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Notes
An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a seminar on "Booksellers, readers and reviewing," chaired by Michael J. Suarez, at the 24th annual meeting of ASECS, 25 April 1993. I am grateful for criticism and comments from Bertrand Goldgar, Michael Treadwell, Robert D. Hume, and Martin Battestin.
Henry Knight Miller, Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies (1961); Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq;: Volume One, ed. H. K. Miller (1972) (hereafter cited as Misc. I).
Matthew Hodgart, "The Subscription List for Pope's Iliad, 1715," in Robert B. White (ed.), The Dress of Words: Essays . . . in Honor of Richmond P. Bond (1978), p. 34.
Miller, Essays, p. 3; Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (1989), p. 318.
Details of the biography of the subscribers, and their identification, await my edition of the list, scheduled for publication in the Wesleyan Edition of vol. 3 of Fielding's Miscellanies.
"Duvall" is rightly "Davall", but was probably written "Devall", as he appears in Sarah's subscription list. The secretary features of Fielding's hand, apparent in his c and e, are probably attributable to his legal training: cf. Mr. B's description of good Mr. Longman's hand, "Don't you see by the Settness of some of these Letters, and a little Secretary Cut here and there, especially in that c and that r, that it is the Hand of a Person bred in the Law-way?" (Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel [1971], p. 229). Unfortunately, a number of Fielding's solicitors were also lawyers.
Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq; Volume Two, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar and Hugh Amory (1993), p. 165, n. 4 (hereafter Misc. II); M. C. with R. R. Battestin, "Fielding, Bedford, and the Westminster Election of 1749," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 11 (1978), 143-185, at p. 176.
R. W. Chapman, Names, Designations & Appellations (1936). Fielding must have known Grenville, perhaps even from his Eton years, and social habit would have encouraged the abbreviation even though authors willingly expanded entries on better knowledge. A. C. Elias Jr. kindly drew my attention to a cancel in the subscription list to Mary Barber's Poems (1734), which expands some last-name entries to their fuller forms; and cf. the same phenomenon in Vida's Poemata (1722-23), discussed by B. N. Gerrard, "Post-impression Correction in British Books Printed During the Eighteenth Century," Ph.D. Thesis (Monash University), 1993, pp. 195-196.
Cf. "Mrs. Ann Admirer," who appears among the subscribers to the Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond (1965), I, lxxxix, n. 2; or "Miss Fanny Hill," who subscribed to Samuel Derrick's Collection of Original Poems (1755).
For parallels, cf. Pat Rogers, "Pope and His Subscribers," Publishing History, 3 (1978), [7]-36, at p. 10 and n. 15; and David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. by J. McLaverty (1991), p. 62.
J. D. Fleeman, "Johnson's Shakespeare: The Progress of a Subscription," in Writers, Books and Trade, ed. O M Brack, Jr. (New York: AMS Press [forthcoming]); who kindly allowed me to read his contribution in proof.
The best biography of Carey is Roger Fiske's article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music; the quotation is from A Biographical Dictionary of Actors . . . and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800, by P. H. Highfill, Jr., K. A. Burnim, and E. A. Langhans, v. 3 (1975), 60.
W. A. Speck, "Politicians, Peers and Publication by Subscription, 1700-50," in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (1982), pp. 47-68, at p. 65; Pat Rogers, "Book Subscriptions Among the Augustans," TLS (15 Dec. 1972), p. 1539.
K. I. D. Maslen, "Book Subscription Lists," TLS (29 Sep. 1972), p. 1157, citing Castiglione's The Courtier (1729). Of the 113 who subscribed in advance to Edmund Morgan's A Complete History of Algiers (1728-29), "very few" took delivery, according to W. A. Speck, "Politicians," p. 50; and cf. the case of Blomefield's Norfolk, described by David A. Stoker (ed.), The Correspondence of the Reverend Francis Blomefield (1705-52) (Norwich: Norfolk Record Soc., 1992), pp. 46-55, esp. p. 53.
Donald D. Eddy and J. D. Fleeman, "A preliminary Handlist of Books to which Dr. Samuel Johnson Subscribed," Studies in Bibliography, 46 (1993), 187-220.
"Book Subscription Lists": correspondence by Paul J. Korshin and Michael Treadwell, in TLS, 23 June 1972, p. 719 and 7 July, 1972, p. 777; Foxon, Pope, p. 62; and Rogers, "Pope and His Subscribers," p. 13.
Book Prospectuses before 1801 in the John Johnson Collection, ed. J. P. Feather (1976) (italic reversed).
The Third and Last Volume of the Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington (1754), p. 121. A. C. Elias, Jr., kindly brought this reference to my attention.
Cf. the prospectuses reprinted in The Term Catalogues, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1903), III, 47, 118, 132, etc.
Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, ed. A. N. L. Munby (hereafter SCLEP) 7 (1973), 123-158 (lot 53); and cf. Arthur Sherbo, "'Hesiod' Cooke and The Subscription Game," SB, 41 (1988), 267-270. Pope devised a similar scheme, recounted by Foxon, Pope, p. 62.
The Bowyer Ledgers, ed. Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (1991), fiche P 1049; this document will be analyzed in more detail in the Textual Introduction to Vol. 3 of the Wesleyan Edition of the Miscellanies.
SCLEP, 1 (1971), 47-66, at p. 55 (lot 1). T. Cadell, A Catalogue of Approved English Books in Several Branches of Useful and Ornamental Literature (1775), p. 26 (Cambridge Univ. Lib., call no. Munby d. 193); T. Becket, Catalogue of Foreign Books Imported, and English Books Printed for and Sold by, T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt (1773), p. 174 (Cambridge Univ. Lib., call no. Munby d. 141).
The degree to which subscription publishing was a joint venture between the author and the bookseller has often been underestimated by scholars. See, however, William M. Sale, Jr., Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (1950), pp. 108-117, where, with some regularity, the number of copies printed substantially exceeds subscriptions; Keith Maslen, "Printing for the Author: From the Bowyer Printing Ledgers, 1710-1775," The Library, 5th ser., 27 (1972), 302-309; and David McKitterick, A History of the Cambridge University Press (1992- ), I, 377f.
R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England before 1750 (1957), pp. 186-187; Wallis, "Book Subscription Lists," p. 262; Graham Pollard, "The English Market for Printed Books," Publishing History, 4 (1978), [7]-48, at pp. 15-16. The discount may not have been as uniform as Pollard implies, and it may be significant that Fielding's advertisement of 5 June 1742 does not specifically mention it, but the size of the booksellers' subscriptions is highly suggestive.
Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburn (1956), IV, 452: "Fielding has sent the Books you subscribd for to the Hand I employd in conveying the 20 ll. to him"; the close coincidence with "Peele's" exceptionally large subscription is irresistible, and the discrepancy may easily be explained by the fact that the nominal value of a guinea was a pound (there being no coin worth exactly £1). Fleeman, "Johnson's Shakespeare," provides parallels, where receipts are made out for "£1," though the subscription calls for a guinea.
Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, "The Drury Lane Actors' Rebellion of 1743," Theatre Journal, 42 (1990), 57-80.
The Complete Peerage, by G. E. C[okayne]., ed. Vicary Gibbs et al. (1910-40), X, 839, n. e; noting that her marriage (at 13) "was merely a bargain to cancel a gambling debt" between their fathers. It seems to have been an exceptionally happy one, nevertheless.
Misc. II, 26-28; Thomas R. Cleary, Henry Fielding: Political Writer (Waterloo, Ont., 1984), p. 189.
Thomas Keightley, "On the Life and Writings of Henry Fielding," Fraser's Magazine, 57 (1858), 1-13, 205-217, 762-763.
Cf. also John Barnard, "Dryden, Tonson, and Subscriptions for the 1697 Virgil," PBSA, 57 (1963), 129-151; The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, I, lxxxviii-lxxxix; and Pat Rogers, "Pope and His Subscribers," for other statistical or quasi-statistical analyses of subscription lists.
Johnson's only likely subscriptions around this period are to Brooke's Gustavus Vasa (only 5s.), Lediard's continuation of Rapin's History of England ([1735]-37), and Chambers' Cyclopœdia, 4th ed. (1741), the last two published in six-penny numbers.
Miller, Essays, p. 25. Some of these absentees may have subscribed, but failed to appear in the list: cf. the case noted by Charles Ryskamp, "Epigrams I more especially delight in': The Receipts for Pope's Iliad," PULC, 24 (1962-63), 36-38. A more extreme case is Catherine Jemmat's, who claimed that the printer had omitted "upwards of 150 Names besides making many other Errors throughout the List" in her Miscellanies (1766) (cited by Gerrard, "Post-impression Correction," p. 54).
Speck, "Politicians." MPs appear in 147 of the 500 lists, 94 of which show a "real association" between the politics of the MPs and the author; Fielding's list (45 Whig, 20 Tory MPs, as of publication on 7 Apr. 1743) would qualify as a 95th, by Speck's criteria. Of these 94 lists, only ten showed a partisan majority: 6 Whig (two of them for the same work), 1 Tory, 2 Administration, 1 Opposition. In the remaining 84 lists, Speck simply claims that "none had an inexplicable bias towards an alliance of government Whigs and Tories." In short, Administration and Opposition Whigs regularly joined in subscribing for each other's ventures. See also P. J. Wallis, The Social Index (Newcastle, 1978), pp. 39-40, distinguishing Whig and Tory subscriptions by a numerical figure (rev. [sceptically] by T. H. Howard-Hill, The Library, 6th ser., 2 [1980], 247-249). Both Speck and Wallis rely on the PHIBB data-base (announced for publication on CD ROM, Apr. 1994). This indexes the raw data of the original lists, not the personal identities underlying the various homo-/allo-/pseudonyms, which must be controlled retrospectively, without the benefit of their historical context. The data thus correlates more readily with the fairly stable political ideologies of the period, than with its rapidly changing political combinations; and, indeed, with the House of Commons than with the Lords (where many MPs from time to time continued their politics and their subscriptions under different names). The evaluation of the data, then, even with (or because of?) this powerful tool, is somewhat delicate, as Wallis's anxious qualifications, though not his figures, make clear.
Miller, Essays, p. 28; Martin C. Battestin, "Fielding's Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews," PQ, 39 (1960), 39-55.
For a careful review of Battestin's theory and W. B. Coley's objections, see Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits (1976), who accepts it; as does Brian McCrea, Henry Fielding and the Politics of Mid-Eighteenth Century England (1981), p. 98; Cleary, Henry Fielding, pp. 140-162, accepts Digeon's theory, but not Battestin's; Robert D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, 1728-1737 (1988) follows Cleary, but does not specifically address the later period. Digeon's theory is cogently attacked by Hollis Rinehart, "The Role of Walpole in Fielding's Jonathan Wild," English Studies in Canada, 5 (1979), 420-431, and Roy Bennis Friedman, "Fielding's The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great: A Textual and Critical Study," Ph.D. Thesis (City University of New York), 1982; but they are still a minority.
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