Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men by Stephen H. Gregg

Abstract

225 to get published. Ms. Maruca rightly states that the statute of 1709, known as the ‘‘Copyright Act,’’ was more of a smokescreen protecting booksellers’ copyright interests than it was a law intended to establish authors’ copyrights. However, her follow-up statement—‘‘in order to get published a writer had to sell this right’’—is not entirely true. Many publications of the following decades show imprints that read ‘‘Printed for the Author by [such and such a printer].’’ In such cases, of course, the author did not sell the copyright to the printer (or bookseller), but rather assumed all expenses the publishing agent incurred for the book’s paper, printing, and advertising . Likewise, authors who had already established popular reputations and therefore considered their new publications to be sure sellers did not feel compelled to sell their copyrights to their booksellers; and often booksellers, especially beginners, were happy just to share the profits with such authors. Finally, as Ms. Maruca herself notes, Pope set up businesses for a series of booksellers (Lawton Gilliver, Dodsley) so that he would not have to negotiate with established City booksellers for the copyrights to his works. Notwithstanding Ms. Maruca’s significant achievement, at times certain themes seem questionable or disproportionate, for example, her penchant for sexualizing the printing/publishing process: she dedicates thirteen pages, in one instance, to a sexual interpretation of Moxon’s and Smith’s typesetting equipment. Although indeed Moxon employed the terms ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ in describing the interaction of the tools of his trade, his allusions were more likely voiced in the jargon of a modern plumber’s describing the joining of pipes. Ms. Maruca’s novel and intriguing interpretation takes historical liberties. Finally, traditional book historians will find her volume hard travelling. Whereas traditional book history has usually been conveyed in the simple language of the trade, the new language of media theory that characterizes Ms. Maruca’s treatment often obscures the subject she is attempting to encapsulate. We find such long stretches as: ‘‘Such an analysis does acknowledge the especially slippery nature of print as a self-advertising discourse, invisibly mediating itself through itself. To disrupt its tautology and to re-envision it as the graphic, visible tool that it is, we must turn to the rhetoric of print, to print as a human-linguistic construct.’’ It is not surprising that the author misinterprets Thomas Sprat’s intention when the seventeenth-century bishop, attempting to put an end to the inflated language that had characterized science of the past, insisted that the work of the Royal Society be carried on in the ‘‘language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants.’’ James E. Tierney University of Missouri–St. Louis BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED STEPHEN H. GREGG. Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men. Burlington , VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 208. $99.95. Defoe’s women—Moll Flanders and Roxana—have gender issues. Until recently , his men did not. Robinson Crusoe struggled for control over his passions , H. F. the Saddler wrestled with a vengeful (if not absent) God who visited 226 London in the time of the plague, Colonel Jack looked for gentility in all the wrong places, and Captain Bob dared not explain the basis of his friendship for William the Quaker, but none of these dilemmas was thought to be related to their masculinity. Mr. Gregg now shows us that a unifying theme of much of Defoe’s writing had to do with the nature of manliness, a problem made especially urgent by the emergence of a culture in which such traditionally (or stereotypically) feminine practices as the pursuit of civic and religious virtue, the consumption of luxury goods, and a dependence on credit and trade increasingly defined what it was to be a man. Defoe, like the Earl of Shaftesbury and other contemporaries, assumed that masculinity was normative and natural, and defined femininity (and feminized men, like fops) as the contradiction to manliness. Thus physical vigor, personal courage, rationality, godliness, selfcontrol , and an ethic of civic utility comprised manliness, and their contraries were feminine. But none of the males in Defoe’s writings exhibited all of these qualities all of the time; rather, his men are often anxious that they...