Printing History and Cultural Change Fashioning The Modern English Text in Eighteenth Century Britain Richard Wendorf All Chapter

Printing History and Cultural Change:
Fashioning the Modern English Text in

Eighteenth-Century Britain Richard
Wendorf
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Printing History and Cultural Change: Fashioning the Modern English Text in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Richard Wendorf
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898135.001.0001
Published: 2022 Online ISBN: 9780191924583 Print ISBN: 9780192898135
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Published: April 2022
Subject: Literary Studies (18th Century)
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A rule of thumb about culture is that personal or public
yearning for a better time to come or one in the past and
nostalgia of any sort are reliable signs of the counterfeit.
The past is there to be studied in its reality, moment by
moment, and the future can be discussed in its reality to
come, which will be a reality moment by moment; but
doing that means being honest just as doing it makes you
too busy to yearn; and doing it shows you that nostalgia
is a swindler’s trick. A sense of the real is what is meant
by good sense. And because of the nature of time and
because of how relentlessly change occurs, good sense has
to contain a good deal of the visionary as well as of ironic
apology to cover the inevitable mistakes.
(Harold Brodkey, “Reading, the Most Dangerous Game”)
I hope that I have absorbed Harold’s lesson. I hope that you will not be subjected to a swindler’s trick. And I
now o er apology that is not ironic for whatever mistakes large and small I may have made while working
on this book for over two decades. Printing History and Cultural Change has always been the bridesmaid,
never the bride, as I have either written books on other subjects that have caught my interest or edited or
written books associated with the institutions I have served. Along the way, many friends and colleagues
have attempted to keep me honest and to o er me good sense. I take profound pleasure in thanking them,
and in apologizing if I have forgotten anyone who lent a helping hand as I slowly traced the abandonment of
the capital.
This study is particularly indebted to the work of three scholars, two of whom I’ve had the privilege of
knowing, who have laid the groundwork for analyzing the changing features of the printed page in English:
Nicolas Barker, David Foxon, and D. F. McKenzie. Among scholars of my own generation, I am particularly
indebted to the work of James McLaverty, James Raven, and Michael Suarez. Heather Ummel-Wagner
served on two continents as my research assistant and it gives me pleasure to thank her, many years later,
for her meticulous work. Two readers for Oxford University Press provided detailed critiques of this book,
for which I am extremely grateful. And my thanks go once again to Terry Belanger for reading my work with
patience, good humor, and a meticulous eye.
p. viii I also o er my warm thanks for advice and assistance to Peter Accardo, Ming Aguilar, Danielle Allen, Susan
Allen, the late Hugh Amory, Maphon Ashmon, Megan Benton, Peter Berek, John Bidwell, John Bloomberg-
Rissman, Barry Bloom eld, Keeley Bogani, the late William Bond, Thomas Bonnell, Joanna Bowring, Archie
Burnett, Mark Chonofsky, Alice Cresap, Caroline Currin, Mark Dimunation, Laura Doran, Holly Dowse,
Andrew Edmunds, Lori Anne Ferrell, Christopher Fletcher, Peter Forsaith, Eric Frazier, Arthur Freeman, Ian
Gadd, Jill Gage, Fernando Galvan, David Gants, Helen Gilio, James Green, Stephen Gregg, David Hall, Wayne
Hammond, Stephen Hebron, Miki Herrick, Susan Hill, Elizabeth Hilliar, Caroline Holden, Paul Hunter, Ian
Jackson, Mervyn Janetta, Nora Khayi, Wallace Kirsop, John Kristensen, Michael Kuzinski, Henrike
Lähnemann, Lawrence Lipking, Roger Lonsdale, Elizabeth Lyman, Dennis Marnon, Catherine McGrath,
David McKitterick, James Misson, Brian Moeller, Leslie Morris, Elizabeth Morse, James Mosley, Martin
Mueller, Elissa O’Loughlin, Nicola O’Toole, Martyn Ould, Karen Nipps, Stephen Nonack, Michael North,
Catherine Parisian, David Perkins, Kaara Peterson, Julian Pooley, Margaret Powell, Goran Proot, Jessy
Randall, Bruce Redford, Christopher Reid, Sir Christopher Ricks, Nigel Roche, Loren Rothschild, the late
Charles Ryskamp, Karen L. Schi , the late Kevin Sharp, Patricia Meyer Spacks, David Spadafora, Roger

Stoddard, Michael Suarez, Charlotte Sussman, Stephen Tabor, James Tierney, Julia Underwood, David
Vander Muellen, Scott Vile, Susan Walker, David Webb, Liz Hopkinson Wildi, Abigail Williams, David
Zeidberg, Amanda Zimmerman, and Steven Zwicker. At Oxford University Press, I have been warmly
supported by Jacqueline Norton, Eleanor Collins, Aimee Wright, Nicola Maclean, Dharuman Bheeman, and
Christine Ranft. I am also thankful to many colleagues in the Bodleian’s photography department who
managed to locate books and produce images during the upheaval of the recent pandemic.
I have had the opportunity to rehearse the scope and arguments of this book in several congenial settings,
for which I am also grateful: the American Museum & Gardens, Bath Spa University, Boston University, the
Boston Athenæum, the Huntington, the University of South Florida, Exeter College, Oxford, and Yale
University. The Houghton Library, the Boston Athenæum, and the American Museum & Gardens have
provided a home base for over thirty years, and I therefore thank my colleagues and trustees at these
institutions for encouraging their director to pursue scholarly as well as managerial pursuits. The research
for this book has been generously supported, moreover, by the Huntington, the British Academy, the
Newberry Library, and Exeter College, Oxford.
My colleagues at Bath Spa University have provided a helpful intellectual environment in which to work, and
I thank Kristin Doern, Ian Gadd, and former Vice Chancellor Christine Slade for making my appointment as
a visiting professor such a pleasant one. More recently I have had the opportunity to serve as a Visiting
p. ix Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, and I extend warmest thanks to the Rector, Sir Richard Trainor, for this
helpful sabbatical in 2019 and for ve decades of warm friendship. Six cohorts of NEH summer seminarians
—at Northwestern, Harvard, and the Boston Athenæum—have worked with me on issues relating to
literature and the visual arts, and I am therefore thankful to almost one hundred scholars for their
contributions to my own intellectual life.
Previous versions and rehearsals of parts of this book appeared in Publications of the Bibliographical Society of
America, in Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (ed. Kevin Sharp and Steven N. Zwicker), and
in my book The Scholar-Librarian. I am grateful for permission to build upon those essays here.
This book is dedicated to Elizabeth Hilliar, who has put up with a “highly skilled migrant” with unstinting
p. x patience and love.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 02/03/22, SPi
For Elizabeth Hilliar


In some modern Books, the common Names of Substantives
are not printed with Capitals, only the proper Names.
(Ann Fisher, A New Grammar, 1750)
I am very apt when I write to be too careless about great and small
Letters and Stops, but I suppose that will naturally be set right in the
printing.
(Sarah Fielding, Correspondence, 1758)
we only use small characters because it saves time. moreover, why

have 2 alphabets when one will do? why write capitals if we cannot
speak capitals?
(The inscription on Bauhaus writing paper, 1919–1933)
If you read older books you will see that they do pretty well what they
please with capitals and small letters and I have always felt that one
does do pretty well what one pleases with capitals and small letters . . . .
We still have capitals and small letters and probably for some time we
will go on having them but actually the tendency is always toward
diminishing capitals and quite rightly because the feeling that goes
with them is less and less of a feeling and so slowly and inevitably just
as with horses capitals will have gone away.
(Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 1935)
List of Illustrations

1.1 Guy Miege, English Grammar (1688). By permission of the British Library
Board (General Reference Collection 1551/111, p. 120). 9
1.2 William Haefeli, cartoon, The New Yorker (April 9, 2018). By permission of
Condé Nast. 13
1.3 William Caslon, type-specimen (1734). By permission of the British Library
Board (General Reference Collection 74/c.180.ff.4.(2.)). 16
1.4 William Collins, Persian Eclogues (1742). By permission of the
Houghton Library, Harvard University. 18
1.5 William Collins, Oriental Eclogues (1757). By permission of the
Houghton Library, Harvard University. 19
1.6 David Mallet, Verses on the Death of Lady Anson (1760). By permission
of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Vet. A5d.574, p. 5). 27
1.7 Logistic Regression of Old Style and New Style in London Imprints,
1740–1780 (Dr. Mark Chonofsky). 29
2.1 Q. Horatius Flaccus [Opera], ed. Richard Bentley (1711). By permission
of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (4o K26 Art, p. 236). 39
2.2 The Epistles and Art of Poetry of Horace, ed. Philip Francis (1746).
By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
(Radcl. e.251, pp. 6–7). 41
2.3 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711). By permission of the
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Don. e.70, title-page). 44
2.4 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1714). By permission of the
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Don. e.115, A2). 46
2.5 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1714). By permission of the
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Don. e.115, p. 48). 47
2.6 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum (1729). By permission of the
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (cc76(1) Art, p. [1]). 48
2.7 Alexander Pope, The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated
(1737 [1738]). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
(G.Pamph. 1670 (2), pp. 6–7). 51
2.8 William Shakespeare, The Works of William Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope
(1723 [1725]). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
(Mal. C194, p. 543). 55
2.9 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1763). By permission of
St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. 58
xvi List of Illustrations
2.10 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1741 [1740]).

(Don. f399, A3). 61
2.11 Samuel Richardson, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734). By permission
of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Vet. A4 e.3631(2), p. 58). 62

2.12 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young Lady (1748).
(Vet. A4 f.1921, 4:18). 65
2.13 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young Lady (1748).
(Vet. A4 f.1921, 5:239). 67
2.14 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1765).
By permission of the Newberry Library. 70
2.15 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748).
(Don. f.147–149, p. 23). 71
2.16 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). By permission
of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Johnson f.179, 1:156). 72
2.17 The Gentleman’s Magazine (January 1732). By permission of the
Boston Athenæum. 76
2.18 A Select Collection of Old Plays, ed. Robert Dodsley (1744). By permission
of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Mal. 267(2), 1:144). 80
3.1 John Butler, A Sermon Preached at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford
(Oxford, 1778). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of
Oxford (4o D 4 Th., p. 16). 89
3.2 William Tyndale’s New Testament (1526). By permission of the British
Library Board (General Reference Collection RB.37.a.2, pp. cviii–cviiii). 93
3.3 Friedrich Nausea, A Bright Burning Beacon, transl. Abraham Fleming
(1580). By permission of the British Library Board (General Reference
Collection DRT 446.a.27). 97
3.4 King James Bible (1611). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford (Arch. A b.19, A3). 99
3.5 John Baskett’s Bible (1763). By permission of the British Library Board
(General Reference Collection 3053.f.2, Genesis ch. 32). 101
3.6 John Baskerville’s Bible (1763). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford (Bib. Eng. 1763 a.1, Micah ch. 1). 102
3.7 Benjamin Blaney’s Bible (1769). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford (Vet. A5 b.137, Genesis ch. 32). 103
3.8 John Wyclif ’s manuscript New Testament (1731). By permission of the
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (N.T. Eng. 1731 b.1, title-page). 105
3.9 Robert Leighton, cartoon, The New Yorker (19 October 2015).
By permission of Condé Nast. 106
List of Illustrations xvii
3.10 Daniel Mace’s New Testament (1729). By permission of the Bodleian

Libraries, University of Oxford (8o F264 Linc., p. 713). 107
3.11 John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755).
(Vet. A5 d.1876, p. 29). 112

4.1 Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776).
By permission of the Library of Congress. 130
4.2 Declaration of Independence (July 5, 1776), printed by John Dunlap.
By permission of the Chapin Library, Williams College. 131
4.3 Declaration of Independence (July 6, 1776), printed by Benjamin Towne
in the Pennsylvania Evening Post. By permission of the Huntington Library. 135
4.4 Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union (1777). By permission of the
Chapin Library, Williams College. 137
4.5 Constitution of the United States of America (1787). By permission of the
Chapin Library, Williams College. 139
C.1 Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities (1749). By permission of the
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Douce A 561, p. 177). 146
C.2 Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe (1719). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of
Oxford (Don. e.442, title-page). 149
C.3 Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders,
third edition (1722). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of
Oxford (8o B 412 Linc., title-page). 150
C.4 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, fourth edition (1741).
(Don. f399, title-page). 151
C.5 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young Lady (1748).
(Vet. A4 f. 1921, title-page). 152
C.6 Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, third edition
(1754). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
(8o R85 Art., title-page). 153
C.7 John Baskerville, A Specimen by John Baskerville of Birmingham
(Birmingham, 1757). By permission of the British Library Board (015311728). 156
C.8 Thomas Fletcher, Arithmetick made so easy (1740). By permission of
the British Library Board (General Reference Collection DRT Dig.
Store 716.b.41, p. 90). 157
C.9 John Bettesworth, Arithmetic made easy (1780). By permission of the
British Library Board (General Reference Collection DRT Dig.
Store 531.d.33.(1.), p. 17). 158
C.10 Charles Macklin, The Man of the World (John Bell’s edition, 1793).
By permission of the Huntington Library. 159
xviii List of Illustrations
C.11 George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, in the Bodley Head Bernard
Shaw: The Collected Plays (Oxford, 1970). Private collection. 160
5.1 John Walker, The Melody of Speaking Delineated (1787). By permission
of the British Library Board (General Reference Collection 74.c.9,
pp. 46–47). 187

5.2 Robert Dodsley, scribal copy of The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1740/41).
By permission of the Huntington Library. 204
5.3 Robert Dodsley, The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1741). By permission
of the Huntington Library. 205
5.4 Arthur Murphy, scribal copy of The Desert Island (1760). By permission
of the Huntington Library. 206
5.5 and 5.6 Arthur Murphy, The Desert Island (1760). By permission of the
Huntington Library. 207–08
6.1 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Kelmscott Press, 1896).
By permission of the Boston Athenæum. 216
6.2 Robert Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems, first edition (1748). By permission
of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Don. f17, vol. 1 title-page). 232
6.3 Robert Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems, second edition (1748).
(Harding C145, vol. 1 title-page). 233
6.4 Robert Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems (1758). Private collection. 234
7.1 Nathaniel Hone’s copy of Robert Dodsley’s The New Memorandum
Book Improv’d (1752). By permission of the British Library Board
(Add. MS. 44,024). 244
7.2 Nathaniel Hone’s copy of Robert Dodsley’s The New Memorandum
Book Improv’d (1752). By permission of the British Library Board
(Add. MS. 44,025). 245
7.3 William Hogarth, Beer Street, engraving (1751). Courtesy of
Andrew Edmunds. 247
8.1 and 8.2 John Smith, The Printer’s Grammar (1755). By permission of
the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Vet. 258 e.280, pp. 186–87). 259–60
8.3 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733). By permission of
the British Library Board (General Reference Collection DRT Dig.
Store 792.c.6, A2). 264
8.4 A Letter from Mr. Gallipillee (1740). By permission of the Bodleian
Libraries, University of Oxford (Vet. A4 e.68(1), pp. 18–19). 265
8.5 Jean-Ignace de La Ville, Two Memorials of the Abbé de la Ville (1747).
(G.Pamph. 1169 (1), pp. 2–3). 267
List of Tables

1.1 Old style and new style in London imprints, 1740–1780 28
2.1 Old style and new style in London poetical imprints, 1745–1775 32
3.1 Old style and new style in London religious imprints, 1745–1770 87
3.5 Old style and new style in European imprints, 1700 119
4.1 Old style and new style in American imprints, 1740–1780 121
4.2 Comparison of American and London imprints, 1740–1780 122
4.3 Old style and new style in Dublin imprints, 1740–1780 142
C.1 Formats of London imprints, 1740–1780 144
5.1 Old style and new style in manuscript plays submitted to the Examiner
of Plays, 1740–1780, with a comparison of printed texts 202
1
The Great Divide

The difficulty is, how shall i begin?
(Luke Hansard, The Auto-Biography)
Old Style and New
This is a wide-ranging book about what may appear, at first glance, to be a rather
narrow subject. My ambition is to provide, by example, a necessarily limited but
nonetheless positive answer to the general challenge posed to scholars of the his-
tory of the book several decades ago by D. F. McKenzie: “is bibliotextual history
possible, as a fine conjunction of literary, cultural, social, economic, material and
behavioural history expressed in the world of the book?”1 In order to meet this
challenge, my preliminary focus is in fact minuscule. In the following chapters I
chart the gradual abandonment of pervasive capital letters (majuscules), as well as
italics and caps and small caps, in English books published during the middle
decades of the eighteenth century. The first part of this book, whose province is
printing history, presents a descriptive and analytical account of how this process
unfolded in London and the colonies from roughly 1740 to 1780. I gauge this
fundamental change in printing conventions by drawing on an extensive database
that maps this development in five-year increments and in a wide range of genres,
with particular emphasis given to poetry and plays, the novel, the Bible and the
Book of Common Prayer, sermons and religious writings, newspapers, magazines,
anthologies, classical texts, and government publications. This study provides
what is probably the most detailed and comprehensive examination ever devoted
to such a critical transformation in the material substance—and the comparative
lisibilité—of the printed page.
Books published in London in 1740 were usually printed in what I call the old
style. With their employment of heavy capitalization, italics, caps and small caps,
they are still essentially early modern books, their typographical appearance
predicated on an elaborate (if inconsistent) protocol of hierarchical differentiation.
1 McKenzie, “Typography and Meaning,” in his Making Meaning, 207. My starting point could be
plotted on what Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker call the “Whole Socio-Economic Conjuncture,” an
adaptation of Robert Darnton’s “Communications Circuit,” under the heading of “Manufacture” but
affecting several other stages in the “conjuncture.” See Adams and Barker, “A New Model for the Study
of the Book,” esp. 14, and Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?”
Printing History and Cultural Change: Fashioning the Modern English Text in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Richard Wendorf,
Oxford University Press. © Richard Wendorf 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898135.003.0001
4 Printing History and Cultural Change
Books published in London in 1770, on the other hand, were likely to have been
printed in a newer style, with a much more restricted use of italics and small caps,
and with only the occasional capitalization of words that are not proper nouns.
Within fifteen years, following the abandonment of the long “s” and its affiliated
ligatures in John Bell’s edition of Shakespeare in 1785, most books printed in
England and its colonies began to present modern texts to their readers, essen-

tially providing the kind of encounter with the printed page with which we are
familiar today.2
Stanley Morison famously claimed that “the history of printing is in large measure
the history of the title-page.”3 This book argues that this is patently not true for
England during the eighteenth century, even though an analysis of title-pages can
certainly extend our understanding of how the printed page changed during this
period. Instead of focusing on a single page, important as it is, I want to direct
attention to the average page—to every page, in other words—so that we can
gauge the aesthetic and cultural shift that took place during the middle decades of
the century. Bonnie Mak has noted that we are so habituated to the “operation” of
the page that we often overlook how it sets the parameters for our engagement
with the text itself.4 Joseph Dane has rightly pointed out that we have no com-
monly shared word in English to capture the visual appearance of the page, with
its text, running heads, columns, commentary, margins, and typographical variety.
Dane suggests “format” or “layout”; Richard Kroll has adopted the French mise-
en-page; Nicolas Barker has written about the “morphology” of the page; Cynthia
Wall has explored the “topographical” and “picturesque” page. We could also
approach the page in even more visual terms, as W. J. T. Mitchell has, as a sophis-
ticated species of iconotext.5 But however we choose to describe the material
appearance of the printed page, we must acknowledge that fundamental changes
2 For Bell, see Steinberg, The First Hundred Years of Printing, 113 (among several other sources).
Bell then dropped the long “s” in his English Chronicle and World in subsequent years. Steinberg notes
that catchwords at the foot of each page were first abandoned in 1747 by the Foulis Press (67). The best
surveys of the evolution of the page during the century are Nicolas Barker, “The morphology of the
page” and “Typography and the Meaning of Words,” but see my summary of all of these issues in the
Coda to the first section of this book.
3 Morison, First Principles of Typography (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 16. I am pleased to see that
Alan Bartram agrees with me: only the pages themselves “show the remarkable changes that have
taken place over the centuries” (Five hundred years of book design, 11). This is not to denigrate the
interesting permutations of the title-page during the eighteenth century, but rather to put any focus on
this feature of the printed book into proper perspective. For commentaries on the title-page, see
Barker, “The morphology of the page”; Paul Luna and Martyn Ould, “The Printed Page,” 528–45; Janine
Barchas, Graphic Design, ch. 3; James McLaverty, “Questions of Entitlement”; Richard Kroll, “Mise-en-
Page,” 14–20; and Joseph Dane, Out of Sorts, ch. 4, where he argues that title-pages are age-specific
rather than tied to specific genres. I provide a summary of changes in the Coda to the first section of
this book.
4 Mak, How the Page Matters, 9, who works almost exclusively with a Renaissance Italian manu-
script and its printed and digital editions.
5 Dane, What Is a Book? 85; Kroll, “Mise-en-Page” and The Material Word; Barker, “The morphology of
the page”; Wall, Grammars of Approach, ch. 3; Peter Wagner, Reading Iconotexts; and W. J. T. Mitchell,
Picture Theory, 95.
The Great Divide 5
in printing conventions occurred during this period, and that the roles of
minuscules and majuscules need to be examined within a broad and multifaceted
historical context.
The second part of this book, whose province is cultural history, therefore con-
fronts a rather different challenge, which is to expand upon how this transform-
ation took place by attempting to explain why it should have occurred in England

during this particular historical period. This has led, in turn, to my exploration of
a number of related issues, including how we edit eighteenth-century texts and
how we calibrate the role of typographical conventions in textual interpretation.
As Michael Warner argued some time ago, many of the scholars working on the
history of the book “suppose printing to be a nonsymbolic form of material real-
ity,” divorced from rhetoric or forms of subjectivity—a medium that is itself
unmediated.6 This can lead, in turn, to a focus on printing history that is entirely
separated from other cultural forces that are at play at the same time. It can also
lead us, as James Raven has pointed out in his cautionary essay on “print culture,”
to forget that “historians start with people, study people and make conclusions
about people.” The history of the book is, in his words, “the history of human
relationships and the relationships between people and objects.”7 My intention in
this book is to keep individuals—writers, readers, publishers, and printers—
clearly in view, and my ambition is to demonstrate just how deeply printing his-
tory was embedded in the fabric of British life at a time when significant changes
were taking place elsewhere in the cultural arena.
It is remarkable that a change in the presentation of English texts as fundamen-
tal as this could escape the notice of so many scholars who have attempted to
chart the history of the book in Britain—or that it could, at least, be noted so
infrequently in the scholarly literature devoted to the history of the book. There is
no mention of capitalization in Steinberg’s wide-ranging survey of the first five
hundred years of printing, nor in the more recent two-volume Oxford Companion
to the Book. There is nothing in The Book History Reader nor in A Companion to
the History of the Book, nothing in The Book: A Global History, nothing in Adrian
Johns’ The Nature of the Book, nor in Richard Sher’s The Enlightenment & the
Book.8 There is nothing in the volumes of A History of the Book in America covering
the period before 1850.9 James Raven addresses various issues of capitalization in
6 Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 5; his entire first chapter paints a cautionary tale about “print
determinism” in the hands of Elizabeth Eisenstein, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and others. See my
discussion in Chapter 8, below.
7 Raven, “‘Print Culture’ and the Perils of Practice,” in Jason McElligott and Eve Patten, eds., The
Perils of Print Culture, 218 and 228.
8 Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Book; David Finkelstein
and Alistair McCleery, eds., The Book History Reader; Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., The
Book: A Global History; Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds., A Companion to the History of the Book.
9 Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in America; Robert A. Gross and Mary
Kelley, eds., An Extensive Republic.
The Business of Books, but they are, appropriately, financial rather than typographical.
In the volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain devoted to the
eighteenth century, there is only one mention of these changes in capitalization,
by Nicolas Barker, and that has been prompted by the work of David Foxon, who
almost single-handedly drew our attention to the importance of this issue by
examining—in great detail—the evolution of Alexander Pope’s manuscripts and

printed editions. Scholars who have written about these issues have been working
primarily in linguistics, the history of printing manuals, and textual editing
(which is where my own interest was first piqued several decades ago). Gavin
Edwards, the only literary critic other than Bertrand Bronson to have focused
extensively on these changes in typography, has written about authors in the early
nineteenth century—Crabbe, Blake, Wordsworth, and Dickens—and he has con-
cluded that the treatment of capitals was quite unsettled during the second half of
the eighteenth century.10 This was not the case, as I shall demonstrate at the end
of this chapter.
In the pages that follow, we shall encounter a number of eighteenth-century
figures who noted that such changes were under way—many welcoming them,
some naturally resisting them—but no one, to the best of my knowledge,
attempted at the time to explain why this transformation was happening: not on
aesthetic grounds, nor in terms of the economy of the printing house, nor on the
basis of England’s commercial and political relationships with its continental
rivals. The most relevant passage I have found is a single sentence in Lindley
Murray’s English Grammar of 1795, which focuses on the coherence and aesthetic
appearance of the printed text: “It was formerly the custom to begin every noun
with a capital; but as this practice was troublesome, and gave the writing or print-
ing a crowded and confused appearance, it has been discontinued” (174). This is a
retrospective interpretation, however, written several decades after these changes
in printing conventions took place, and I therefore relate these significant changes
10 See Gavin Edwards, “William Hazlitt and the Case of the Initial Letter,” “George Crabbe: A Case
Study,” and “Capital Letters.” Edwards draws the wrong conclusion about the state of capitalization in
the second half of the eighteenth century because he quotes from grammars and printers’ treatises
rather than examining actual practices during this period. He is, however, perceptive about the social
and political dimensions of deliberate capitalization and italicization after the turn of the nineteenth
century. James McLaverty is attuned to the variations in capitalization in his chapter on “Poems in
Print” and in Pope, Print and Meaning. Cynthia Wall provides a lively discussion of capitalization and
other typographical conventions in ch. 3 of Grammars of Approach. For debates over capitalization
placed in their linguistic context, see Murray Cohen, Sensible Words, 51–53, who also notes Michel
Maittaire’s use of the first-person “i,” which could be compared with Hansard’s many decades later.
Capitalization is frequently discussed by Jocelyn Hargrave in The Evolution of Editorial Style; see
especially her chapters on the printing manuals by Moxon, Smith, and Luckombe. One of her main
arguments is that John Smith attempted to establish “editorial standardization definitively” in The
Printer’s Grammar (87) and that his treatise represents the pinnacle of editorial innovation (see her
graph on 258). She also includes a concise history of the treatment of italics (89–91). See also Lisa
Maruca, “Bodies of Type: The Work of Textual Production in English Printers’ Manuals” and her book
The Work of Print.
The Great Divide 7
to a number of other forces as well: to the roles of author, publisher, and printer
during this period, to the growth (and diversification) of the reading public, to the
emergence of an English pantheon of canonical works and writers, and to com-
parative printing practices in Paris, Rome, Madrid, and the American colonies
and Ireland.
Essential to my own model of historical explanation is the analysis of other

cultural phenomena with which these changes in the printing house might profit-
ably be associated and correlated, particularly the adoption of the Gregorian cal-
endar in 1752, the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755, and the imposition
of house numbers in the streets of London in the 1760s. My research suggests that
such a fundamental shift in printing conventions was closely tied to a pervasive
interest in refinement, regularity, and standardization at mid-century—and that it
was therefore an important component in the self-conscious process of modern-
izing English culture. Modernization on such a pervasive scale necessarily
included a less isolated view of Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe, and
especially so with France. Johnson could note that “Our language, for almost a
century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from
its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and
phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it.”11 But by 1755,
when Johnson published these words in the “Preface” to his Dictionary (in the
new style), the typographical floodgates had stood open for almost twenty years.
Part of the argument of this book is that our eighteenth-century precursors
initiated and eventually completed a transformation of the printed page in
English that influences virtually everything we read today. It is crucial to remem-
ber, however, that the new style with which we are now comfortable actually
posed interpretive problems for less-educated readers when it was introduced in
the first half of the century. Joseph Dane has made a similar argument about vari-
ous kinds of type (roman, italic, gothic): “Legibility of type is not a quality inher-
ing in type but a function of a reader’s reading experience.” There is no legitimate
way, he writes, in which a twenty-first-century reader “can judge the readability
or legibility of a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century type to [its] contemporary read-
ers.”12 Like the movement from gothic to roman type in English printing, the
transition from the old style to the new was a gradual one, based in part on the
increasing facility of the general reading public to understand texts that were now
bereft of their traditional typographical styling. What is relatively difficult (or at
least cumbersome) for us to read today was easy (or at least less cumbersome) for
our eighteenth-century predecessors—and vice versa. The earliest attempts to
strip English poetry of its typographical distinctiveness were aimed at an elite and
highly educated class of readers, not at Johnson’s “common reader,” let alone at
11 Johnson, “Preface to the English Dictionary,” in Johnson on the English Language, 95.
12 Dane, What Is a Book? 125.
those whose experiences as readers were limited to the rudiments of literate

culture (the Bible, the chapbook, the weekly newspaper). Before we turn to
imprints of any kind, however, we need to establish a common vocabulary and
provide a context for the roles of minuscules, majuscules, and italics.

Defining Terms and Contexts
They that content themselves with general ideas may rest in general
terms; but those whose studies or employment force them upon closer
inspection must have names for particular parts, and words by which
they may express various modes of combination, such as none but
themselves have occasion to consider.
(Samuel Johnson, The Idler)
Perhaps I can best introduce my terms of engagement by quoting from Guy

Miege’s English Grammar of 1688. After discussing the various manuscript hands
that were in common use among English writers, Miege remarks that “in the Art
of Printing, there is much more Uniformity and less Disproportion, than in that of
Writing. In England we use three Sorts of Letters for Print,” which he then presents
in their appropriate fonts as “Roman,” “Italick,” and “English” (120) (Figure 1.1).13
My initial focus will center on these three kinds of typeface, but it may be helpful
to point out a number of other important elements that are captured in these two
short sentences. Although Miege will later stipulate that capital letters should
begin “any Noun that has an Emphasis with it, or that is predominant” (126), his
text actually exemplifies the old style, with every noun—common as well as
proper—dutifully elevated (as in “Uniformity” and “Sorts”). Miege will later
inveigh against the contemporary taste for inserting numerous words printed in
italics into a roman text, but here he in fact singles out two words for this treat-
ment in each of his two sentences. He employs the long “s” (which I shall not
reproduce in my own text), and he spells “Italick” with a final “k,” which (like the
long “s”) will not disappear for another hundred years.
Miege refers to the third family of typeface as “English,” whereas we are more
used to calling it “gothic,” “textura,” or “black letter.” The earliest books printed in
England appeared in black letter; the first English book completely printed
in roman type did not appear until 1555; the Bishop’s Bible (1568) and the
authorized King James version (1611) were printed in black letter; and royal
proclamations were printed in this style until 1730.14 By the time Miege published
13 Miege, English Grammar, 119–20. S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, provides a
good historical summary of these three typographical families (11).
14 Harry Carter, A Short View of Typography, 92.
9
The Great Divide
Figure 1.1 Guy Miege, English Grammar (1688).

his Grammar in 1688, however, he could safely omit black letter in his hierarchy
of roman and italic printing sizes “both for want of room, and because it grows
out of date” (120). The last English Bible printed in black letter appeared in 1640.15
Miege’s readers occasionally encountered it on title-pages and on the mastheads
of newspapers that were appearing with greater frequency late in the century, but
he is correct in stating that black letter had essentially grown out of “date”—or at

least out of style—by the 1680s.
As their names suggest, roman and italic typefaces are derived, respectively,
from Latin and Italian sources.16 Harry Carter has succinctly defined roman type
as “one whose capital letters reproduce classical inscriptional models and whose
minuscules are made to conform with the capitals in their style or construction.”17
The minuscules actually took a very long time to develop. The Roman or Latin
alphabet that we encounter in classical inscriptions consisted entirely of square
capitals called quadrata.18 Because these capital letters were less amenable to the
needs of everyday writing, a form of “current” or “cursive” (running) script, with
rounded Roman capitals, evolved during the early centuries of the modern era.
Smaller letters, derived from classical Roman capitals, also appeared at this time,
but the various forms of uncials, half-uncials, and other transitional letters were
not codified until Charlemagne asked Alcuin of York to perfect a scribal hand
around 800.19 The resulting Carolingian (or Caroline) minuscule was then refined
by humanists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, eventually producing a
prototype for the earliest printing in roman, which seems to have appeared in
1467, a little more than a decade later than the black-letter Gutenberg Bible.20 The
roman majuscule and minuscule alphabets that we use today were then given
typographical shape during the later decades of the fifteenth century.21
Typefaces in italic were greatly influenced by the scribal hands that proliferated
during the Italian Renaissance. Aldus Manutius introduced a cursive Latin script
for learned books in Venice late in the fifteenth century and then adopted it for
his celebrated books in smaller formats. Italian printers employed their own ver-
sions of the Aldine italic for texts printed in either Latin or the vernacular
throughout the sixteenth century. Italic type found its way into German printing
by 1520 or so, into French books by 1530, and into English texts by 1555—but
often with a difference, for the typeface that had originally been created as an
alternative to roman or gothic was also being used piecemeal within roman texts,
15 Carter, A Short View of Typography, 92.

16 Throughout this book I place “roman” type in lower case so as not to confuse it with classical
Roman letters or culture; for the sake of consistency, I follow the same styling with “italic” and “black
letter” as well.
18 Geoffrey Glaister, Glaister’s Glossary of the Book, 283; Torbjörn Lundmark, Quirky Qwerty, 27.
19 Glaister, Glaister’s Glossary of the Book, 284–5; Lundmark, Quirky Qwerty, 28–9.
20 Glaister, Glaister’s Glossary of the Book, 286; Carter, A Short View of Typography, 47.
The Great Divide 11
in marginal notes, or for decorative purposes on title-pages.22 An eighteenth-

century English edition of Horace might well be printed in italics with roman
notes, as we will see in the next chapter, but this would be an exception; the nor-
mal practice was for books to be printed in roman with insertions and supple-
ments in italics (as in, for example, an italic dedication, preface, or introduction
to a roman text).23 Miege is quite clear on this point: “In the Way of Printing, the

Roman Letter is the chief and predominant; the Italick being only used for
Distinctions sake, but chiefly for Proper Names, Quotations, and Change of
Language” (121). At work in such “Distinctions” are hierarchical, nationalistic,
aesthetic, and even gender issues to which I shall return in the second half of
this book.
Each of the three principal Western typefaces—roman, italic, and black letter—
employed capital letters, although Carter argues that it was the introduction of
roman type that taught printers how to use them, “and who knows to what extent
the eventual supersession of gothic types is due to the weakness of their capital
forms?”24 The word itself derives from the Latin caput (head) because of the
inscriptional letters found near the capitals of Roman columns. Those inscrip-
tions were entirely chiseled in upright quadrata in a form called scriptio continua,
without punctuation or the separation of words.25 With the eventual introduction
of minuscules, capital letters naturally began to play a more specialized (and
noticeable) role as litterae notabiliores, often at the beginning of sentences.
By the twelfth century, as M. B. Parkes has shown in his history of punctuation,
“the fundamental conventions of the written medium had been established.”26
The separation of words had been fully developed; the spaces between letters in a
word had been reduced; a general repertory of punctuation marks had been
accepted; and individual letter forms were read as parts of larger patterns (the
word, the phrase, and the sentence, which in turn generated modern punctuation
marks such as the comma, the colon, and the period or full-stop). Aldus embraced
the comma, question mark, and parenthesis, and he was the first to print a semi-
colon. His grandson, who shared the same name, published his Orthographiae
ratio in 1566, in which the various punctuation marks (comma, semicolon, colon,
22 Carter, A Short View of Typography, 117; Glaister, Glaister’s Glossary of the Book, 287; Margaret
Smith, “The Pre-history of ‘Small Caps,’” 79–80.
23 Isaac Watts, The Art of Reading and Writing English, could provide the following uses for italics as
late as 1721: prefaces, indices, tables; titles or arguments of chapters, sections, or pages; examples from
rules; foreign words; quotations from other authors; words that are to be explained; and (cf. Moxon
below) “Those Words that have the chief Place or Force in a Sentence, and are most significant and
remarkable; when the Emphasis is placed” (63).
25 Parkes, Pause and Effect, 10. See also Park Honan, “Enlightenment and Eighteenth-Century
Punctuation Theory,” who points out the difference between pointing for grammar and for elocution
(94) and who argues that rules for punctuation were not agreed upon in the late eighteenth century (95).
26 Parkes, Pause and Effect, 41.
and period) were still based on the practice of reading aloud, with its emphasis on
pauses, breathing, and the raising or lowering of one’s pitch of voice.27
By the second half of the seventeenth century, there was substantial agreement
among English printers and grammarians concerning the use of capitals, italics,
and the modern panoply of punctuation marks.28 Or, to be more precise, there
was at least agreement in principle, for, as we have seen in Miege’s grammar book,

capitalization was likely to proliferate even in a treatise devoted to making nice
distinctions. In Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises of the Whole Art of Printing
of 1683–84, for example, a fairly precise stylistic hierarchy is established for print-
ing proper names and words of greater or lesser emphasis. When the compositor
“meets with proper Names of Persons or Places he Sets them in Italick, if the
Series of his Matter be Set in Roman; or in Roman if the Series of his Matter be Set
in Italick, and Sets the first Letter with a Capital, or as the Person or Place he finds
the purpose of the Author to dignifie, all Capitals.” The compositor will also set a
space between the letters in an important word and several spaces before and
after it “to make it shew more Graceful and Stately. For Capitals express Dignity
wherever they are Set, and Space and Distance also implies stateliness” (216).
Proper names, in other words, are to be set in a different typeface and capital-
ized, and the most important proper names may be set entirely in caps. “Words of
great Emphasis” are also to be set in italics and “sometimes” begin with a capital
letter: “If the Emphasis bear hard upon the Word to be exprest as well as the Thing
to be exprest, it ought to begin with a Capital” (216). Moxon’s distinction appears
to be based on a text that is being read aloud (thus the emphasis on the word
itself), and the same criterion is then applied to “Words of a smaller Emphasis,”
which are to be set in the “running Character” (roman, if the text be in roman) and
begun with a capital if “Thing and Word both bear Emphasis” (217) (Figure 1.2).
Directions such as these could easily lead to a highly capitalized (and italicized)
text. Moxon himself capitalizes and italicizes the verb “Set” throughout this pas-
sage, and adverbs, adjectives, and pronouns are also frequently capitalized in late
seventeenth-century texts. The norm, however, was to italicize and capitalize
proper nouns and to capitalize important common nouns. By 1735, in The
Instructor: Or, Young Man’s best Companion, George Fisher presents the most
extreme (and, we could argue, the most rationalized) advice as he ventures “to
27 Lundmark, Quirky Qwerty, 45.

28 Two unusual punctuation marks should be noted here. Our exclamation mark, which was called
an “admiration” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, could be inserted directly following an
individual word in order to draw specific attention to it (this was rarely done). One grammarian,
Charles Wiseman, suggested in his Complete English Grammar on a New Plan of 1764 that a similar
mark, perhaps diacritical in nature, might be devised to point out “irony” as well, but that, of course,
would undermine the effect (and often the intentional ambiguity) of ironical statements. The first text
to address the possible insertion of marks for irony was apparently John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a
Real Character and a Philosophical Language of 1668—and an interest in doing so has persisted for
some time. For a recent survey, see Keith Houston, Shady Characters.
The Great Divide 13

Figure 1.2 William Haefeli, cartoon, The New Yorker (April 9, 2018).
give a general Rule when Capitals are to begin Words; Which is this: All Nouns
Substantive may begin with a Great Letter; and a Substantive may be known by
the signs either of A, An, or The before them” (4). Fisher thinks that adjectives may
appear in lower case, but his text actually violates this principle at every turn, thus
providing us with a vivid reminder that even the most straightforward rules may
be ignored by the compositor setting a writer’s manuscript.
These distinctions are complicated by the profusion of caps and small caps in
English books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early printers some-
times employed smaller capitals from other fonts in order to regain some of the
flexibility enjoyed by Renaissance scribes, but the mixture of caps and small caps
appears to have begun in France in the mid-1520s.29 In England, caps and small
caps often began the first word or phrase in a paragraph, indicated other breaks
between parts of a text, or appeared on title-pages; they were also used to indicate
individual speakers in poems and plays. But caps and small caps were also pressed
into service to mark important words in a sentence, and they therefore often per-
formed precisely the same role as initial capitals and italics. As we shall see, the
gradual abandonment of initial capitals in the middle decades of the eighteenth
29 Smith, “The Pre-history of ‘Small Caps,’” esp. 80–81.

century occasionally enabled caps and small caps to take their place in making a
distinction or marking an emphasis, although this was a role that steadily declined
as the century drew to a close.
The rules laid down by printers and grammarians—and there were many such
rules, as we shall later see—are not necessarily inconsistent, although they may
specify different degrees of exactitude. Inconsistency lies squarely in the texts

themselves, whose employment of capitals, caps and small caps, and italics is often
at odds with other contemporary practices and even with other parts of the same
text. It is therefore comforting to find realistic advice occasionally meted out, even
if it follows more than 150 pages of rules and lessons. In A New Grammar of the
English Language of 1771, Daniel Fenning offers the following dialogue on punc-
tuation, which normally included capitalization as well in such treatises: “Q. Are
the rules of pointing fixed and established? A. No; they are extremely arbitrary,
and depend very much upon the fancy of the writer” (162).
Capitals, italics, and caps and small caps all provide different styling to words
in a text, and they do so by changing the visible shape of individual letters.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in Edinburgh in 1771
(in the new style), a letter is “a character used to express one of the simple sounds
of the voice: and as the different simple sounds are expressed by different letters,
these, by being differently compounded, become the visible signs or characters of
all the modulations and mixtures used to express our ideas in a regular language”
(2:968). Thought, as Walter Ong has nicely phrased it, “is nested in speech,” in the
sounds of language, and the letters of an alphabet in turn represent those
sounds.30 The letters of an alphabet can be characterized as graphemes; capitaliza-
tion, italics, and diacritical marks are called suprasegmental graphemes (if the
“running Character,” as Moxon put it, be lower-case roman) because they change
the shape of the underlying grapheme.31 When letters, numerals, punctuation
marks, and symbols are cast and then placed in a printer’s case, they are called
sorts; a font is a group of sorts all of one typeface.
In eighteenth-century London, there were about 150 different sorts of type typ-
ically making up a font, divided into two cases. The Encyclopaedia Britannica in
fact specifies that there were 152 different sorts of type: the upper case held caps,
small caps, accented letters, and figures in ninety-eight cells; the lower case held
lower-case letters with points and spaces in fifty-four cells (3:510). English makes
very little use of accented letters; it is also unusual in capitalizing its first-person
pronoun (“I”), which we do not find in other pronouns either in English (with the
except of the occasional “You,” as in some of the familiar letters quoted in
Chapter 5) or in the major continental languages (je, yo, io, and even ich). As
Joseph Robertson pointed out in his Essay on Punctuation (1786), “we seem to be
30 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 75; cf. 5: “language is nested in sound.”

31 Earl M. Herrick, “A Taxonomy of Alphabets and Scripts,” 10–11.
The Great Divide 15
the only people, who have dignified the little hero with a capital” (140). Both this
anomaly and the placement of the tittle on top of our lower-case “i” have their
roots in what is called “minim confusion” in early scribal practice.32 The small
downward stroke that produced “i” (a minim) also generated the forms of “n”
and “m”; capitalizing the word or dotting its smaller form was therefore a form
of chirographic disambiguation. Not everyone has been comfortable with the

capitalized pronoun. The printer Luke Hansard told his grandson that the use
of it was a “kind of conceit” and he refused to employ it in his autobiography.33
“The difficulty,” he wrote on the second page of his manuscript, “is where shall
i begin?”34
We should also note that the changes I shall explore in the following pages took
place within a linguistic environment that was still partially in flux. In 1721, for
example, Isaac Watts could write in his Art of Reading and Writing English that he
follows the “old and usual Custom” of listing twenty-four letters in the alphabet,
although he wishes that “our Fathers” had made “v” and “j” consonants “and called
them ja and vee, and thus made Six-and-twenty” (2). Most of his contemporaries
did make six-and-twenty, but even as “j” and “v” entered the hornbook and the
printing house, there were continuing debates about how the various letters
should be pronounced (“ja” eventually lost out to “jay,”) and whether “h” was a
proper letter in English or merely a mark of aspiration.35
Once we reach the 1720s, we can at least point to significant uniformity in the
physical appearance of letters on the printed page. Most fonts of type used by
English printers in the seventeenth and the early decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury were produced by Dutch foundries or by the English using Dutch matrices.
During the Restoration, the number of English type-founders was officially lim-
ited to four—a restriction that was not lifted until 1693—and it was not until the
1720s that native design and production began to change with the introduction of
William Caslon’s first roman and italic typefaces.36 Caslon issued his first type
specimen in 1734 (Figure 1.3).37
His designs were so popular by then that his fonts were purchased by foreign
printers as well as by local masters such as Samuel Richardson, who printed all of
his novels in Caslon roman pica. Caslon’s roman typefaces have been character-
ized by Philip Gaskell as “without serious blemish, but also without much life;
they were tasteful, subdued, and rather dull.”38 A. F. Johnson considered Caslon’s
32 David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 40, 261; Lundmark, Quirky
Qwerty, 38.
33 The Auto-Biography of Luke Hansard, 2 n. 34 The Auto-Biography of Luke Hansard, 3.
35 See Ian Michael, The Teaching of English, 14–134, for a magisterial survey of the problems in the
evolution of explaining (and naming) the alphabet in English.
36 R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography, 299.
37 Lawrence Wroth, Typographic Heritage, 39, who speculates that Benjamin Franklin was probably
responsible for transmitting it to America.
38 Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 23.
Figure 1.3 William Caslon, type-specimen (1734).
roman to be “pleasantly legible”; the letters combine well together “and no one
letter calls attention to itself by any oddity of form.”39 D. B. Updike was somewhat
more positive, noting that Caslon “introduced into his fonts a quality of interest,
39 A. F. Johnson, Type Designs, 53, who also argues that Caslon’s specimen sheet could have been
produced a hundred years earlier. Cf. Harry Carter and Christopher Ricks, introd. to Rowe Mores, A
Dissertation upon English Typography (lxvi): “The history of English before Caslon is a weak and fitful
accompaniment to the continent.” Although Paul Luna and Martyn Ould (“The Printed Page,” 517)
concede that Caslon types lacked innovation and modernity, they nevertheless argue that the aban-
donment of French and Dutch types following the adoption of Caslon by Oxford University Press in
the eighteenth century led to a much more contemporary page.
The Great Divide 17
a variety of design, and a delicacy of modeling, which few Dutch types possessed,”
and he compared them to the early furniture of Chippendale and the architecture
of Vanbrugh.40 It is difficult, in any case, to overestimate the pervasiveness of
Caslon’s types during much of the rest of the century—including the first mass
printing of the Declaration of Independence41—and they remain part of the
stock-in-trade of publishing today. Although John Baskerville began to create

rather more elegant typefaces beginning in the 1750s, his designs (especially for
his lower-case letters) are not significantly different from Caslon’s, although his
experiments in spacing and the treatment of paper certainly give his books a dra-
matically different appearance.42 But the work of William Caslon—father, son,
and grandson—dominated English printing during the period under discussion
here, and the changes in capitalization and italicization that I document took
place within an essentially stable typographical environment.
The Great Divide
My own confrontation with what I now realize was a sweeping transformation in

the appearance of the printed page occurred when Charles Ryskamp and I began
preparing our edition of the poetry of William Collins in the mid-1970s. Collins
enjoyed an unusual career as a writer, publishing a number of poems while he was
still at Winchester and Oxford, orchestrating a somewhat successful assault on
London in his early twenties, and then essentially disappearing from the literary
scene in 1747, at the age of twenty-five. In deciding which version of Collins’s Persian
Eclogues of 1742 to accept as copy-text for our critical edition, we discovered
that the revised edition of 1757 (entitled Oriental Eclogues) contained not
only substantive variants but a host of changes in what are traditionally called
“accidentals” as well: nouns other than proper names were no longer capitalized
and many of the words and phrases originally in italics were stripped of their
distinctively different styling. The difference between the presentation of the
accidentals in these two editions can be gauged in the opening two lines of the
poem (Figures 1.4 and 1.5):
1742: YE Persian Maids, attend your Poet’s Lays,

And hear how Shepherds pass their golden Days:
1757: YE Persian maids, attend your poet’s lays,
And hear how shepherds pass their golden days.
40 Updike, Printing Types, 2:105 and 1:xlv, whose statements are sometimes disputed. See also
Johnson Ball, William Caslon.
41 These authenticated copies were printed by Mary Katherine Goddard in Baltimore; see Steinberg,
Five Hundred Years of Printing, 78.
42 McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography, 300–1.
Figure 1.4 William Collins, Persian Eclogues (1742).

19
The Great Divide
Figure 1.5 William Collins, Oriental Eclogues (1757).

Our attempt to account for the changes to be found in the second edition was
doubly difficult. We discovered, in the first place, that Collins’s modern editors
had rejected the later edition’s substantive alterations—usually defined as the
verbal changes that affect the meaning of the text—because Collins was
thought to be insane in the 1750s and therefore incapable of revising his own
poetry. After looking closely at the surviving evidence, however, we concluded

that the poet, despite the vaguely defined illness from which he suffered,
was “able and eager to perform additional revision as late as 1756,”43 and
we therefore accepted, for the first time in the long trail of modern textual
transmission, the substantive variants as they appeared in the text of the
Oriental Eclogues.
It proved just as difficult to determine a proper copy-text for a poem that had
undergone such significant transformation in the space of only fifteen years.
Under normal circumstances, a text with this kind of printing history would have
prompted a straightforward editorial decision in the 1970s to follow the first edi-
tion as copy-text because that text would be most likely to preserve the author’s
intentions regarding accidentals (spelling, punctuation, and other elements of the
formal presentation of the text). The edition would then incorporate authorial
revisions from the later printing into the base text, and these revisions would be
modified, if necessary, to conform to the presentation of the copy-text. These are
the procedures laid down by Sir Walter Greg in his classic essay on “The Rationale
of Copy-Text” and subsequently refined and codified by Fredson Bowers and
other textual editors and theorists.44
But the Persian and Oriental Eclogues pose a special problem in the modifica-
tion of accidentals, standing as they do on opposite sides of what Bertrand
Bronson has called the “Great Divide” in eighteenth-century printing practice.
In his essay of 1958 on “Printing as an Index of Taste in Eighteenth-Century
43 The Works of William Collins, 104.

44 Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” 43: “We need to draw a distinction between the significant,
or as I shall call them ‘substantive,’ readings of the text, those namely that affect the author’s meaning
or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division,
and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I
shall call them ‘accidentals,’ of the text.” But see David Foxon, “Greg’s ‘Rationale’ and the Editing
of Pope.”
It should be kept in mind that Greg himself was empirical rather than prescriptive in his views.
For similar arguments to mine on behalf of the role of accidentals, see especially D. F. McKenzie,
Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, and Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual
Criticism.
The argument of my book is that “formal presentation” directly affects the author’s meaning and
expression. For a perceptive analysis of satire in the early eighteenth century along these lines, see
Christopher Fanning, “Small Particles of Eloquence,” especially his emphasis on what he calls “a
materially embodied text” (361) and his description of the Scriblerian dilemma: “its greatest target is a
flourishing print culture. But because it is itself presented in the material form of a printed text, it
necessarily becomes subject to its own critique of the modern condition” (369).
The Great Divide 21
England,” Bronson pointed out that what I have described in the transmission of
Collins’s text was actually characteristic of printing practices in London from
roughly 1745 to 1755: the highly mannered look of the typical English page of the
preceding century had rather suddenly become (to impose my terms) the less
emphatic, less cluttered, and less distinctive page that we expect to encounter in
books published today. Bronson was aware that inconsistencies existed within the

printing of a single author’s works during the first half of the century, and he con-
ceded, in a footnote, that books in a smaller format were more likely to retain
their vigorous capitalization. But it was nevertheless clear to him “that there is a
quite abrupt shift of convention just at the midpoint of the century. Before 1750
poetry was likely to be generously capitalized; after 1750 it was likely to be given a
modern capitalization. There are exceptions on either side of the line, but they do
not conceal the fact that 1750 is the Great Divide.” Prose, he adds, “seems to have
followed roughly the same course.”45 Given the inherent conservatism of printing
as a trade, the phenomenon Bronson described would seem to have taken place
virtually overnight, transforming “the whole visual effect of a page of type” and
consequently demanding a “change in psychological response” in us, as readers (340).
Bronson was not the first scholar to notice this phenomenon. As he prepared
his edition of The Spectator in the early 1950s, Donald Bond observed that
Addison and Steele’s essays were
published at a time when these matters [variations in capitalization] were in

process of becoming standardized, but there was still considerable latitude.
McKerrow has pointed out how different, in the matter of capitalization, is
Rowe’s text of Shakespeare, printed in 1709, from that of Pope, published just
sixteen years later: “In one respect Rowe’s text appears to-day more old-fashioned
than the Fourth Folio, for he, or his printer, introduced the practice common in
his time of capitalizing almost all nouns. Pope’s text, on the other hand, though
printed from Rowe’s, has hardly more capitals than a modern edition.”46
Not long after Bond’s remarks, Geoffrey Tillotson, one of the editors of the
Twickenham edition of Pope’s works, suggested that “at least in some instances
there was method in what appears haphazard. The subject is of course enormous,
and all that I can claim with confidence is that where Pope and his printers were
concerned there was on some occasions, and perhaps on all, something like
method and even rigorous method, determined by format.” Tillotson concluded his
45 Bronson, “Printing as an Index of Taste,” in his Facets of the Enlightenment, 339–40. It is import-
ant to remember just how pioneering an essay this is, displaying an impressive understanding of both
literary issues and the many factors that affect the appearance of the printed page.
46 Bond, “The Text of the Spectator,” 122. Bond quotes Ronald W. McKerrow, The Treatment of
Shakespeare’s Text, 32.
note by stating that it “would require the length of a book to present an adequately
full account of the facts for even the first quarter of the eighteenth century.”47
In the case of a poet such as Collins, with his heavy investment in allegorical
personification, these changes in typographical presentation produce a radical dif-
ference in the visual texture of his poetry as well as the dilemma of distinguishing
between what is figurative and what is literal in his verse. The decision that

Charles Ryskamp and I faced over forty years ago was therefore a difficult one
indeed. If we chose the later text as our copy, we would both impose a form of
Greg’s “tyranny of the copy-text” by allowing the choice of substantives to rule the
accidentals and we would ignore the careful distinctions established within the
printing houses of the early 1740s, when Collins was most active as a publishing
poet. If, on the other hand, we returned to the presentation of accidentals in the
1742 edition, we would not have been able to suggest—at least not in the text of
the poem itself—the major departures in stylistic presentation occurring within
the author’s own lifetime. We finally decided to retain the accidentals of the
Persian Eclogues in our eclectic, “amalgamated” text, and to address the editorial
dilemma in the textual commentary. But this fundamental change in printing
practice has continued to haunt me. Why did such a radical transformation take
place? Who was responsible for it? How, precisely, did it unfold?
We know that writers and printers had already experimented with the stylistic
presentation of their works for at least two hundred years. In the unpublished
final chapter of his Lyell Lectures devoted to Pope and the eighteenth-century
book trade, David Foxon noted that Ben Jonson abandoned the free use of cap-
itals in preparing his folio Workes for publication in 1616. Jonson reserved final
polishing for the fine-paper folio copies of his play Every Man out of his Humour
while also taking a further step towards what Foxon calls “the classical tradition”
by printing the names of the characters in his plays in caps and small caps—not
just in the scene headings and speech prefixes, but in the text itself.48 John Ogilby
(or his printer), on the other hand, adopted a typographical style later in the cen-
tury that was abundantly capitalized, and Abraham Cowley (or his printer)
invested equally heavily in italics (238–40). Perhaps the most systematic of
authors, moreover, was Edward Benlowes, whose Theophila of 1652 capitalizes
every noun (as well as every pronoun relating to God, angels, or the soul), gener-
ously italicizes words for emphasis, and for even greater stress prints some words
in caps and small caps, with the deity always printed in full capitals (235). The
result is a textual page filled with the intricacies of hierarchical differentiation.
47 Tillotson, “Eighteenth-Century Capitalization,” 269–70.

48 Foxon, “Poets and Compositors,” 228–9. Copies of this lecture are deposited in several major
libraries, including the British Library. I am grateful to David Vander Muelen for providing me with a
copy and thereby drawing my attention to this text, which is in many ways a rough draft whose quota-
tions and conclusions need to be verified.
The Great Divide 23
We discover a similar concern with “the visual language of typography” in what

D. F. McKenzie has characterized as “a new and intimate form of teamwork
between author or editor, bookseller and printer” at the turn of the eighteenth
century.49 In revising and reprinting his Restoration plays for a new, collected edi-
tion in 1710, William Congreve collaborated with the publisher Jacob Tonson
and the printer John Watts to produce classicized texts that attempt to bridge “the

gap between the fleeting image on a stage and the printed words on a page”
(233–34). Congreve and Tonson did so by carefully choosing caps and small caps
for headlines and character groupings and by introducing headpieces and other
printers’ devices to separate act from act and scene from scene—an innovation
that enunciated the scenic design of the plays for the first time in print and thereby
repudiated the normal presentation of dramatic texts throughout the seventeenth
century. In his plays as well as in his novel Incognita, McKenzie argues, Congreve
was intent on making reading “a dramatic experience” (233). Tonson and Congreve
did not abandon the capital, however; they simply learned to modulate it.
The distance between the 1710 edition of Congreve’s works and the early col-
lected editions of Pope is fairly short—only seven years—and David Foxon has
demonstrated, at great length and in painstaking detail, that Pope revised the
accidentals of his work “at least as thoroughly as he revised the words of his
text.”50 Pope’s pioneering abandonment of capitals began in his collected Works of
1717 and continued in his miscellaneous Poems on Several Occasions of the same
year, in which he imposed this new convention on his fellow contributors. Proof-
sheets for the first two volumes of Pope’s Iliad unmistakably show us, moreover,
that it was the poet rather than his printer, William Bowyer, who was responsible
for this usage, for we not only have the evidence of Pope’s own hand on the proof-
sheets but also the testimony of Bowyer’s other publications of this period, which
all follow the traditional style. By the time the Dunciad Variorum was published
in 1729, Pope had begun to abandon the use of italics as well, and the so-called
“death-bed” editions of 1743–44 show the entire range of his editorial activity:
“first the abandonment of profuse italic, then of initial capitals for common
nouns, and finally the abandonment of italic for proper nouns” (179). In Foxon’s
view, only John Gay was as bold a typographical revolutionary during the first
half of the eighteenth century.
It is worthwhile rehearsing the example of Pope in some detail because of the
prominence and prestige of his published work and because of the obvious care
he devoted to the presentation of his poetry on the printed page. But Pope is
interesting for two other reasons as well. In the first place, Foxon shows that,
49 McKenzie, Making Meaning, 227.

50 Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 153. Percy Simpson had earlier
addressed some of these issues in Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, 99–104.
despite Pope’s insistence on these pervasive changes in typographical convention

between 1717 and his death in 1744, Pope never followed this system in his own
manuscripts (186 and passim). Pope’s holographs clearly show that he continued
to write his poetry—and even revise it in fair copies—according to the traditional
conventions; only in his proof-sheets and the revised copies of his early editions
do we see him actively changing the style of his accidentals. This suggests not only

that his manuscripts should not automatically be drawn upon as copy-text by
modern editors, but also that Pope, like writers later in the century, created his
work in the old style even as he realized that it would eventually be published in
the new. Old habits seem to die hard, even for inveterate innovators.51
The second point to emphasize about Pope’s practice is the fact that, like Ben
Jonson before him, he distinguished between different editions or formats of his
works. The evidence of most of his publications after 1717 indicates that he wished
to classicize his verse, even though this practice was in direct conflict with his con-
tinuing temptation to use italics to make a point or to mark an antithesis. Foxon
concludes that Pope consciously decided to employ italics in his trade editions—
whether they were original folio publications of his poems or the collected works
in octavo—whereas he avoided italics as far as possible in the large formats
intended for a “select circle” (196). Perhaps Pope felt, Foxon speculates, “that
the vulgar needed help in reading his work correctly, or at least that they should
have italics for proper names as they would expect; and if these italics, why not
others?”52
Given the powerful force of Pope’s example, it might seem both natural and
inevitable that English publications moved in the direction of Bronson’s “Great
Divide” sometime around 1750, if not before. My own research indicates, how-
ever, that this transformation did not take place as early, consistently, or com-
pletely as Bronson suggests. We need to consider, in the first place, the unusual
nature of Pope’s role. Pope was a shrewd businessman and a master manipulator
as well as a painstaking editor. His influence over Bowyer and his later printer,
John Wright, was extraordinary, and it should not be assumed that many other
writers of the time could lay claim to equal control of the printed word, although
there are interesting exceptions such as the two Richardsons, Jonathan and
Samuel.53 Printing conventions, including the presentation of capitals and italics,
51 It is also worth pointing out that many printers during this period lived for a very long time, and
the habits inculcated in their training may have been difficult to modify later in their careers.
52 Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 196. It is curious that Foxon never
draws upon the observations made by Tillotson in “Eighteenth-Century Capitalization” for Tillotson,
in addition to focusing the discussion of capitalization on Pope, also speculated on the importance of
the aesthetics of the page from the poet’s point of view: as to “the reasons for it—perhaps it was felt
that whereas the bigger page of folio and quarto had an obvious, indeed a Roman, dignity, the page of
octavo needed all the help it could get” (269).
53 See, for instance, Wendorf, The Elements of Life, 136–50, for Jonathan Richardson, and Chapter 2
of this book for Samuel.
The Great Divide 25
firmly fell within the purview of the trade during this period—compositors,
correctors, printers, and booksellers—and the power of the booksellers as pub-
lishers only increased during the middle years of the century.54
Pope was primarily a poet, of course, but poetry, important as it was, repre-
sented a relatively small percentage of the output of the London press during this
period.55 The English reader was assaulted by a wide array of genres ranging from

sermons and religious texts to historical works, political tracts, reference books,
and the suddenly flourishing novel of the 1740s. Many booksellers and printers
specialized in particular genres or subjects, and there is no reason to believe that
they were unduly influenced by the rarified world of Augustan verse. And there
was also, as Foxon’s speculation about popular and refined editions suggests, sig-
nificant variety within the reading public itself. If Pope himself sensed a need for
retaining italicized pointing within the trade editions of his own poetry—editions
that presumably fell into the hands of most of his readers—we can begin to gauge
how sophisticated indeed the members of his more select circle probably were.
Pope’s innovations, in other words, were not directed at his entire reading public,
let alone at those readers whose normal choice of text was a sermon, newspaper,
or political tract. If we are to reach firm conclusions about how this transform-
ation in printing conventions took place, we shall have to survey both a large
number of imprints and a broad variety of genres, extending far beyond what we
normally consider to be literary publications.
Mapping the Great Divide
The figures that follow are based on an examination of over 1600 books printed
in London between 1740 and 1780, calculated every five years. The database that
I have constructed records the salient characteristics of each publication:
• the author (when he or she can be identified)

• a short title for the book
• the book’s genre
• the book’s format
• the number of volumes in the edition (if more than one)
54 For the relative autonomy of the printer, see Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 40–3
and 339 (where n. 6 refers to changes in printing practices in the mid-eighteenth century). For a dis-
cussion of the book trade, see Terry Belanger, “Publishers and writers in eighteenth-century England,”
and John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 477.
55 John Feather, “British Publishing in the Eighteenth Century,” reports that literature represented
about 20 percent of all titles and that poetry represented 47 percent of all literary titles, or roughly 10
percent of the entire market. Michael Suarez’s calculations are similar: belles-lettres and classics are
never more than 20 percent, beginning and ending the century at 11 percent, and with poetry repre-
senting 4.5 percent to 10.5 percent; see “Towards a bibliometric analysis,” 48.
• the publisher/bookseller
• the printer (if known)
• printing style: old, new, or a combination of the two (mixed).
I have attempted to be fairly specific about the genre of each publication, for
categorization of this sort will be helpful as I comment on the relative progression

in presentational style from one genre to another. The books I have examined
should be varied enough to be representative of the genres published in the mid-
dle decades of the century in London: poetry, novels, plays, and classical texts;
history, biography, and criticism; science and medicine; Bibles, sermons, religious
tracts, and hymns; political tracts, satires, and dialogues; travel and geography;
news, reports, and education; legal works and miscellanies. Many of these publi-
cations could quite easily be classified within a number of different genres; I have
chosen what I consider to be the most salient descriptor.
My research indicates that this general transformation of printing conventions
took much longer to complete than Bronson had realized or the revelations of
Foxon’s study of Pope might suggest. It is even difficult to define the word “complete,”
given the fact that English books are filled with inconsistencies and exceptions
throughout the century. At what point do we decide that such a change is statistically
persuasive? And what do we make of the fact that a change in one convention—
the abandonment of capitals for all substantive nouns, for example—could trigger
a countervailing change in the opposite direction: the italicization of common
nouns, for instance, or the placement of personified words in caps and small
caps? For an example of this modulation, we need to look no further than
the opening lines of Collins’s Oriental Eclogues, in which the italicized “Selim”
of the 1742 edition now appears as “Selim”; only “sacred Truth” retains its
original appearance.
By characterizing a book’s typographical conventions as “OS” (old style), I have
determined that common nouns are much more likely to be capitalized than not.
This pervasive capitalization may often be accompanied by a liberal use of italics
and caps and small caps as well, but in preparing a statistical summary it has been
necessary to focus on one specific and reasonably recognizable feature. In deter-
mining whether a text has been printed in the old style or the new (“NS”), I have
taken a particularly close look at those texts that combine these two forms of
presentation in what might paradoxically be called a clear pattern of inconsistency.
This third category (“MIXED”) usually denotes one of two situations: either the
text is frequently but not consistently capitalized or italicized, or, in other cases,
parts of the text are predominantly printed in one style whereas other parts are
printed in another.56 An interesting example of this mixed style occurs in David
56 A few caveats should be provided here. Judgment calls sometimes have had to be made, espe-
cially within religious texts that include excessive italicization of scripture, which is then often applied
The Great Divide 27
Figure 1.6 David Mallet, Verses on the Death of Lady Anson (1760).
to other words as well. The format of each book has not been analytically determined, but I feel confi-
dent that the characterizations of the books examined are accurate and that the conclusions I have
drawn about formats in the Coda to the first half of this book are correct. Reprints are not included.
The database for Colonial and early American imprints is identical in its structure and adds several
hundred more items to the total of those examined—as do the surveys of French, Italian, and Spanish
imprints introduced later in this book, and the survey of books printed between 1520 and 1680. I have
also looked at over 700 Irish imprints. The total number of books examined is more than 4000.
Mallet’s Verses on the Death of Lady Anson (1760), which combines capitals,
italics, and caps and small caps to adorn proper, allegorical, and even several
common nouns—and yet prints most of Mallet’s common nouns in the new
style (Figure 1.6). This third category is obviously not rigorously defined, but it is
an important one, as I shall demonstrate.
Here, in Table 1.1, we can trace the movement, in percentages, from the old

style to the new in books printed in London between 1740 and 1780. The sample
for each year far exceeds what is necessary for a statistically accurate survey for
this forty-year period.
Table 1.1 Old style and new style in London imprints, 1740–1780
Year OS % NS % MIXED NS + MIXED %
1740 91 9 0 9
1745 90 6 4 10
1750 77 13 10 23
1755 66 26 8 34
1760 50 40 10 50
1765 34 42 24 66
1770 22 62 16 78
1775 18 74 8 82
1780 7 93 0 93
In 1740 only 9 percent of the books in my sample were printed in the new style,
whereas by 1780 that figure had swelled to 93 percent, almost an exact mirror-image
of the state of affairs forty years earlier. The tipping point, as we can see, had been
reached by 1765, when the number of new-style imprints finally outstripped
those in the old style by 42 percent to 34 percent. This, then, is the central date—1765
or possibly a year or two earlier—and I wish to note three phenomena associated
with the figures at this point. The first is that the new-style imprints did not yet enjoy
an outright majority. Twenty-four percent of the books published in 1765 were still
in that mixed category of old style and new, which is by far the largest percentage to
be found at any five-year interval. This figure strongly suggests the amount of flux to
be found in London’s printing houses during this period: flux surely generated by the
perception that more and more books were being printed in a new style, which
presumably led, in turn, to either confusion or inconsistency—or both.57 This
57 My statistics agree with N. E. Osselton’s short survey in “Spelling-Book Rules,” where he notes
the dramatic decrease of heavily capitalized texts in the second half of the century. Although his sam-
ple of fifty books over fifteen decades is not statistically valid, it is interesting that the books he exam-
ined produced a similar pattern. He notes, moreover, that “running across this word-class system [of
nouns] is an awareness of sentence-rhythm, syntactical parallelism, semantic weight, and of special
emphases dictated by context” and he argues for distinctions among different classes of nouns over
time (49–56). He concludes by stating that writers wanted more precision, elegance, and expressive-
ness of language (59). See also Manfred Görlach, Eighteenth-Century English, 80–1. In his Introduction
to Early Modern English, 49, Görlach focuses on capitalization in Shakespeare’s texts. He concludes
The Great Divide 29
appears to be a case of what McKenzie, in another context, has called “the normality
of non-uniformity.”58
The second phenomenon to consider is the dramatic increase in the percentage
of books published in the new style between 1765 and 1770, from 42 percent to
62 percent. As the figures in Table 1.1 show, this increase was fueled both by a sharp
decline in the number of books printed in the old style and by a similar decrease in

the number of books printed in an inconsistent style, thus reinforcing our sense that
a decisive divide had indeed been crossed. Finally, it is instructive to compare the
acceleration of books published in the new style in the five-year increments before
and after 1765. It only took a 2 percent increase in the number of books presented
in this style between 1760 and 1765 to produce the first (partial) majority in this
category. In the preceding fifteen years (from 1745 to 1760), the accumulated move-
ment in this direction totaled 34 percent, whereas in the fifteen-year period from
1765 to 1780 this figure increased to 51 percent, a clear sign that the new style, once
firmly established, quickly found acceptance throughout the printing trades.
This analysis can be augmented, moreover, by creating a graph that charts the
movement from the old style to the new by employing logistic regression
(Figure 1.7).59
New
Old/New
Old
1740 1750 1760 1770 1780
Figure 1.7 Logistic Regression of Old Style and New Style in London Imprints,
1740–1780 (Dr. Mark Chonofsky).
In this model the proportion of new-style books begins at 0 and finishes at 1. The
circles are proportional to the number of books in each category, although books
in the mixed category are removed from the determination of the progress from
the old style to the new. This model assumes that all books were old style at the
starting point and that they were eventually all printed in the new style, and it also
assumes that the rate of change from one style to the other varies smoothly and
evenly on both sides of the transition point. Using logistic regression, which
that the period between 1660 and 1750 marked the “heyday” of rampant capitalization, a topic that I
turn to in the final section of Chapter 3.
58 McKenzie, “Printers of the Mind,” 23.
59 I thank Mark Chonofsky, formerly of Exeter College, Oxford, for providing this logistic regres-
sion analysis.
focuses purely on books that were clearly printed in one of the two styles, the
transition point emerges as 1762.3 (that is, March 1762) with a margin of error of
+/−0.5 percent. In this modeling, in other words, the tipping point is no later than
1763. I shall continue to cite 1765 as the transition point, however, because it
incorporates the entire sample of books printed during these decades and charts
the movement towards the new style that is reflected in books printed in a mixed

fashion, which is a phenomenon that was quite rare at the beginning of this period.
In the following chapter, I turn to the various genres in which these changes
occurred, not necessarily (of course) at the same time nor with the same rapidity.
Before doing so, however, I wish to draw two conclusions, the first of which is that
Bronson’s great divide—which I have entertained as a helpful metaphor through-
out this chapter—never actually existed. The history of printing conventions in
the eighteenth century is much more complex and much more varied than such a
formula (no matter how appealing) can actually capture. We can establish a turn-
ing point that was also a tipping point, but this transformational process was so
gradual that the metaphor of a great divide is somewhat misleading.
Second, it is useful to keep in mind that the date of this turning point, 1765,
occurred several decades before the outbreak of the revolutionary forces that led
William Hazlitt, albeit in a mock-heroic manner, to speculate on the relationship
between the decapitation of letters and the decapitation of French monarchs and
aristocrats. In his lectures on the English poets, Hazlitt argued in 1818 that
Wordsworth’s school of poetry “had its origin in the French revolution, or rather
in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution.” The figures of
poetry—tropes, allegories, personifications, and “the whole heathen mythology” –
were instantly discarded. “Capital letters were no more allowed in print, than
letters-patent of nobility were permitted in real life.”60 The goal, he concludes, was
to reduce all things to an absolute level. This is clever, of course, and essentially
fanciful. Wordsworth and Coleridge inherited a system of printing conventions
that had largely been standardized by the time they published their Lyrical Ballads
in 1798. Typographical elements could be employed for polemical purposes, as
when Thomas Paine modulated from italics to capitals in The Rights of Man
(1791) in describing how the French Constitution had exalted “the peer” into “the
MAN” (70). But typographical manipulation had always been used for these
purposes—as it still is today. The conventions of the new style are certainly less
hierarchical than those of the old, but we should be wary of drawing crude political
conclusions. In the second half of this book, I shall look carefully at a variety of
social factors that accompanied these changes—and I shall also examine the ways
in which we make historical sense of these correlative forces.
60 The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 5:161–2.

2
Literary Texts and Collections

To Statesmen wou’d you give a Wipe,
You print it in Italick Type.
When Letters are in vulgar Shapes,
’Tis ten to one the Wit escapes;
But when in C A P I T A L S exprest,
The dullest Reader smoaks the Jest.
(Jonathan Swift, “On Poetry: A Rhapsody”)
Poetry
More than any other literary genre (including drama), poetry places the visual
attention of printers and readers on the presentation of the written word. Poetry
is relatively sparse in its appearance on the printed page. It is not justified on the
right-hand margin nor does it generally run on to the following line during this
period. The interplay between print and the increased amount of white space on
each page helps to define the poetical form each text will take and assists the reader
in understanding the poem’s internal structure. Indentation, the spacing of verse
paragraphs, the inclusion of historiated capital letters and printers’ devices: each
element of a page of poetical text is more isolated—and therefore more visually
significant—than in most other forms of printing. Thus the introduction of italics
and capital letters is likely to receive more scrutiny in poetry than in other literary
genres. As a consequence, we might expect the presentation of poetical texts to
lead the way in the gradual abandonment of the capital in the middle decades of the
eighteenth century. And this is precisely the case, as the following summary dem-
onstrates (Table 2.1; percentages for all books examined are in parentheses).
In five of the seven yearly counts, poetical texts exceeded the composite average
in the column that includes both the new style and mixed presentation: in 1745,
25 percent vs. 10 percent; in 1755, 59 percent vs. 34 percent; in 1760, a remarkable
93 percent vs. 50 percent; in 1765, 73 percent vs. 66 percent; and in 1770, 88 per-
cent vs. 78 percent.1 Poetical texts therefore clearly moved towards the new style
of printing conventions ahead of the larger composite that includes plays, novels,
1 Variations in the use of capitals did not end during this period, of course; for an analysis of
Byron’s Don Juan and John Hunt’s editing practices in 1823, see Gary Dyer, “What is a First Edition?”
Printing History and Cultural Change: Fashioning the Modern English Text in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Richard Wendorf,
Oxford University Press. © Richard Wendorf 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898135.003.0002
Table 2.1 Old style and new style in London poetical

imprints, 1745–1775
Year OS% NS% MIXED% NS + MIXED%
1745 75 (90) 18 (6) 7 (4) 25 (10)

1750 80 (77) 8 (13) 12 (10) 20 (23)

1755 41 (66) 32 (26) 27 (8) 59 (34)
1760 29 (50) 64 (40) 7 (10) 93 (50)
1765 27 (34) 37 (42) 36 (24) 73 (66)
1770 12 (22) 71 (62) 17 (16) 88 (78)
1775 30 (18) 60 (74) 10 (8) 70 (82)
and a wide variety of other works in prose.2 Only one other genre—sermons and
religious tracts—has a similar percentage of works in the new style or in the cat-
egory of new and mixed styles this early, as we shall see in the following chapter.
I have already charted the changes in the presentation of William Collins’s
poetry in my introductory chapter, and I will return to Collins and also examine
Samuel Johnson’s poetry when I turn to a discussion of editing eighteenth-century
texts in Chapter 6. The poetry of Alexander Pope has, in David Foxon’s hands,
been one of the points of origin for this study, and I return to Pope’s poetry in the
next section. Before I do, however, I want to explore how two other major poets,
James Thomson and Thomas Gray, approached the question of capitalization in
their manuscripts and in their printed texts.
Like Collins and Pope, Thomson (1700–48) wrote and published his work
before changes in printing conventions began to be generally accepted by both
authors and printers. The publishing history of The Seasons nonetheless reveals
that these changes entered his texts at a fairly early stage, even though it remains a
complicated and even confusing history, with no evidence to prove that Thomson
himself was involved in this transition from the old style to the new. The evolution of
the texts of The Seasons—four poems, often conjoined with others, printed separately
as well as together throughout the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s—has been examined in
detail by Thomson’s most recent editor, James Sambrook. Winter first appeared
in 1726. In a letter to a friend, Thomson writes, with very little capitalization of
common nouns, about the poem he is composing and includes these opening lines:
I sing of winter and his gelid reign;

Nor let a riming insect of the spring
Deem it a barren theme. to me tis full
2 It is possible to augment my statistical analysis by examining the sampling of poetical manuscripts in

P. J. Croft’s Autograph Poetry in the English Language, vol. 1. From William Herbert (d. 1333?) to Sidney
and Fulke Greville, all of the texts are in the old style. Donne’s verse letter is then an exception, as is a
poem by Jonson (although it is mixed), but Herrick, Herbert, Carew, Shirley, Waller, Milton, Dryden,
and Prior all write in the old style. In the new style we find, earlier than expected, Samuel Butler,
Cowley, and Traherne, followed as we would expect by Swift, Gay, Pope, Johnson, Gray, and Collins.
Literary Texts and Collections 33
Of manly charms; to me, who court the shade

Whom the gay seasons suit not, and who shun
The glare of summer. Welcom! kindred Glooms
Drear awfull wintry horrors, welcome all, &c.3
When the poem was published later that year, the opening lines had been heavily

revised and the presentation of the text was completely in the old style:
SEE! Winter comes, to rule the varied Year,

Sullen, and sad; with all his rising Train,
Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms: Be these my Theme,
These, that exalt the Soul to solemn Thought,
And heavenly Musing. Welcome kindred Glooms!4
Summer, also printed in the old style, appeared in 1727, and Thomson’s letters
describing his poem also include significant capitalization. Spring followed suit in
1729. By this time Thomson was already hard at work on Autumn and on revising
the first three poems, all of which were published in quarto format as The Seasons
in 1730. When this volume appeared, however, it was printed in the new style:
capitalization of common nouns almost entirely disappeared and caps and small
caps replaced italics for proper names and emphasized words. Sambrook thinks
that Pope may have suggested these changes to Thomson (whom he knew well),
for they were certainly not consistent with the practice of Samuel Richardson, in
whose shop the volume was printed and who employed the old style when he
published other works by Thomson in the late 1720s and early 1730s (xlviii).
The individual poems were then issued in pamphlet form in 1730 and 1734–35,
taking the presentation of the 1730 quarto text as their guide; but when an octavo
edition of the complete poem appeared later in 1730 (or possibly in 1731), the
presentation of the text was reversed once again. Later, when Thomson’s complete
poem appeared in his Works of 1738, the printer appears to have taken his copy
from the pamphlets while attempting, at the same time, to normalize capitaliza-
tion and italics according to the old style—but not consistently. The final editions
during Thomson’s lifetime appeared in 1744, 1745, and 1746, and they continue to
reveal the author’s interest in revising his text. Sambrook therefore chose the final
lifetime edition for his own copy-text.
What hand did Thomson play in this constant and sometimes inconsistent
revision of the style of presentation in which The Seasons appeared in edition
after edition? None of his manuscripts has survived, but an interleaved copy of an
edition that he heavily revised in 1743–44 has led Sambrook to observe that
3 James Thomson (1700–1748): Letters and Documents, 16–17.

4 The Seasons, 260. I am indebted to Sambrook’s lengthy introduction.
Thomson paid at least “sporadic attentiveness to accidentals” at the time and that his
earlier attentiveness may be inferred (lxxx).5 But attentiveness is not the same as
consistency in Thomson’s case. Although it may be possible that Thomson simply
acquiesced in the accepted house style of various printers following the presenta-
tion of The Seasons as a quarto in the new style in 1730, Sambrook points out that
his changing habits in the revised printed texts during 1726 and 1730 correspond to

changing habits in his holograph letters during this period as well—and that he
reverted to the capitalization of common nouns in his letters beginning at least in
1735 (lxxxvi). Thomson also began to pay much closer attention to his punctuation
during the late 1720s, introducing an increasingly frequent use of commas in his
personal letters. “In the long process of revising copy and proof,” Sambrook con-
cludes, “Thomson probably took at different times differing views, or followed vary-
ing whims, concerning which common nouns required emphasis” (lxxxix).
The sequence of styles in Thomson’s letters is indeed unusual. We have seen
that he wrote out the early lines of Winter in a letter in the new style in 1726. By
the late 1720s his letters show a mixed style, and from 1735 until his death in 1748
he was consistently reverting to the older style of presentation. The poetical text
of 1726 can be usefully compared, for instance, to the draft of a poem he sent
within a letter of 1745 to Elizabeth Young, whom he was unsuccessfully attempt-
ing to woo:
Hail to the Day! hail to the smiling Skies!

That first unseal’d my lov’d Amanda’s Eyes.
Blest Day! thou still my Annual Voice shalt hear,
Thou joyous Leader of the brightening Year! (175)
Thomson’s case is unusual, although perhaps no more complicated than we would

expect to find in the work of a poet writing between 1725 and 1745. To review the
changes in his style: his early letters are free of capitalization, including the draft
of Winter contained within one of them. That poem was then printed in the old
style, although later editions of Winter and the other parts of The Seasons were
cast in the new. Subsequent editions reverted to the old style, as did Thomson in
his own letters—and in the poem of 1745 that he addressed to Elizabeth Young.
Thomson may not have been responsible for the abandonment of the capital in
some of the printed editions of his poems, but he was surely responsible for the
change in his own style of presentation within letters to his friends.
As we shall see in Chapter 5, Thomas Gray also changed the style of capitaliza-
tion in his letters over several decades, although in his case this change occurred
later in the century and the evolution was finally towards the new style without
5 See also Robert Inglesfield, “The British Library Revisions to Thomson’s The Seasons.”
Literary Texts and Collections 35
reversion to the old. In his early letters, moreover, he embraced the new style as
well as the old, often displaying inconsistency within a short period or in letters to
the same correspondent (to Horace Walpole, for example). In addition to poems
copied into his correspondence, we also have ample opportunity to chart Gray’s
course of presentation in his commonplace book and in surviving autograph cop-
ies of individual poems. Notoriously loathe to be seen as a “publishing” author,

Gray did allow his work to be printed during his lifetime, ranging from Dodsley’s
anonymous publication of the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in 1751
to Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray in 1753 and Dodsley’s
edition of Poems by Mr. Gray in 1768. Dodsley also included poems by Gray in
various editions of his Collection of Poems by Several Hands, which I examine
in Chapter 6.
Gray’s commonplace book at Pembroke College, Cambridge, provides a
detailed and continuous view of his private practice during its first thousand
pages. It is an extraordinary document for several reasons, not least for reflecting
the broad spectrum of Gray’s antiquarian interests, ranging from ancient history
to British cathedrals and aristocratic genealogies. Embedded within these extracts
are a handful of his own poems, usually with a note indicating the date when they
were written. We need to remind ourselves that this document is neither a diary
nor a series of letters—both of which normally follow a simple chronology—but
rather an archive into which Gray inserted his work at various times. Many of his
poems were clearly entered at the same time even though they bear different dates
(the major cluster appears in pages 278–85). Here, for instance, are the opening
lines of his sonnet on the death of his close friend Richard West, composed in
1742 but only published posthumously, by William Mason, in 1775:
In vain to me the smileing Mornings shine,

And redning Phoebus lifts his golden Fire:
The Birds in vain their amorous Descant joyn;
Or chearful Fields resume their green Attire:
These Ears, alas! For other Notes repine,
A different Object do these Eyes require. (284)
The “Ode to Adversity,” later published as a “hymn,” is also dated 1742 and written
out in the old style in Gray’s small and meticulous hand (284–85). Also dated
1742 is the poem now generally known as the Eton College ode, although it is
recorded here as “Ode on a distant Prospect of Windsor, & the adjacent Country”
(278–79, 284). It also appears in the old style: “Ye distant Spires, ye antique
Towers.” “Noon-Tide, An Ode,” which we know as the “Ode to Spring,” follows the
same pattern—“Still is the toiling Hand of Care” (275, 278)—as does “A Long
Story,” dated 1750 and entered much later in the book (651–52). “On the Death of
Selina, a favourite Cat, who fell into a China-Tub with gold-fishes in it, & was
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instant three of them drove by in rapid, provoking, orderly
succession, as if they would devour the ground before them. Here
again I seemed in the contradictory situation of the man in Dryden
who exclaims,
‘I follow Fate, which does too hard pursue!’
If I had stopped to inquire at the White Horse Cellar, which would

not have taken me a minute, I should now have been driving down
the road in all the dignified unconcern and ideal perfection of
mechanical conveyance. The Bath mail I had set my mind upon, and
I had missed it, as I missed every thing else, by my own absurdity, in
putting the will for the deed, and aiming at ends without employing
means. ‘Sir,’ said he of the Brentford, ‘the Bath mail will be up
presently, my brother-in-law drives it, and I will engage to stop him
if there is a place empty.’ I almost doubted my good genius; but, sure
enough, up it drove like lightning, and stopped directly at the call of
the Brentford Jehu. I would not have believed this possible, but the
brother-in-law of a mail-coach driver is himself no mean man. I was
transferred without loss of time from the top of one coach to that of
the other, desired the guard to pay my fare to the Brentford
coachman for me as I had no change, was accommodated with a
great coat, put up my umbrella to keep off a drizzling mist, and we
began to cut through the air like an arrow. The milestones
disappeared one after another, the rain kept off; Tom Turtle, the
trainer, sat before me on the coach-box, with whom I exchanged
civilities as a gentleman going to the fight; the passion that had
transported me an hour before was subdued to pensive regret and
conjectural musing on the next day’s battle; I was promised a place
inside at Reading, and upon the whole, I thought myself a lucky
fellow. Such is the force of imagination! On the outside of any other
coach on the 10th of December, with a Scotch mist drizzling through
the cloudy moonlight air, I should have been cold, comfortless,
impatient, and, no doubt, wet through; but seated on the Royal mail,
I felt warm and comfortable, the air did me good, the ride did me
good, I was pleased with the progress we had made, and confident
that all would go well through the journey. When I got inside at
Reading, I found Turtle and a stout valetudinarian, whose costume
bespoke him one of the Fancy, and who had risen from a three
months’ sick bed to get into the mail to see the fight. They were
intimate, and we fell into a lively discourse. My friend the trainer was
confined in his topics to fighting dogs and men, to bears and
badgers; beyond this he was ‘quite chap-fallen,’ had not a word to
throw at a dog, or indeed very wisely fell asleep, when any other
game was started. The whole art of training (I, however, learnt from
him,) consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence and
exercise, repeated alternately and without end. A yolk of an egg with
a spoonful of rum in it is the first thing in a morning, and then a walk
of six miles till breakfast. This meal consists of a plentiful supply of
tea and toast and beef-steaks. Then another six or seven miles till
dinner-time, and another supply of solid beef or mutton with a pint
of porter, and perhaps, at the utmost, a couple of glasses of sherry.
Martin trains on water, but this increases his infirmity on another
very dangerous side. The Gas-man takes now and then a chirping
glass (under the rose) to console him, during a six weeks’ probation,
for the absence of Mrs. Hickman—an agreeable woman, with (I
understand) a pretty fortune of two hundred pounds. How matter
presses on me! What stubborn things are facts! How inexhaustible is
nature and art! ‘It is well,’ as I once heard Mr. Richmond observe, ‘to
see a variety.’ He was speaking of cock-fighting as an edifying
spectacle. I cannot deny but that one learns more of what is (I do not
say of what ought to be) in this desultory mode of practical study,
than from reading the same book twice over, even though it should
be a moral treatise. Where was I? I was sitting at dinner with the
candidate for the honours of the ring, ‘where good digestion waits on
appetite, and health on both.’ Then follows an hour of social chat and
native glee; and afterwards, to another breathing over heathy hill or
dale. Back to supper, and then to bed, and up by six again—Our hero
‘Follows so the ever-running sun
With profitable ardour‘—
to the day that brings him victory or defeat in the green fairy circle. Is
not this life more sweet than mine? I was going to say; but I will not
libel any life by comparing it to mine, which is (at the date of these
presents) bitter as coloquintida and the dregs of aconitum!
The invalid in the Bath mail soared a pitch above the trainer, and
did not sleep so sound, because he had ‘more figures and more
fantasies.’ We talked the hours away merrily. He had faith in surgery,
for he had had three ribs set right, that had been broken in a turn-up
at Belcher’s, but thought physicians old women, for they had no
antidote in their catalogue for brandy. An indigestion is an excellent
common-place for two people that never met before. By way of
ingratiating myself, I told him the story of my doctor, who, on my
earnestly representing to him that I thought his regimen had done
me harm, assured me that the whole pharmacopœia contained
nothing comparable to the prescription he had given me; and, as a
proof of its undoubted efficacy, said, that, ‘he had had one gentleman
with my complaint under his hands for the last fifteen years.’ This
anecdote made my companion shake the rough sides of his three
great coats with boisterous laughter; and Turtle, starting out of his
sleep, swore he knew how the fight would go, for he had had a dream
about it. Sure enough the rascal told us how the three first rounds
went off, but ‘his dream,’ like others, ‘denoted a foregone conclusion.’
He knew his men. The moon now rose in silver state, and I ventured,
with some hesitation, to point out this object of placid beauty, with
the blue serene beyond, to the man of science, to which his ear he
‘seriously inclined,’ the more as it gave promise d’un beau jour for
the morrow, and showed the ring undrenched by envious showers,
arrayed in sunny smiles. Just then, all going on well, I thought on my
friend Toms, whom I had left behind, and said innocently, ‘There
was a blockhead of a fellow I left in town, who said there was no
possibility of getting down by the mail, and talked of going by a
caravan from Belcher’s at two in the morning, after he had written
some letters.’ ‘Why,’ said he of the lapels, ‘I should not wonder if that
was the very person we saw running about like mad from one coach-
door to another, and asking if any one had seen a friend of his, a
gentlemen going to the fight, whom he had missed stupidly enough
by staying to write a note.’ ‘Pray, Sir,’ said my fellow-traveller, ‘had
he a plaid-cloak on?’—‘Why, no,’ said I, ‘not at the time I left him, but
he very well might afterwards, for he offered to lend me one.’ The
plaid-cloak and the letter decided the thing. Joe, sure enough, was in
the Bristol mail, which preceded us by about fifty yards. This was
droll enough. We had now but a few miles to our place of destination,
and the first thing I did on alighting at Newbury, both coaches
stopping at the same time, was to call out, ‘Pray, is there a gentleman
in that mail of the name of Toms?’ ‘No,’ said Joe, borrowing
something of the vein of Gilpin, ‘for I have just got out.’ ‘Well!’ says
he, ‘this is lucky; but you don’t know how vexed I was to miss you;
for,’ added he, lowering his voice, ‘do you know when I left you I
went to Belcher’s to ask about the caravan, and Mrs. Belcher said
very obligingly, she couldn’t tell about that, but there were two
gentlemen who had taken places by the mail and were gone on in a
landau, and she could frank us. It’s a pity I didn’t meet with you; we
could then have got down for nothing. But mum’s the word.’ It’s the
devil for any one to tell me a secret, for it’s sure to come out in print.
I do not care so much to gratify a friend, but the public ear is too
great a temptation to me.
Our present business was to get beds and a supper at an inn; but
this was no easy task. The public-houses were full, and where you
saw a light at a private house, and people poking their heads out of
the casement to see what was going on, they instantly put them in
and shut the window, the moment you seemed advancing with a
suspicious overture for accommodation. Our guard and coachman
thundered away at the outer gate of the Crown for some time without
effect—such was the greater noise within;—and when the doors were
unbarred, and we got admittance, we found a party assembled in the
kitchen round a good hospitable fire, some sleeping, others drinking,
others talking on politics and on the fight. A tall English yeoman
(something like Matthews in the face, and quite as great a wag)—
‘A lusty man to ben an abbot able,’—
was making such a prodigious noise about rent and taxes, and the
price of corn now and formerly, that he had prevented us from being
heard at the gate. The first thing I heard him say was to a shuffling
fellow who wanted to be off a bet for a shilling glass of brandy and
water—‘Confound it, man, don’t be insipid!’ Thinks I, that is a good
phrase. It was a good omen. He kept it up so all night, nor flinched
with the approach of morning. He was a fine fellow, with sense, wit,
and spirit, a hearty body and a joyous mind, free-spoken, frank,
convivial—one of that true English breed that went with Harry the
Fifth to the siege of Harfleur—‘standing like greyhounds in the slips,’
&c. We ordered tea and eggs (beds were soon found to be out of the
question) and this fellow’s conversation was sauce piquante. It did
one’s heart good to see him brandish his oaken towel and to hear him
talk. He made mince-meat of a drunken, stupid, red-faced,
quarrelsome, frowsy farmer, whose nose ‘he moralized into a
thousand similes,’ making it out a firebrand like Bardolph’s. ‘I’ll tell
you what my friend,’ says he, ‘the landlady has only to keep you here
to save fire and candle. If one was to touch your nose, it would go off
like a piece of charcoal.’ At this the other only grinned like an idiot,
the sole variety in his purple face being his little peering grey eyes
and yellow teeth; called for another glass, swore he would not stand
it; and after many attempts to provoke his humourous antagonist to
single combat, which the other turned off (after working him up to a
ludicrous pitch of choler) with great adroitness, he fell quietly asleep
with a glass of liquor in his hand, which he could not lift to his head.
His laughing persecutor made a speech over him, and turning to the
opposite side of the room, where they were all sleeping in the midst
of this ‘loud and furious fun,’ said, ‘There’s a scene, by G—d, for
Hogarth to paint. I think he and Shakspeare were our two best men
at copying life.’ This confirmed me in my good opinion of him.
Hogarth, Shakspeare, and Nature, were just enough for him (indeed
for any man) to know. I said, ‘You read Cobbett, don’t you? At least,’
says I, ‘you talk just as well as he writes.’ He seemed to doubt this.
But I said, ‘We have an hour to spare: if you’ll get pen, ink, and
paper, and keep on talking, I’ll write down what you say; and if it
doesn’t make a capital ‘Political Register,’ I’ll forfeit my head. You
have kept me alive to-night, however. I don’t know what I should
have done without you.’ He did not dislike this view of the thing, nor
my asking if he was not about the size of Jem Belcher; and told me
soon afterwards, in the confidence of friendship, that ‘the
circumstance which had given him nearly the greatest concern in his
life, was Cribb’s beating Jem after he had lost his eye by racket-
playing.’—The morning dawns; that dim but yet clear light appears,
which weighs like solid bars of metal on the sleepless eyelids; the
guests drop down from their chambers one by one—but it was too
late to think of going to bed now (the clock was on the stroke of
seven), we had nothing for it but to find a barber’s (the pole that
glittered in the morning sun lighted us to his shop), and then a nine
miles’ march to Hungerford. The day was fine, the sky was blue, the
mists were retiring from the marshy ground, the path was tolerably
dry, the sitting-up all night had not done us much harm—at least the
cause was good; we talked of this and that with amicable difference,
roving and sipping of many subjects, but still invariably we returned
to the fight. At length, a mile to the left of Hungerford, on a gentle
eminence, we saw the ring surrounded by covered carts, gigs, and
carriages, of which hundreds had passed us on the road; Toms gave a
youthful shout, and we hastened down a narrow lane to the scene of
action.
Reader, have you ever seen a fight? If not, you have a pleasure to
come, at least if it is a fight like that between the Gas-man and Bill
Neate. The crowd was very great when we arrived on the spot; open
carriages were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing,
and the country people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all
directions, to see their hero beat or be beaten. The odds were still on
Gas, but only about five to four. Gully had been down to try Neate,
and had backed him considerably, which was a damper to the
sanguine confidence of the adverse party. About two hundred
thousand pounds were pending. The Gas says, he has lost 3000l.
which were promised him by different gentlemen if he had won. He
had presumed too much on himself, which had made others presume
on him. This spirited and formidable young fellow seems to have
taken for his motto the old maxim, that ‘there are three things
necessary to success in life—Impudence! Impudence! Impudence!’ It
is so in matters of opinion, but not in the Fancy, which is the most
practical of all things, though even here confidence is half the battle,
but only half. Our friend had vapoured and swaggered too much, as if
he wanted to grin and bully his adversary out of the fight. ‘Alas! the
Bristol man was not so tamed!’—‘This is the grave-digger’ (would
Tom Hickman exclaim in the moments of intoxication from gin and
success, shewing his tremendous right hand), ‘this will send many of
them to their long homes; I haven’t done with them yet! ‘Why should
he—though he had licked four of the best men within the hour, yet
why should he threaten to inflict dishonourable chastisement on my
old master Richmond, a veteran going off the stage, and who has
borne his sable honours meekly? Magnanimity, my dear Tom, and
bravery, should be inseparable. Or why should he go up to his
antagonist, the first time he ever saw him at the Fives Court, and
measuring him from head to foot with a glance of contempt, as
Achilles surveyed Hector, say to him, ‘What, are you Bill Neate? I’ll
knock more blood out of that great carcase of thine, this day
fortnight, than you ever knock’d out of a bullock’s!’ It was not manly,
’twas not fighter-like. If he was sure of the victory (as he was not), the
less said about it the better. Modesty should accompany the Fancy as
its shadow. The best men were always the best behaved. Jem
Belcher, the Game Chicken (before whom the Gas-man could not
have lived) were civil, silent men. So is Cribb, so is Tom Belcher, the
most elegant of sparrers, and not a man for every one to take by the
nose. I enlarged on this topic in the mail (while Turtle was asleep),
and said very wisely (as I thought) that impertinence was a part of no
profession. A boxer was bound to beat his man, but not to thrust his
fist, either actually or by implication, in every one’s face. Even a
highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he
uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no
gentleman. A boxer, I would infer, need not be a blackguard or a
coxcomb, more than another. Perhaps I press this point too much on
a fallen man—Mr. Thomas Hickman has by this time learnt that first
of all lessons, ‘That man was made to mourn.’ He has lost nothing by
the late fight but his presumption; and that every man may do as well
without! By an over-display of this quality, however, the public had
been prejudiced against him, and the knowing-ones were taken in.
Few but those who had bet on him wished Gas to win. With my own
prepossessions on the subject, the result of the 11th of December
appeared to me as fine a piece of poetical justice as I had ever
witnessed. The difference of weight between the two combatants (14
stone to 12) was nothing to the sporting men. Great, heavy, clumsy,
long-armed Bill Neate kicked the beam in the scale of the Gas-man’s
vanity. The amateurs were frightened at his big words, and thought
that they would make up for the difference of six feet and five feet
nine. Truly, the Fancy are not men of imagination. They judge of
what has been, and cannot conceive of anything that is to be. The
Gas-man had won hitherto; therefore he must beat a man half as big
again as himself—and that to a certainty. Besides, there are as many
feuds, factions, prejudices, pedantic notions in the Fancy as in the
state or in the schools. Mr. Gully is almost the only cool, sensible
man among them, who exercises an unbiassed discretion, and is not
a slave to his passions in these matters. But enough of reflections,
and to our tale. The day, as I have said, was fine for a December
morning. The grass was wet, and the ground miry, and ploughed up
with multitudinous feet, except that, within the ring itself, there was
a spot of virgin-green closed in and unprofaned by vulgar tread, that
shone with dazzling brightness in the mid-day sun. For it was now
noon, and we had an hour to wait. This is the trying time. It is then
the heart sickens, as you think what the two champions are about,
and how short a time will determine their fate. After the first blow is
struck, there is no opportunity for nervous apprehensions; you are
swallowed up in the immediate interest of the scene—but
‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.’
I found it so as I felt the sun’s rays clinging to my back, and saw the
white wintry clouds sink below the verge of the horizon. ‘So, I
thought, my fairest hopes have faded from my sight!—so will the
Gas-man’s glory, or that of his adversary, vanish in an hour.’ The
swells were parading in their white box-coats, the outer ring was
cleared with some bruises on the heads and shins of the rustic
assembly (for the cockneys had been distanced by the sixty-six
miles); the time drew near, I had got a good stand; a bustle, a buzz,
ran through the crowd, and from the opposite side entered Neate,
between his second and bottle-holder. He rolled along, swathed in
his loose great coat, his knock-knees bending under his huge bulk;
and, with a modest cheerful air, threw his hat into the ring. He then
just looked round, and began quietly to undress; when from the
other side there was a similar rush and an opening made, and the
Gas-man came forward with a conscious air of anticipated triumph,
too much like the cock-of-the walk. He strutted about more than
became a hero, sucked oranges with a supercilious air, and threw
away the skin with a toss of his head, and went up and looked at
Neate, which was an act of supererogation. The only sensible thing
he did was, as he strode away from the modern Ajax, to fling out his
arms, as if he wanted to try whether they would do their work that
day. By this time they had stripped, and presented a strong contrast
in appearance. If Neate was like Ajax, ‘with Atlantean shoulders, fit
to bear’ the pugilistic reputation of all Bristol, Hickman might be
compared to Diomed, light, vigorous, elastic, and his back glistened
in the sun, as he moved about, like a panther’s hide. There was now a
dead pause—attention was awe-struck. Who at that moment, big
with a great event, did not draw his breath short—did not feel his
heart throb? All was ready. They tossed up for the sun, and the Gas-
man won. They were led up to the scratch—shook hands, and went at
it.
In the first round every one thought it was all over. After making
play a short time, the Gas-man flew at his adversary like a tiger,
struck five blows in as many seconds, three first, and then following
him as he staggered back, two more, right and left, and down he fell,
a mighty ruin. There was a shout, and I said, ‘There is no standing
this.’ Neate seemed like a lifeless lump of flesh and bone, round
which the Gas-man’s blows played with the rapidity of electricity or
lightning, and you imagined he would only be lifted up to be knocked
down again. It was as if Hickman held a sword or a fire in that right
hand of his, and directed it against an unarmed body. They met
again, and Neate seemed, not cowed, but particularly cautious. I saw
his teeth clenched together and his brows knit close against the sun.
He held out both his arms at full length straight before him, like two
sledge-hammers, and raised his left an inch or two higher. The Gas-
man could not get over this guard—they struck mutually and fell, but
without advantage on either side. It was the same in the next round;
but the balance of power was thus restored—the fate of the battle was
suspended. No one could tell how it would end. This was the only
moment in which opinion was divided; for, in the next, the Gas-man
aiming a mortal blow at his adversary’s neck, with his right hand,
and failing from the length he had to reach, the other returned it with
his left at full swing, planted a tremendous blow on his cheek-bone
and eyebrow, and made a red ruin of that side of his face. The Gas-
man went down, and there was another shout—a roar of triumph as
the waves of fortune rolled tumultuously from side to side. This was
a settler. Hickman got up, and ‘grinned horrible a ghastly smile,’ yet
he was evidently dashed in his opinion of himself; it was the first
time he had ever been so punished; all one side of his face was
perfect scarlet, and his right eye was closed in dingy blackness, as he
advanced to the fight, less confident, but still determined. After one
or two rounds, not receiving another such remembrancer, he rallied
and went at it with his former impetuosity. But in vain. His strength
had been weakened,—his blows could not tell at such a distance,—he
was obliged to fling himself at his adversary, and could not strike
from his feet; and almost as regularly as he flew at him with his right
hand, Neate warded the blow, or drew back out of its reach, and
felled him with the return of his left. There was little cautious
sparring—no half-hits—no tapping and trifling, none of the petit-
maitreship of the art—they were almost all knock-down blows:—the
fight was a good stand-up fight. The wonder was the half-minute
time. If there had been a minute or more allowed between each
round, it would have been intelligible how they should by degrees
recover strength and resolution; but to see two men smashed to the
ground, smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out
of their bodies; and then, before you recover from the shock, to see
them rise up with new strength and courage, stand steady to inflict or
receive mortal offence, and rush upon each other ‘like two clouds
over the Caspian’—this is the most astonishing thing of all:—this is
the high and heroic state of man! From this time forward the event
became more certain every round; and about the twelfth it seemed as
if it must have been over. Hickman generally stood with his back to
me; but in the scuffle, he had changed positions, and Neate just then
made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was
doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung
suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his
hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw
any thing more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of
life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a
human skull, a death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled
with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood.
He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral
appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante’s Inferno. Yet he
fought on after this for several rounds, still striking the first
desperate blow, and Neate standing on the defensive, and using the
same cautious guard to the last, as if he had still all his work to do;
and it was not till the Gas-man was so stunned in the seventeenth or
eighteenth round, that his senses forsook him, and he could not
come to time, that the battle was declared over.[3] Ye who despise the
Fancy, do something to shew as much pluck, or as much self-
possession as this, before you assume a superiority which you have
never given a single proof of by any one action in the whole course of
your lives!—When the Gas-man came to himself, the first words he
uttered were, ‘Where am I? What is the matter?’ ‘Nothing is the
matter, Tom,—you have lost the battle, but you are the bravest man
alive.’ And Jackson whispered to him, ‘I am collecting a purse for
you, Tom.’—Vain sounds, and unheard at that moment! Neate
instantly went up and shook him cordially by the hand, and seeing
some old acquaintance, began to flourish with his fists, calling out,
‘Ah you always said I couldn’t fight—What do you think now?’ But all
in good humour, and without any appearance of arrogance; only it
was evident Bill Neate was pleased that he had won the fight. When
it was over, I asked Cribb if he did not think it was a good one? He
said, ‘Pretty well!’ The carrier-pigeons now mounted into the air,
and one of them flew with the news of her husband’s victory to the
bosom of Mrs. Neate. Alas, for Mrs. Hickman!
Mais au revoir, as Sir Fopling Flutter says. I went down with
Toms; I returned with Jack Pigott, whom I met on the ground. Toms
is a rattle brain; Pigott is a sentimentalist. Now, under favour, I am a
sentimentalist too—therefore I say nothing, but that the interest of
the excursion did not flag as I came back. Pigott and I marched along
the causeway leading from Hungerford to Newbury, now observing
the effect of a brilliant sun on the tawny meads or moss-coloured
cottages, now exulting in the fight, now digressing to some topic of
general and elegant literature. My friend was dressed in character for
the occasion, or like one of the Fancy; that is, with a double portion
of great coats, clogs, and overhauls: and just as we had agreed with a
couple of country lads to carry his superfluous wearing apparel to the
next town, we were overtaken by a return post-chaise, into which I
got, Pigott preferring a seat on the bar. There were two strangers
already in the chaise, and on their observing they supposed I had
been to the fight, I said I had, and concluded they had done the
same. They appeared, however, a little shy and sore on the subject;
and it was not till after several hints dropped, and questions put, that
it turned out that they had missed it. One of these friends had
undertaken to drive the other there in his gig: they had set out, to
make sure work, the day before at three in the afternoon. The owner
of the one-horse vehicle scorned to ask his way, and drove right on to
Bagshot, instead of turning off at Hounslow: there they stopped all
night, and set off the next day across the country to Reading, from
whence they took coach, and got down within a mile or two of
Hungerford, just half an hour after the fight was over. This might be
safely set down as one of the miseries of human life. We parted with
these two gentlemen who had been to see the fight, but had returned
as they went, at Wolhampton, where we were promised beds (an
irresistible temptation, for Pigott had passed the preceding night at
Hungerford as we had done at Newbury), and we turned into an old
bow-windowed parlour with a carpet and a snug fire; and after
devouring a quantity of tea, toast, and eggs, sat down to consider,
during an hour of philosophic leisure, what we should have for
supper. In the midst of an Epicurean deliberation between a roasted
fowl and mutton chops with mashed potatoes, we were interrupted
by an inroad of Goths and Vandals—O procul este profani—not real
flash-men, but interlopers, noisy pretenders, butchers from Tothill-
fields, brokers from Whitechapel, who called immediately for pipes
and tobacco, hoping it would not be disagreeable to the gentlemen,
and began to insist that it was a cross. Pigott withdrew from the
smoke and noise into another room, and left me to dispute the point
with them for a couple of hours sans intermission by the dial. The
next morning we rose refreshed; and on observing that Jack had a
pocket volume in his hand, in which he read in the intervals of our
discourse, I inquired what it was, and learned to my particular
satisfaction that it was a volume of the New Eloise. Ladies, after this,
will you contend that a love for the Fancy is incompatible with the
cultivation of sentiment?—We jogged on as before, my friend setting
me up in a genteel drab great coat and green silk handkerchief
(which I must say became me exceedingly), and after stretching our
legs for a few miles, and seeing Jack Randall, Ned Turner, and
Scroggins, pass on the top of one of the Bath coaches, we engaged
with the driver of the second to take us to London for the usual fee. I
got inside, and found three other passengers. One of them was an old
gentleman with an aquiline nose, powdered hair, and a pigtail, and
who looked as if he had played many a rubber at the Bath rooms. I
said to myself, he is very like Mr. Windham; I wish he would enter
into conversation, that I might hear what fine observations would
come from those finely-turned features. However, nothing passed,
till, stopping to dine at Reading, some inquiry was made by the
company about the fight, and I gave (as the reader may believe) an
eloquent and animated description of it. When we got into the coach
again, the old gentleman, after a graceful exordium, said, he had,
when a boy, been to a fight between the famous Broughton and
George Stevenson, who was called the Fighting Coachman, in the
year 1770, with the late Mr. Windham. This beginning flattered the
spirit of prophecy within me and rivetted my attention. He went on
—‘George Stevenson was coachman to a friend of my father’s. He was
an old man when I saw him some years afterwards. He took hold of
his own arm and said, “there was muscle here once, but now it is no
more than this young gentleman’s.” He added, “well, no matter; I
have been here long, I am willing to go hence, and I hope I have done
no more harm than another man.” Once,’ said my unknown
companion, ‘I asked him if he had ever beat Broughton? He said Yes;
that he had fought with him three times, and the last time he fairly
beat him, though the world did not allow it. “I’ll tell you how it was,
master. When the seconds lifted us up in the last round, we were so
exhausted that neither of us could stand, and we fell upon one
another, and as Master Broughton fell uppermost, the mob gave it in
his favour, and he was said to have won the battle. But,” says he, “the
fact was, that as his second (John Cuthbert) lifted him up, he said to
him, ‘I’ll fight no more, I’ve had enough;’ which,” says Stevenson,
“you know gave me the victory. And to prove to you that this was the
case, when John Cuthbert was on his death-bed, and they asked him
if there was any thing on his mind which he wished to confess, he
answered, ‘Yes, that there was one thing he wished to set right, for
that certainly Master Stevenson won that last fight with Master
Broughton; for he whispered him as he lifted him up in the last
round of all, that he had had enough.’”’ ‘This,’ said the Bath
gentleman, ‘was a bit of human nature;’ and I have written this
account of the fight on purpose that it might not be lost to the world.
He also stated as a proof of the candour of mind in this class of men,
that Stevenson acknowledged that Broughton could have beat him in
his best day; but that he (Broughton) was getting old in their last
rencounter. When we stopped in Piccadilly, I wanted to ask the
gentleman some questions about the late Mr. Windham, but had not
courage. I got out, resigned my coat and green silk handkerchief to
Pigott (loth to part with these ornaments of life), and walked home in
high spirits.
P.S. Toms called upon me the next day, to ask me if I did not think
the fight was a complete thing? I said I thought it was. I hope he will
relish my account of it.
MERRY ENGLAND
The New Monthly Magazine.]

[December, 1825.
‘St. George for merry England!’
This old-fashioned epithet might be supposed to have been

bestowed ironically, or on the old principle—Ut lucus a non lucendo.
Yet there is something in the sound that hits the fancy, and a sort of
truth beyond appearances. To be sure, it is from a dull, homely
ground that the gleams of mirth and jollity break out; but the streaks
of light that tinge the evening sky are not the less striking on that
account. The beams of the morning sun shining on the lonely glades,
or through the idle branches of the tangled forest, the leisure, the
freedom, ‘the pleasure of going and coming without knowing where,’
the troops of wild deer, the sports of the chase, and other rustic
gambols, were sufficient to justify the well-known appellation of
‘Merry Sherwood,’ and in like manner, we may apply the phrase to
Merry England. The smile is not the less sincere because it does not
always play upon the cheek; and the jest is not the less welcome, nor
the laugh less hearty, because they happen to be a relief from care or
leaden-eyed melancholy. The instances are the more precious as they
are rare; and we look forward to them with the greater good will, or
back upon them with the greater gratitude, as we drain the last drop
in the cup with particular relish. If not always gay or in good spirits,
we are glad when any occasion draws us out of our natural gloom,
and disposed to make the most of it. We may say with Silence in the
play, ‘I have been merry once ere now,’—and this once was to serve
him all his life; for he was a person of wonderful silence and gravity,
though ‘he chirped over his cups,’ and announced with characteristic
glee that ‘there were pippins and cheese to come.’ Silence was in this
sense a merry man, that is, he would be merry if he could, and a very
great economy of wit, like very slender fare, was a banquet to him,
from the simplicity of his taste and habits. ‘Continents,’ says Hobbes,
‘have most of what they contain’—and in this view it may be
contended that the English are the merriest people in the world,
since they only show it on high-days and holidays. They are then like
a schoolboy let loose from school, or like a dog that has slipped his
collar. They are not gay like the French, who are one eternal smile of
self-complacency, tortured into affectation, or spun into languid
indifference, nor are they voluptuous and immersed in sensual
indolence, like the Italians; but they have that sort of intermittent,
fitful, irregular gaiety, which is neither worn out by habit, nor
deadened by passion, but is sought with avidity as it takes the mind
by surprise, is startled by a sense of oddity and incongruity, indulges
its wayward humours or lively impulses, with perfect freedom and
lightness of heart, and seizes occasion by the forelock, that it may
return to serious business with more cheerfulness, and have
something to beguile the hours of thought or sadness. I do not see
how there can be high spirits without low ones; and every thing has
its price according to circumstances. Perhaps we have to pay a
heavier tax on pleasure, than some others: what skills it, so long as
our good spirits and good hearts enable us to bear it?
‘They’ (the English), says Froissart, ‘amused themselves sadly after
the fashion of their country’—ils se réjouissent tristement selon la
coutume de leur pays. They have indeed a way of their own. Their
mirth is a relaxation from gravity, a challenge to dull care to be gone;
and one is not always clear at first, whether the appeal is successful.
The cloud may still hang on the brow; the ice may not thaw at once.
To help them out in their new character is an act of charity. Any
thing short of hanging or drowning is something to begin with. They
do not enter into their amusements the less doggedly because they
may plague others. They like a thing the better for hitting them a rap
on the knuckles, for making their blood tingle. They do not dance or
sing, but they make good cheer—‘eat, drink, and are merry.’ No
people are fonder of field-sports, Christmas gambols, or practical
jests. Blindman’s-buff, hunt-the-slipper, hot-cockles, and snap-
dragon, are all approved English games, full of laughable surprises
and ‘hairbreadth ‘scapes,’ and serve to amuse the winter fire-side
after the roast-beef and plum-pudding, the spiced ale and roasted
crab, thrown (hissing-hot) into the foaming tankard. Punch (not the
liquor, but the puppet) is not, I fear, of English origin; but there is no
place, I take it, where he finds himself more at home or meets a more
joyous welcome, where he collects greater crowds at the corners of
streets, where he opens the eyes or distends the cheeks wider, or
where the bangs and blows, the uncouth gestures, ridiculous anger
and screaming voice of the chief performer excite more boundless
merriment or louder bursts of laughter among all ranks and sorts of
people. An English theatre is the very throne of pantomime; nor do I
believe that the gallery and boxes of Drury Lane or Covent Garden
filled on the proper occasions with holiday folks (big or little) yield
the palm for undisguised, tumultuous, inextinguishable laughter to
any spot in Europe. I do not speak of the refinement of the mirth
(this is no fastidious speculation) but of its cordiality, on the return
of these long looked-for and licensed periods; and I may add here, by
way of illustration, that the English common people are a sort of
grown children, spoiled and sulky perhaps, but full of glee and
merriment, when their attention is drawn off by some sudden and
striking object. The May-pole is almost gone out of fashion among
us: but May-day, besides its flowering hawthorns and its pearly
dews, has still its boasted exhibition of painted chimney-sweepers
and their Jack-o’-the-Green, whose tawdry finery, bedizened faces,
unwonted gestures, and short-lived pleasures call forth good-
humoured smiles and looks of sympathy in the spectators. There is
no place where trap-ball, fives, prison-base, foot-ball, quoits, bowls
are better understood or more successfully practised; and the very
names of a cricket bat and ball make English fingers tingle. What
happy days must ‘Long Robinson’ have passed in getting ready his
wickets and mending his bats, who when two of the fingers of his
right hand were struck off by the violence of a ball, had a screw
fastened to it to hold the bat, and with the other hand still sent the
ball thundering against the boards that bounded Old Lord’s cricket-
ground! What delightful hours must have been his in looking
forward to the matches that were to come, in recounting the feats he
had performed in those that were past! I have myself whiled away
whole mornings in seeing him strike the ball (like a countryman
mowing with a scythe) to the farthest extremity of the smooth, level,
sun-burnt ground, and with long, awkward strides count the notches
that made victory sure! Then again, cudgel-playing, quarter-staff,
bull and badger-baiting, cock-fighting are almost the peculiar
diversions of this island, and often objected to us as barbarous and
cruel; horse-racing is the delight and the ruin of numbers; and the
noble science of boxing is all our own. Foreigners can scarcely
understand how we can squeeze pleasure out of this pastime; the
luxury of hard blows given or received; the joy of the ring; nor the
perseverance of the combatants.[4] The English also excel, or are not
excelled in wiring a hare, in stalking a deer, in shooting, fishing, and
hunting. England to this day boasts her Robin Hood and his merry
men, that stout archer and outlaw, and patron saint of the sporting-
calendar. What a cheerful sound is that of the hunters, issuing from
the autumnal wood and sweeping over hill and dale!
——‘A cry more tuneable
Was never halloo’d to by hound or horn.’
What sparkling richness in the scarlet coats of the riders, what a

glittering confusion in the pack, what spirit in the horses, what
eagerness in the followers on foot, as they disperse over the plain, or
force their way over hedge and ditch! Surely, the coloured prints and
pictures of these, hung up in gentlemen’s halls and village alehouses,
however humble as works of art, have more life and health and spirit
in them, and mark the pith and nerve of the national character more
creditably than the mawkish, sentimental, affected designs of
Theseus and Pirithous, and Æneas and Dido, pasted on foreign
salons à manger, and the interior of country-houses. If our tastes are
not epic, nor our pretensions lofty, they are simple and our own; and
we may possibly enjoy our native rural sports, and the rude
remembrances of them, with the truer relish on this account, that
they are suited to us and we to them. The English nation, too, are
naturally ‘brothers of the angle.’ This pursuit implies just that
mixture of patience and pastime, of vacancy and thoughtfulness, of
idleness and business, of pleasure and of pain, which is suited to the
genius of an Englishman, and as I suspect, of no one else in the same
degree. He is eminently gifted to stand in the situation assigned by
Dr. Johnson to the angler, ‘at one end of a rod with a worm at the
other.’ I should suppose no language can show such a book as an
often-mentioned one, ‘Walton’s Complete Angler,’—so full of
naïveté, of unaffected sprightliness, of busy trifling, of dainty songs,
of refreshing brooks, of shady arbours, of happy thoughts and of the
herb called Heart’s Ease! Some persons can see neither the wit nor
wisdom of this genuine volume, as if a book as well as a man might
not have a personal character belonging to it, amiable, venerable
from the spirit of joy and thorough goodness it manifests,
independently of acute remarks or scientific discoveries: others
object to the cruelty of Walton’s theory and practice of trout-fishing
—for my part, I should as soon charge an infant with cruelty for
killing a fly, and I feel the same sort of pleasure in reading his book
as I should have done in the company of this happy, child-like old
man, watching his ruddy cheek, his laughing eye, the kindness of his
heart, and the dexterity of his hand in seizing his finny prey! It must
be confessed, there is often an odd sort of materiality in English
sports and recreations. I have known several persons, whose
existence consisted wholly in manual exercises, and all whose
enjoyments lay at their finger-ends. Their greatest happiness was in
cutting a stick, in mending a cabbage-net, in digging a hole in the
ground, in hitting a mark, turning a lathe, or in something else of the
same kind, at which they had a certain knack. Well is it when we can
amuse ourselves with such trifles and without injury to others! This
class of character, which the Spectator has immortalised in the
person of Will Wimble, is still common among younger brothers and
gentlemen of retired incomes in town or country. The Cockney
character is of our English growth, as this intimates a feverish fidgety
delight in rural sights and sounds, and a longing wish, after the
turmoil and confinement of a city-life, to transport one’s-self to the
freedom and breathing sweetness of a country retreat. London is half
suburbs. The suburbs of Paris are a desert; and you see nothing but
crazy wind-mills, stone-walls, and a few straggling visitants in spots
where in England you would find a thousand villas, a thousand
terraces crowned with their own delights, or be stunned with the
noise of bowling-greens and tea-gardens, or stifled with the fumes of
tobacco mingling with fragrant shrubs, or the clouds of dust raised
by half the population of the metropolis panting and toiling in search
of a mouthful of fresh air. The Parisian is, perhaps, as well (or better)
contented with himself wherever he is, stewed in his shop or his
garret; the Londoner is miserable in these circumstances, and glad to
escape from them.[5] Let no one object to the gloomy appearance of a
London Sunday, compared with a Parisian one. It is a part of our
politics and our religion: we would not have James the First’s ‘Book
of Sports’ thrust down our throats: and besides, it is a part of our
character to do one thing at a time, and not to be dancing a jig and
on our knees in the same breath. It is true the Englishman spends his
Sunday evening at the alehouse—
——‘And e`en on Sunday
Drank with Kirton Jean till Monday’—
but he only unbends and waxes mellow by degrees, and sits soaking
till he can neither sit, stand, nor go: it is his vice, and a beastly one it
is, but not a proof of any inherent distaste to mirth or good-
fellowship. Neither can foreigners throw the carnival in our teeth
with any effect: those who have seen it (at Florence, for example),
will say that it is duller than any thing in England. Our Bartholomew-
Fair is Queen Mab herself to it! What can be duller than a parcel of
masks moving about the streets and looking as grave and
monotonous as possible from day to day, and with the same lifeless
formality in their limbs and gestures as in their features? One might
as well expect variety and spirit in a procession of wax-work. We
must be hard run indeed, when we have recourse to a pasteboard
proxy to set off our mirth: a mask may be a very good cover for
licentiousness (though of that I saw no signs), but it is a very bad
exponent of wit and humour. I should suppose there is more drollery
and unction in the caricatures in Gilray’s shop-window, than in all
the masks in Italy, without exception.[6]
The humour of English writing and description has often been
wondered at; and it flows from the same source as the merry traits of
our character. A degree of barbarism and rusticity seems necessary
to the perfection of humour. The droll and laughable depend on
peculiarity and incongruity of character. But with the progress of
refinement, the peculiarities of individuals and of classes wear out or
lose their sharp, abrupt edges; nay, a certain slowness and dulness of
understanding is required to be struck with odd and unaccountable
appearances, for which a greater facility of apprehension can sooner
assign an explanation that breaks the force of the seeming absurdity,
and to which a wider scope of imagination is more easily reconciled.
Clowns and country people are more amused, are more disposed to
laugh and make sport of the dress of strangers, because from their
ignorance the surprise is greater, and they cannot conceive any thing
to be natural or proper to which they are unused. Without a given
portion of hardness and repulsiveness of feeling the ludicrous cannot
well exist. Wonder, and curiosity, the attributes of inexperience,
enter greatly into its composition. Now it appears to me that the
English are (or were) just at that mean point between intelligence
and obtuseness, which must produce the most abundant and
happiest crop of humour. Absurdity and singularity glide over the
French mind without jarring or jostling with it; or they evaporate in
levity:—with the Italians they are lost in indolence or pleasure. The
ludicrous takes hold of the English imagination, and clings to it with
all its ramifications. We resent any difference or peculiarity of
appearance at first, and yet, having not much malice at our hearts,
we are glad to turn it into a jest—we are liable to be offended, and as
willing to be pleased—struck with oddity from not knowing what to
make of it, we wonder and burst out a laughing at the eccentricity of
others, while we follow our own bent from wilfulness or simplicity,
and thus afford them, in our turn, matter for the indulgence of the
comic vein. It is possible that a greater refinement of manners may
give birth to finer distinctions of satire and a nicer tact for the
ridiculous: but our insular situation and character are, I should say,
most likely to foster, as they have in fact fostered, the greatest
quantity of natural and striking humour, in spite of our plodding
tenaciousness, and want both of gaiety and quickness of perception.
A set of raw recruits with their awkward movements and unbending
joints are laughable enough: but they cease to be so, when they have
once been drilled into discipline and uniformity. So it is with nations
that lose their angular points and grotesque qualities with education
and intercourse: but it is in a mixed state of manners that comic
humour chiefly flourishes, for, in order that the drollery may not be
lost, we must have spectators of the passing scene who are able to
appreciate and embody its most remarkable features,—wits as well as
butts for ridicule. I shall mention two names in this department,
which may serve to redeem the national character from absolute
dulness and solemn pretence,—Fielding and Hogarth. These were
thorough specimens of true English humour; yet both were grave
men. In reality, too high a pitch of animal spirits runs away with the
imagination, instead of helping it to reach the goal; is inclined to take
the jest for granted when it ought to work it out with patient and

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Printing History and Cultural Change Fashioning The Modern English Text in Eighteenth Century Britain Richard Wendorf All Chapter

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Printing History and Cultural Change:

Fashioning the Modern English Text in

Subject: Literary Studies (18th Century)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/book/41556/chapter/353024079 by University of Essex user on 07 October 2022

yearning for a better time to come or one in the past and

nostalgia of any sort are reliable signs of the counterfeit.

The past is there to be studied in its reality, moment by

moment, and the future can be discussed in its reality to

come, which will be a reality moment by moment; but

doing that means being honest just as doing it makes you

too busy to yearn; and doing it shows you that nostalgia

is a swindler’s trick. A sense of the real is what is meant

by good sense. And because of the nature of time and

because of how relentlessly change occurs, good sense has

to contain a good deal of the visionary as well as of ironic

apology to cover the inevitable mistakes.

(Harold Brodkey, “Reading, the Most Dangerous Game”)

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For Elizabeth Hilliar

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we only use small characters because it saves time. moreover, why

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xvi List of Illustrations

2.10 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1741 [1740]).

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List of Illustrations xvii

3.10 Daniel Mace’s New Testament (1729). By permission of the Bodleian

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xviii List of Illustrations

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Old Style and New

4 Printing History and Cultural Change

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The Great Divide 5

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6 Printing History and Cultural Change

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The Great Divide 7

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8 Printing History and Cultural Change

those whose experiences as readers were limited to the rudiments of literate

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Perhaps I can best introduce my terms of engagement by quoting from Guy

Figure 1.1 Guy Miege, English Grammar (1688).

10 Printing History and Cultural Change

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15 Carter, A Short View of Typography, 92.

The Great Divide 11

in marginal notes, or for decorative purposes on title-pages.22 An eighteenth-

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12 Printing History and Cultural Change

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27 Lundmark, Quirky Qwerty, 45.

The Great Divide 13

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29 Smith, “The Pre-history of ‘Small Caps,’” esp. 80–81.

14 Printing History and Cultural Change

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30 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 75; cf. 5: “language is nested in sound.”

The Great Divide 15

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