Lord Byron, Manuscript Poet

Chapter 4 considers the most popular and commercially successful of the English Romantic poets, Lord Byron, to explicate his continuous and deep engagement with manuscript culture. It begins by offering a quantitative assessment of his use of print publication and manuscript dissemination. Throughout, from his earliest poetic efforts to his last, we find that Byron encountered difficulty in preparing his verse for print and relied on manuscript to circulate his poetry, particularly his short verse. The chapter considers his earliest four verse collections, and then studies the manuscript revisions to the poem that launched his fame – Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Both examples demonstrate Byron’s early struggle to transition from narrower to wider audiences without compromising his poetic candour. Afterwards, Byron avoided these time-consuming processes of rearrangement and revision by separating his writing into two categories: the handwritten short poems he entrusted to members of his coterie and the longer poems he wrote for the public. This chapter demonstrates Byron’s use of manuscript at all stages of his career, confounding the notion that he can be regarded exclusively as a print author and elucidating the sources of his discomfort with print.

Literary Reviews and the Reception of Manuscript Culture

Chapter 2 examines how literary reviews engaged in debates about what should appear in print. As reviewers encountered large quantities of published literary writing, some of which had identifiable origins in sociable manuscript culture, they faced both a practical problem – how to keep up with the rising tide of new publications – and an ethical dilemma – how to respond to the proliferation of print. Did the large increases in literary print publication (and the increasing number of authors entering print) signal a decline in taste and a degeneration of literary standards, or the enlightened progress of society and the improvement of literary taste? This chapter compares the reviewing practices and editorial policies in the Edinburgh Review, which was outspoken in its criticism of the publication of manuscript writing, and the Annual Review, which was tolerant of all literary productions. Specifically, it finds that the Edinburgh constructed print as a public medium and, by necessary contrast, manuscript as a private one, a division that came to be understood as intrinsic to script and print, rather than what it was, a product of an ideological dispute, fought in part in the pages of the literary reviews.

Intentionality and the Romantic Literary Manuscript

Chapter 1 supplies an essential description of manuscript and print cultures in the Romantic period. It probes the attempts by book historians, manuscript scholars, and textual editors to establish guidelines for understanding modern literary manuscripts, that is, manuscripts created in the age of print. It questions conceptions of scribal culture that rest upon the scholar’s capacity to discern authorial intention, and that exclude from consideration those manuscripts intended for print. Donald Reiman, in his categorisation of modern manuscripts into three groups – private, confidential or social, and public – relies upon an editor’s ability to determine the intended audience of any given manuscript. However, as this chapter demonstrates, intention is rarely discernible. This chapter grounds its theoretical analysis in a detailed survey of the literary writing and material practices of Charlotte Smith and Dorothy Wordsworth, two authors who have long been regarded as belonging, respectively and exclusively, to the divided worlds of print and script.

Introduction

The Introduction draws upon recent work in the fields of book history, literary and media studies, textual scholarship and digital humanities, to advance the fundamental thesis of early modern scholars – that manuscript production and circulation continued long after the advent of print. It also supports the consensus of media historians – that newer media (such as print) did not overtake and subsume older media forms (such as manuscript). Repudiating a ‘decline and rise’ or ‘succession’ model of technological change, this book instead posits a model characterized by media interaction and exchange. Taking Romantic-era literary manuscript culture and its inevitable entanglement with print as its central subject, the subsequent six chapters examine the literary manuscripts and writing practices of several central Romantic authors, and the shifting set of cultural and political conditions they faced. In doing so, this study presents a new account of literary Romanticism, one that recalibrates accounts of individual authors’ works, careers and practices; reconstructs networks of authors, editors, publishers and readers; and reconfigures concepts of privacy, sociability and publicity. It also addresses how the expanding print culture of the late eighteenth century impacted both the practices and the values ascribed to manuscript culture.

Anna Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print

Chapter 3 takes the long view of Anna Barbauld’s career as a dynamic example of the interactions between media, gender, and genre over nearly seven decades, from the 1760s, when she began composing verse, to the mid-1820s, when she died and a significant quantity of her unpublished writing came to light. Barbauld’s considerable fame as a poet rested on the social verse she published in the 1770s – poems she had written a decade earlier for her domestic circle and which she reluctantly published. For reasons we only imperfectly understand, she never printed another collection of her poems, even after the enormous success of her 1773 volume, reviews of which compared her to both Milton and Shakespeare, and even though she continued to write poetry for the next five decades of her life. She did strategically print some of her poems in magazines, whereas others she circulated in manuscript. This chapter points to the sociable and political nature of many of Barbauld’s poems, as well as to the satiric vein that runs throughout, to understand her reluctance to publish poetry and her willingness to publish in other genres, from political and religious tracts to educational and children’s books.

Script’s Afterlives

Chapter 6 draws the consideration of Romantic literary manuscripts forward to the present moment, examining their shifting cultural status from the late eighteenth century onward, including their preservation and dissemination in print and now in digital form. Significant changes to the treatment and valuation of literary manuscripts began in the late eighteenth century, as they began to be preserved and collected as never before. The attention to contemporary manuscripts arose from a growing scholarly and public interest in ancient scripts and manuscripts, and a new devotion to handwriting and to handwritten manuscripts. The second half of this chapter turns to critical treatments of the period’s manuscripts in its textual scholarship, to ask how the privileging of the textual has impacted our engagements with the period’s literary manuscripts. It investigates the major scholarly critical editions of the last five decades to understand how editorial practice has grappled with the period’s literary manuscripts and the literary culture in which they were embedded. It examines how recent digital editions of the period’s manuscripts have improved our access to and revived our interest in literary manuscripts as bearers of cultural meaning beyond the textual.

Afterword: Blake’s Digitised Printed Script

The Afterword provides a brief consideration of the unique method of printed script developed by William Blake in his attempt to fuse the media of script and print, drawing and engraving, and thereby collapse the divide between handwriting and typography, word and image. Blake’s attempt to unite script and print aligns with one of the chief objectives of this study and inspires its methodological attempt to deconstruct the problematic separation between the two media, a division that owes itself at least in part, as this book has sought to demonstrate, to Romantic-era debates. This last chapter turns to Blake as a summation of the aims and methods of the book as a whole, which urge a more integrated and holistic approach to the study of literary culture.

Jane Austen’s Fiction in Manuscript

Chapter 5 examines the novelist’s scribal practices through a study of her surviving manuscripts. It deconstructs the separation that has been assumed between her early fiction in manuscript and her later novels in print, demonstrating how elements of and impulses from the early writing survive into print. Austen presents a provocative case of a canonical and beloved novelist whose fiction manuscripts languished en route to print, as she laboured to conform to the demands of the print novel. The nature of Austen’s confrontation with print can be discerned by examining her later manuscripts – those written near the end of her life and at the height of her career in print. These manuscripts reveal the continued pleasure she took in her confidential manuscript writing and infer the challenges she faced in transitioning her fiction into print. A common thread running through this chapter and the previous two case-study chapters is the extensive accommodations made by authors to make their writing publishable. Nevertheless, by bringing into print culture some of the confidentiality more easily expressed by them in manuscript, these authors challenged the rigid conceptions of print propriety under which they wrote.