University of Virginia Library

Virtual Readers: The Subscribers to Fielding's Miscellanies (1743)
by
Hugh Amory [*]

In a magisterial prolegomenon (1961) to his edition of Volume I of Fielding's Miscellanies (1972), Henry Knight Miller carefully discussed and illustrated the list of subscribers, which then, curiously enough, he never printed in his edition.[1] He never explained this decision—nor the omission of some other features of his copy-text, such as divisional title pages—and probably saw no need to do so, for such edition-specific features, like illustrations, imprints, dust-jackets or advertisements, were not then regarded as part of the work for which the editor was responsible. In that bygone age, when self-referentiality was the peculiar (but excellent) privilege of literary language, documents like subscription lists seemed extra-literary and even extra-textual—part of the "background" of the work, no doubt, but operating by different rules and subject to different disciplines. Whatever else subscription lists may have been, they were not verbal icons or well-wrought urns, and certainly no reviewer questioned Miller's decision, if one pondered the matter at all.

Now, thirty-three years later, Bertrand Goldgar and I are continuing Miller's edition in a very different scholarly climate. The Project for Historical Bio-Bibliography at Newcastle has greatly stimulated interest in subscription publishing,[2] and Bibliography itself has slouched toward a History

of the Book, in which all the physical features of the editor's sources take on heightened significance. Our sense of textuality, moreover, has broadened— some would say, blurred, but to particularize the rocks, human bodies, street signs, and other objects that are now acceptable literary texts would be invidious. Suffice it to say, that the inclusion of Fielding's list in our edition should be theoretically unobjectionable, though in practice I can no longer print it where it belongs, at the head of Volume I.

This deferment of the list in no way affects its value as a document, but transforms and disguises its textuality. Fielding, unusually, set his list at the traditional site of dedications, invocations, and proems. Here, at a green oak by the edge of the sea, on a golden chain, says Pushkin, a learned cat walks to and fro. Half in, half out of the work, simultaneously authors, characters and readers, the muses, noblemen and cats that inhabit this place ambiguously recommend both its truth and its fiction. Matthew Hodgart compares the "haughty territorial magnates" among Pope's subscribers to the Homeric heroes in the Catalogue of Ships.[3] Though many of these heroes never reappear in the Iliad, they continued to haunt the imagination of the audience, providing a grip for their paesani, or semblables, to appropriate the text. I call them "virtual readers" in the rather esoteric sense that the electronic simulation of experience through VCRs and electromechanical gloves is known as "virtual reality." Depending on the reality, of course, the difference may be small or great: virtual sex, for example, may be indistinguishable from the real thing, whereas virtual representation is a poor substitute for direct elections. When we have assessed the adequacy of the list as an account of Fielding's actual readers, we can better appreciate its virtues.

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.

Northey, née Vyner, married; and Major Fairfax, Andrew Ducarel, d.c.l., Nathaniel Gundry, k.c., William Harbord (olim Morden), John Probyn (olim Hopkins), Samuel Henry Pont, Recorder of Cambridge, and Henry Morgan Byndloss of the Middle, erstwhile of the Inner, Temple, all have names, addresses and distinctions postdating Walpole's fall.[6]

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

unreliably recorded lawyers? On the one hand, I have not found any very plausible lay candidates for these names. A John Beech Esq; died at Richmond on 12 May 1766, but I have no evidence that he ever lived in the Inner Temple; a Mr. Manton quitted his Inner Temple chambers in 1777, leaving the rent in arrears, but I do not know his first name or whether he was renting them thirty-four years earlier; and Lewis Innes, a Scotch Catholic, died in Paris in 1738, making his way into the DNB, but not, I think, into Fielding's list. On the other hand, the Registers of the Inner Temple provide three closely similar names that might easily have been confused with those of the subscribers: Lewis Jones, John Martin, and Thomas Beach. The subscribers' address is a more reliable indicator of their identity here than the record of their names.

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

"Thomas Draper, Esq; Serjeant at Law." One is irresistibly reminded of the aphasia that perplexes Fielding's naming of his characters and his citation of his authorities, and which regularly led him to address Robert Butcher, with whom he corresponded in 1748-49, as "Richard."[8] Serjeant Draper's subscription is very likely one that Henry solicited in person, and passed on to his sister.

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

siege of Cartagena, over two years before publication of the Miscellanies, and a year before our earliest record of subscriptions. The rest—Thomas Ashby, the Hon. Sir Michael Newton, and the eccentric Col. Richard Pierson, whose body lay forty days in state and—all died in 1743.

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

Fielding, whose own title to Esquire was insecure, took it seriously. His usage occasionally stumbles, as we might expect: "Mr." Alexander Thistlethwaite's family had lived at Winterslow (Wilts.) since the sixteenth century; "Mr. Henry Alcroft" is otherwise styled "Henry Allcraft, Esq;" in a monumental inscription; "Mr. Thomas Poldon" is the son and heir of Job Polden, Esquire; "Mr. Edward Clerke" seems to be a Wiltshire JP; and a "Mr." John Fawkner—probably the MP John Falconer—intrudes, anomalously, among the Esquires of Fielding's list. Nevertheless, these occasional mistakes scarcely argue that Fielding was wrong wherever the possibility arises, and indeed, his opinion of his subscribers' quality is clearly stated, apart from the ambiguous Mr. Fawkner, and generally correct, so far as I can judge it. Most of the Misters, for example, turn out to be attorneys, surgeons, booksellers, or actors, and even if they were armigerous, like Giles Taylor, they claimed no higher rank than "gentleman." Hence I accept the general accuracy of the distinction, in default of strong evidence to the contrary. "Hesiod" Cooke, for example, invariably subscribes himself "Mr. Cooke," and Pope dismissed him as the son of a Muggletonian innkeeper; still, like Miller and the Battestins, I think he qualifies as the subscriber "Thomas Cooke, Esq;." He was a personal friend of Fielding's, a member of Jonathan Tyers's "Club of Wits," all of whom subscribed for the Miscellanies, and the promoter of an edition of Plautus, for which Fielding subscribed in his turn—as "Esq;" to be sure.

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

ignorance, the blind operation of assumptions, and the inadequacy of my sources. I have tried to explain the limitations of my research and the methods behind my conclusions, but I despair of indicating the degree of doubt appropriate to every individual case.

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

resurfaces in the sales catalogue of his library.[19] About 46% of the Miscellanies subscribed-for were never delivered, if the survivors are any indication; since some subscribers called for multiple copies, we cannot determine on this evidence how many defaulted altogether, but some such there surely were.

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

a surcharge of 55%, merely for the pleasure of seeing their names in print. "Hesiod" Cooke coolly defended this racket in his preface to a long-running but never completed translation of Plautus: At the sale of Fielding's library in 1755, Cooke repurchased his friend's copy of Plautus: conceivably, he valued the sentimental association, but Cooke was remarkably hard-headed, not to say cynical, about his project, and I suspect that he was in hopes of a second premium.[25] By such means, the number of Cooke's subscribers might eventually have exceeded the number of copies printed.

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]

II
The Textual Implications of the List

Fielding, famously, compared his writing to a banquet laid out for his readers, and we might consider the lower orders in his list as folk who have come for a power lunch at a posh restaurant, less concerned for what they eat and drink than for their visible association with Prince Frederick and the nobility, at the better tables. Everyone is looking at everyone else, and an informed observer may note many gradations of decorum in the number and quality of their orders. Royal-paper copies are about an inch taller, twice as thick, cost twice as much as the ordinary paper, and do not enjoy the normal trade discount of seven copies for the price of six.[29] The stiff paper and extra weight made for awkward reading, but that was not the point; the conspicuous size and expense advertised the subscriber's status. Even today, the visitor to Sir Robert Walpole's residence at Houghton Hall may readily see why he was known as the Great Man; some god, one feels, inserted a tube into an ordinary library and blew.

To avoid the taint of trade, multiple subscriptions are normally expressed in royal-paper units, and in the ordinary paper rarely rise above two or three copies. When a bookseller like Andrew Millar or Edward Easton subscribes for a single copy, he acts on his own account, as a friend, for he cannot hope to profit from the excessive advance price. Otherwise, like Robert Dodsley or James Leake, he will subscribe in multiples of six ordinary copies, pocketing the seventh as a reward for his solicitations. The bookseller like John Peele, who takes ten royal-paper copies, could expect neither commercial nor social advantage from his subscription; we may thus infer that he is acting for an armigerous client. Ralph Allen, indeed, subscribed in secret for the requisite sum,[30] and since only three other subscribers took so many royal-paper copies, it is likely enough that this is his subscription.

Conversely, subscriptions for multiple copies on ordinary paper, however

suitable for people in the trade, look mean or odd in a gentleman. Did Bubb Dodington gape after a free copy, when he subscribed for six? W. L. Cross supposed that Charles Fleetwood distributed his twenty copies among the players of Drury Lane,[31] but it seems improbable. Had he waited until after publication, he might have acquired one more copy for £7 10s. less, and in any case, he was bilking the actors of their wages, and could hardly have fobbed off their demands with free copies of the Miscellanies.[32] The likeliest explanation is that Dodington and Fleetwood's "copies" merely represent receipts on which they had paid the advance, but had failed to dispose of. Had they been acting on their own accounts, they might have enjoyed more social éclat for exactly the same outlay, after all, by taking half the number of copies, but in the royal paper.

Apart from Peele, no male subscriber below the rank of Esquire presumes to take the royal paper, but women wear their paper with a difference. "Esquire" and "Mister" have no feminine equivalents: Kitty Clive, the daughter of Irish gentry, has the same precedence as Peg Woffington, whose father was a bricklayer. Gender replaces birth: wives defer to their husbands' subscriptions, even when, like Lady Anne Strode, they are of nobler birth, or like the Duchess of Bedford, notorious viragos; Kitty may take a royal-paper copy, and yet Peg does not, because she would not make her ordinary-paper lover, Garrick, look cheap. When only the wife subscribes, her husband thus implicitly joins in her subscription. Fielding celebrates both the Richmonds, for example, one for his generosity, the other for the whiteness of her breasts, but only the Duchess subscribed, which Miller found "strange." Perhaps he would not have found it "strange" if only the Duke had subscribed, but in any case I cannot share his perplexity: surely her generous subscription (12 guineas) recognized both obligations.[33]

Such queries and conjectures were doubtless part of the pleasures and pains of subscribing and invest the list with the intense, narrow interest of a society column, but Fielding also introduces the subscribers into the Miscellanies itself. In the Introduction, he acclaims the professional recognition conferred by his numerous lawyer subscribers; in the text he compliments nineteen subscribers by name, and obliquely flatters many others. Celebrating the beautiful and modest "Seraphina" in a Journey from This World to the Next, for example, he noted that "A particular Lady of Quality is meant here; but every Lady of Quality, or no Quality, are welcome to apply the Character to themselves."[34] In a rather more restricted compliment, the portrait of the patriotic King Spirit, destined long to reign, is surely intended

for Prince Fred, as Thomas R. Cleary has pointed out.[35] Consider, too, Vicary Gibbs's amusing account of the politics of the subscriber Edward Seymour, later Duke of Somerset, who was "presumably a Whig, but his aversion to the risks of small-pox . . .—which became a mania in later life—prevented him from attending crucial divisions in the House of Lords." Is he a candidate for the gentle satire on the narrator's travelling companion in A Journey from This World to the Next, who still dreads smallpox, even after death?[36] And finally, when the narrator encounters a physician in the City of Diseases, "whose Countenance had in it something more pleasing than ordinary,"[37] how did Dr. Barker, Dr. Bedford, Dr. Baker, Dr. Bostock, Dr. Brewster, Dr. Hoadly, Dr. Harrington, Dr. Pile, Dr. Wasey and Dr. Wilmot, all of them subscribers, respond? Did they mentally compare countenances?

Fielding also seems to have dealt out compliments with his left hand, however. The prime example, of course, is the applicability of his portrait of Jonathan Wild to Sir Robert Walpole, first proposed by Thomas Keightley in 1858.[38] Yet if Walpole, with his exceptionally large subscription, is truly part of the text, is such a sustained attack credible? Could we suppose that Squire Allworthy, who, for all his too-obvious virtues, has numerous comic flaws, is a covert satire on George Lyttelton? If Jonathan Wild had not become detached from the Miscellanies and its subscribers, I question whether Keightley's theory would ever have seemed quite so pat. "In the panegyrical Part of this Work," Fielding cautiously notes, "some particular Person is always meant, but in the satirical no body,"[39] but few have quite believed him.

Despite this textualization of the list, its leading scholars have approached it as raw data, of primarily statistical significance. The names are reduced to an index of a single aspect of the subscriber's life, like politics; the "missing persons" may become more significant than those who subscribed; and the social presence, weight and weave of the entire list is ignored in favor of minorities who ought not to have subscribed, but did. That is what statistics is all about—synecdoche; but I propose to read the list mimetically, as metaphor. It is neither randomly generated nor complete. We are entirely ignorant of those who declined to subscribe; the data on those who did are ruinously defective; and the defects can only be filled in with unproven assumptions. Mathematics continues to work its magic on this unreliable data, however, with uncanny results.[40]

Thus, Fielding attracted few literary subscribers, as Miller has shown—indeed, fewer than Miller supposed. By my reckoning, Mallet, Garrick and Cooke, all of them personal friends, are the only professional authors, eked out by amateurs like Lyttelton, Charles Hanbury-Williams, Bubb Dodington, and Lord Chesterfield, whom Miller rather unfairly dismisses as a "scribbling peer." Pope, Thomson, Horace Walpole and Sterne, indeed, purchased copies, though they do not appear in the list; Richardson and Cibber had personal grievances against Fielding; and in 1743 Swift was deep in senile dementia, and Samuel Johnson in poverty.[41] Nevertheless, even with these allowances, we may note the absence of the Wartons, Akenside, Collins and Shenstone, of the Pre-Romantics; Edward Young, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Uptons and either Whitehead, of the Augustans; Lewis Theobald, James Ralph and a host of Grubs and Dunces. "It would appear," Miller concludes, "that the publication of the Miscellanies was not greeted as a literary event: the majority of subscribers seem rather to represent political or professional or merely personal connections."[42]

The evidence is curiously inconclusive, however: were any of this unlikely crew of absentees ever asked? and what influence did they actually wield? None of them subscribed for Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero, yet it went through eight London editions between 1741 and 1764. The Dictionary of the English Language was a literary event, though Johnson dedicated it, however grudgingly, to a "scribbling peer." As the Dunciad might suggest, professional writers were not exactly at the center of the literary scene; political, social and "merely personal" connections had always mattered far more. By isolating the list from its text, and indeed from the values of its historical moment, Miller seriously mistakes its literary function. Fielding's opinion of the relative importance of his subscribers should be clear from their arrangement, and his editor may find a guilty satisfaction in the knowledge that the women and Misters whose identity so often eludes him didn't really count.

The political composition of the list would seem to offer a more realistic subject for analysis: subscribers were patrons, and one might expect authors to defer to their political views. There were other, equally powerful factors at work beside politics, however, like family and friendship (often at several removes), so that subscriptions were rarely a strictly party affair: Brooke's Gustavus Vasa was a notable exception. W. A. Speck's survey of 500 lists

published between 1710 and 1740 discloses only ten in which there seems to be any positive correlation between the party of the subscribers and that of the author.[43] The admixture of Administration lions with Opposition lambs among Fielding's subscribers, then, should have come as no surprise, but scholars, as usual, have sought for more interesting explanations. "How does one account for the name of the Duke of Devonshire, one of Walpole's most loyal supporters," wonders Miller, "or the Duke of St. Albans, or Earl Cholmondeley (Walpole's brother-in-law), the Earl of Pembroke, Lord Cornwallis, or General Churchill?" And he finds the solution in Martin Battestin's account of Fielding's "changing politics."[44]

Battestin proposed that the Walpolian subscriptions rewarded Fielding's withdrawal from his party in 1741, culminating in his sendup of their efforts in The Opposition: A Vision. The list may thus be broken down into archeologically distinct components, the Administration stratum presumably overlaying and folding alphabetically into the originally pure substratum of the Opposition. This conjecture parallels a textual theory that goes back to Aurélien Digeon's thesis of 1923, by which the Opposition rhetoric that repeatedly surfaces in the Miscellanies is explained as a "survival" from an earlier stage of composition.[45] In particular, Digeon posits an earlier version of Jonathan Wild (an Ur-Wild, as we may dub it), and Battestin conjectures that the suppression of this version in 1740 was another reason for Walpole's generosity. Both Battestin's and Digeon's theories have been criticized, though the critic, like Thomas R. Cleary, may accept one, while rejecting the other; and I believe that together, they still enjoy a scholarly consensus today.[46]

I shall confine my comments here to their implications for the subscriptions of Walpole and his party.

We do not need to go back to 1740 to explain Walpole's subscription. The far more substantial, timely and solidly attested service that Fielding had rendered in The Opposition: A Vision adequately "explains" the Prime Minister's generosity, if any explanation is needed. If the Prime Minister had actually hoped to silence the Ur-Wild, why did he finally forward its publication (unchanged, by Digeon's account, apart from the addition of Heartfree's story) with an exceptionally generous subscription? And if Fielding actually published satire on Walpole in 1743, he must have had his reasons; it seems excessively ingenious to suppose that it somehow "survived" unchanged from 1740, despite his "changing politics." Or if the satire is in fact conscious, how had his politics actually changed? The allegation that Fielding suppressed the Ur-Wild is not only unnecessary but also insufficient to explain the Prime Minister's subscription. Walpole, at least, the only person in any position to judge, evidently saw no connection between the work he allegedly silenced, and the one to which he subscribed.

The analysis of the political tendency of Fielding's list, moreover, is circular, because the vast majority of the subscriptions are hopelessly undatable. We can sort the Whigs from the Tories (in so far as this distinction was still meaningful in 1743), but apart from a few Jacobites, whose opposition was constitutional, which subscribers belonged to which Oppositions, and which to which Administrations, is simply beyond conjecture. Did the Prince of Wales subscribe before Walpole's fall or after it? before, of course, if his subscription expressed Opposition solidarity; Opposition, of course, if he subscribed before; but there is no proof of either premise. Miller and Battestin reckoned the subscribers' politics as of 1741, when the two sides were sharply polarized. Fielding was still garnering subscriptions in 1742-43, however, when the political gamut was broader. The problem of Fielding's "Walpolian" subscribers dissolves, once Walpole's Administration ceases to be the central issue. The passions that he raised did not immediately subside with the death of his Administration, of course, but they were diverted and overlaid by political maneuver.

Between 1742 and 1743, such leading subscribers as Walpole, Pulteney, the Prince of Wales and Chesterfield were engaged in a political dance, whose figures changed from moment to moment. Even those like Winnington or Newcastle, who maintained places in the Administration, had very different games to play before and after Walpole's fall. "We shall not all die," sighed

one old-timer as he tendered his resignation, "but be all changed."[47] Pulteney and Carteret, with the help of the Prince of Wales, triumphed over the Old Administration and the Old Opposition alike. The "Broad Bottom" coalition of 1744 was the natural product of the mutual disappointment of these two factions: four of the former Opposition—Chesterfield, Bedford, Lyttelton and Dodington—would ultimately join two "loyal" Walpolians and a Jacobite—Devonshire, Newcastle, and Sir John Hynde Cotton, whose enormous backside gave piquancy to the new group's nickname.[48] All of them subscribed to the Miscellanies, and if Fielding's politics changed, so did those of his subscribers. The list is not a poll on the ambivalence of Fielding's political loyalties, then; we may doubt that his subscribers ever expected the constancy of a hired pen from a gentleman who set his name to the title page; and we do not need textual crutches to explain their individualistic politics and supple principles, which were neither better nor worse than his.

If the Opposition and Administration Whig factions and the Tories are evenly represented in Fielding's list, then, one might conclude that it is ipso facto non-partisan; but whatever the politics of the list, its rhetorical appeal abides, transparent despite scholarly troubling. In all its order and variety, descending from Prince Frederick through the multiple orders of the nobility, ladies before gents, to a wide range of ever less distinguished commoners, Fielding's list projects a powerful impression of English society at large: mores hominum multorum vidit, et urbes, we may well exclaim. Society as it actually was was something else, of course: in 427 mostly masculine, armigerous names, any child can see that certain elements are over- or under-represented. Nevertheless, if one can only read the list mimetically, and not statistically, it amply satisfies neoclassical criteria of generality, and contemporary theories of virtual representation.

In a notable departure from bibliographic precedent, Fielding mustered his subscribers before the Introduction to the Miscellanies, in the same large type, thus assimilating them to dedicatees. Before this place, on the title page, he, "Henry Fielding, Esq;" now reassumes his proper name and rank after six years of professional anonymity; no longer the proletarian "Capt. Hercules Vinegar," he may now rise above the dust and toil of politics; and as parties to his undertaking, he impleads his 427 subscribers, in order of social precedence. The reality of this spectacular performance was perhaps suspect from the start, but that should not make us overlook its virtues. As his editor, I will correct the compositor's mistakes; I will conform the order of names to the social hierarchy that Fielding intended; I will upgrade Mr. John Fawkner to Esquire. The list of subscribers—or "Subscrebers", as the compositor would have it—is not a document, to be copied letter by letter,

but an integral part of Fielding's work. I cannot, alas, print it where it belongs, in proper dignity of type at the head of vol. 1. It will appear in nine-point type at the end of vol. 3 of the Wesleyan Edition of the Miscellanies, followed by my identifications in eight points. The virtual reality of Fielding's list pales before mine, which should be virtually invisible.

Notes