. 1742.
The numerous errors in the names of subscribers indeed suggest that the receipts received little editing, apart from their alphabetical and social arrangement. "Henry Byndhass, Esq; of the Middle Temple" can only be our distorted friend Byndloss; and Adrian Ducarel, both of whose brothers subscribed, masquerades as "Adrian Duterel, Esq;" as Ruthe Battestin kindly pointed out to me. The last names of "Peter Kelewick, Esq;" and "E. Lauchert, Esq;" are quite unrecorded, and (with some assistance from the "Edward Lambert, Esq;" who subscribed for Sarah Fielding's Familiar Letters) I do not doubt that they should be Kekewick (of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn) and Lambert (Deputy Recorder of Salisbury).
Fielding, who rarely gives any addresses, lists seventy-five subscribers as "of" one of the four Inns of Court, to provide rhetorical "proof" of the professional support he celebrated in the Introduction to the Miscellanies. The "proof" is somewhat tendentious, to be sure. The Inns housed many laymen during the eighteenth century, among them Samuel Johnson, and even businesses, like the bookstore of Thomas Waller, Fielding's publisher; nevertheless, all but three of the seventy-five subscribers are identifiably lawyers. "J. Beach, Esq;" "John Manton, Esq;" and "Lewis Innys, Esq;" indeed, all "of the Inner Temple," are not to be found in the registers of any Inn, the lists of legal personnel in the Magnœ Britanniœ Notitia, nor the rather less complete lists of attorneys that were maintained by Act of Parliament from 1729. And yet Fielding apparently supposed they were lawyers, or meant them to be taken as such.
Are "J. Beach," "John Manton," and "Lewis Innys" laymen, then, or
The easiest explanation of these errors is that Fielding or the compositor misread the receipts, perhaps misled by a one-stroke capital T such as Fielding himself wrote, or a secretary e, common in eighteenth-century lawyers' hands. "J. Beach, Esq;", indeed, reappears four years later without a legal address among the subscribers to Sarah Fielding's Familiar Letters; at least I assume it is the same man, and that she omitted his address, as she omitted Edward Hooper's, for the simple reason that she saw no advantage for her enterprise in parading their professional association. Beach's abbreviated Christian name certainly suggests that neither Henry nor his sister recognized his identity, even though, intriguingly, it appears that his father had sold some woods at West Ashton (Wilts.) to their uncle, George Fielding, so that their families may have been acquainted.
The detours of solicitation surely encouraged such errors. Historically, Fielding's list descends from the receipts sent in by his friends, in a variety of hands, as well as from those he wrote out himself. As he confessed in the Introduction, he owed "not a tenth Part" of the subscriptions to his "own Interest" (Misc. I, 13), and the identity of these friends of friends might well elude him. The careful arrangement and artful typography of the list argue that the compositor worked from a fair copy, and not directly from the receipts themselves. The repeated misreadings of e as i ("Briton," "Bidford," "Nathaneil," "Percival," and "Woodmancie") or as u ("Duvall" and "Murlott") are both attributable to a secretary e; since these errors have no clear personal, geographical or professional association in common, they support the conjecture that the compositor's copy was in a single hand—presumably Fielding's, though the evidence is hardly conclusive.[7] One should add, of course, that his direct acquaintance with his subscriber is no guarantee of accuracy. Both he and Sarah misreport their subscriber Richard Draper as
Because his list is exceptionally laconic, the names are peculiarly liable to distortion and difficult to identify with certainty. The subscribers are not in general represented by their legal signatures, but by social designations that assume their physical presence for full intelligibility. David Garrick is plain "Mr. Garrick," as he might appear in a cast or a playbill; Richard Grenville is "--- Greenville, Esq;" reflecting the usual pronunciation of his name. His first name is probably omitted as a mark of distinction for the eldest son, whereas his younger brothers appear as "James Greenville, Esq;" and "George Greenville, Esq;".[9] Phonetic spellings, like "Massam" for Masham, and "Guernier" for Garnier are not uncommon, though contemporaries perhaps found them less confusing than I have. "Mrs." denotes both married women and spinsters, but the spinsters are normally distinguished by the addition of their Christian names: "Mrs. Elizabeth Adams" is certainly single, whereas "Mrs. Hooper" may only be presumed to be married (in her case, wrongly). Thus the record provides ample room for ambiguity. Fortunately, I have found no evidence of pseudonymous, fictive, or jocular entries, as in some other lists.[10]
Besides misreadings (as I charitably suppose them), there are actual errors of fact, and omissions of essential data in Fielding's list. "Thomas"—or rather Richard—Draper is the most striking, but we may also wonder at "The Hon. William Leweson, Esq;" evidently a phonetic representation of the MP William Leveson-Gower, shorn of the second half of his name. The entry for Abraham Elton fails to note the baronetcy he received on 20 October 1742; and at least four of Fielding's subscribers died before publication, unnoticed in the list. The first of these virtual readers to die is Capt. Christopher Garey, who had been out of the realm since mid-October 1740 on Admiral Vernon's West Indian expedition and died on 2 February 1741, shortly before the
My identification of "Major Garey," as he appears in the list, may be questioned, since it seems to impugn the received dating for the opening of subscription. Christopher is unmistakably denoted by this entry, however, despite the discrepancy in his rank: army officers are reliably recorded, the records have been thoroughly studied and indexed by Charles Dalton, and Philip Gery, the only major who might conceivably qualify, died in 1736. Hence I doubt that an unidentified "Major Garey"—or Gary, Gery, Gerry, Geary, or Gearie—is still lurking about the staff officers of George II's army, unknown to history; and in any case, there is no other indication that subscription opened so early. I rather suppose that a friend of Garey's may have signed him up, before news of his death had reached England,[11] and that he received a brevet rank before embarking on the Caribbean campaign. Thus—whether "Major Garey" is unidentified, a vicarious entry by one of his friends, or an authorial invention to vary and enliven the social composition of the list—I see no need to question the received dating. The 4th Baron Berkeley of Stratton, William Hillman Sr., Alderman of Salisbury, the 1st Duke of Roxburghe, and the 3rd Earl of Radnor all died in early 1741, and were succeeded by heirs who answer equally well to their descriptions in the list. In such cases, I have identified the subscribers as the heirs, reducing Fielding's extinct subscribers to a minimum.
Accuracy of identification depends not just on the fullness and correctness of the record, but also on the completeness and adequacy of my reference sources. I have run the list against such standard references as Musgrave's Obituary, the DNB, the Complete Peerage, Burke's Landed Gentry, the county histories, registers of schools, universities, and Inns of Court, and wills in the Probate Court of Canterbury. Some of the classes in Fielding's list—particularly merchants, attorneys, and, of course, women—are poorly recorded in these references, but their bias is more serious for the names they do record. If we can match a subscriber in any one of these sources, there is an enormous incentive to look no further for possible homonyms. An author with a good biography, like Fielding, will thus seem to be more successful in dunning his friends and relations, and eighteenth-century merchants, if they were better represented in the DNB, might take a more serious interest in the arts.
Fielding's list is arranged, like many others, in a social hierarchy, but unlike most of them, he makes a firm distinction between the Esquires and the Misters. The fabric of this distinction was already wearing thin, as the College of Arms had made no visitations since the seventeenth century, but
Where I am defeated by the poverty of the descriptions or the richness of my sources, I have made a number of more or less plausible assumptions to resolve the ambiguities. I assume that names which reappear as subscribers to Sarah Fielding's Familiar Letters denote the same person, since I suppose that Henry or his friends helped his sister gather subscriptions: as I have already remarked, two subscribers appear in the same erroneous forms in both lists, but in general, Sarah's is more correct, or fuller. I have also favored candidates who have biographical connections with Sarah's subscribers. Finally, I have surveyed a sample of 100 lists appearing in books published in London, Cambridge, and Oxford between 1739 and 1749, and in ambiguous cases, I have favored candidates with a demonstrable habit of subscribing.
A few examples will illustrate the application of these assumptions. Miller, followed by Martin Battestin, accepts the manager of Drury Lane (1696-1774) as the subscriber "Mr. Lacy," but the manager was "Esquire," as he is styled in his will, and as Fielding, at least, should certainly have been aware. A likelier candidate is the homonymous James Lacy (d. 1750), an attorney of Bishop's Walton (Hants.), persuasively associated by his profession and location with many other subscribers. Such connections, which fit the subscriber into a general "profile," seem to me more reliable than vague biographical associations, since by Fielding's own confession, his acquaintance with his subscribers was limited. Like Johnson's Shakespeare, Fielding's Miscellanies was largely promoted by the author's friends.[12]
Hence I also question the identification of "Mr. Carey" with the poet and composer Henry Carey, hesitatingly proposed by Miller, and adopted by Battestin.[13] The poet hanged himself on 5 October 1743, leaving three young children and his pregnant wife "destitute of any provision."[14] He and his wife (whom Battestin also proposes as a subscriber) could scarcely have afforded to lay out two guineas on Fielding's Miscellanies, I believe; nor did Fielding himself, who was equally distressed, subscribe in his turn for Carey's Dramatick Works, published in August 1743. Miller's hesitation is thus abundantly justified. My co-editor, Bert Goldgar, however, with his unrivalled instinct for the contemporary scene, suggested the surgeon Squire Carey (his real name, not a title). Carey's medical clients included Fielding's patron, George Dodington, and the Prince of Wales (both subscribers), and his sympathy with their politics appears in his subscription to Henry Brooke's play, Gustavus Vasa. My judgment here is necessarily tentative. Most of the possible Carys, Careys, and Carews are Esquires; the only plausible Misters I know of are the surgeon and the poet; and of these, the surgeon seems easily the most eligible. He has no other known connection with Fielding, indeed, but he is satisfyingly connected with the subscription process, as we may picture it, and he makes an interesting addition to the large medical contingent among Fielding's subscribers.
Some four contemporary divines qualify for the subscriber listed as "The Reverend Mr. Goddard." I was initially attracted by John Goddard, Rector of Wreningham (Norf.), the only Etonian, for this is a strongly represented group among Fielding's subscribers. Nevertheless, he never subscribed for other books during my sample period, and I have therefore plumped for Peter Stephen Goddard, an active subscriber and the only Reverend Goddard to subscribe for secular literature. Finally, I could never have identified "--- Wyndham Esq;" as William Wyndham of Dinton (Wilts.) if a "Mrs. Wyndham of Dinton" had not appeared among Sarah's subscribers. I have since learned from Professor Thomas Lockwood that his name appears in a manuscript cast to the Bodleian copy of a Franglais version of Fielding's Tom Thumb.[15]
By these specious expedients, I have "identified" all but sixteen of Fielding's subscribers. Five of these identifications controvert Miller and the Battestins; six require substantive emendations of the text; and in thirty instances, an alternative, less plausible identification might also be proposed. Thus a total of fifty-seven subscribers, or about 13%, are either unidentified or more or less questionable, and I would double this figure to allow for simple
Even if my conjectures were infallible, moreover, I could not be as confident as some other students of subscription lists that they form a "precise readership," "unusually prompt purchasers," and the like.[16] The list only shows that 427 historical people advanced a sum of money for a copy or copies of the Miscellanies, or had such sums advanced on their behalf. Nothing in the list proves that they ever paid the second half of their subscription, much less that they ever read their copies if they did. What on earth could Prince Frederick have done with fifteen royal-paper copies or Sir Robert Walpole with ten? And why does not a single one of their copies seem to have survived? Indeed, no copy of the Miscellanies appears in the sale-catalogues of any subscriber's library down to and including Garrick's in 1823. The 1st Marquess of Buckingham, on his marriage to Mary Elizabeth Nugent in 1775, was the rightful heir of eight subscribers: his great-uncle and great-aunt the Cobhams, his uncle Richard, 2nd Earl Temple, his father, George Grenville and his mother, Elizabeth Wyndham, his in-laws the Nugents, and finally George Bubb Dodington, whose property, including his house at Eastbury in Dorset, had passed to the 2nd Earl Temple, were all subscribers, and their ten ordinary-paper copies and three royal-paper copies should have descended to him, together with their titles and the family estate at Stowe. But did these subscribers ever take delivery? There was no copy of the Miscellanies in the sales of the Stowe library in 1849 and 1921. There is no copy in the bequest of the Marquess's brother Thomas Grenville, which he left to the British Library in 1846.
Of those copies that still survive today, I can locate a total of only three with evidence of the subscriber's ownership—all, as it happens, on royal paper—as opposed to eight of both sorts that have the signatures or ex-libris of eighteenth-century nonsubscribers. We too easily assume that subscribers took their books: 75% of one poor author's list defaulted, Keith Maslen notes, and this may or may not have been exceptional.[17] If fully 300 of the 658 subscribers for the first volume (1729) of Oldmixon's History failed to subscribe for the second (1735), it seems a fair conjecture that many of them had little interest in possessing either.[18] In a much better-studied group of subscriptions, by Dr. Johnson, only one in five titles to which he subscribed
Certainly, as Michael Treadwell and others have shown,[20] subscribers for multiple copies occasionally took fewer than they had paid for, treating the overplus as a genteel form of patronage; others may have regarded their advance as a form of charity. Fielding illustrates the attitude in Amelia, where a hack writer solicits a guinea from Colonel James, "which was double the sum mentioned in the Receipt" (viii.5). Both parties consider this to be the end of the transaction, though Fielding reflects severely on the hack's dishonesty, in never intending to publish, and on the Colonel's cynicism, in not caring whether he ever would.
Nevertheless, Fielding only singles out an abuse of what must have been common practice. Around 1740, an "F. Blyth," whom I take to be the Discalced Carmelite, once more proposed his Poems on Various Subjects, this time at full price (a half guinea) on delivery. "The Author's Reason for requiring no Money, for the future, till the Work be deliver'd," he explained in his new prospectus, "is to avoid being suspected (by such as are unacquainted with him) to be of the Number of Those, who make a Trade of taxing PUBLICK SPIRIT for Works they never design to publish."[21] Unhappily, as some of my readers will have guessed, his Poems were never printed—but perhaps his subscribers did not greatly care. Laetitia Pilkington, who proposed her Memoirs in the 1740s at 5 shillings down, and 5 on delivery, smugly reported that she often had "the good Fortune to have a Guinea Subscription, for Gentlemen seldom send me any smaller Coin."[22] Did these overly generous gentlemen also expect to lay down a further five shillings on publication? In Pilkington's account, as in Fielding's, they would have been hard put to it to prove how much they had actually advanced. Evidently, she provided her guinea subscribers with only a single receipt, entitling them to a single copy, for her list, at any rate, does not abound in subscriptions for four copies, as we might otherwise expect. Like Fielding's hack (though she, at least, eventually published her book), she simply pocketed the difference, and the transaction was closed on either side.
Early eighteenth-century subscribers had generally acquired their copies at a discount from the publication price,[23] but by Fielding's day, they paid
Twenty days after the subscribers' copies of the Miscellanies were ready, Andrew Millar advertised a "second edition" for only fifteen shillings, bound. This is merely the first edition with a new title page, and without the list of subscribers; but in about two years, perhaps when "second edition" title pages ran out, Millar also advertised the original edition for the same low price: James Thomson did not subscribe, yet he had a first edition by 1749. Presumably Millar took the copies printed in excess of subscriptions, plus any called-for but never delivered. If we assume the probably over-generous norm of one copy per subscriber and two per married couple, the subscribers took 149 out of the 250 royal-paper and 316 out of the 1,000 ordinary-paper copies. This estimate roughly agrees with the Bowyer Paper Ledger, which shows that Bowyer had delivered no more than 160 royal-paper copies and 258 ordinary-paper copies of the "first edition" by 17 September 1743, some five months after publication.[26] This left Millar an ample supply, and indeed his successors still had copies for sale thirty-two years later.[27] Subscribers no doubt financed the Miscellanies, but they were greatly out-numbered by subsequent purchasers, and their weight in any account of the work's reception and readership must be gauged accordingly.[28]
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