A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood Juliette Merritt (bio) Patrick Spedding. A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004. 848pp. £120; US$195. ISBN 1-85196-739-7. As a descriptive bibliography, Patrick Spedding's A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood performs an essential task of literary scholarship by trying to establish, as securely as possible, Eliza Haywood's canon. The bibliography enumerates "every issue of every work and every variant of every issue" of those texts published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and all forms (print, microform, or electronic) of texts published in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Following the rules for attribution set out by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens (The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe), Spedding insists on clear empirical evidence before an attribution is advanced; this evidence appears in a head note preceding each entry and testifies to his extensive research. Spedding resists tentative attributions, and all such are discarded. (One I had wished to be confirmed, A Present for Women Addicted to Drinking, [End Page 545] was not.) Although he admits that, once made, attributions are difficult to "undo," he has evaluated painstakingly all previous attributions, researched the origin and history of all the attributions that have been made, traced "all attributions to their source and consider[ed] all of the arguments offered" (18)—if any arguments were offered at all. Haywood scholars will not be surprised that such an exhaustive research project confirms what we already know: inaccurate statements of all sorts have dogged Haywood criticism. Of particular importance for Spedding is the correction of common misconceptions regarding the popularity of specific Haywood texts. Previously "there had been no way of distinguishing a work that was printed many times from one that was printed only once but issued many times. The result is that almost all discussion of the popularity of Haywood's works has been wildly inaccurate" (19). Spedding corrects a virtually universally accepted fact: Love in Excess was wildly popular, a runaway best-seller. Apparently, it was not, "nor was it close to being Haywood's most popular work" (19). More "enduringly popular" was The Distress'd Orphan (1726), which "was reprinted more often, in larger editions, and remained in print for a longer period, than ... Love in Excess" (21). Spedding's correction reveals his commitment to thorough primary research: "By locating many previously unrecorded editions and issues of works and by distinguishing from each other the many editions and issues of works conflated by Whicher, it is possible to offer a far more reliable record of Haywood's popularity" (21). The necessary additions and deletions that we expect to find in a corrective bibliography are here. Specific changes to the bibliographic record are the seven "new" attributions made since Whicher's bibliography (1915), including Spedding's earlier attribution of The Sopha, made in 1999. The only attribution made here for the first time is Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (1743). Spedding describes the story of James Annesley, who "claimed to have been sold into slavery by, and lost his inheritance to, his uncle. Haywood's vivid and romantic account of Annesley's life and trial, the great cause célèbre of 1743–44, was one of her most popular works" (21). Creating a more reliable picture of Haywood's presence and influence within eighteenth-century literary culture is only part of a more ambitious venture. Spedding admits to a goal not usually within the purview of a scholarly bibliography: this project has a "biographical focus" because he intends to produce a detailed and definitive biography of Haywood: "it was hoped that a detailed bibliographical analysis would reveal details of Haywood's life" (15). These details have eluded scholars—Spedding hopes to overcome the dearth of information on Haywood's personal life by a scrupulous and thorough examination not only of her output, but also of her relationships within the publishing and literary milieu. Spedding focuses on two items of particular interest, Haywood's activities as a publisher and her relationship with William Hatchett. Driving this dependence on her output as a [End Page 546] writer and publisher is the notorious obscurity of Haywood herself...