The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660–1760 by Lisa Maruca

Abstract

MLR, 104.3, 2009 839 seem superfluous, that fails tovitiate the excellence of a book which, in illuminating the fluidity and heterodoxy of this subversive literature,will cause many readers to rethink their attitudes towards royalism itself. Ifone views theCromwellian Protectorate, inpolitical terms, as a uniquely reac tionary, quasi-monarchical phase of the English Revolution, one might be forgiven for reading the contemporary poetry it inspired as one-dimensionally encomiastic or condemnatory, depending on the affiliations of the particular poet. In fact, as Edward Holberton demonstrates in his superbly written first monograph, nothing could be further from the truth.Verse written in and about this period is among themost nuanced and energized tobe found in the seventeenth century, stimulated as it was by the contingencies rather than elusive certainties of the Protectoral state. Adducing poems composed for a strikingly diverse range of occasions, including embassies, pageants, parliaments, mayoral elections, elitemarriages, and state fu nerals, the author elucidates how they develop complex entanglements with [. . .] institutions that could no longer be taken forgranted, yetwhich variously constrain, encourage, or complicate political beliefs' (p. 3). The finelygrained compromises and subtle ambiguities which thispoetry derived from such heavily negotiated relationships are exemplified in Latin poems by Ed mund Litsfield andMarchamont Nedham, provoked by the civic entry and reception afforded by the City of London to Cromwell in 1654, soon afterhis investiture as Protector. As with many of the other examples Holberton offers up, both poems registermulti-layered representations and reconfigurations of republicanism and allegiance, inways which both legitimize the new regime and expose the potential dangers itsnew-found authority poses to the freedoms of the citizenry. Impressively close readings of salient and equally equivocal works byWaller, Marvell, Davenant, and Dryden deepen the impression of a genre which, revealingly, looked beyond the Protector himself to the cultural tensions that produced crises during, before, and afterhis rule' (p. 205). Birkbeck, University of London Philip Major The Work of Print: Authorship and theEnglish Text Trades, 1660-1760. By Lisa Maruca. Seattle and Washington: University ofWashington Press. 2008. viii+227 pp. ?52. ISBN 978-0-295-98744-6. As we soon discover in the polemical introduction to this challenging book, the title isdeliberately ambiguous: meaning not only the printed book itselfbut also all the various labourers involved in itsproduction and its cultural significance. The whole theory here depends largely on themodel of authorship emerging gradually in eighteenth-century England after the new copyright laws, an argument set forth by David Saunders (Authorship and Copyright (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)), Mark Rose (Authors and Owners: The Invention ofCopyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)), and Alvin Kernan (Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)). 840 Reviews Selecting two examples of printers' manuals?Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Ex ercises on theWhole Art of Printing (1683-84) and John Smith's The Printers Grammar (1755), Lisa Maruca's second chapter interprets an ideological shiftfrom theworking body, including the labourer who set type, to a transcendent Author' who erased' the printer from the scene of production. To trace a similar chro nological development away from recognizing the humble workers of print, the third chapter compares 'three central and representative figures'?Francis Kirkman (1632-1680), JohnDunton (1659-1732), and Robert Dodsley (1703-1764). By con trastingDunton's promotion of thebookseller as originator of ideas as well as texts with Dodsley's career as writer as well as publisher, whose epitaph praises him for having risen above his proletarian roots,Maruca arrives at a predictable conclusion: As the idea of the author as a natural genius grew in popularity, representations of the commercially creative bookseller waned and print workers were evicted from understandings of the creation of texts' (p. 83). Although the fourth chapter,mainly about women in the printing business, is an expanded version of the essay 'Questions of Literary Property inEighteenth-Century England' for Studies in theLiterary Imagination, 34.1 (Spring 2001), 79-100, oddly enough, itnever engages with either of two authors in this same collection who demonstrated convincingly the importance of the author as originator of the text well before the timetable set byMaruca. Bertrand Goldgar's focus on the issue of plagiarism (Imitation and Plagiarism...